Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,67
in an alley yelling and smashing bottles. It bothered and confused me. Unsettled me. I didn’t know why he would do that, and I wanted him to stop, and before I even realized what I was doing, I was already swallowing his soul. Feeling all the agony that I was putting him through. Wanting more.”
“And then you punished yourself for that mistake by hiding away in the shadow realm for ages to make sure you never did it again. It’s not like you just brushed it off.”
“I know. But…” He tipped his head close to mine again. “The sphinx may do evil things, but she’s wise about a lot too. She said we were only pretending not to be monsters, that we can’t just ignore what we are forever. I wish I could. I wish I hadn’t liked it. I wish I didn’t still feel pinches of the hunger now and then. I’d like to just be your beloved and one who can taste impressions to help with our mission, and that’s all. Even if you can accept how I am, I don’t know if I can.”
Was that why he’d been even cuddlier than usual the last few days? I turned in his arms to offer him a kiss. He kissed me back with such sweet tenderness that it was impossible to picture this man as some kind of savage beast.
“I just burned my one-hundred-percent innocent dragon because I still haven’t gotten a handle on my powers,” I said. “If you can forgive me for that, then I hope you can forgive yourself for not having full control over every impulse. You’re doing a much better job keeping your urges in check than I am.”
Snap let out a huff. “You’ve had much less time to get used to them.”
“But much more practice using them. And I’m still fucking up. We just… We do our best, right? No one goes through life never wanting anything that could hurt someone else. You decide what’s most important, and act on that as well as you can, and that shows who you really are.” I kissed him again. “And I think you’re pretty damned fantastic.”
He hummed and nestled me against him, his gaze returning to the windows warily. The voices had fallen silent. I hoped that meant Omen had sent the skinny lackey off—with or without assistance from our companions—and not that the prick was investigating to make sure the hellhound shifter had been true to his word.
Fuck the Highest for hassling Omen when they wouldn’t help him with the actual catastrophe we were facing. Fuck Tempest for messing with all of my shadowkind lovers’ minds.
The anger nibbled at my nerves, but Snap’s adoring warmth around me stopped it from flaring into a real fire.
The equines tramped on board first with a defiant air, followed by a skipping Antic, then Thorn and Ruse, and finally a scowling but no longer impeded Omen.
“He’s gone,” the hellhound shifter said before I had to ask. “But I can tell they’ll be sending more. Bloated self-important jackasses. I don’t know how much warning we’ll have.”
I forced a smile. “I’ll work extra hard at keeping my flambéing tendencies tamped down.”
As Omen took over at the wheel, the atmosphere stayed subdued. Gisele and Bow retreated to the master bedroom with a joint of their “other kind of” grass. Antic tried to coax Pickle out of my room and sulked when he didn’t respond. The rest of us eyed the bulging bags that held our lunch, but none of us moved to open them.
Ruse had pulled out his phone. He tapped at it, swiped through some pages, and tapped some more, his expression getting noticeably stiffer with each passing minute.
“Have you realized that place actually only had the second-best dolmades in this half of the country?” I said after a while, just to prod a response out of him.
The incubus chuckled without much humor and shoved his phone in his pocket. His gaze shifted to the window, but the haziness in his eyes suggested he was thinking about something far beyond the view outside.
“I told you once about a particular mortal woman I occupied myself with back in the mists of time,” he said, painfully droll. “It happens that she lived not far from Athens. As do rather a lot of her descendants now.”
A prickle ran down my spine. He meant the first mortal woman he’d thought he’d fallen in love with—the one who’d rejected him. “Are you planning on doing