Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,84

love. I’ve had my heart broken. I’m human, for fuck’s sake. You’re carving up a person.”

Not that it was any more okay when they did crap like this to a shadowkind. But my captors clearly didn’t give a shit how much like them I was. They’d happily destroy me just as they’d destroyed so many other creatures—even their own people, when they’d thought their opponents were getting too close to the truth—just for the chance to exterminate a whole realm of beings, most of whom hadn’t done any more damage than the average human.

How could they hold so much hate? How could they let it burn out every bit of compassion in them?

Or maybe human beings weren’t all that compassionate to begin with. I wasn’t fully one myself, was I? Were all mortals capable of turning this sociopathic if given a nudge in the right direction?

“Listen to me!” I shouted, my voice breaking with a cry as the scalpel slashed the tip off my baby toe. Rage whipped up inside me and surged from my body—only to meet the falling water with a hiss of dissipating steam. My tormenters stepped back just for a second as the scalding droplets cleared, but for all the notice they gave me, I might as well have been a malfunctioning radiator rather than a living, thinking being.

Thinking for now. As they closed in on me again, the man raised his syringe. “Now to take the unconscious samples. Bags labeled B.”

“No!” I said, managing to choke back a sob.

He jabbed the needle into my neck just below the cuff. Darkness unfurled over my mind. My awareness narrowed and spiraled down, down, into cool blackness—but not quite so fast that I missed one last remark the woman made, with a sigh as if slicing and dicing me was cramping her style.

“This had better be enough to get that cure.”

23

Thorn

The imp eyed us as we moved out of the shadows into the interior of the Everymobile. “That was a fast trip.” She had the impudence to curl her lip in the slightest pout, as if she were actually put out that we hadn’t fallen into enemy hands.

That was, most of us hadn’t. My jaw clenched in the wake of yet another wave of rage and loss.

“We returned through a rift,” Omen said curtly. “Seeing as we needed to move quickly—for the same reason as we were able to make use of a rift without worrying about the Highest.”

Gisele’s gaze had already traveled over the four of us. She leapt up, the ferocity that appeared incongruous with her petite frame sparking in her eyes. “What happened to Sorsha?”

Those words brought the little dragon scuttling out of the bathroom. Pickle peered at us, his wings trembling at half-mast, and let out a snort that sounded of both consternation and anxiety.

“Tempest took her,” Snap said, his usually bright voice turned dagger-sharp. Impassioned fury had been radiating off the devourer from the moment we’d regrouped. “The sphinx was too swift—we were overwhelmed by the Company attackers—we have to get her back before they hurt her!”

I didn’t want to see what state it would bring him to if I acknowledged that the sphinx and her murderous Company had likely already harmed our mortal in some way. My hopes centered around recovering her alive.

They’d held Omen for months when they’d captured him, conducting their torturous experiments. But that had been while they were still determining the shape of their plans. Tempest had indicated she expected to see those plans through in mere days now. Had she even wanted Sorsha for some use or simply to deprive us of all our mortal offered?

My hands balled into fists of their own accord. If Tempest had been following the second reasoning, she’d have been motivated to end my lady’s life the moment she could. If she had—if she’d taken Sorsha from us in the most irrevocable possible way… I would see the pieces of that venomous being’s body torn apart bit by bit and scattered to the ends of the earth before I was through. I would rend the wings from her back and stuff them down her throat. I would—

Our commander spoke up again. “We can’t be completely sure of where Tempest will have taken her, but from what Snap gleaned from the man in Crete, it sounds as though the sphinx intends to be near Stonehenge in the near future. If she thinks our mortal is going to play some part in her scheme,