“Your masculinity has been called into question? That’s the newest blockade?” he asks like he’s hoping he’s figured this out and found this hellish answer.
Mercifully, he keeps his tone as low as mine so the other two assholes don’t overhear this conversation.
“I’ve been handling her too gently, apparently, and there’s been a miscommunication of intentions, it seems,” I correct, glaring at him.
He chokes back a laugh…barely.
Before he can say something I can punch him for, the cockpit door swings open, and Violet runs out, sprinting to her seat with a slightly panicked look on her face.
“What’s going on?” Damien calls out as Violet’s seatbelt clicks into place.
The plane dips immediately, and Violet squeals, as I quickly strap my own damn self in.
“A storm,” Arion says mildly. “An electrical one.”
My eyes widen, as Violet whips off her necklaces, tossing them toward the back of the plane.
She screws her eyes shut, her skin paling, as she shakes with notable dread or fear.
“Oh, right. You’re a lightning rod,” Damien says dryly, as he fastens his own belt on the second hard dip of the plane. “This ought to be interesting.”
Violet shrieks a little this time, grabbing his arm and squeezing hard.
“Considering I’m inside a flying metal object, I’m surprised the storm isn’t already over here,” Violet says in a shaky, half panicked tone.
The plane violently dips this time, like Vance is forcing our descent too fucking fast.
“Can he even land anywhere here?” Damien snaps as we’re aggressively jolted, my teeth smashing together so hard I’m worried I’ve broken an important tooth or two.
“H-he said i-it won’t be pr-pretty,” Violet stammers, shaking even harder in her seat, as the plane’s descent gets faster and—
A scream tears through the plane as something bright and blinding crackles and pops in the air, nearly searing my eyes with the heat off it. It’s so bright that it’s all I can see, making it impossible to know what the actual fuck is happening right now.
The plane is thrown, as the scream gets louder. The light abruptly vanishes…and then I realize what just happened.
The bolt of lightning that just struck us and tore a problematic slit through the plane…was consumed by Violet...
There’s a completely silent moment—no screams, no thunder, no thrumming engines—and we just seem to hover in a moment of suspended animation.
Violet’s eyes get more violet, and her breaths shake harder, along with her hands, as a slight whimper escapes her lips.
That’s when the plane drops hard, and the absence of the thrumming engines finally registers as a really bad fucking thing.
“Vance!” Damien and I both shout, as the thunder warns us of what’s soon to follow.
Arion comes over the speaker—which seems to be the only fucking thing still working on the plane, as we essentially plummet with a little style.
My ears pop, my stomach climbs, my heart pounds heavily, and I watch as gravity works in clumsy motions, sending things flying and crashing all around. Air whirs through the plane that is wobbling and threatening to be torn apart, metal screeching as it fights to stay in one piece.
“Vance can’t talk right now. He’s in the middle of crashing a completely fried plane. This won’t happen on Air Arion when I’m your captain,” the psychotic vampire says with a careless tone.
“Brace!” Vance shouts abruptly, before we’re all jolted hard.
My head flies back as a sense of weightlessness hits briefly, just long enough to confuse all my senses, before that clumsy gravity hits me so hard that it feels like I’m being dragged down by hundreds of hands, violently rocked and jarred.
Violet screams again as the light blares inside. It’s almost like having a welder’s glare directly in front of unshielded eyes, as we’re launched sideways, skidding in circles. We crash and tumble through what sounds like a forest, but all I can see is that damn streak of blinding light.
My seat feels on the verge of breaking off, just as we’re painfully yanked to a halt. Violet’s bloodcurdling screams of agony mostly distract me from all else going on.
That light is so bright because it’s all funneling directly into her, and her body is contorted in obvious torture, as it finally fizzles out as abruptly as it started.
Not even one scorch mark is on anything but her. It’s like she absorbs every fucking spark.
Violet’s body slumps forward, and her weak eyes helplessly look up at me, as Damien curses his broken leg.
“Get me out of here. It hurts worse with so much metal,” she whispers almost desperately.
My seat collapses when I rip the belt free, grabbing her as quickly as I can. Making as much haste as possible, I maneuver myself through the carnage, stumbling only a couple of times.
“Violet!” Vance shouts from the front, just as Arion kicks the cockpit door open on its side.
He throws himself into the door above us, knocking it open, as he disappears out of the way. I launch myself through the opening he makes, cradling Violet to my chest, as I land in an unsteady crouch.
The thunder warns of the next strike, and Violet slaps at my chest.
“Put me down! Put me down!” she shouts in a panic, shoving hard at my chest.
I don’t get her lowered fast enough, and pain licks up my spine so hard that I don’t even feel it at first. In the next instant, it feels like I’m blinded and flayed open, as it rockets through me with another shock.
