Impulse by Dannika Dark Read Free Book Online Page A

charged at him.
    There was no time to wait. I threw my hands forward to pull the gun, but it never came. Meaning—he wasn’t a Mage. I could only pull certain metals recently touched by a Mage. He glanced at his watch and ran out of sight.
    Then it grew eerily silent.
    The front door crashed in and an engine roared as a vehicle skidded to a stop in the main room, pinning a body beneath a tire.
    It was pandemonium. People crawled over pieces of debris and I thought I saw Merc flash into the room. Someone coughed, a few voices shouted out, and then it happened.
    An explosion.

Chapter 4
     
    I shouldn’t have survived, but I did . The floor in the hallway looked like a war zone as pieces of a collapsed wall covered the white floor. When I coughed and looked at my palm, a slick film covered my skin and shimmered on my clothes like the wet trails that slugs leave behind.
    “Ghuardian?” I coughed into my hand. “Simon?”
    The cries that surfaced were horrifying, but it was the quiet moans that made my hands shake.
    “Silver!” Simon called out. “Cover up your wounds!”
    I stumbled through the dim hallway, stepping over chunks of mortar. “Simon, where are you?”
    He caught my wrist and I looked up.
    “Are you injured?” His panicked voice made my heart kick up a beat. “There was liquid fire in the truck and if it gets on any of your wounds then the injury will be permanent. I don’t know how they managed to get it in an aerosol form. It’s a stubborn substance, its properties not easily changed. It’s airborne.”
    That scared the hell out of me and I looked myself over. “I think I’m okay. Where’s Justus?”
    My eyes widened in horror when I saw a woman with her face half gone lying in the main room.
    “They won’t heal. Liquid fire will seal mortal injuries.” Simon grimaced and shrugged out of his jacket, tossing it over the dead woman’s face. “Sodding bastards!”
    In a connecting room, the woman who helped take down the two gunmen was crouched on her knees. Blood trickled from her ears and she appeared disoriented. A tall Chitah was dragging an overweight man out of what used to be the front door.
    Amid the chaos, Adam stood up and took a few shaky steps before he knelt in front of a body missing a leg. In vain, he tried to heal the dead man.
    I shuddered when I noticed the gashes on his face and the blood on his arms and shirt. He wiped his brow and I remembered him standing behind the glass wall. That damn glass wall ! I sprang forward, tripping over a chunk of concrete in my flimsy shoes.
    “Adam! It’s too dangerous in here. The air isn’t safe! You need to get outside and—”
    “I can’t leave them. They need help,” he said in a disconnected voice, grimacing from his own pain. He lifted the man in his arms and disappeared through the rear of the house.
    “Search the room,” Simon yelled out. “Justus was headed this way looking for Novis before the explosion.”
    My tangled hair clung to my face and I tried to avoid looking at the carnage.
    “Ghuardian!” I shouted in a raspy voice. “Please call out!”
    I crawled over piles of broken furniture near the vehicle; it didn’t appear the intent was to blow up the building as Nero could afford enough explosives to complete the job. He rigged this bomb to leave people injured. Permanently.
    A foot stuck out from beneath a white sofa. I lifted one end, hoping the leg was still attached to a person. He looked to be a boy of sixteen, and while my fingers felt for a pulse, the chunk of metal embedded in his chest told me everything I needed to know.
    Part of a stone archway had collapsed, along with half of the ceiling. Mage energy nipped at my skin and I crawled over the debris into the room with hope in my pocket. Sitting on a large pile, my hands worked at tossing aside chunks of rock and plaster.
    A deep voice groaned beneath the rubble and as I cleared some of the debris, I found myself staring at the hilt of a