Chico immediately stiffened. Slowly he swerved to look at me, his face grim and his jaw taut. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Oh I’m sorry, did I touch a nerve?” I knew I had. Preparing for a violent response, I absorbed the immediate energy, feeling it tingle and tickle as if eager to be released.
“You need to get away from here now, do you understand me?” His tone was deadly.
“Or you’ll spit some measly thorns at me?”
Without hesitation he forced out a heavy breath of poisonous thorns. Quickly I manipulated the energy I’d absorbed into the form of a hungry flame, burning the thorns to nothing.
“What about you, Butch? Think you can take me on?” I asked. I was a sponge of energy at this point. I was anticipating attacks from all angles and I needed to be prepared.
“You can fling all the flames you want at me, I’ll just negate them.”
“Negate this.” Before Butch could blink I had my energy whip in hand and slashed open his cheek with it. I knew that the crack of the whip would be too speedy for him to act in time. “You could have protected yourself, you know. All you’d have had to do was use the counteracting force you have to form a deflecting shield.”
“Negators can’t form shields.”
“Oh yes they can, Butch. I bet you’d love a shield that would help against emotional pain. Maybe then you wouldn’t still be feeling so raw about your mummy leaving you on the doorstep of a church.”
His eyes blazed red instantly and he came at me without thought. I let my hands shoot out in front of me and then spread them wide, pulling the energy to pop up my own shield. Butch ricocheted off it like a bouncy ball.
“Wouldn’t you like one of these, Butch? I can show you how to do it.”
He was too busy panting and sneering at me to answer.
“I’ve had an interesting afternoon talking to all your Sires and vampy friends. Turns out they were quite happy to divulge dark secrets. It must be jealousy because you were picked for the legion and they weren’t. Should I just carry on revealing them or shall we go to the arena now?”
“My Sire would never have told you anything,” said Stuart.
“Oh is that right? Would you bet your pride on that?” He seemed confident, how silly of him. “Come on, Stuart, shred yourself into nothing and come all the way over here and then I’ll only whisper to you what I was told. No one else has to know.”
He giggled at me without humour.
“You can’t move from where you’re stood when you do it?” I asked as if he’d said it first. “Not even when I’m telling everyone how you couldn’t protect your little sister and she became a drug addict and then a prostitute to pay for her addiction?” God he was pissed now: if looks could kill...
“And what about you, Damien?” I said. “Shall we share how just because your rich daddy left you bugger-all in his will you beat your brother half to death like an ignorant, bitter shit?”
“Bitch,” he cursed through his teeth.
“Sorry, didn’t catch that. Why don’t you astral project all the way over here and say it to my face? Oh that’s right, you can’t. Just like Reuben can’t weaken my power unless he holds on to me, not even when I tease him for the fact that his Sire abandoned him and he woke up to find nobody there to help him control his bloodlust and he more or less ate three people.”#p#分页标题#e#
Reuben started to charge at me but I raised a hand and released a tiny breeze at him as a promise of what would come if he proceeded. Wisely, he stopped.
“Slap-head, Slap-head, Slap-head.” I glared at him. “Aren’t you gonna silence me with that nifty power of yours before I blab about how you were abducted as a kid by a nut who couldn’t have a baby of her own? Stuck with her for three weeks, weren’t you?” There was plenty of cursing going on now. “Why not shut us all up and save yourself the earache? Or can you only attack one person at a time with it?” It was a rhetorical question. Max inhaled deeply but attempted no attack on me. Probably because he knew I’d just put my shield up.
I noticed that Denny and David didn’t appear challenging in anyway, as if they thought they might deserve a little payback. So I decided not to tease animal mimic Denny about not knowing his biological parents or psionic blaster David about being Turned against his will.
When I looked at Salem he knew what was coming and arched a brow in warning.
“What?” I said innocently. “You don’t want people to know how your gambling debts ended up getting your parents burnt alive while they slept in their bed?” I felt the ripple in the air as he aimed his invisible psychic boom at me to knock me out cold. My shield came in handy again. It almost hit Harvey as it bounced off the shield.