Dragon's Storm (Legion Of Angels #4)(10)

Her eyebrows drew together in genuine confusion.

I slowed down the hand movements and exaggerated the motion of shoveling one cupcake after the other into my mouth.

Comprehension dawned on her face. She flipped me off.

I laughed under my breath and pulled the bars apart. Truth be told, Captain Somerset’s plight wasn’t due to her fondness for cupcakes. Our supernatural metabolism almost immediately burned through anything and everything we ate. No, her hours each day of lifting weights in the gym was the reason she couldn’t fit through the bars when I had. She was only about ten times stronger than I was. I don’t care what people say about magic’s ability to distort the rules of the universe. There was only so much strength that magic could buy you. The body’s muscles had to pick up some of the slack. Captain Somerset was just buffer than I was. Then again, so were most Legion soldiers. I was more of a runner than a lifter.

The dungeon’s ceiling was so low that we had to bend over to avoid bumping our heads. The passageway was colder than winter’s kiss, but for once I welcomed the cold. There was no proper ground to this tunnel. We were walking on ice—or, as I suspected, old frozen sewage. Winter had reigned in this part of the Wilds since the monsters overran the Earth two centuries ago, so whatever was frozen beneath our feet must have come from that era. I prayed that it stayed frozen.

In theory, it would. The monsters’ magic had dropped the temperature in the whole area, plummeting it into perpetual winter. The monsters and the Wilds were trapped in a never-ending cycle, each affecting the other. It would take an incident of enormous magical power to melt these frozen wastelands, something that could kick this magic ecosystem out of its loop.

As far as I knew, there wasn’t a power on Earth that could do it. If the Legion had such a power, sometime in the last two centuries they would have used it to kill the monsters and return the lost lands to civilization. And then we wouldn’t be out here in the wilderness, sneaking across a layer of frozen sewage, infiltrating a castle occupied by the vampire mafia. On the bright side, at least the vampires hadn’t yet noticed us.

Gunfire erupted from the far end of the tunnel, shattering that fragile illusion.





3





Poison





Vampires streamed down the tunnel, shooting wildly. But they weren’t shooting at us. They were shooting at something behind them. A thick steamy mist flooded the hallway and swallowed the vampires whole. When it cleared a few moments later, all eight vampires lay dead on the ground.

“That’s weird,” I said, looking down at them.

The vampires’ throats were slit. No bullets or cuts marred their bodies. In fact, there wasn’t a scratch on them.

“Indeed, it is weird,” Captain Somerset agreed, frowning.

“Maybe there’s an angry spirit roaming these halls.”

She shot me a hard look.

“What? We live in a world ruled by gods, and you’re telling me angry spirits don’t exist?”

“I’ve never seen one.”

I gave the dead vampires on the ground a pointed look.

“I’m sure there is another explanation.” She stepped around the vampires. “Let’s keep going.”

We made our way through the castle’s dungeon. It was like walking through a metallic jungle. Chains hung from the walls like soggy vines. Levers, wheels, and hooks jutted out from between the bricks. The Legion’s Interrogators would have felt right at home here.

A chorus of screams pierced the cold air. It was coming from a room on the right. We ran, but by the time we got there, dark fog was rising from the bodies of three dead vampires.

“I get the feeling we’re not the only ones after the vampires of House Rune,” I said.

“Except we’re not supposed to kill them. The Legion wants to question them.”

“Maybe someone doesn’t want us to question them,” I suggested.

Captain Somerset brushed her hand across the neck of one of the vampires. “The fog could be poison.”

“A witch’s brew?”

“Perhaps. We should keep our distance from it in any case.”

Legion soldiers were pretty resistant to poison, but we weren’t immune. After all, Nectar was poison. And so was Venom, the demons’ drink of choice. If witches had laced their spell with either, the fog could kill us too. But why would witches come all the way out here, deep into the monster-infested Wilds, to kill a few vampires?

“The Kane coven,” I realized. “This is their way of getting back at House Rune for turning one of their own.”

Marina had been standing right there when her brother told the Interrogators were to find Charles Rune and his band of rogues. She must have told her parents where the vampires were hiding. And now the witches were taking matters into their own hands.

“Witches,” Captain Somerset growled. She pulled out her phone. “Sergeant Vance, have you come across any mysterious fog?”

“No,” Claudia Vance’s voice came out of the phone. “Morrows?”

“Describe this fog,” Alec Morrows’s voice clicked.

“Creepy, magical, and poisonous.”

“It sounds like Captain Somerset.”

Captain Somerset frowned at the phone in her hands. “Try to take this seriously, Sergeant. The fog has already killed at least ten vampires in the south castle.”