Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,57

for them to have much awareness of a realm they’ve never bothered to venture into.”

“Right.” As Pickle curled up tighter on my lap, I scratched his belly with careful fingers, putting on my best impression of being totally okay with all this. The thought of those overbearing beings ignoring Omen’s totally valid warnings—of them declaring me a much more urgent threat than a centuries-old genocidal maniac who’d already been responsible for innumerable deaths of humans and shadow creatures alike—definitely wasn’t stoking the angry fire inside me to uncomfortable heights. And if I decided that fire wasn’t there, then it definitely couldn’t justify their insistence that I be exterminated.

If pretending away reality worked for the Highest, why shouldn’t it work for me?

But heat I couldn’t totally will out of my consciousness prickled under my skin. I jerked my hand from Pickle’s side as a particularly sharp flare seared across my palm. I’d already scorched the little dragon once, and it’d taken days for him to forgive me. If even he wasn’t safe around me…

He was. I had it under control. With a few deep breaths and an image of the ocean I summoned into my head, the flames were retreating.

“No one’s heard from Thorn yet?” I asked.

Omen shook his head. “I’ve yet to convince our wingéd companion of the wonders of cell phones. He did say he might need to lend his former comrades a hand before they’d agree to help us. I suppose we’ll see whether it was worth the bargain when they show up.”

He couldn’t disguise his skepticism, but it was hard to mind when I was pretty skeptical myself. The warrior could take a physical beating without a wince, but from the way he’d looked after his first talk with those two lingering wingéd, they’d mauled something in his spirit. He’d felt so guilty about not being there for the final battle, about not dying there… How much would they shake his faith in himself this time?

“Once he’s back, my hacker back in Paris did turn up an interesting lead we might want to pursue,” Ruse said. “He’s found an interesting pattern of—”

Cutting the incubus off, a swell of triumphant trombones blared through the RV with a multicolored flash of the overhead lights. As the electric panels blinked from pink to orange to green as if we were in a very cramped dance club, they caught on three figures who’d just appeared by the front door.

Antic hopped up and down with a guffaw at the unexpected welcome. Behind her, Gisele and Bow stared around them, the delicate unicorn shifter and the burly centaur looking equally bewildered.

Uh oh. As much use as we’d been putting the Everymobile to, it actually belonged to the two equines, who’d generously lent it to us to continue our quest. When they’d lent it to us, it hadn’t been sprouting odd instruments from its roof or producing music at random moments. It seemed the vehicle was happy to have them back, but I wasn’t sure how happy they’d be about the way it was expressing that joy.

Omen dashed past them to jab at the buttons on the dashboard, with a deeper grimace when he took in the smashed spot where Thorn had “disabled” the radio not long ago. Gisele’s doe-eyed gaze followed him, her rainbow-streaked hair swishing over her shoulder.

“What did you do to the Everymobile?” she said, her melodic tinkle of a voice rising over the cacophony. “I thought you were going to take it for a road trip, not renovate it.”

Omen managed to shut up the trumpets, but the lights kept flashing strobe-like over us. The hellhound shifter had expressed plenty of disdain for the equines when they’d first joined us, but since then they’d proven themselves capable fighters and generous allies. Worthy of guilty tensing of his expression as he groped for an explanation.

I managed to suppress a smile at seeing him put in his place by shadowkind he’d once sneered at, but I couldn’t help tossing a remark of my own his way. “Yeah, Omen, why don’t you tell them all about what you’ve put Darlene through?”

Bow ran a hand through his thick mohawk mane of chestnut hair, still staring befuddled at his former mortal-side home. “Who’s Darlene?”

Omen shot a glare at me. Served him right for naming things that didn’t belong to him. I leaned back in Snap’s embrace to watch as the hellhound shifter straightened his posture.

“Never mind that.” He waved to the RV’s interior. “We didn’t do