Ruler (Wolves of Royal Paynes #2) - Kiki Burrelli Page 0,8

patch of grass, ignoring the stares he got from those around him. Most people looked at him with fear. His beefy frame, missing ear, and laser gaze didn't put people at ease. He hopped back in, turning to knock his nose into my chest as if to say, let's get on with it then.

I started the car, and Diesel polished off the rest of his burgers.

"Want me to take over?"

I shook my head. It wasn't like I'd be able to sleep, and I didn't want to give up control of the car. The seagulls had quickly fallen back once we'd driven out of city limits, which meant I'd be navigating on intuition alone.

Diesel pulled out a laptop from his bag and balanced it on his knees. He booted it up, scanning his thumb to bypass the security. The soft glow illuminated the deep lines in his face. "You know what Knox said about it all being connected? Walter Whitten, Jazz, Portal, our pack? And then earlier, Jazz's dad's last words…"

"Hard to forget something like that." I knew where this question was going and not only because Diesel looked like he would rather swallow one of the explosives strapped to his chest than talk about this. When Walter had bragged about Portal's ability to destroy entire towns and that Jazz would choke on hellfire, I'd wondered the same thing.

Considering our pack members had all died in an explosion that had razed every tree, plant, and structure to the ground, it wasn't hard to believe hellfire was to blame. The destruction was unlike anything I'd seen. It left the soil barren. The land was dead. There wasn't a better word to describe what our old home was now. Dead. Every leaf, flower, and person. Would we feel better if we knew exactly how they'd died? The type of explosive and what effect it'd had on the body? If they'd had time to scream? Time to suffer? I couldn't look at any of the evidence without thinking about our family in pain. But that didn't mean I didn't look at it.

And if we were talking about a company that hunted nephilim, killed people with hellfire, and had the ability to make men explode into ash without being anywhere near them, we were talking about shit that was out of our paygrade. Cosmically.

"I had to find out what it was," Diesel said in a furious rush. The words tumbled out of his mouth like they'd all tripped over his teeth. "Hellfire. If that was what killed my Qu-Quinlan, I had to know what it was like." He sounded out of breath. "But it's fucking hard to tell what's true and what's been posted by some nutjob."

When you were delving deeper into phenomenon that shouldn't be possible, that was bound to be the case. "I've researched a little," I admitted, the fast food souring in my stomach. "I found a lot of the same crap you did. Bullshit and wackos. But I can say two things about hellfire with confidence. It burns hotter than thermite, and that sulfur-like substance is the fuel. Portal has played the magic card already, and loosely at that. It isn't unreasonable to assume hellfire is magical in nature."

His lips pressed together, carving deep lines around his mouth. "How are we going to protect them from this kind of shit? We trained for bullets and guerrilla warfare, not fucking magic fire or men ashploding."

Jazz would be pleased the word was catching on.

"We know what it is now. We know who is behind it. That's a damn far cry from what we knew before. We'll be ready."

Diesel's chin lifted and lowered, but his gaze was a million miles away. "The nephilim Portal wanted to kill, the one that must've been on pack lands, do you think…" By the time he got toward the end of his question, he was growling.

"Diesel…" He wanted to know if it had been Quinlan. If his mate had been nephilim. There hadn't been another human in the pack, and nephilim were the offspring of a human and an archangel, not an archangel and a shifter.

"Explains a lot. He was always too good for me." Diesel shut the laptop, sliding it back in place. He angled his head toward his window, making it clear he was done talking about the topic at hand.

I appreciated Diesel getting something off his chest instead of keeping it locked in, but I knew that the simple act of talking about it brought