Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,54

to add, “Thank you. For worrying about whether I’d worry.”

He made a dismissive sound, but then he ran his fingers along my jaw to draw me to him. He kissed me hard, the intensity of it sparking all kinds of flames beneath my skin, but only the pleasant kind.

Why couldn’t my inner fire always feel this delicious?

When he let me go, another ache formed in my chest to join the one Snap’s disillusionment had provoked. I couldn’t help curling my fingers around Omen’s before he could drop his hand. “Make sure you come back.”

He gave me a full smile then. “No one’s managed to crush me yet, as many as have wanted to. You’re not getting rid of me that easily, Disaster.”

I laughed and followed him into the Everymobile so he could tell the others where he was going, but underneath my good humored response, the ache remained.

How had I gotten to the point with this man where the thought of anyone getting rid of him made me want to rain fire from the sky?

15

Omen

It said something about how eager the Highest were for any news of the mission they’d sent me on that the slathering goblin who stopped me at the edge of their vast hollow came barreling back mere minutes later with an urgent rasp that rippled through the clotted darkness around us. “They’ll see you now. Come on!”

That welcome was a far cry from my last visit, when they’d left me waiting for what had turned out to be more than a day. And that time they’d summoned me. I’d just have to hope they’d be too distracted by the news I’d brought to sulk over the news I hadn’t.

As far as I was concerned, I had no idea where a hybrid being named Ruby might live. The only human-shadowkind mishmash of a being I knew was named Sorsha, and the Highest hadn’t asked me about anything to do with her.

Besides, Tempest had ruined about a realm’s worth of lives already. You couldn’t find a threat much clearer than that.

The goblin followed me all the way into the yawning cavern, where the potent if ponderous energies of the Highest beings washed over me with an itch through my shadow-side body and a twinge around my neck. They never quite let me forget the hold they had over me. I’d have preferred not to have their slathering lackey witness it, but it wasn’t my place to send him off. Or to take a good chomp out of his throat, which would have accomplished nearly the same thing with much more satisfaction.

Shadowkind couldn’t die in our shadow forms, but we could certainly be maimed to the point that we might as well be dead.

The Highest’s penetrating attention weighed down on me even more heavily than before. The goblin dipped into a sort of groveling bow as if looking for praise for managing the incredible task of walking me the short distance from the entrance. Self-respect was not a quality the behemoths looked for in their minions.

The Highest ignored him. “What word have you brought, hellhound?” one of them demanded, her hollow bellow of a voice echoing through every particle of my being.

Oh, I had a whole lot of words for them, but I’d better choose which ones I actually said carefully. I gathered myself. “I have not encountered a being that goes by the name Ruby, but my search has turned up an even graver danger to both realms. The shadowkind you believed you dispatched ages ago, the one whose vicious tricks I admit I sometimes assisted with, has survived after all. Tempest the sphinx lives, and she has a plot more immense than ever before underway.”

I couldn’t make much of the muttering that passed between the pompous leviathans. “It cannot be so,” another said. “Our warriors tore her to shreds. They reported as much—they would not have lied.”

“I doubt they knew they were lying,” I said. “I’d imagine she performed one of her tricks on them too, to make them think she’d died or that they had her at all. But whatever they tore up, it either survived despite their ravaging or it wasn’t her. I’ve spoken to her face to face. And if anyone should recognize that menace, it’s me.”

One of the massive beings loomed closer with a thicker, harsher surge of energy. “How can we know this isn’t you playing tricks on us?”

For all my own power, it took the tensing of every muscle in my