Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,118

its charge was dead. I had no way to get out of the handcuffs and shackles, and no way to call for help. It was possible one of the neighbors had heard the blast and called the cops, but I didn’t think that would be a good thing. I did not want to try to explain the current situation to cops, and if Konstantin came back to life while there were witnesses . . .

I scanned the sky, trying to judge how likely it was that I had to start figuring out a cover story. The blast had been incredibly loud from close range, but in this neighborhood, there were acres of land between houses. I could imagine someone nearby being roused from their bed by the blast. They might even go look out their window in case they could see what had caused it. However, you couldn’t see Alexis’s ex-house without actually trespassing on the grounds. The fire had burned so fast and fierce that it had burned itself out already, but there was still plenty of smoke rising from the smoldering wreckage. The darkness wouldn’t hide the smoke for long, which meant I had until dawn to get myself and Konstantin’s body out of here.

I was frankly at a loss for what to do. With a lot of work, I might be able to drag Konstantin’s body past the tree line, where he was less likely to be found right away. What I really needed was a Liberi extraction team to come get me. We would then have to find someplace secure where we could bury Konstantin’s body. I still didn’t like the idea, no matter how evil Konstantin was, but until we could get Anderson out from under all the rubble and saw through his metal casing, we didn’t have anyone who was capable of making Konstantin’s death permanent.

I now had something new to add to my list of things I didn’t want to think about: how to get Anderson out. We would need a freaking excavation to get down to where he was, and somehow I didn’t think it would be so easy to arrange an excavation on land that didn’t belong to us.

I’d spent about fifteen minutes dithering, trying to come up with a plan that didn’t suck, to no avail. Maybe it was my imagination, but when I forced myself to look, I thought the depression in Konstantin’s skull was shallower than it had been.

Hitting a dead man in the head with a hunk of concrete shouldn’t bother me so much. It wasn’t like he could feel it. But it was still remarkably hard to get myself to do it. I’m just not the violent type. However, I couldn’t risk him coming back to life.

Closing my eyes and turning my face away, I brought the concrete down on Konstantin’s head. The nasty crunching sound it made when it hit his skull made my stomach turn over, and it took everything I had not to throw up. I was just not cut out for this sort of thing.

I put down the hunk of concrete, then lowered my face into my hands, momentarily overwhelmed. It didn’t help that the heat from the fire had dissipated. I was shivering, and I couldn’t feel my feet. It was bitterly cold out, and ice was forming on the surface of the puddles the melting snow had formed. Frostbite couldn’t kill me, but it could make getting myself out of this mess even harder.

I was still hanging my head, my mind cycling through each of the possible things I could do next and hitting the same brick walls, when the sound of a throat clearing behind me made me scream and jump to my feet. The screaming part of that equation worked just fine. Jumping to my feet, not so much. It’s amazingly hard to stand up when you can’t feel your feet, especially when your ankles are shackled together.

I landed in a heap in the snow.

“I’m sorry,” Anderson said. “I didn’t think there was any way I could make my presence known without scaring you.”

My jaw gaped open, and I turned to look at the smoldering ruins of the house. Then I turned to look at Anderson. My gaze dropped to his feet when I realized he was stark naked. He was standing in a pristine patch of snow about ten feet away from me, past the debris field and past where the heat from the fire had melted