On the next blink, I’m crashing hard into a tree, knocking it to a lean, as it cracks a couple of my ribs. Dropping hard onto the ground, I grunt and peer through half-lidded eyes to take in the blurry image in front of me, as the rain pelts Violet.
It all seems to slow down at once, as I rock back up to my feet, staring as her head flings back, back arching, while the light feeds into her body. Her head swings back, and her hair sprays water in the streak of its sharp path.
The next strike hits her right behind that one, not even giving her time to breathe between rounds.
“How do we make it fucking stop?” I shout as Arion tries to get close, but he gets knocked back by the next hit.
With a grunted curse, he hits the ground as effectively as I did, when yet another strike seems to come at an impossible angle, literally seeking her out.
All the while, her tortured screams leave us helpless.
“Bloody make it stop!” Damien shouts, shoving at Vance, as the storm whirs louder around us, small pieces of the somewhat intact plane still flitting down like forgotten debris.
Vance starts toward her and stops, when the next bolt rains down on her as well. Violet’s shouts fade into silence, her mouth open in a soundless, pitiful scream, until her body goes limp.
The storm eases as the thunder dulls, and Violet collapses to the wet ground, barely managing to get her hands out in front of her face before it takes the brunt of the impact.
Arion beats me to her by a fraction of a second, and her head lazily lulls to the side. The vampire hisses out a breath and jerks back his hand. A spark at his other hand has him making another expression of mild pain, but he grinds his teeth and deals with it, as the sparks trickle from her in ebbing currents.
Violet limply reaches for Vance, who snags her away from Arion. She clears her throat, as she gives us all a weak thumbs up, even as that violet rim has expanded to nearly take up most of her eyes. “The seatbelts were exceptional,” she says through strain.
Vance makes a humorless laugh, and I shake my head, as Violet gives us all an unconvincing, tired smile. “Next time, maybe just avoid the storm,” she adds as her eyes roll back in her head and her entire body goes slack.
I snatch her out of Vance’s arms, and I cradle her unconscious body to me again. Vance wisely lets me keep her, since I’d likely bite any hand that tried to pry her away in this moment.
“That might have been the most pain I’ve felt while conscious in quite some time, and it was just a taste of what she experienced just now,” I state quietly, gingerly running my lips over her head, as just the tiniest bit of electrical currents tingle against my touch.
I’m aching all over from the lightning bolt wallop.
“We question her resiliency too often and too easily,” Vance says, drawing my attention to him, staring on at the remaining pieces of Fiona.
Damien snaps his leg into place as if to punctuate just how severe this all could have been.
“She has the most painful feeding curse of anyone,” Damien says so quietly I almost don’t hear him. “It was almost like watching the lightning from that night’s storm that awoke Bobo and the others from their deaths.”
“It makes a man feel stupid when the answers to the nagging questions have been glaringly obvious all along,” Vance says on a tired exhale.
“She’s soft when her guard is down. She’s damn near unbreakable when it’s up,” Damien adds, jaw grinding.
“I’d prefer to never witness that again, so a full weather report will be added to Shera’s daily tasks,” Arion chimes in, looking idly around the airplane. “On another note, so long as I learn to land a plane, I’ll already be an exceptionally better pilot than Vance.”
“Do you have any idea how damn fine of a job I just did?” Vance asks Arion with narrowed eyes.
Arion glances over at the smoking wreckage, quirking an eyebrow. “Not really, no,” the vampire quips in a very genuine tone.
“Fuck’s sake, Arion. It wasn’t me who crashed the plane; it was the—fuck it. Never mind,” Vance says, sighing in exasperation as he pulls out his phone. “I’ll have someone come take care of this and pick us up.”
I start walking, feeling the need to do something, as Violet remains unconscious in my arms, the rain growing colder and colder.
My footsteps pause when the rain turns to powder-soft snow, and gently trickles down on us.
Arion moves beside me, eyes intently on Violet, as his breath puffs out in a fog in front of his face.
A howl in the far distance, along with the familiar scent finally cutting through the smoke from the plane, quickly tells me what territory we’ve just crashed into.
Arion stares off in the direction of the howl, twirling a strand of Violet’s hair around his finger, as he keeps stride with me. In a wry tone, he says, “Now that we’re here, let the fun begin.”
CHAPTER 15
VIOLET
“You’re insane if you think I’m leaving her at the Morrigan Estate in these parts,” is the first thing I hear Arion arguing when I come to.
“She’ll stay in neutral territory—the Van Helsing Estate,” Vance states dismissively.
“That’d be a fine argument, anywhere but at the estate your father runs,” Damien chides in a dry tone, sounding very close, as fingers gingerly stroke through my hair.