Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,15
admitting it to Sorsha. Thorn would have a far clearer understanding of just what my deal had required of me.
Thorn wasn’t the type to dwell on minor conflicts anyway, not when he’d had such a huge transgression of his own weighing on him for so long. After a moment, he shook his head. “You’re right. If we’re agreed to protect her from the Highest’s plans, that’s all that matters. Then we’d better go—”
The peal of my phone interrupted him. Maybe remembering what had gone down the last time that ringtone had split the air, Thorn cut himself off into an uneasy silence.
I hadn’t been expecting a call… just like I hadn’t been last time. Tempest didn’t enjoy being ignored. As I pulled the phone out of my pocket, I braced myself, anticipating the blank screen and all that would follow.
The thought of hearing her needling voice carrying from the speaker again made me want to hurl the phone into the depths of the canyon. But I knew better than anyone that my former co-conspirator wasn’t a problem you could expect to just go away. Even when a horde of immensely powerful beings went to extreme lengths to ensure she was battered out of existence, somehow she was still here, playing out another of her gleefully malicious schemes.
I hit the answer button and held the phone a good foot away from me, remembering how loudly she’d projected her remarks through it two days ago. “For someone who hid her existence from me for the better part of six centuries, you seem awfully eager to chat all of a sudden, Tempest.”
Her voice slithered out in a languid tone I knew better than to believe. “I simply wanted to confirm you hadn’t met some sudden calamity after we last spoke. Have you become a much slower traveler in your old age?”
“I haven’t started traveling yet,” I said. “Funny thing—when you drop out of the blue into someone’s life, they often have prior affairs they need to take care of first.”
“And here I thought meddling with the Company of Light was your largest concern at the moment. I have all the answers you need on that subject.”
“Yes, well, for all your sphinxly wisdom, you never did manage to know everything. How many guesses did it take you to get my phone number right, hmm?”
She would have managed to hit on the right one with a guess—plucking the correct answer to anything remotely like a riddle out of thin air was as much a talent of hers as coming up with riddles designed to confound was. It wasn’t an exact science, though. I’d be willing to stake my tail that she’d gotten at least ten wrong numbers before she’d heard my voice on the other end of the line.
That suspicion was born out by the irritation that crept into her tone while she dodged that question. “You sound displeased with me. No rejoicing at the chance for us to join forces again? Have you forgotten what a good run of it we had long ago?”
I hadn’t at all, and that was the problem. The question sent a slimy sensation down my spine as if she’d trailed decaying seaweed over my back. Sorsha might call me a bastard now, but what a bastard I’d truly been back then—not ice-cold but searingly sadistic, as selfish when it came to indulging my disdain for mortals as that mortal woman had proven herself the opposite moments ago.
And Tempest had gleefully egged on that side of me. She’d stoked my flames and my contempt, and nothing had made her applaud louder than seeing our mortal targets twisted into agony. If she’d been around when the hunters had burst in on the innocent creatures I’d inadvertently led them to, she’d have laughed at their mistake and found some way to amplify it without a second’s regret for the deaths of the lesser beasts.
And maybe I’d have done the same if she’d still been standing with me in all her sly, vicious glory.
But I was better than that now, even if she didn’t understand. I was better than that… and was there perhaps a better way through this mess than had occurred to me before?
Tempest might hold a different sort of answer. She might even delight in providing it, if I played the game right. I had known her awfully well, and she didn’t appear to have changed much.
“It has been a long time,” I said, bringing out all the inner cool