Rage.
Chapter 21
Cherry
Dante’s eyes bled from gray to violet. His body trembled as gray smoke rose from him like steam from a kettle. He stroked back a few tendrils of my hair, just below the bruise on my head.“Who did this, Cherry?”
I flinched, having never heard his dragon voice when he was still in human form. Its deep timbre blanketed the room with tension. My human hearing may have been nothing compared to that of a demon, but I swear on my life I heard everybody’s ass clench.
Cherry. Not princess, badger, or even sweetheart. Well fuck.“Umm.”
He smiled, the fangs of his upper jaw elongated, while silver scales plated up the ridge of his nose.“Doesn’t matter. I’ll drown this land in fire and you can point out their ashes later.”
He touched my face softly, his thumb passing over the dry surface of my lips. His expression was reverent, the look on his face held promises of adoration and unspeakable violence. Heat flooded my lower belly. I pushed it away, refusing to think about what that said about me.
I’m not attracted to this. I’m not.
I chewed on my bottom lip, unsure how to respond to such a promise. “Or, ya know, you could justnotdo that.”
Wind howled around us, ripping tapestries from the walls. The king shouted for his guards to run us through, then promptly disintegrated in a flash of white.
“Dante, stop!” I cried.
“Don’t worry,”he soothed.“It will be over soon.”With a flick of his wrist, flames engulfed the lower floor of the room, barely giving the men below a chance to eke out their last scream.
Slap.
My hand stung from where the palm met hard scales. I was fairly certain the action hurt me more than it did him. But it got his attention. “I don’t want you to drown anything. Please, just help us fix this mess so we can all be done with it. The king is dead, and your sister is off somewhere finding the head mage. There’s no need to kill anyone else.”
“I’d also like to not drown in fire,” Cyser called behind us. “Just saying, if he’s taking it to a vote.”
The wind stilled. Hard scales receded into soft russet skin. Before I could breathe a sigh of relief, the roof tore off. “Dammit, what now?”
Kohara poked her massive head through the hole in the ceiling. Rebekah was clutched firmly in her clawed hand, yowling and spitting at the dragoness in indignation.“I got ’em!”Kohara cheered, the words muffled by something in her mouth. She swallowed it down, then lifted her chin in pride, as if expecting praise.
For my own sanity, I decided to pretend it was a loaf of bread and humored her with a weak clap. “Great job!”
Dante regarded her with a long-suffering expression. “What are you doing here?”
She snorted, shooting flames into the sky.“Is that any way of thanking me for saving your wife?”
Debatable.
Yala rose from the floor and stretched. “Well, that’s done. Are we raiding the king’s liquor cabinet or what?”
We all looked at him in silence.
“What? He’s dead. No use to him now.”
I like Yala.
With the king and his mages dead, and Rebekah sealed in some sort of magic cage of Kohara’s making, things settled pretty quickly. Even the bees were quickly brought to heel. Turns out there was a bee flute Dante kept next to their hive that allowed him to control them. Live and learn, I guess.
All the demons trapped in the coliseum came to their senses and seemed to be more than willing to join in Yala’s plan to storm the castle and raid the king’s liquor cabinet.
For you know, penance or whatever.
Half the city’s guards had been turned into zombies at Rebekah’s doing, so there wasn’t much resistance along the way. When I followed the party through the gates, most of the remaining guards were forming a blockade around the king’s daughters and a few people who I assumed were important members of the court.
