Jennifer St Giles - Shadowmen 03 by Kiss of Darkness

Author:Kiss of Darkness [Darkness, Kiss of]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

THE HELICOPTER yawed hard to the right. Sam struggled into a seat, grabbing the buckle and shoving it home. There were so many Underlings attaching themselves to the cockpit that seeing was the least of their worries. The creatures concentrated heavily on the right side, putting the bird off balance.

Shit, Sam thought, his stomach lurching as wildly as his heart raced. They were going to crash on Hades Mountain and the blame was his. He’d cockily written off the Underlings as mindless beasts incapable of acting together in any way. It never occurred to him they’d plaster themselves to the copter, hanging all over it like punks trying to upend a car in a violent riot. Nick would be hard-pressed to break free of the cloud and past the Underlings’ boundary of existence, but if he did they just might be worse off than crashing. If all of these beasts incinerated at the same—

Suddenly fire mushroomed around them, putting them in what looked like a nuclear fireball. Intense heat reached him. Sam shut his eyes, bracing himself to die in an explosion of fire. He’d always thought that if a man had to go that would be the best way. Just boom. One quick instant of excruciating pain and then nothing. After suffering session after session of torture that drew out pain for hours and hours under Vasquez’s cruelty, such a quick death had sounded like heaven.

Not anymore, though.

Emerald was it. Her misty green eyes and Irish burr. Her angry fire and her passion.

Of all the mistakes in his life, of all the things he’d done wrong, from getting captured by Vasquez to keeping Emerald at a protective arm’s length for her own good, walking away from her without having the guts to admit his feelings had been ®asqthe worst. That he would now die made it unforgivable. He wanted to take her slowly and tell her how much she’d burrowed down deep inside of him.

Nick’s yell brought Sam’s eyes wide open to face death head on.

Instead of fire and imminent annihilation, through the scarred and distorted cockpit shield he saw nothing but buckets and buckets of rain deluging the helo. He’d never seen such a heavy blinding rain before. Then suddenly, the rain stopped, leaving them with blue sky and sunshine.

An odorous cloud hovered inside the cockpit, fed by tendrils of acrid smoke rising from where the Underling’s body had lain. The spontaneous combustion of its carcass had left a burn mark on the floor.

There were no cheers, no victorious war cries. They all sat in stunned silence as Nick maneuvered the beleaguered helicopter back to the ranger camp. Every one of them knew how close they’d come to dying, and none of them were in the mood for any false cheer. The deadly game they were in was too real, too vital, and nowhere near over.

When Sam looked back to see where the rain had come from, he found two miracles. The first was that the solid black cloud was now riddled with holes where plumes of white smoke puffed out.

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