“It’s okay. I’m okay.” Adrien does not look okay. He scrabbles for the salt he’s stocked in his pockets, pinches some out, then flicks it at the beast.
The guivre snaps its head back, but then it lunges. Adrien dives out of the way, sliding over the whitened remains of calcinated wood, bumping into my boots. I grab his arm and heft him up.
“What about if we put a circle of salt around it? Like we did with that garlic mixture for Matthias?” Cadence suggests. “Not that it worked on him . . .”
“We’d have to get the damn thing to stay in one place first.” On the wall beside the front door, which is surprisingly intact, I catch a glimpse of silver—two elaborate crisscrossed swords.
The sulfur must be making me giddy. I’m thinking of unhooking them to fight the dragon like one of Bastian’s favorite fictional characters. Yeah. There’s gotta be some hallucinogenic effect to the brimstone, because not only am I thinking of doing it, I actually feel like I could win and not get cursed. Before I can analyze my chances of becoming an epic hero or an epic piece of toast, I race across the open space and rip Excalibur down. Its heft takes me by surprise, and I nearly chop off my own foot.
Smooth.
I go to toss the sword Adrien’s way when Cadence shrieks my name. I spin around in time to see the beast hack up a giant fireball. I swing like I’m playing cricket. The blade connects with the fiery orb, which glances off and sails straight through a smashed window.
Advantage, Slate.
I’m about to gloat about my backhand when Cadence yells my name again.
The creature snarls and flaps its fibrous wings once before lowering its head like a bull and charging me with its razor-tipped, obsidian horns.
“Don’t make contact, Slate!” Cadence yells. “You’ll get cursed! Please!”
Right.
I reel my arm back and toss the sword like a javelin, hoping to brain the beast. The blade meets flesh—not quite where I was aiming—with a loud, wet squelch. The dragon shakes its head, but Excalibur stays stuck, dangling from its left nostril like a giant piercing.
“Adrien! Cadence! The salt!”
They dash over. With trembling hands, Adrien digs the salt out of his pockets, dumps some in Cadence’s palm, then reaches for more. Thank fuck he filled his pockets with the stuff because sifting salt out of this mess would’ve been impossible. Back to back, they draw arcs around the goth creature until they reach me.
“What do we do now?” Cadence asks.
“Gaëlle gave me a Sumerian demon burial bowl.”
“Wouldn’t happen to be in your pocket, Prof, ’cause—” I jut my chin to the surrounding rubble.
Cadence scans the wreckage, and then she’s dashing toward where the couch used to be and leaning over, her black skirt riding up her ruined black tights. Too soon, she’s straightening and flipping around, a hammered silver bowl tucked against her heaving chest. “This it, Adrien?”
He joggles his head as though his spine has turned into a spring.
Cadence strides back toward us, hair loose and whipping around her face, cheekbones blackened by soot. She looks like an avenging goddess come to defeat all evil. Badass and edible.
The dragon sneezes out the sword, the whizzing clank stealing my attention off the woman I almost passed on because of scruples. Fuck scruples. If Adrien’s spell works, and I get to live another day, I’m going to make this girl mine.
The beast wheezes out a fireball aimed directly at Cadence. She holds out the bowl like a shield. My breath jams, and I lunge, my foot catching on something. I slam down on one knee just as the flaming sphere reaches Cadence. Noise vanishes as fear drills into my skull. I roar her name.
In slow-motion, the fireball thumps into the bowl, making Cadence stumble backward, then ricochets off and boomerangs toward the monster, whopping it square in its scaly chest. The odor of scorched reptile and rotten egg leaks out from the glowing crater.
“Holy hell.” I climb to my feet. “It can’t handle its own fire.”
“That’s it, Adrien!” Cadence yells excitedly. “That’s how you defeat him. With fire! With its own fire.”
Adrien’s mouth is moving. I concentrate on his lips, discover he’s speaking words that sound like Latin. The spell?
“Mori. Ad inferos daemonium. Mori. Ad inferos daemonium.”
The beast chuffs, its wings lifting as though readying to take off.
