Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [786]
The Gen One assassins rained down a hail of bullets on Reichen and the warriors caught within the UV prison below. Returning their fire wasn’t easy. The light bars were blinding and searingly hot, offering little room to dodge the incoming rounds while the warriors volleyed back shots with their own weapons.
From his periphery, Reichen saw Tegan take a bullet to the shoulder. Another grazed Nikolai in the thigh, knocking him on his ass for a second before he locked and loaded a second pistol and squeezed off several semiautomatic rounds. And up above, secure behind the bulletproof Plexiglas that shielded him from the fray, Wilhelm Roth was still watching, still gloating. Smiling, as though it were all merely entertainment and he’d already won this war.
Reichen’s fury churned on a swift, hard boil.
Already the pyro was rising up inside him; he felt the living heat ripple over his skin, watched with nonchalant acceptance as the bullets that should have punctured his body instead fell away the instant they met the field of psychic energy that enveloped him.
“Get behind me!” he shouted to Tegan and the others, spreading his arms wide to create an even wider field of protection. “Not too close,” he warned. “The heat will deflect the bullets, but it also kills.”
The warriors moved in as tight as was prudent, using Reichen’s body like a shield as they continued to strike back at their attackers, who had the advantage of unrestricted movement and seemingly endless firepower.
Reichen’s vision began to warp before his eyes. His pyro was building faster now, burning hotter than ever as he glared up at Roth. He let his rage expand, coaxed the flames to swell even bigger from within him. He summoned every ounce of fire at his command, letting it tumble and roil in his gut, willing it to strengthen as he held it down well past the point of pain. Past even the point of sanity.
Some threadbare shred of instinct told him that he was courting disaster, but he shoved reason aside and stoked the flames brighter. Tasting the need for vengeance—for a final, bloody justice—like potent liquor on his tongue.
“Wilhelm Roth,” he bellowed darkly, centering all of his hatred, all of his white-hot energy, on the male who had taken so much from him, even before he’d called for the slaughter of Reichen’s Darkhaven kin. “Tonight you die, Roth!”
Focusing his talent, Reichen fisted his hand and punched it through the ultraviolet light bars of the cell. He felt no burn, other than the heat coursing through him already. He glanced up and took great satisfaction in the sudden, slack-jawed astonishment written across Roth’s face. Grinning himself now in a smile full of hatred and laser-sighted purpose, Reichen stepped out of the Ancient’s cage with a roar of mingled triumph and murderous rage.
The two Gen One assassins blasted at him with their useless weapons. Reichen glanced up at them, heat rippling outward from his body with nuclear intensity. He summoned power to his raised and fisted hands, then turned it loose on the pair. Twin fireballs rocketed out of his palms. The spinning white-hot orbs struck their targets in an instant, incinerating the vampires on impact, bodies and weapons reduced to a flurry of drifting ash and molten bits of metal showering down from the top of the double staircases.
“Holy shit!” one of the warriors crowed from behind him, but Reichen had no time to relish the small victory.
Not when Roth was staring wide-eyed in panic, backing away from the window as if he was preparing to bolt.
Reichen crouched low, then sprang into the air. In one fluid motion, fire engulfing him, he leapt off the floor and sailed up to the broad sheet of Plexiglas that separated him from his quarry. He locked eyes with Roth, curling his lip off his teeth and fangs as he smashed into the window and watched the barrier shatter inward in a million melting pebbles.
Wilhelm Roth gaped at the towering