Well, unless maybe he’d gone around kidnapping other people.
But no. “I told you to bring him,” Fearson said to someone behind me, almost certainly Carmen. “I didn’t tell you to bring your pathetic dead army.” Then he motioned to a guy wearing weird black gear, who stepped forward and...I’d seen that kind of thing on TV before.
That was definitely a flamethrower.
First of all, shit.
Secondly . . . why did a dragon need a flamethrower?
I threw up a hand, glaring at him. “I don’t care if she gave you what you demanded how you demanded it. Give her son back.”
He curled his nose at me like I smelled bad, which, fuck that guy. I smelled fine. Even if I had been wearing the same clothes for two days.
Dammit.
“Why?” he asked. “So they can die together? I shouldn’t have been surprised there was a vampire infestation in Los Angeles, but it seems I’ll be able to wipe the cockroaches out in one go. I should thank you for bringing them to me.”
A couple of the vampires who had come closer to him shifted nervously, and clearly they were thinking about the relative abilities of dragon and vampire as much as I’d been. Plus, there was a second guy with a second damned flamethrower.
Wasn’t it illegal to own even one of those?
I turned all my attention on Fearson, tried my best to channel Blair’s confidence, and scoffed. “You’ve clearly never met a vampire before. Or maybe the LA vamps are just special. But I grew up with them, and I can tell you that this? Is not going to impress them.”
He glared at me, so either he hated me, or I was succeeding at pissing him off. Or both. I was good with both. “You could save their lives,” he suggested, his voice going silky, and...something oozed over my mind.
It was like when Sexton had tried to push inside my mind, but somehow more...just more. More unctuous, like his mind was an alien thing, a slime that would simply flow over the top of me and consume everything I was.
The shields my father’s power had taught me didn’t know what the hell to do with this.
What was...was the world melting around me? The trees didn’t have leaves, but great fat green drops of some kind of liquid, dripping down to pool on the ground, where the grass had already liquified and puddled, shades of green commingling like too much paint on a watercolor canvas.
Where were we again?
What was I . . .
CHAPTER 20
The sharp, angry caw of a raven pierced my mind, making me blink and draw back a full pace, as the smears of watercolor reintegrated themselves in my view. Trees. Grass. A huge house, a bunch of jack-booted jackasses working for an evil dragon.
The whole world righted itself, leaving me gasping for breath like I’d just been given smelling salts.
Water.
Fearson’s mind was liquid, and it had been pressing itself into the seams of my own brain, forcing its way in. Insidious and dangerous as any floodwater, and just as full of shit.
The whole picture changed in an instant, and I could see not only the world as it was, but the flow of energy.
My energy.
Cut loose and snapping back into myself, because my raven had landed between Fearson and me, somehow pushing into the middle of where he’d managed to attach himself to my brain like some kind of monster barnacle.
But no, that meant he was sapping her energy instead of mine, and I didn’t care how old she was, a raven was just a tiny bird. He would hurt her. I had to?—
In an explosion of feathers, my raven friend was...a tiny redheaded woman in old-fashioned homespun clothing. She couldn’t be much more than five feet tall, but her presence between the two groups was bigger than the whole of them all combined, and it made my breath catch. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
She was shining like the sun.
She reached out with one hand and wrapped the energy Fearson had been tugging at around and around her wrist, then yanked backward. The bright gold flow detached from him and broke into a thousand droplets, scattering into the air like a rainbow fog.
