Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,13

keep doing that. Tell them I’ve been trying to stop the extermination of your kind, and the last thing I want to do is devastate the realms myself. See if there’s any way they’d consider making some kind of deal with me rather than going straight to murder. Please.”

He blinked, his expression still frozen in its state of shock.

“Sorsha,” Thorn rumbled. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do. Because I like the alternatives even less.”

Omen drew himself up straighter abruptly. I didn’t know how to read the brooding look he gave me. Then he motioned to the warrior with a jerk of his hand.

“You heard her. She doesn’t want to be rescued. Let’s go, before you insist on doing it anyway. You can weigh in on where I take things from here—outside, in the fresh air, like comrades.”

Thorn shot me an imploring glance that wrenched at my heart. I nodded encouragingly. “It’ll be okay,” I said, with no idea at all how that could turn out to be true. “Go with him and give him some pointers on how to present my better qualities in a good light.”

The warrior grimaced, but at another beckoning gesture from Omen, his bulky form vanished into the shadows. As Omen dove after him without a backward glance, it occurred to me with a lurch of my gut that this might be the last time I’d ever see them before I faced the direst possible fate I’d ever imagined I might meet.

5

Omen

I nudged Thorn down the dark passage beyond the door of my canyon safe house, out to the narrow ledge of yellow-brown rock where the morning sun shone. He went without protest but with tension still ringing through his presence.

We could have talked in the shadows, but the blurred awareness of the outer world made my thoughts feel muddled. And they’d been muddled enough already after Sorsha had made her offer and her plea just now.

I waited at the mouth of the passage long enough for the cool shade to knit the wounds from our fight to the point that I wasn’t worried about how much smoky essence I was leaking, and then I emerged into the sunlight.

Thorn followed me into physical form but stayed in the passage. There wasn’t really room for him to join me on the ledge, considering it only jutted about a foot from the entrance and a few feet across. Getting to and from this place while carrying Sorsha had required a precarious scramble down the uneven rock face above, which held nothing wide enough to be considered an actual path. No human could have made it here alone without a host of rock-climbing gear.

We were about halfway down the canyon wall. Rocky cliffs stretched out all around us, towering over a valley flecked with green vegetation on either side of its shimmering river. The wind whistled through the crags, dry and fresh with no hint of human occupation.

The grandeur of the landscape before me might have been the closest any place in the mortal world came to matching the sublime if oppressive enormity of the Highest and their vast hollow in the shadow realm. Looking out over it in the flood of warm light from above, it was hard to imagine that Sorsha had volunteered to trade her existence here for the complete and infinite darkness of the death the Highest wished on her. Even harder to imagine that only minutes ago, I’d been wavering on the edge of consigning her to that darkness.

And the first point was exactly why I was now feeling so unsettled about the second.

Thorn had wrapped a strip of cloth around the worst of the slashes my claws had dealt. With another uncomfortable pang, I watched him secure it. I hadn’t enjoyed fighting him any more than I’d enjoyed the idea of subjecting Sorsha to the Highest’s potentially irrational brutality.

“You can’t listen to her,” he said, fixing the full depth of his dark eyes on me. “She was only trying to stop us from hurting each other. She doesn’t want to die. And you know the Highest won’t be moved by any overtures on her behalf. If they’d been willing to believe she might not be such a terrible threat, the twenty-five years in which she failed to incinerate the world while they searched for her should have made them rethink their position.”

“Agreed.” He hadn’t even heard how the Highest spoke about her. I had no doubts at all about how quickly