Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,115

through the melting snow. Despite the pain, I kept trying to sift through the snow with my fingers in search of a weapon. Unfortunately, the snow was covering a lawn, and there aren’t a whole lot of useful throwing weapons lying about on your average lawn.

Konstantin had dragged me all of about five feet when there was a deafening, earthshaking boom. He let go of my hair and dropped to the ground as the flaming house collapsed, the walls falling in upon themselves. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Konstantin covering his head, and I wished I could do the same. There was another blast, even louder than the first, and a huge cloud of smoke and dirt and debris fountained into the air.

I had no way to protect myself as the debris came raining down. The best I could do was curl into the smallest ball possible and hope nothing too big and lethal landed on me. Flaming pieces of house dropped to the ground all around me. A couple of the missiles hit me, including one that nearly lit my pants leg on fire, but I rolled enough for the wet snow to snuff it out.

When the debris rain had lessened enough for me to risk it, I sat up and looked all around me.

The house was completely gone, nothing but a burned-out, debris-filled, smoldering crater where it had once sat. Konstantin had seemed to know the explosion was coming, and I figured that meant he had set up explosives so that the house would fall down directly over the basement where he’d stashed Anderson. Now I saw what he meant by overkill, though to tell you the truth, if being encased in metal didn’t keep Anderson contained, I doubted the weight of an entire mansion crumbling on top of him would, either. Still, it made for quite the spectacular show.

I hoped that a stray piece of debris had crushed Konstantin like the bug he was, but he’d actually gotten us pretty close to the edge of the debris field before the charges went off. There were bits and pieces lying on the still-melting snow around us, but most of the heavy stuff had come down closer to the house, and except for his seriously destroyed designer suit, Konstantin was unharmed. His eyes were practically glowing with pleasure as he eyed the destruction.

For the moment, his attention was not focused on me, and I knew I had to take advantage of his distraction in any way I could. The nice, grassy back lawn had been a poor candidate for providing a projectile weapon, but thanks to Konstantin’s overkill, there was now a lot of potentially handy debris lying about.

I searched the ground around me. I needed something heavy enough to do some damage, yet small and light enough that I could either lift it with my bound feet, or at least slip my feet under it so I could give it a kick. And it also needed to be close enough that I could get to it before Konstantin noticed I was getting ready to try something.

Moments ago, I’d been glad we were out of the worst of the debris field, but now I wished I had more larger chunks around me. Most of it was too small to do any significant damage. However, I did spot a broken piece of brick not too far away. A normal person wouldn’t have been able to do any damage with that piece of brick unless they could really wind up and throw it like a baseball, but I thought it possible that with my aim, I might be able to do it.

Keeping an eye on Konstantin, I wriggled and squirmed my way toward the brick, angling my body so my feet would get there first. Despite the fact that my socks were soaking wet from melted snow and my feet beneath them felt frostbitten in places and burned in others, I was glad I’d taken off my boots while in the house, because I was definitely more agile without them.

I managed to wriggle my toes under the piece of brick, then positioned myself so I could get the best momentum behind my kick/throw. Konstantin was still looking at the crater. The brick felt alarmingly light under my feet, and I knew it was all going to come down to perfect placement. I had to hit Konstantin in just the right spot to disable him, and in my