“Prof, I don’t think your spell’s—”
Something hisses, and it’s not the dragon. The salt liquifies and binds together in a glowing, smoking circle. When the wispy veil drifts into the creature’s face, its lids slam shut, then open, slitted pupils growing thinner. It rages, rolls its sinewy body, lowers its head, then charges straight for Cadence.
Her skin goes bone-white beneath her war paint.
“Run!” I yell.
She takes off, nimbly leaping over debris. I snap Excalibur’s sister off the wall and sprint toward the beast with my brandished weapon just as his curled horns slam into an invisible wall that sends it hurtling backward.
Cadence stumbles to a stop, lips parting around hectic breaths. “The salt worked!” Her chest lifts and falls almost as fast as my own.
Adrien speaks the incantation louder. The beast agitates its head as though the spell is causing it physical pain. It snarls and turns to Adrien, opening its mouth.
“Adrien, catch!” Cadence yells, frisbeeing the bowl at him.
Her aim is perfect and yet he fails to catch it. The bowl glances off his rigid body, spinning like a shiny top above the rubble.
“Fuck!” I dash toward him and pick it up.
The guivre spits out a jet of flames, arrowing straight at the professor.
I pop up in front of Adrien, shielding him with my body and the bowl. I lock my elbows and steady my gaze on the incoming fireball, praying for the Quatrefoil to have mercy.
The smoldering orb, like the dragon’s horns earlier, pounds against the invisible salt barrier, before bouncing back and streaking toward the beast, chewing right through its right wing. The monster shrieks and thunders, then breathes out more fire, which knocks into the magical wall, before charging the beast’s belly. And then his other wing. The smoke thickens and the place stinks like a prehistoric barbecue.
Bit by scaly bit, the guivre cremates itself. When the oily smoke clears, all that remains is a heap of ash.
I squint, trying to make out a glimmer. “Do you guys see the leaf?”
Cadence’s eyebrows jolt together. “Non.”
“I think you have to go dig through the ash, Prof.”
Wordlessly, Adrien seizes the bowl from my hands and crosses the ring of salt—perhaps because it’s gone, or perhaps because the repellent magic doesn’t affect the spellcaster. He kneels and sets the bowl down. Like a kid in a sandbox, he gathers the ashes and dumps them inside.
“The lid. There was a lid.” He gazes around the bareboned house with the despondent look of a soldier who made it out of battle alive while his entire regiment was defeated. “I’m going to need it.” His toneless voice fills me with pity.
“You mean this?” Cadence pulls a cone-shaped silver lid out of the rubble. It’s adorned with runes and narrows into a chimney-like spout. He nods and Cadence walks over to him, but the wall, which hadn’t affected Adrien, keeps her out.
Good. She shouldn’t get too close to a piece that isn’t hers.
Adrien gets up to retrieve the lid, his arm sliding right through the transparent boundary. He plucks it out of Cadence’s hands, then returns to his bowl and plops it on top.
He whispers, “Ad inferos daemonium,” on a loop, until a thick ribbon of crimson smoke coils out of the pinhole-chimney.
The stench from that smoke is worse than brimstone. Worse than barbequed dragon. Worse than death. The bowl and lid shudder, and then something clinks inside. Adrien reaches down and removes the lid.
The Quatrefoil leaf glistens like pirate booty.
; Three down.
One to go.
38
Cadence
Drained. Hot. Cold. Dirty. Relieved.
I am swarmed by all of these feelings, and not one after the other, but all at once. They twist through me like a tornado, violent and exacting, harshening the beats of my heart.
We did it!
Or rather Adrien did it, and Slate and I managed to survive to see another sunrise. We faced a guivre. A real-life, fire-breathing beast. My new normal would drive a weaker girl to complete insanity. I’m halfway there myself.
To think the remaining piece of the Quatrefoil is mine to defeat. I shudder harder.
When the adrenaline fades, which happens as fast as a blown-out wick, my teeth chatter and a full-body shiver courses through me.
I cross my arms to ward off the chill and calm the tremors, but it does zilch.
“Did the guivre . . .?” Adrien stands, clutching his silver dish. “Did it touch you, Cadence?” His voice sounds like his cashmere vest—soft and half-charred.
