Page 99 of Commanding Flame and Shield
You knew we would be, Al.Fae reminded her, shifting to her next position.
We had to fucking try.She swore—low, filthy and threatening. Now she wanted this to be a fight. I’d seen the fallout of a Renown battle once, and wasn’t particularly inclined to again.
Focus on who’s left. We’ve got the first floor.Marcus commanded, and the moment he rumbled down the line, Ally was moving.
I stayed glued to her heels as she flowed down the hallway, dark ponytail billowing on some phantom breeze. With a mixture of horror and awe, I realized it washerbreeze. Her anger. And the only warning the next room would receive of her presence before she snuffed them out like candles. She flashed me a wicked grin, raised her booted foot, and smashed the door down.
THIRTY-EIGHT
FOREPLAY
AUGUST
The woman’s unseeing brown eyes stared right through me, like I was nothing but a phantom. Perhaps that’s what we were to them, in that form, in that spell. But she sat, obedient, unmoving, as I washed the blood from her neck and face. As Fae drew water up from the sink and wrapped it in rivulets around the woman’s matted blonde hair. She washed it clean as I healed the bite wounds on the woman’s sun-kissed neck.
Cameras are clear.Damien told us as we finished. I rose to wash my hands, as Fae dried the woman’s hair. The sudden tang of rancid blood wafted into the air as Alvara dispatched another tormentor she’d found lurking in a closet, her lip curled in a snarl as she dropped its flaming corpse to the ground. Her flames were a contained force—like Brody had said—incinerating the bodies we left in our wake.
She whirled on her heel, chest heaving, black and red blood slipping down her pale hands and dripping against the tile. It was Fae’s victim, now healed and clean, as she whimpered in her hypnotized state, that caught Ally’s attention. Emeralds snapped between me and the woman.
“Fuck,” she muttered, taking a heaving breath and wiping her palms on her shirt as she closed the distance. Alvara was the one to instruct the victims on what they remembered and wipe away what we didn’t want them to know. Namely,us. They had already turned the bodies to ashes, cameras wiped away, and memories of onlookers altered by the Westerlund Commander. Alvara slowly crumpled to her knees, her jaw locking as her hands cupped the woman’s tiny, trembling ones. She wiped the tears now streaming down her face with such a maternal touch it shocked me after all she’d just done. Emeralds locked on those deep brown eyes, and Alvara’s voice cracked when she said, “I’m so sorry.”
In that enchanting, melodic tone I’d first heard in my dreams, Alvara then told the story she would remember and what she would do. I looked away, not entirely sure getting into someone’s mind like that was kinder than the reality.
The reality of being kidnapped, tortured, and fed off by demons?Alec pressed. His living mark had already wandered—a bit dazed—back through the crowd of dancers upstairs, to her car on the curb a block away. Jason and Damien ensured her safe arrival home with wardings around her car.
Well…when you say it that way.
A snort from the other room was the only response.
Once the scene was clean, we snuck out a back door. Jason had disabled the alarm while Marcus disposed of the suspended tormentor in its true form in the hallway.
It had only taken seconds. Under a minute, from the moment her boot smashed the door in, Alvara was a phantom on the wind. The literal wind, as she unleashed a bit of that anger into a smaller version of the tornado she’d spun when Aren was wounded. She had learned how to harness it, wrapping protective circles around the victims as they fled forward. Before anyone could scream, I’d thrown up my shield, as instructed. And Alvara. That woman had three Renown telekinetically pinned against the wall in a heartbeat. In the next, two of them crumpled to the floor, their thick necks broken at unnatural angles.
The third was still pinned against the wall, blood beading across the surface of his face as small cuts appeared—her wind tearing across his flesh. He clawed at his throat as the air was sucked from his lungs, and she stared at him with that predator’s finality that would ice over hell itself. My mouth went dry…and it wasn’t from the wind. Or the two surviving women that made a desperate dash to accept my outstretched arms.
“Where are the rest?” She demanded, voice steady through the roar of the wind I had contained to our one room. I pulled both women around the corner, passing them off to an awaiting Fae and Alec, and rushing back to Alvara’s six.
The monster sneered, and she inclined her head to the side. Pure feline. She tore more air from his lungs, and his eyes widened, body failing to fight the force pinning him there. As though he attempted to summon a shield, but couldn’t. He made to speak, but had no air to do so. Without warning, the storm ceased, and she dropped him into a heap on the floor.
The monster tried for a second, and third time, to open his mouth, but it failed again. He gasped for breath, the stench of him thick in the air as he worked to suck any trace of it into his lungs. She lowered onto her haunches, bowing her head to look into his eyes as he clawed onto hands and knees.
“Where are the others?” She demanded, tone soft. Unruffled.
A low chuckle. The monster wiped his mouth of the blood that had begun seeping from his nose. “Why don’t youread me, and find out?” His voice was barely audible as he panted, but still defiant. Then he spat that rancid blood towards Alvara, who—of course—had seen that coming, and blocked it with a shield.
“So, we’re acquainted? Not the best way to greet an old friend.”
“Alvara of Grayshell,” the man rasped, “is no friend of mine.”
“Well, I would certainly say not.” Alec stepped into the room, washing his hands with a glowing ball of summoned water. “She would never sully herself with the likes of you.”
Alvara’s lips curved upwards, and with a flourish and contraction of her long fingers, she began sucking the air back out of the beast’s lungs. His eyes widened and Alec laughed, the sound humorless, and cold.
“I would tell the lady what she wants to know, if I were you,” Alec stated flatly. Bored. He carved the blood out from under his nails with a silver blade. “This is her idea of foreplay, and I assure you, you don’t want to see how that ends.”
The monster raised those onyx eyes up to survey his captors, and his gaze hesitated when it fell on me. He sneered again, blood soaking his rotting teeth. Those dark eyes twisted with ire. Fighting the restraints, he raised one shaking hand and pointed at me.
“He will…come for you…Commander. He will claim you.”
