I can’t stay up here forever, especially not with the wounds I have now.
I start my descent, curving my body so that my circle tightens up, and there’s another round of bullets fired into the air around me. The panic of the enemy at my approach is a palpable presence in the air.
This time, one hits me on my long neck, a larger target on me than my vessel, and the taste of blood floods my mouth and my lungs as the bleeding gets worse. Another roar tears out of my jaws, bitten out from between my fangs as I spiral faster to get back down onto the ground. I’d rather be there, tearing these puny humans apart with my claws and jaws than burning them.
I’d rather be close to my Bonded if the bullet wounds kill me and once again take me from her before our time.
My feet hit the ground, and I swipe my tail out at the men who run towards me, guns and hands raised, spearing two of them on my tail spike. The others all scream, but when they turn to run, I burn them alive with nothing more than a single breath of fire.
Pathetic, all of them.
Unfortunately, what they lack in skills and spine, they make up for in numbers.
More Resistance appear, Transporters popping in and out dozens of times as they bring with them the best of what the Resistance has to offer, all of them ready to kill us. Whether it’s for power or morals or simply for the pleasure of killing is irrelevant.
They want us all dead.
I take a deep breath, ready to burn them all, when suddenly, they all drop dead around me, their bodies crashing to the ground as one, soulless and gone.
My Bonded destroys them all.
Before I can exhale or catch my breath, the next wave of Transporters arrive with more Gifted, this wave even stronger than the last. This time, I’m hit with a long stream of ice as one of the Elementals strikes out at me, thinking faster than any of the others as they just stand there, looking at me in varying degrees of horror.
I breathe a long stream of fire at them, killing most of them in a single breath. As the flames die down, I find that two Gifted have survived it. One of them is untouched, even her clothing is unharmed, while the man standing only a few feet away is holding a battered shield to protect himself. They either knew about me already, somehow surviving the Wasteland, or they were counting on coming up against a Flame. Instead, they found a Shifter of mythic proportions.
I swing my tail around to spear them, but they’re both fast, quick to jump out of its path. They’re battle-trained, not just grunts to be used as fodder in the fight. Whatever they can do, it’s powerful enough that the Resistance poured their resources into them.
They might even come from a family worth noting, but I don’t give a shit about any of that. I only care that they’re on the wrong side of this fight, the side that wants my Bonded dead.
Or enslaved.
A burst of power hits me, my skin burning as it begins to stitch itself back together. My blood heats up, and my heart, now an eight-chamber monstrosity in my shifted chest, thumps so hard that I’m sure the Gifted fighting below must think that war drums have begun to beat.
My Bonded is healing me.
Both of the Resistance standing in front of me watch with horror as my skin knits back together as though I was never touched by their weapons, and they see the power of my Bonded right there in front of them. There's no question that we are the most powerful Bonded Group. I'm sure they were debriefed before they got here and knew about it, but actually seeing the ability that my Bonded has to heal me, even from across the battlefield with death and destruction all around us, must be something else.
For the first time so far, I see the enemy hesitate.
I doubt that Davies had prepared them for this.
I swing my tail out again. This time, the very end of it clips the man with the shield, but he’s quick to twist his body, protecting himself from the spear as he falls to the ground with a grunt.
The untouched woman runs to one of the tents that is still on fire, yanking out one of the construction poles and hefting it onto her shoulder and hand as if it’s a spear of her own. She's faster than I'm expecting, and when she launches the pole into the air towards me, I am barely able to move out of its path before it skewers me.
I'm a much bigger target down here, and though I want to stay on the ground and continue to fight in close quarters, I am most useful to them in the air, that way my Bonded won't have to continue healing the damage done to me.
I need to take flight again, burn hundreds of them at a time.
I don't want to run away from these two though, I’m not one to leave a job half done.
They're not expecting me to be as agile as I am, and with a swipe of one of my clawed talons, I'm able to pin the man down, the satisfying crunch of his spine as it breaks beneath me sending a shiver across my wingspan. I press down even further, just to be sure he’s gone, and the way that his body bursts is both fatal and satisfying.
The woman turns to run to another tent to grab another pole, desperation making her movements jerky, but I use my wings to glide as I jump up, my neck stretching out as I catch her in my jaws and bite down. Her screams are ear-splitting as my mouth fills with her blood.
I don't enjoy the taste of human flesh, but I don't stop chewing until I'm sure she's dead. Then I spit her back out onto the ground, nothing more than a bloodied mass of flesh and broken bones, and I stretch my wings out to take back to the air without a second thought.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Oli
The moment the fighting starts around us, Kieran disappears to sound the alarm to the TacTeams in place for backup. They were close to moving out anyway, but as the waves of Resistance begin to arrive, we need all of the help we can get.
North and Nox move to flank our small group, their shadow creatures thick in the air, and Gryphon’s eyes shift to white as he throws his Gift into the mix, hacking into the brains of the Gifted around us to shut down their Gifts as he renders them nothing more than mindless, quick meals for the Dravens’ creatures.
Gabe’s dragon is quick to move off, and Atlas stays at my side, watching my every move obsessively as I lose myself in the Soul Rending. I become nothing more than a machine, filtering the souls of our enemies into power for my Bonded. I take from them and give it to my most beloved until they’re all terrifyingly powerful, indestructible gods.
The Resistance were prepared for that though.
Their strategy is easy to read. Each wave of Gifted they throw at us is stronger than the last as they attempt to chip away at us little by little, weakening us so that when Davies finally arrives, there’s no way we could possibly beat him.
The human part of me is worried that it’s working.
The god is too busy devouring the glut of lifeforce and power that we’re destroying around us to be worried about something so trivial as strategy and warfare. No, it’s writhing with joy in there, unrestrained and consuming everything around us to its heart’s content, because there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect my Bonded.
Nothing.
Instead of taking over completely, my bond just shifts into my mind so that we’re working together, my eyes shifting to black and helping me to see through the carnage.
The Resistance just keep on coming.
I let North and Nox work their way through the ones who arrive in the waves, and I focus on emptying out the rest of the camp. Tent by tent, I work through them all, but I’m also thankful when Gabe is able to wipe out rows and rows of the tents himself from the air.