I suck in a breath that momentarily calms my trembling and dart a glance at my legs. “I-I don’t think so.” Even though I’m covered in soot, and there are a dozen runs in my stockings, there are no visible burn marks. I untie my arms and dance my hands over the back of my dress, hoping not to feel any holes. Although, would the beast’s fire have cursed us? As long as we didn’t rub up against his scales, we should be fine . . .
Right?
“Slate?” Adrien asks.
I whip my attention toward the boy who protected my body but injured my heart, hoping to see him shake his head . . . needing to see him shake his head. I want him gone from my life and Brume but not from this world.
His gaze wanders off the Quatrefoil leaf at the bottom of Adrien’s bowl and perches on my face. “Hope not,” he says in that cool, careless tone of his.
He might try to act all stoic but he’s not made of stone. Only of sin. He steals from innocents.
Correction.
He fornicates then steals.
I’m still not sure what I find more revolting: luring someone in before backstabbing them, or the larcenous act in and of itself.
Or the fact that I fell for him.
Banging on Adrien’s door has my chest tightening. In the havoc of the moment, I’d forgotten there was a town beyond the walls of this house. A town that must’ve been privy to the nonsensical inferno.
Adrien blanches behind the veneer of blackened dust that coats his nose, cheeks, and jaw. His forehead is red and peppered with clear blisters, and the hair atop his head has been singed down to the roots. When he turns toward the door, his remaining blond locks flutter, dusty, chaotic but still there.
“Coming!” He hinges at the waist and pinches the lid off the floor, then replaces it on top of the bowl, sealing in the cursed artifact.
Slate steps in closer to me, the heat from his body rivaling the one coming off the carbonized entrails of the gutted house.
“You think they heard? You think they know?” I keep my voice extra low. Even though I dislike him on a personal level, we’re still partners, so I attempt professionalism by discussing the situation.
“They didn’t hear the groac’h. Or see the ghost. Maybe they didn’t hear or see the dragon, either.”
My teeth knock together, this time, because of the snowflakes drifting through Adrien’s new skylight. Shivering, I scan the area next to where he’s standing with his father, but just like everything else, my coat’s disappeared in the fire.
“Cadence?” Slate’s breath pulses against my temple.
My gaze travels between Geoffrey’s fraught face and Adrien’s pinched shoulder blades. “What?”
“It isn’t true. What your father accused me of, it isn’t true.”
I narrow my eyes. “If you’re expecting me to believe—”
“I’m no good for you. I know it. Your dad knows it. But somehow, you don’t. Accepting what I was charged with felt like the honorable thing to do.” Slate’s lips twist. “At the time.” He circles around me until we’re face to face, until he’s obstructing my line of sight. Surely his plan. “All this near-death shit is making me reconsider my resolve to keep you away.”
“Keep me away?” I snort, which makes his eyebrows dip. “You make me sound like some desperate stalker.”
“That’s not—I didn’t mean—” A sigh, long, low, brimming with frustration, rumbles from him. “I like you, Cadence de Morel. A lot. Too much. Okay?” He growls his declaration.
My heart swerves into my lungs before managing to brake its crazed careening and righting itself. Slate’s a liar.
Li-ar.
I need to remember this.
I need to stop falling for him.
“Okay,” I finally say, injecting my reply with a strong dose of nonchalance, then sidestep him and start toward the front door.
“Okay?” This time, his voice isn’t low.
I can’t help the small smile that curls one corner of my lips. He can’t see it since I have my back to him. “Good evening, Mr. Keene.”
“Mademoiselle de Morel.” The mayor’s eyes travel over my face, then lower. He is so repulsively sleazy that I almost wish he’d fought off the guivre with us. I might’ve just pushed him into its path.
“Cadence!” Papa’s snowmobile sits at the bottom of the steps. His features are tensed and his skin pale as fresh snow.
I clamber down the two steps, bend over, and sling an arm around his neck. “Oh, Papa.” I release a wobbly breath, then inhale his fragrance of home and safety. “Oh, Papa.” I repeat softly. “It was so awful.”
“Ma chérie.” He smooths back my hair over and over. “Did it—did you . . . touch it?”
