Delinquents Turned Fugitives - Ann Denton Page 0,132
the same as they did in his. And then I smashed back into my brother—the only family member I had left.
43
Running on ice was a bitch. My boots slid out from under me, and I nearly faceplanted. It made me fucking furious that I had to hug the wall and step carefully when all I wanted to do was run. Especially since we could hear Pinnacle guards moving in on the first floor, the clomp of their thick boots echoing against the tile as they got closer. Closer.
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath as I barely avoided falling, just outside the door next to Matthew’s room. I glanced side to side, looking for my crew, but no one was in the halls.
That’s when I realized that every door was open. A gust of wind blew past—one of Callum’s vampires, a woman; I could only tell by the shape of the hair streaming behind her like a banner. She shoved open a door at the end of the hall and I heard a crash, a howl, and then a loud snap.
“Are they … killing them?” Matthew sounded horrified.
“It’s better than the alternative,” Callum’s voice whispered from behind us—startling me because I hadn’t even heard him approach. The Brit’s eyes were stone cold as he said, “Roof. Now.”
The vampire’s hands curled over our shoulders, shoving us forward and brooking no argument. Matthew extended his hand and used it to help melt the icy floor in front of us, so that we at least stomped through slush instead of slid across the ice.
Callum followed more slowly. When we were halfway up the steps and he was at the very base, I turned back to watch him raise his hand. Two seconds later, the entire second floor filled with water—Callum backing up the steps each time the little waves threatened to touch the tips of his boots, eventually building a block wall of ice to hold the water back.
The water climbed. And climbed. And didn’t stop climbing …
I saw a pinhead appear in the water at the edge of the steps—he must have made it up the stairs and waded the entire length of the second-floor hallway. His swarthy complexion was set in a grimace as he lifted his hand and shot a huge fireball at the stairwell.
My face heated and I cringed, raising my hands to block my face and cursing my magic.
Matthew lifted his hand to stop it, but magic didn’t even begin to pour out of his palms before the threat was gone.
With a flick of Callum’s fingers, the fire died midair. He didn’t stop creating his waves. The water surged up another foot and he simply waved his left fingers back and forth as the ball of flame faded to nothing.
As I lowered my hands, I could only guess that Callum had done what Malcolm often did: change the air around him, make it so damp and muggy that the flames couldn’t breathe.
The cop tried again, this time sending a dagger of ice through the air, but not at Callum, at me.
The next moment, the cop’s head burst into flame. And another two feet of water surged up through the hall. The vampire was clearly the most powerful Icefire I’d ever seen—able to work with both his elements at once to maximum capacity.
Below us the cop screamed, turning his hands toward his own face and shooting water at it, not thinking clearly enough to just fall forward into the water to douse the fire. By the time he’d put out the flames, he was hardly more than a skull covered by random flaps of red—muscle and tendon exposed. He was as gruesome as a horror villain, and just as hard to look at. Near him, the melting bodies of all the frozen police bobbed like ice cubes, still slowly melting.
All of it made my stomach twist.
Despite looking dead, the burnt man surged forward through the pool of water, sloshing toward us.
My heart dropped when I saw that and I stumbled backward up a stair, nearly falling, scraping my hand.
Behind me, Matthew muttered, “Holy fuck! He’s not dead?”
“Claude must really hate you,” Callum said casually as he shot another jet of flame at the cop, this one straight through his heart.
“Who?” Matthew asked.
But I didn’t answer—because I saw my stepfather surge up out of the dead cop’s body and sail through the air right toward me. He’d been forcing the man’s body to move even as it shut down.