“Edgar suit,” Remi muttered.
“A what suit?” I asked.
“Like Edgar in Men In Black. A demon is wearing him like a suit. It doesn’t fit quite right, that’s why he’s so shambly and awkward.”
Obviously he was referencing a film I hadn’t seen yet. I added it to the never-ending list of movies we would be watching on one of Kingston’s movie nights.
The half-dead possessed man grew closer, his stench now reaching my nostrils. One adversary, I could handle. One was manageable on my worst day.
I rolled my neck and readied to charge him, but as soon as I took a step forward he stopped. He was only a few feet away from us.
“What’s he do?—”
Before Briar finished asking her question, the man exploded, red mist and chunks of gore spraying out in every direction. Tor and I hit the ground out of instinct. Some of the others were not as lucky, the force of the unexpected blast sending them flying.
“Oh, gross,” Remi complained, spitting out whatever he’d unfortunately gotten in his mouth. Perhaps if he kept it shut more often, things like this wouldn’t happen to him.
“Everyone okay?” I called, pushing myself off the ground.
I glanced around, doing a quick headcount as the others gathered themselves.
“I wouldn’t do that—” Thorne started, just as his brother licked at some of the blood coating his face.
West immediately grimaced and gagged. “Yup. Definitely demon.”
“I tried to warn you,” Thorne said with a barely contained smirk. It was a look only a smug older brother could pull off.
“What was the point of this?” Finbar asked, pulling a piece of entrails from his hair and flicking it to the ground with a disgusted look on his face.
“Have you never seen a bomb?” Lucas asked, his voice tight with pain as we all turned our attention to him. Briar gasped and rushed to his side when he gripped the large piece of what looked to be a femur and pulled it free from his gut.
Strega was similarly impaled by bone shrapnel, though she’d taken it to the neck.
“Maybe you should w?—”
She tugged the shard free with barely a hiss before I could finish, blood blooming from the wound and running down her neck.
“Fucking hell,” Thorne grumbled, blurring to Strega as the other two vampires stiffened and homed in on the waterfall of blood coming from her throat.
She had her fingers pressed to the wound, but it was doing nothing to stanch the flow. The bone had most likely nicked an artery. Stubborn woman.
“Wh-what,” she spluttered, making a feeble attempt at fighting him off, but she didn’t have healing magic. She was a formidable Novasgardian warrior, not immortal.
“Let him help you,” I said with a nod for Thorne to continue. His blood would close the wound and speed up the healing process. It was that or abandon the hunt and get her back to sanctuary immediately.
She gave Thorne a wary side-eye before lowering her hand. “If you turn me, I will kill you before you have time to draw breath.”
“As far as death threats go, it’s one of the better ones to come my way,” he said with a half-smile as he pierced the skin of his thumb and swiped his blood over the tear in her flesh.
Vampiric healing power never ceased to amaze me, no matter how many times I witnessed it in action.
As her skin knitted back together, her expression went from wary to grateful, and by the time she was fully healed, she had placed a palm on Thorne’s shoulder in a gesture of thanks.
“This is really moving and all, but allow me to ring the alarm bells, because?—”
“We’ve got company,” Tor snarled, his transition to his Berserker form instantaneous.
“—we’re fucked,” Dylan finished.
