Bitter Bite (Elemental Assassin #14)(94)
would need almost all my power to blast through it. So I reached and reached
for that mix of cold and hard magic flowing through my veins, letting it pool
in the palms of my hands, until my spider rune scars were glowing a bright,
brilliant silver with the cold, continuous ripple of my magic. Then I tapped
into the Ice and Stone magic stored in my spider rune ring and necklace.
When I had gathered up all that power, I slowly turned my hands over so that
my palms—and my spider runes—were facing the floor.
I raised my hands, steeling myself, then snapped my hands down, blasting all
my magic at the floor directly below my feet.
Crack!
Crack! Crack!
Crack! Crack! Crack!
The surface of the marble immediately shattered, and I slammed a wave of my
Ice magic down into all the jagged zigzags. The stone shrieked at the sudden,
brutal assault, but I ignored its cries and hammered at it with the brutal
one-two punch of my Ice and Stone magic, pouring all my power into the growing
cracks and widening them even more, shattering every single bit of stone, then
all the metal underneath.
The seconds ticked by, and I reached for even more of my power, gathering up
every single scrap of it and forcing it down, down, down—
CRACK!
With one giant, crashing roar, the floor beneath my feet split wide open.
*
For a moment, there was just noise.
A rushing roar filled my head with a dizzying symphony of sound. I had the
sense of free-falling, and I reached for what little was left of my Stone
magic to harden my skin, so that I wouldn’t impale myself on a piece of
shrapnel and bleed out before I got the chance to kill Deirdre.
I hit the ground hard, bouncing off the rocky rubble that covered the vault
floor from my blasting through the one above it. Dust clouded the air, making
it hard to breathe, and I coughed and coughed, trying to clear the pulverized
marble from my lungs.
I dug my hands into the loose rocks under my body and managed to push myself
up and then onto my feet. I squinted, trying to see through the billowing
clouds of dust, but I couldn’t so much as see the walls around me, much less
peer out the vault door and tell if Bria, Owen, and Silvio had managed to
rescue Finn yet.
As I stumbled around the vault, trying to figure out where the door was, I
palmed one of my knives, searching for someone to kill.
“You bitch!” a voice roared behind me. “You just don’t know when to quit,
do you?”
I whipped around just in time for a fist to zoom out of the dust and slam into
my face. Thanks to my jarring landing, I’d lost my grip on my Stone magic, so
the punch socked me square in the jaw, making pain explode all the way up my
cheekbone.
The force of the punch threw me back through the dust and up against a bank of
safety-deposit boxes, some of which had been opened. I slammed the metal
drawers shut with my body, each one punching into my back like a hammer and
making me groan with pain. So that was where one of the walls was. Good to
know.
Santos loomed up in front of me, his black hair now gray with marble dust.
Even more of it coated his face, including that jagged scar on his cheek,
making him look like he’d upended a sack of flour over his head. He growled
and came at me. I raised my knife to stab him, but he knocked the weapon out
of my hand. He tried to punch me again, but I blocked the blow and slammed my
fist into his throat, hitting the giant where he was vulnerable.
Santos coughed, wheezed, and sputtered, but he surged forward again and
wrapped his hands around my throat. He lifted me off the ground and wrenched
me left and right, slamming my body into more open safety-deposit boxes, like
I was the silver piece in a pinball machine and he was trying to get a high
score.
I punched him, slamming my fists into his face over and over again, but he
just snarled and took the blows, even though I managed to break his nose with
one of them. The blood mixed with the marble dust on his face and made him
look even more angry and vengeful.
I palmed a second knife, but Santos realized what I was up to, and he grabbed
my arm, pulled it forward, and then rammed my hand back against the wall. The
bones in my left wrist shattered on impact, and I screamed, my knife slipping
from my numb, nerveless fingers. The weapon clattered to the floor and dropped
into a hole in the piles of rubble.
White spots began winking on and off in my field of vision, and it was only a
matter of time before I ran out of air. I’d already used up most of my magic
breaking into the vault, and an Ice dagger wouldn’t do me any good against
the giant. My eyes flicked left and right, looking for something that I could
use to at least get him to let go of me. Once I had air back in my lungs, I
could figure out the rest.
Santos drew me away from the wall and then slammed me right back up against
it, hard enough to make some of the loose safety-deposit boxes rattle beside