Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,106
Isaac from the corner of my eye. To get the jacket off him as quickly as possible, I’d need to stand—yeah, just like that would be fine.
No one had used the main elevator since I’d gotten off. The door opened the second he pushed the button. We stepped on, and I kept the same anxiety racing through my veins. Oh, to be out in the open air, away from any potential prying eyes.
We descended without interruption. I hurried through the lobby a step ahead of the big boss, both to maintain my story that I was worried about the supposed Carmen and to get on with the part of the plan that didn’t rest entirely on me.
“This way,” I said on the sidewalk, hustling a few buildings over and then ducking away from the streetlamps down a driveway currently closed off with a thick chain. A tarry smell drifted in the darkened air.
When I paused, Isaac came up beside me. His head swiveled. “Is this where she was? We have to—”
As he spoke, I placed myself at his right flank, braced myself, and let relief and urgency wash through me. We’re in the clear. Let’s do this!
My feelings must have pealed through loud and clear. Ruse, Snap, Thorn, and Flint sprang into being around us.
The boss man startled with a fearful cry, and I grasped his suit jacket by the collar. With one sharp yank, I’d pulled it to his elbows—but then he connected one of those elbows with my forehead.
The impact radiated through my skull, sending my thoughts reeling. I clung on, but he was twisting around to strike another blow, and while he had the jacket on him my allies could barely touch him—
I could use my fire. I could control it enough to have it do my bidding down to the letter. I could.
Through a hasty swell of ocean imagery, I coaxed my flames from my hands and into the fabric of Isaac’s jacket.
He let out a hiss of shock. The wool melted into cinders, the sagging strips of metal pattered to the pavement—and there he was, naked of protections, the fabric of his dress shirt only faintly singed.
The emotion that hit me then was nothing less than elation. I could have hugged the dude I’d just traumatized for staying uncrispified if he wouldn’t have tried to punch my nose in again.
Ruse shot me the swiftest of winks, already talking with the full force of his power thrumming through his voice. “We’re so glad you could join us, my friend. We have the answers to destroying the monsters you wish to exterminate. Unfortunately, you’ve been helping them rather than hindering them. Because of you, so many more young women like your fiancé have fallen.”
The big boss pressed his hands to his head. “What are you talking about? I’ve—that can’t be true.”
“Oh, but it is. We’ve been watching, and we’ve seen. What you don’t know, what your bosses don’t know, is that the entire Company of Light is a trick dreamed up by the monsters themselves. They set this whole thing in motion, made the first crusaders feel they had to come together to fight back. But the truth is that they need your anger and fear to continue passing into this world. Every bit of evidence about them you take down in your computers, every order anyone gives to capture or kill them, it allows the pathways between the realms to remain strong.”
“I can show you,” Flint said with that voice like a roll of thunder. He fixed his gaze on Isaac’s. An eerie light flickered into being in the depths of his eyes, and the color drained from our target’s face.
We hadn’t been sure if even Ruse’s charm could win the boss man over convincingly enough. But Flint—Flint could show him the supposed horrors the Company of Light was enabling in vivid reality, as if he were standing in the midst of the worst of it. We’d determined that his ability could work across great distances as long as he could look into the other person’s eyes. As soon as we got the biggest boss of all on the phone, Ruse was going to cajole him into a video call.
By the time the vision the second wingéd stirred up had faded away, Isaac was trembling. He swiped his hand across his mouth, looking as though he might vomit. “I never realized—I had no idea…”
“None of you did,” Ruse said with false sympathy. “The worst of it