Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,81

eye. “No. One rock here and one there, many of them, standing in a circle. A large circle, with a smaller ring inside it. Some of them were stacked on each other like… tables.”

Ruse’s eyebrows leapt up. He tapped at his phone and held it toward me with a photograph on the screen. “Like this?”

My breath caught. “Yes. That’s the pattern.”

“Stonehenge,” Omen murmured. “If that’s where she plans to launch her catastrophe from, she must be working out the final details close to there. We’ll just have to—”

With a boom that rang through my ears, the roof over our heads exploded in a shower of shingles.

Thorn bellowed and leapt up from the limp corpse. Orange light flared across Omen’s body. Shouts volleyed all around us—a glittering net heaved through the air—laser-like whips streaked across the darkness.

The wingéd warrior ducked, dodged, and bashed his fists into the faces of two of the attackers who appeared to be careening down the hillside in a wave. I spun around, grasping for some sort of weapon—

But we hadn’t been their main target after all—not the four of us shadowkind. Two figures were lunging at Sorsha from behind. One of them jabbed something into the base of her neck with a crackle of electricity that made her body spasm before she could land her first punch.

I leapt at them, not caring that all I had to defend her were my bare hands, which weren’t half as suited to the job as Thorn’s. The brutes were already propelling her sagging body out onto the rocky terrain. I shoved one of them aside, but it was too late. As I reached for my beloved, a feline creature swooped down on vast wings to snatch Sorsha up in her paws.

A whip lashed across my shoulder. Ruse knocked the helmet off my attacker with the clang of a cooking pot. Omen tore past us all, his hellhound claws gouging the man’s stomach open as he sprang.

She was already gone. Bodies lay broken and bleeding around us. A few figures who’d seen the turn of the tide fled into the night. And the sphinx had soared off into the blackness of the sky, not a hint of her or her precious cargo in sight.

She’d taken Sorsha. My fingers curled into my palms as every particle of my body cried out in horror. What did Tempest mean to do with her?

I’d devour every member of the Company if that was what it took to save her.

22

Sorsha

I woke up curled into a ball, my knees pressed to my forehead, every muscle still tensed with the memory of the electric shock that had knocked me out, as if it had happened only seconds ago. Even my hands had clenched tight to my chest. And, nestled against my palm—

Footsteps tapped toward me. I jerked my hand up to swipe it over my mouth and tentatively raised my head.

I was locked up in a cage like the ones I’d seen in Company facilities before: a solid metal floor rigid against my shoulder and hip, bars gleaming all around me in the stark light. But they mustn’t have been silver or iron, which wouldn’t have affected me anyway, because Tempest was now resting her hands against those bars as she peered between them at me with her catlike eyes.

With her that close, the razor-edged chill of her innate power walloped me harder than it had in our meetings before. My pulse hiccupped, a tickle of my inner heat flaring in response.

I directed that first jolt of flames into my cheek. The sensitive skin stung, but the sphinx didn’t give any sign that she’d noticed anything amiss. Her plump lips had curved into a smirk.

I didn’t have much room to straighten out my posture. The roof of the cage stood only a foot above my prone body, and I couldn’t have stretched my legs toward the walls without banging my feet on the bars. Tempest and her Company lackeys must have had quite the time squeezing me in here.

More fire stirred in my chest. If she thought I was simply going to lie here quietly—

“Throw your power around if you must,” the leonine woman said. “It won’t get you anywhere. I’d vanish into the shadows before I got more than a sunburn, and nothing else in here will smolder.”

My gaze slipped beyond her to the wider room. Sweet twinkly trash cans, she wasn’t kidding. The entire space looked as if it were constructed out of steel, from