“What the hell did I give you smoke bombs for?”
He cursed.
“Just make sure everyone gets clear!” I said, dropping into the driver’s seat as he scooched over.
“They’ll get clear.” He grabbed my arm, his eyes serious. “Don’t die.”
“She won’t.” Someone said, as Zheng threw the bombs and bailed. Billowing white boiled up all around us, covering our team’s flight. But, of course, one vamp hadn’t bailed, and the damned building was coming up fast.
“Give me the cuff,” I demanded.
“Give me the explosive.” It was Louis-Cesare’s implacable voice, and God, I was so sick of this shit! It felt like I had to fight him and our enemies, too!
“You can’t do this!” I snapped. “You weigh ninety pounds more than me, and it was calibrated to my weight!”
“I will risk it.”
“You’ll be dead!”
“Better me than you.” It was obdurate. And so stupid that it made me want to kiss him and kill him, at the same time.
So, I kissed him, tenderly, for a second, my hands sliding over his body, my tongue twining around his. Then I pulled back. “All right! But I need my bag! The charges are in there!”
I pointed to where it lay on the floor in back of the truck.
“I’ll get it.” He swung out of the cab, grabbed the bag and was back in a second, his body framed in the passenger side door.
“I love you,” I said, and saw when his eyes caught the flash of white on my wrist—the bracelet I’d taken from his pocket when I kissed him.
But it was too late.
I lashed out with both feet and swerved at the same time, and he was gone, they were all gone. A second later, I had my foot back on the gas the second bomb I’d taken for the dragon pressed to the passenger side dash. It was just in time.
I sent thousands of pounds of solid steel crashing through the too small doors of the still-intact building. Or still-intact before I exploded the charge, because the only way to survive this was to make sure that our pursuers thought we hadn’t. And then the world whited out.
Chapter Forty-Six
Dory, Hong Kong
Maybe I passed out, or maybe it was just the force of the blast making it feel that way. I didn’t know. I just knew that I came back to myself inside a giant orange fireball, watching the seat flaring up around me, the rubber on the steering wheel melting onto my lap, and the now missing windshield showing nothing but a solid wall of flame.
It was mesmerizing. Until a huge piece of masonry caved in the passenger side roof, and I snapped out of it. I scrambled out of the now missing driver’s side door, hit the floor and rolled through the fire.
I was all but blind from the smoke, but I was also almost out of time on the shield. So, I crawled, across a burning hellscape until I cleared the wreckage, although it was hard to tell exactly when that was. The whole world was on fire. But I kept on going, trying to get away from anything lethal.
I didn’t make it.
When the smoke cleared enough to let me see anything, it wasn’t another ruined lobby. It was an echoing space that looked more like a warehouse, with a high ceiling, red brick walls, and a concrete floor covered with burning debris and dead guys.
And fey.
A lot of fey.
They were not burning and they were not on the floor. But I didn’t immediately react because I was dizzy and my eyes kept wanting to cross. However, I’d have probably needed a moment, even on a good day.
It was a lot to take in: the human corpses on the floor, which I didn’t think had gotten that way because of me, since I didn’t recall shooting anybody full of arrows; the burnt concrete around the blast, radiating outward to burning detritus sticking out of the brick walls; the large group of Svarestri warriors, now headed this way.
I belatedly began to scramble for weapons, only to recall that I’d given most of them to Louis-Cesare. And it probably wouldn’t have mattered in any case. There were twenty, maybe thirty fey here; I couldn’t tell through all the drifting smoke.