Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,72

of them around.”

“That actually makes it worse. Which is a pretty mean feat considering I barely have a stomach in that state.”

“I suppose that means this picnic lunch is all for me, then.”

As I rifled through the large bag of edible supplies we’d brought for a bottle of lemonade, Snap hustled over with a sound of mock consternation. “I’ll take Ruse’s portion.”

The incubus felt well enough to laugh. “That’s no surprise.”

The devourer gave me the sly look he was starting to perfect, turned adorable by his beaming grin. “You’d make yourself sick too if you tried to eat all of it, Peach. I’m simply keeping your best interests in mind.”

“Of course you are,” I said with a playful swat. “But it’s hardly lunchtime yet. We just had breakfast.”

The next sound Snap made wasn’t so joking in its consternation, but he settled for only plucking a plum out of the bag. He perched on the railing, long legs dangling over the water, and hummed happily as he bit into the fruit. “I like the sea.”

“You’re welcome to it,” Ruse muttered, but after a stretch of calm waters and the soothing rumble of the motor, he’d come back more to his usual color.

For the first few hours, Omen focused on sailing, which apparently he had some experience with, and left the rest of us to lounge—or, in Thorn’s case, to broodingly eye the horizon. I knew that reprieve wouldn’t last. Not long after we’d dug into our picnic lunch, the hellhound shifter emerged from the cabin, considered the vast sprawl of endless blue all around us, and snapped his fingers at me.

“All right, Disaster. Let’s see what we can do to mitigate that catastrophic nature of yours.”

I licked the last few flecks of icing sugar from my custard bougatsa dessert off my fingers. “I’m not the canine here, dog-breath. How about a ‘please’?”

He glowered at me and dipped into a little bow. “Would Her Highness kindly allow me to continue teaching her how she might avoid incinerating herself?”

“That’s more like it.” I got up, stretching my arms and then cracking my knuckles—and trying not to notice that three other gazes had focused on me with varying levels of concern.

Snap sprang from the arm of the deck chair where he’d been cozying up to me. “If there’s any way I can help—”

“I’ve got this,” Omen said dryly. “She isn’t going to leave your sight, so you can ensure I leave her in one piece.”

Was the devourer worried about what Omen might do to me or what I might do to myself? At this point, it was hard to say which of us was a larger threat to my well-being. Ruse might have even straightened up a tad as if preparing for some kind of intervention, and Thorn was peering at me instead of the horizon now.

I folded my arms over my chest. Okay, so I’d let loose a few more flames than usual in the last couple of days, but we did have a psychopathic, immensely powerful shadowkind who might be launching a double-genocide any moment now, so who could blame me for being a smidge wound up?

How immense a genocide would we be facing if I didn’t get those powers completely under control?

I shoved that question aside and nodded to Omen. “Got some more bits of paper for me to charbroil?”

“I thought we’d try something different for a change. We’re just going to spar. And by ‘just’, I mean fists and feet only. No supernatural powers. You let your fire out, you automatically lose, no matter how pissed off I made you. Oh, and to add a little challenge…” He leapt up onto one of the railings with a nimbleness I wouldn’t have expected from his well-built frame. “Touch the deck with both feet, and you also lose. Should we make it the most wins out of five, or do you need more chances than that to get warmed up?”

As I climbed onto a wooden beam that crossed the stern, I raised my eyebrows at him. “You’re assuming I’ll even need five. I’m the one who spent most of the past few years scrambling across rooftops and through windows.”

Omen smiled at me with a gleam of his teeth. “I suppose we’ll see.”

He didn’t give me any more warning than that. The next thing I knew, he’d launched his muscular frame right at me.

I dashed down the pole protruding from the stern, swayed, and hurled myself upward to grab one of the salt-gritted