Breathing Fire (Heretic Daughters #1)(78)
I looked to the slayer at her words. He knelt on the ground, one hand on the dragon’s heart, one on it’s head, which I could see they had beat to a bloody pulp, as well. With the hammer, I assumed. He was chanting. I would kill to know what he chanted, but I just couldn’t hear it from that distance. And getting closer might be bad for my health.
Suddenly Christian roared and whipped out Dragonsbane, pointing it high in the air. The sword had swelled to a size I had never seen it before, the fiery blue blade as long as Christian was tall.
All at once, my lungs felt emptied of air, as though it was all being pulled like a magnet into Christian. Wind swept past all of us, from gods knew where, rushing at the slayer in a furious tidal wave. I was stunned but pleased as Villi’s blood and gore was pulled off of me, swept up with all the rest.
Dragonsbane, poised gloriously above Christian, seemed to absorb it all.
All of the gruesome pieces of Villi suddenly burst into vivid blue flame. They shimmered like that for long moments before the flames were sucked into the slayer relic like the wind. The weapon was absorbing Villi’s power. The powers of an ancient being with abilities we could only imagine. Christian was naturally powerful, but now he’d be a force to be reckoned with. I was more happy than ever to have him on our side. I had a very good feeling that this wasn’t the last time we’d be doing this.
As the storm seemed to pass, a sonic boom shook the valley. The Vegas Valley. All of it. “Fuck,” I groaned. “We need to get out of here. There’s no way that didn’t bring us to their attention. We’re just damn lucky we caught Villi alone long enough to take him out.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Bitter Pill
I picked Lynn up awkwardly, heading back to Christian and Caleb. Sloan followed silently behind me, a solid, steady presence. Damn, but she was good backup.
The men were carefully scouring the ground where Villi had lain. There was no blood left, only what looked like tiny yellow diamonds, scattered here and there. “What the hell are those?” I asked them.
“All that’s left of a dead dragon. I need to bury them quickly, for the death spell. I know just the place.” Suddenly Christian looked up at me, grinning unabashedly. “I’ve been fantasizing about this day for awhile. Like, my whole life. I feel incredible.” I just blinked. Strange reaction, though I shouldn’t have been surprised.
The men finished gathering the tiny jewels, doing an extra sweep to be sure none were left behind to resurrect the monster. Christian packed the jewels away in a small black pouch, giving us careful directions on where to meet him. It was a good two-hour drive into the middle of nowhere.
“We need to split up. We don’t even know for sure how many of them there are, and we can’t risk it. There’s no way that magical storm didn’t draw someone’s attention. So we need to run fast. We’ll meet up at the burial site. I’ll take Lynn, and we’ll go the long way. You guys take his remains. Whatever happens, don’t let them have those remains, or the hammer.”
“I’m coming with you,” Sloan said quietly.
I nodded at her. “Thank you. This is not going to be pretty.”
We split up, and I made it to the car carrying Lynn.
We took Sloan’s car. I laid Lynn in the backseat, and took shotgun. I shot a glance at the guys, who were casually jacking a sports car from the parking lot. Damned miscreants. But hell, what else could they do?
Sloan pealed out of the stadium’s lot with speed and skill.
If anyone was after us, they would undoubtedly follow Lynn and I. Which gave Christian the opportunity to finish the death spell, no matter what.
Sloan made it quickly out of the stadium parking and onto a small dirt road, speeding like the demons of hell were behind us. It was a good possibility that they were.
Her ridiculously fast driving didn’t make me the least bit nervous. There was nothing Sloan didn’t excel at, I recalled.
We hadn’t made it five miles before I saw the black SUV following us, and I knew, just absolutely knew, that it was my relatives. Every hair on the back of my neck raised, and I gasped. How many of them were in that car? As if the thought had manifested it, another, identical car turned onto the small road behind them. “Holy shit,” I muttered.
“What’s going on? Try not to distract the driver here, please. Especially if you’re not being particularly informative,” Sloan snapped.
“It’s them,” I said, feeling an almost overwhelming sense of despair. How could we outrun them with no head start at all?
Sloan had spotted the cars in the rearview mirror. “How do you know? Those cars could be druids sent to help us.”
Lynn spoke for the first time from the backseat, her arm flung over the spot where her eyes should have been. “It’s them. I can feel it. And if it was druids, I bet you would be able to feel that. Can you see how many there are? We know there were at least three other Norse dragons in town with Villi. At least. And the Chinese dragons had at least three.”
“The windows are tinted too dark. That’s gotta be an illegal tint,” I muttered.
Lynn laughed, albeit weakly. “Yeah, I’m sure they’re real worried about it.”
Shit, shit, shit. “Guns. Everybody give me guns. I’m gonna blow out some tires, buy us some time.”
I rolled down my window. Not surprisingly, Lynn was unarmed. Sloan had two small pistols. I only had one small handgun from my usual ankle sheath. Neither of us had extra clips on hand. Guns hadn’t been the order of the day. There was an arsenal in the trunk, but it didn’t do us any good back there now.