The Sweetest Burn (Broken Destiny #2)

The amusement in Adrian’s tone broke through my near-blasphemous thought. I turned away, feeling a blush burn my cheeks. I was going to die from embarrassment and then go straight to hell. That was my real destiny.

“Yes, I have warmer clothes,” he went on, his tone turning husky. “I didn’t occur to me to change into them until you weren’t looking, and now, I’m glad I didn’t.”

Me, too! the shameless part of me replied, but the rest of me was still cringing over being caught gawking at him as if I’d never seen a naked man before. Okay, so I hadn’t in real life, but the movies and the internet had to count for something.

“Are you dressed yet?” I said, keeping my back turned.

A rustling sound, then he said, “Enough.”

I turned around, marveling that my hearing was back to normal. The manna must have healed more than my cuts. Adrian was now by the trunk of the car, and the taillights revealed that he had on pants and calf-high boots. As I watched, he pulled a sweater over his head, then grabbed a large knife and what looked like a bag of dirt from the trunk.

“What’s with the dirt?” I asked.

He tucked the knife into his pants. “It’s hallowed.”

I hadn’t felt anything from it, but with my hallowed sensor being out of shape, that wasn’t surprising. Plus, it was only a bag. Not an entire plot of ground. “Grave dirt?” I guessed.

He shot me a quick grin. “Not just any. It’s dirt that’s tossed onto caskets as relatives say their final goodbyes. All that emotion plus being blessed soil turns it into a weapon, so to demons, it’s like little grains of dynamite.”

I gave the bag an admiring look. “Do we have any more?”

He tossed it at me. “Nope, so if you need to use it, make it count. Now, let’s find our way out of here so we don’t have to use any of it.”





CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE CHALLENGER HAD a flat tire, but Adrian didn’t use manna to fix it. Yes, manna worked on everything. Since we were low on our supply and didn’t know if we’d need more for future injuries, we just drove at a slow pace, the flat wheel causing us to thump-thump-thump our way across the desert playa.

Adrian kept one hand on the wheel and the other outside the window, feeling the air as if it could provide us with directions. For him, it could. I wanted to look for Jasmine and Costa first, but Adrian said that finding the exit took precedence because without it, we were all stuck here.

He was right, but I was still worried over whether they’d made it out or not. If they had, we only had ourselves to hustle out of here, and we’d made it out of demon realms under worse circumstances. If Adrian was right and this place was currently empty, we weren’t even in any real danger yet. Well, if you overlooked the fact that we were in a now frozen desert with no water, food or shelter aside from a windowless car, anyway.

Because I had nothing else to do at the moment, I kept texting Costa to see if he’d respond. It was possible he’d get them since Jasmine’s cell had briefly worked after she’d been pulled into a realm. It was how I learned that she was in trouble all those months ago, when her frantic texts of help and trapped had put me on a collision course with my fate.

After well over an hour of driving, Adrian turned, and a paved road was revealed in our headlights. We must now be clear of Racetrack Playa. We’d left the bus parked near the Grandstands off this road because no one was supposed to drive onto the Playa. Adrian had ignored that when he took me on our ride, but Costa had followed the rules. Minutes later, I held my breath as we drove by the Grandstand area. So far, no familiar tour bus, but headlights from other vehicles lit up the parking lot, and when I saw large shapes moving around, I was horrified.

“There are people here!”

Adrian kept driving after casting a single, grim look at the Grandstand area. “Tourists. They would’ve gotten dragged along like we did when this area was sucked into the realm.”

Horns began to sound behind us, and I thought I heard shouts. “We have to turn around,” I stated. “Those people have no idea what just happened. They must be terrified!”

“And you think telling them they’ve been pulled into a demon realm will help?” he asked sardonically. “Even if they did believe you, that would only make them more hysterical. Only finding the exit will help them, Ivy. If the gateway’s gravitational fields haven’t settled yet, it might even be weak enough that they’ll be able to cross through on their own without me needing to pull them through.”

What he said made total sense, yet I was still bothered by the way he said it. I looked behind us, not able to see the cars’ headlights anymore even though we hadn’t driven that far. That was how complete the darkness was. It swallowed everything—and everyone—within it permanently.

And Adrian sounded as if he didn’t care about the people we drove away from. Was that by practicality since there was nothing we could do? Or was it another indicator of the coldness that resided in him from spending the first hundred-plus years of his life as a demon prince? He cared about me, sure. And he cared about Costa, I believed. But when push came to shove, did anyone else matter to him? At all?

“You’re right,” I said at last, depressed by the thought. “It still feels wrong, though. They don’t know where they are, what’s going on, or what’s coming for them.”

That was the worst part, because I did know what was coming for them, if we couldn’t get them out. Then again, if we didn’t find the gateway, we’d be worse off than any of them. We’d been number one on the demon’s most-wanted list for months, and how ironic if they ended up nabbing us after something as random as a new land grab...

“Wait, why would demons want to absorb a desert?” I asked abruptly. “They use their realm absorbing for showing off, but there’s nothing out here except sand, more sand and rocks.”

Adrian gave me a thoughtful sideways glance. “They might not want the repercussions of swallowing a populated area. They’ve gotten away with that for millennia, but it’s the information age now. Thousands of people suddenly disappearing would make worldwide headlines and cause mass panic. Still...”

“Demons don’t much care about freaking people out?” I supplied. “In fact, it’d probably amuse them to see governments scrambling to come up with an explanation as to why entire cities became ghost towns in a blink. Plus, if demons get their way and the realm walls crumble, then everyone will be able to see those dark, icy realms spill out into our world, and then they’d know for sure that demons exist.”

Adrian began to slow the car. “Then, the only other reason they’d use their power to absorb a hunk of desert is if they thought there might be more here than just sand.”