“Only its ashes, never the flames or the piece.”
He releases the king of all sighs. “Dieu merci.”
God had little to do with it. Slate, though . . .
I push away from Papa, sighing also, but not for the same reasons. I sigh because Slate is so darn confusing.
In the snowmobile’s beam, I catch two figures hurrying over—one with springy curls, the other with big glasses. While Bastian, like me, looks as though he’s been dropped down a chimney flue that hasn’t been swept in over a decade, Alma’s all clean and neat, barely a smudge of ash on her tear-stained face.
She hurls herself at me, squeezing me so hard it makes a cloud of soot bloom off my black dress. “Oh mon Dieu, mon Dieu. You’re alive!” Her shrieked relief almost blows my eardrums.
I pat her rattling spine. “Did you think one little dragon would kill me?” I murmur so that the thin crowd of bundled-up rubberneckers circling us can’t overhear.
I’m imagining they’re racked with curiosity and concern even though their expressions are difficult to decipher between the surgical masks and the faint light dribbling off the quarter moon.
“Dragon?” Alma breathes.
I nod.
Her eyes grow wide. “Holy shit.”
“Your coat, ma chérie,” Papa says. “Where is it?”
“The fire got it.” I’m surprisingly not cold, though. Maybe my skin absorbed the fiery-demonic heat and stocked it. Or maybe there’s just so much going on inside me that my body can’t process the outside world.
A wall of pulsing warmth appears at my back. A wall that smells of smoke but also of spice. “De Morel.” A wall that sounds exceedingly incensed. If my father shared fallacious rumors about Slate, I suppose he would have every right to be mad.
But I’m not so quick to dismiss Papa’s report and trust Slate. Just because I want it to be false doesn’t mean it is. Does it matter, though? I’m not planning on getting back with Slate. He might not be a lowlife gigolo, but that doesn’t erase the fact that he hates Brume and wants out.
“Roland. Glad to see you made it out in one piece.”
“Are you?”
I don’t say anything. Just keep my eyes on Papa and my back to Slate.
Under hi
s breath, he adds, “I suppose you are glad. After all, I’m the glue to your precious clover.”
I sigh. “Stop it, Slate.”
I sense him tensing even though our bodies don’t connect anywhere. It’s something in the shifting of the air between us, or the way his breaths palpitating against the back of my head have turned shallower, swifter. How I wish the Bloodstone could double as a lie detector. I’d really love to know who’s speaking the truth.
“Adrien!” Papa calls out.
I look over my shoulder, careful not to cross Slate’s tenebrous scowl. Adrien, still gripping his silver tajine dish, makes his father take a couple steps back and then circles him, giving him a wide berth.
“We need to . . .” Papa tips his head in the direction of our house.
He doesn’t mention the piece or the safe but we all get it. Well, except for Alma who’s staring at the dish as though it contains the guivre’s bleeding heart.
“My father will stay here, deal with the . . . with the wreckage, and the firemen.”
“You okay, son?”
“Non, Rainier.”
Papa’s forehead grooves. “Not that I ever doubted your strength and cunning, Adrien, but it brings me great comfort to see you standing before me.”
“I bet,” Slate mutters under his breath. “Would’ve put a real wrench in Operation Quatrefoil if he’d died.”
Adrien cocks the patch of skin that used to house an eyebrow but now sits hairless on his blackened forehead.
“I like the new do, Prof. Party in the back. Churchy in the front.”
“You’re such an ass, Slate,” Adrien says but smirks, so maybe he’s not mad.
But I am. “You know, being a jerk’s really off-putting.”
I don’t look to see what that does to Slate, but I see what it does to Adrien—makes his gaze, which had looked a little lost and wild, firm up. I don’t know if what Charlotte insinuated is true. I don’t know if Adrien actually harbors feelings for me. She probably said it out of spite.
“Papa has some hair clippers at home. I buzzed his hair once. Turned out fine. I’ll gladly help you out. Unless you want to keep it—”
Of Wicked Blood: A Slow Burn Romantic Urban Fantasy (The Quatrefoil Chronicles Book 1) Page 32