Taste a Thousand Deaths (Marionettes of Myth #3)

Chapter Twenty-Six

She placed her naked feet on the ledge of a tower, where the wind brutalized mortal flesh and tore hair from scalps. But her slender frame withstood the onslaught as surely as she always had.

Iron burned her lungs with each inhale. Even the debris that Orion's fucking noisemakers kicked up carried toxins that blazed against her sunless skin as the dust settled in her nest of blood-red hair, the pavement beneath her feet frozen. Lifeless.

The first thing she'd done with her freedom was search for him, for her war lord. He'd been dead for lifetimes, and she'd felt him alive again while still consigned to her prison. A brief flutter in her chest.

Now he was no more than fading smoke that drifted from a snuffed-out candle flame.

Yet, the search for him had led her to the castle of black glass and spires. The monument Cassius had built for himself sickened her until she was feverish. Her fingers closed into fists and her chest swelled with acidic air.

The building before her made her forget about the wail of the sirens, a distant bean sidhe, and it made her forget about the cloud of poison that hovered in her lungs.

It made her quiver all over.

It made her grin.

The only thing that could coax her attention away was the spike of lightning that splintered the sky. The wind whipped her skirt against her legs as she twisted to look into the compressed storm that brewed between the metal teeth of the city.

She rolled her eyes and turned away from Cassius' castle, his very own phallic symbol, and instead she went after the two fucking idiots who were about to make a mistake neither would ever forgive themselves for.

#

The stretch of city street was lifeless, abandoned cars littering the way in the settling concrete dust. With the asphalt upturned and distorted into ripples and craters, Elliot had to jerk the toy car up over the curb, and shit, the tiny car had to climb the mountain of a curb. All three of them jostled and Rosette threw her hands into the air with a whoop, leaving Raven to dodge as she held on for dear life.

No one stood in their way.

Nothing obscured the dark and heavy clouds from them, and when they raced into the downpour of ice and rain, the droplets were so dense that each splatter on the windshield nearly punctured the glass as easily as any bullet. The windshield wipers moved at a frenzy.

Few things could set Kirin off.

Elliot knew of even fewer things that could trigger such a response in Orion.

But there was only one button the two shared.

He could just make out the smell of smoke and ash when the ground began to rumble. He felt the tires lose their traction on the wet pavement. The skyscrapers around them swayed and groaned as loudly as the crackle of thunder, and as far as Elliot could see between the swipes of the windshield wipers, the metal and concrete walls and the endless glass windows of each building were distorted with waves of heat, as if the city was in the slow process of melting to the ground.

But then Elliot's eyes widened. No amount of rain, wind, thunder or lightning could mask that something massive hurtled right at them.

Raven yelped and Elliot slammed on the brakes, fishtailing out of the way just before two monstrous beings barreled down the street with power that no train, jetliner, or manmade device could ever match. They were a blur, black and white and tangled together as they tore apart the asphalt and crushed empty cars before colliding with a building in an explosion of glass and concrete.