Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,97

jet of fiery power alongside the words. “Hey, you beastly bastards! The Ruby you want is right here!”

My voice rang through the air, and the spurt of flames blazed across the night sky to mark our spot like a signal flare. As I blinked the after-glare away, a mass of shadowy figures surged from the ruined brick building toward us.

Tempest spat out several words that sounded deeply profane in a language I didn’t know and dug her claws into my sides again. A warble of her frigid energy penetrated my skin as she made good on her promise to try to yank me into the shadows with her.

Even if I survived the trip, in the shadows I couldn’t hurt her. I had to keep her here. I had to pin her to the fabric of this physical world. And luckily I’d shaped myself just the means to do that.

“Hey, Tempest, there’s something else you should know,” I shouted, and dug my tongue along my gums, where trickles of my supernatural fire had masked any noxious vibes the tiny instrument might have given off.

She swung her head down, her eyes glittering viciously. “What?”

“Your lackey in Crete had a very nice ring.”

A ring I’d melted into a tiny silver-and-iron spear. I flicked the miniature weapon between my lips, clamped my teeth on it to hold it steady, and slammed my mouth into the sphinx’s forehead with all the force I could muster.

As my jaw jarred against the bridge of her nose, the dull end of the needle scraped my tongue, but the sharpened point drove home.

A screech tore from Tempest’s throat. She flailed her head from side to side as if trying to shake the sliver of toxic metals free, but it held in place, smack in the middle of her treasured third eye. Blood welled around the puncture point.

My makeshift weapon prevented her from shedding her physical form, but it didn’t make that form any less deadly. With an ear-splitting howl, she raked her claws down my side and raised a paw as if she meant to slash my face right off.

A glimmer of hellish orange was streaking toward us through the darkness below. I sent up a silent prayer to the universe that the owner of that glimmer would reach us in time and yanked back the barriers that’d been tamping down my inner fire.

The flames erupted from my body like I’d been drenched in gasoline and torched. They flooded every inch of me, stinging and scalding—and they roared across Tempest too. Ignoring the pain as well as I could, I focused every bit of energy I had on hurling more and more heat across and into her leonine body.

The claws on her extended paw drooped and melted with the intensity of the heat as her foreleg fell. The shriek that rattled from the sphinx’s throat then was nothing but agony, no room left for rage. Her other foreleg moved as if to wrench away from me, but I flung my arms around her charred, furry body and squeezed as tight as I could.

The sickly smell of burnt flesh—not all of it hers—filled my nose. Her wings flapped weakly, trailing flames taller than she was, and then we plummeted.

As we dropped, the fire streamed over us like the tail of a meteor. Then the heat glazed my vision so thickly I couldn’t see anything but the flickering light. I choked back a sob at the throbbing digging down to my bones and propelled even more of the raging inferno at my captor.

This was for egging on the mortals’ hate. This was for Luna’s death. This was for the torments Tempest had encouraged her lackeys to inflict on so many shadowkind, including my devourer and my hellhound. This was for the new horrors she’d meant to enact on them and so many mortals too.

Let her burn. Let her burn until there was nothing left of that sadistically cavalier fiend than the barest scraps of ashes—and let them blow down into the foulest sewer in existence for good measure.

Her body started to disintegrate in my hands. Cinders sloughed off into the sizzling wind. She tumbled from my arms just as I collided with someone else’s.

I smacked into a broad chest, a familiar smoky scent with a hint of sulfur washing through the blaze. Arms glowing with a magma-bright light embraced me and eased me the rest of the way to the ground, but their fiery heat didn’t scorch me further. Instead, they