Page 26 of Consume
Whoever flew the helicopter was doing a terrible job. It jerked and tilted dangerously close to scraping its whirling blades over the rooftop. And us. Still, we ran toward it.
My scalp prickled as though we were being watched. Hunted. But all I could make out behind us was more billowing dust.
The closer we drew to the swaying helicopter, the more difficult it was to see. I hoped that meant we were hard to see, too, and that we weren’t about to be picked off one by one.
“Faster,” I hissed, though the roar of the helicopter’s engine swallowed all sound.
If we were being stalked, we wouldn’t be able to see or hear it coming.
Ellison’s steps faltered and then she stumbled, dropping her end of the guard. She grabbed her arm and sagged to the left.
“Ellison!” I screamed. With my pulse beating into my throat, I rushed toward her.
Shit. Had she been shot? If so, I hadn’t heard a thing.
Mase threw down his end of the guard and dodged to her side. While he helped her to her feet again, I searched the grit and smoke swirling all around us for what made a shiver skate up my scales.
Two floating green lights caught my eye, there and then gone again. Then two more, and two more. Growing closer and aiming right at me.
I forced down a swallow. Those weren’t lights. Those were eyes. The eyes of Saelis/human hybrid guards who’d scented the consumectalons in my free-flowing blood from where the ghost had tried to eat me. There were at least thirty of them.
“Run!” I shouted, but it was already too late.
Gunfire ripped through the air, no longer silent.
Panic spiked. Everything I’d done. Everything I hadn’t. It would all end here.
I clung to Ellison, tried to drag her behind me, and tried to run all at once. But Mase threw himself in front of us and blocked with the female guard’s prone body. She jerked as the bullets hit her, but there would always be more bullets.
They came from all directions now. There was no outrunning them. We tried though. Feozva, how we tried.
Mase dropped the guard’s dead body, and we zigzagged toward the helicopter, not once running in a straight line.
The helicopter jerked higher and then leaned heavily to the right, its blades scraping the roof and throwing up sparks. A rope was tied to one of the helicopter’s landing rails and prevented it from leaving. From one side of the cockpit, shots fired at the rope. From the other side, something dangled upside down. Poh, I realized, firing a gun behind us with one hand and reaching the other out toward us. Her blonde ponytail, streaked with crimson, blew wildly in the wind. A horrible bloody gash seeped from her forehead.
My doubts about her—our only hope—paused. We poured on more speed. Ellison reached her first, and Poh effortlessly hauled her into the helicopter. Mase was next, picking off those who came too close behind us. Before he reached for Poh, he fired at the rope holding the helicopter to the roof and snapped it.
My turn. Poh flicked her yellow gaze to me, and a flicker of hurt and doubt rolled across her scaled features before she hardened them again and kept firing.
Hurt and doubt—an exact match of what I felt toward her.
I took her hand anyway, her grasp firm, and just as my feet left the ground, something yanked me back down. My fingers slipped, my palms too slick. No.No.
Poh threw down her gun to grab my other hand and shouted something I couldn’t hear. The helicopter lifted high into the air, but a heavy weight clung to my knees.
A guard. A man with glowing green eyes and thick cords of saliva streaming from his mouth. He opened it like he wanted to take a chunk from my calf, taste the high my blood would give him.
A desperate groan scraped through my clenched teeth. I did not want to be a fucking chew toy for the second time today. I kicked and squirmed, but not too much so Poh would drop me. The guard’s grip faltered down to my boots, tearing one of them off.
Poh pulled hard, her mouth twisted in a grimace, but she tensed when her gaze landed on my necklace. Against my chest, the back of the key pulsed with the slightest red light.
A tracker? Feozva damn that old woman, I bet she’d given me a tracker, not a key. I didn’t know if I was right, but I sure suspected I was.
“You want to eat something, do what I do,” I shouted down to the guard. I yanked one hand from Poh’s, snapped the necklace free, and dropped it and the key into his wide-open mouth. “Eat metal, fucker.”
Perfect aim. They went right down the chute.
His green eyes bugged. While clutching his neck, he dropped.
