Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,90

her. “I think you’ll find it’s the opposite. But why don’t you invite them over to see who’s right? I’d like to watch that visit go down.”

She chuckled. “Perhaps you will. When I hold the only protection against this sickness, I hold all the power. Do you think I won’t have them bowing to me if their survival hangs in the balance?”

Of course. If even she couldn’t withstand the disease on her own, no other shadowkind would either.

Would my lovers compromise their principles to save their own lives? I wouldn’t blame them for appeasing Tempest for long enough to guarantee their immunity if they eviscerated her afterward. But I already knew that Snap would never willingly back down, not once this woman had become my murderer, and I couldn’t imagine Thorn putting his survival over his sense of justice. He’d already spent centuries beating himself up for remaining alive after the last war he’d waged.

She’d destroy not just me but possibly all of the beings I loved as well. A larger surge of fire shot through the nonchalance I’d been trying to convey. I clenched my jaw, but heat crackled just under my skin with a stinging wave of pain.

“You see,” the sphinx said, her voice dripping with vicious sweetness. “You really could have been something, my phoenix, but that mortal side of you hasn’t got the power to aim those talents properly. Such a shame.”

“Or maybe the only shame will be how quickly we’ll snuff you out,” I retorted. “You can’t see everything. We’ve already screwed up your plans at least a dozen times.”

“And yet not badly enough that it stopped me from getting to where we are now.” Her smile came back, thinner now. She motioned to her broad forehead. “It’s not just these two mortal-esque eyes that I see with, but my inner eye as well. And a sphinx always glimpses the answers one way or another.”

My gaze locked onto that smooth plane of skin beneath the fall of her gleaming bronze hair. That was where her supernatural wisdom came from—a third eye within her mind?

A jitter of excitement quivered through me. Tempest turned with a swish of her dress and vanished, leaving me alone again—but with a resolve I hadn’t found until just now.

Omen had told me to fight her by blinding her. I could still do that. I had the tools right here, and now I knew which eye she truly relied on.

The only question was whether I’d get a chance to make use of that knowledge before she brought both realms to their knees.

25

Omen

The rumble of a departing jumbo jet grated against my nerves. I shot a narrow look at Ruse where he was watching the stream of arriving travelers pouring out of the airport’s security area. “Remind me again why you thought this diversion was a good idea? How is having a mortal tagging along going to help us extricate Sorsha any faster?”

The incubus tsked at my impatience, but I could tell from the tension in his jaw that he wasn’t impervious to the same worries. “I told her she should join us. Maybe she won’t be much help getting Sorsha out of the facility, but whatever our mortal has been through, having additional moral support can’t be a bad thing.”

“You don’t think the four of us are enough for her?”

Ruse met my gaze, abruptly more serious than I could ever remember seeing him. “She’s been struggling. I know you’ve seen it too. That’s what our little escapade on the boat was about, wasn’t it? I’m sure she’d say she’s perfectly satisfied with all the wonders we shadowkind can provide… but she is half mortal too. There are things she thinks and feels that we can’t wrap our heads around—as much as I’d like to become her be-all and end-all.”

He put that desire into words so effortlessly, as if there was nothing at all embarrassing about an incubus—or any shadowkind—wanting to devote themselves to a mortal. Which I supposed there wasn’t. But I couldn’t imagine the same sentiment ever falling from my mouth quite that easily.

After all, I still wasn’t entirely sure that my presence in Sorsha’s life wouldn’t be what brought about her ruin rather than what raised her above it. It was my former colleague who might have already ripped into her in who knew how many ways.

I just hoped I still knew Tempest well enough to have made an accurate guess of where she was working from, given the data