Her shoulders back and head tilted defiantly, she said, “I’m not giving my dad up, and I’m sure as shit not surrendering myself either. You can tell your boss to go fuck himself.”
I grimaced. As Chaos’s enforcers, Vesh and all the brothers Bane didn’t give an inch to resistance. If anything, it made them push harder. But this was the first time I’d ever been so close to a target of his before. Despite my warning, I honestly had no clue whether I was strong enough to beat him. It was only a guess.
He withdrew his hands from his pockets, and black tendrils snaked around his fingertips, small, tongue-like things that snapped out like lashing whips tasting the air around him.
“What the fuck?” April muttered, recoiling.
I hooked an arm around her waist and shoved her behind me. “Let me handle this.”
Vesh took a slow step closer, the cloying magic wreaking havoc on my concentration. “We don’t have to do this, Gray. Courtesy is not usually my thing, but we’ve worked together before. Just step aside.” But I wasn’t about to let him have April.
“I take my job as a guardian seriously,” I warned, letting my hold on my human shape fade, relaxing into the shift as my body grew and scales replaced my skin.
“Do you usually fuck your wards? As I recall, you and your fellow bodyguards kept the fornication between the six of you. I wasn’t even sure if you liked women.” He kept advancing, and the aura of chaos around him made the line between rage and panic waver. I had to act soon or risk going mad. I gritted my teeth, glanced back to make sure April was okay, then lunged.
Heaving myself on top of the counter, I shifted in midair with a roar. Vesh backtracked, lifting his hands, but what might have looked like a defensive maneuver was an attack. The black whips of magic sliced at my scales, making them ripple and shift to half dragon-scale, half-human skin. Then he sliced again, and pain burned into my chest.
I bellowed in his face, and he spun away, narrowly missing the cascade of white fire I breathed at him. The tails of his coat burst into flame, fizzling out and leaving a trail of smoke behind when he spun to face me again with rage contorting his face.
“You had your chance!” His hands whirled through the air, the whips of chaos spinning in a void that he shoved straight at me. The air around me wavered and distorted like a surrealist fantasy, the floor tilting and undulating like it was made of taffy instead of hard concrete. I spread my wings to keep my balance, grasped the edge of the counter with one claw, and launched at him, my mouth wide enough to swallow him whole and fire turning my throat molten.
My flames managed to push him back, and sweat broke out on his face. The front of his coat was peppered with fire-rimmed holes burning wider and threatening to consume it entirely. With a curse, he shed the coat, and I took the opportunity to swipe at him with one claw. I caught him on the shoulder, and he stumbled before righting himself and lashing out again with a long tendril of crackling violet chaos magic.
The tongue of magic lashed around my throat, instantly constricting. I let out a croaking roar, and my eyes bulged as he cut off my air. I scrabbled at the length of black that tethered me to him, but my talons passed right through it. Vesh’s hold claimed control of my own magic, forcing me into a shift until I was human again and on my knees in front of him.
“I guess you were wrong,” he said, sneering down at me. “I always wondered how tough you guys really were. Chaos should’ve had me and my brothers guarding his precious songbird instead of you useless lot.”
A flicker of movement caught my eye from behind Vesh as April appeared, naked and glorious with her long steel punty held in both hands like a bat. She swung it at him, the glowing end making an orange arc through the air aimed straight at his head. I summoned what little breath I had left and managed to force one more gout of flame through the narrow passage of my throat, blasting it at his face just as she made contact. The punty smacked hard into his neck, the sizzle of flesh drowned out by his howl of pain as he went down. His power interrupted, I reclaimed my dragon form and jumped, slashing his throat in a single, neat sweep of my talons.
His body instantly went still and ice-cold, his skin turned black and hardened. I jumped off him, shifting back again, and pulled April into my arms. She buried her face in my shoulder as Vesh’s body shattered in an explosion of obsidian shards that pelted my back and fell tinkling to the hard floor like tiny bells.
April shuddered against me, turning her face to peek past my shoulder. “What the hell was he?” she breathed, finally relaxing a little and pushing back to stare around at the destruction. The ground was littered with the black rubble of his remains, and the kitchen counter I’d vaulted to get to him had been knocked back into the wall behind it. The kitchen was destroyed, and somewhere underneath the rubble were our clothes.
“I’ll have to explain later. For now, we need to get the hell out of here.”
“But you killed him. Shouldn’t we call the … ” She cut herself off, frowning, and I picked up on her thought.
“The human authorities can’t do a damn thing.” I took her hands and looked into her eyes. “April, this isn’t the end of it. If Chaos is after your father, he won’t stop until he finds him, and it sounds like they’ll happily take you as a substitute. Do you know where your father is?”
Her eyes were wide with fear, and she shook her head. “He just said he had to go off the grid. I had no idea he’d pissed off…did you say Chaos?”
“I need you to think about where he could be, and in the meantime, is there anywhere close where we can hide. Someplace we can lay low.”
Her brows drew together, and she blinked into the distance, biting her lip. Her thoughts broadcast a hazy image of a house overlooking the water. An island covered in trees. “There might be one place we can go,” she whispered. “But if they’re magic, can’t they follow us?”
“They aren’t omniscient, and they’re really bad with technology. They probably followed your dad to Seattle, then found you. Where’s this place? Is it where your dad went?”
She shook her head, nudging at a chunk of Vesh with one toe and wrinkling her nose. “No, if he were going there, he’d have told me. It’s on an island in Puget Sound. The property itself belonged to my mom’s family. Dad and I lived there with Mom until she left us, then we moved to the city. They were never married, and we haven’t heard from anyone on that side of the family for years, but it’s remote, and you can only get there by boat.”
I scrutinized her face, surprised by her lack of concern over half her family, but time was slipping away from us. “Which direction is it?”
“I guarantee there’s no way we’re getting a boat out tonight. We can go back to my apartment until morning. It’s right next door.”
“I want to put as much space between us and this mess as we can. Vesh isn’t really dead. He’s a Bane brother. He’s the offspring of Chaos. All we did was cut off one head of a creature that has dozens, and when you cut one off, two more grow back. Needless to say, killing him wasn’t ideal, but I needed to give us time to run before Chaos sends more of the brothers after us. He’s bound to know about Vesh already. They’re probably already on their way.”