“Oh, someone’s panties are in a twist.” Rolf blinked in innocence when Mormo turned and flashed a set of pretty fangs at him.
Then the magician grabbed a bottle of booze from out of the air and downed it in one go.
Khent stared, in awe. Wow. They’d been pushing Mormo for nearly two years, but this was the first time he’d seen the magician so aggravated.
Rolf grinned at Khent, and Khent did his best not to smile into Mormo’s glare. The bastard might not be Of the Bloode, but he had massive, unpredictable power. And now he had fangs too.
How…cute.
“Don’t you smile at me,” Mormo warned.
Khent coughed. “Of course not. What do you want us to do?”
“I’ll go talk to Hecate. For now, take a break. I need to check in with Varu too. Things are heating up.” Mormo vanished, and his empty bottle shot straight at Rolf, knocking him off the island so that he crashed onto the floor.
Khent winced.
Nothing kept Rolf down though, and he rolled and bounced to his feet. “Man, that was a nice exit, right,bro?” He winked at Khent.
Khent walked up to him, studied the draugr, then punched him in the face.
Rolf went down again, swearing.
Mood restored, Khent left him for his lab in the basement. Surely, there had to be something dead he could play with while he tried to figure out how toonce againtrack down some evil plaguing Seattle.
Blah blah blah. Rinse and repeat.
CHAPTER
THREE
She pilotedthe corpse with an art lost to the few remaining of her kind…those not shuttled to one of the Hell realms as punishment for daring to exist.
As if Valentine Darkmore had asked to have power over the dead.
The moonlight didn’t help, illuminating the vast forest of Cougar Mountain, spearing through the overhead canopy of alder and maple leaves. With the presence of the coven, Val started to rethink her idea of centralizing their new HQ on the Eastside, though she did like the city of Sammamish especially. Both for its proximity and distance from Seattle.
Where she and her new team planned to take back what was rightfully theirs.
She mentally commanded her minion crows to stealthily report back what they saw while her dead eagles perched in trees and narrowed in on the enemy leader.
One of them sent her an image of a tall witch with beaded braids held back in a band, sigils and spells painted over her dark skin in a luminescent gold paint. The woman was beautiful.
Too bad she had to die.
“Prepare to bite it, you necro scum,” the witch sneered. She closed her eyes, turned in Val’s direction, and let loose a cloud of poison, glowing green in the dark, to snake its way toward her.
Val ducked behind the narrow, seven-foot-tall boulder shielding her from all that attitude.
With a flick of her wrists, her pets dove at the head witch to distract her, giving Val time to reanimate one of the dead witches she’d already killed.
The power it took to bring the witch back to life was minimal, as the recent death energy lingered.
Ingest the poison,Val sent to her new minion’s mind.
“No, Isabella!” the lead witch cried as she watched her dead friend intercept the cloud and suck down the poison, her body blistering before it expanded then exploded.
Blood, bones, and viscera splattered everywhere.
