Page 128 of You Only Love Twice
A second explosion rocked them.
He could hear a winch squealing as if the weight of the chamber strained the pulley system above them. They had to be close to the top. The explosion sounded like it had come from barely fifty feet away.
Screams.
Someone yelling.
"Damn it!" Ingrid tried to push her fingers through the double doors. A thin gap of light splayed through. Muscle flexed beneath her sleeves, but the doors held firm.
"Locking mechanism's in place," Charlie said, prying open the electrical panel that operated the door and surveying the wires inside. "Give me a minute or two."
No time for this.
Obsidian looked up.
Punching a hole through one of the brass panels on the ceiling, he hooked his hands on either sides of the hole, then curled his body and slammed his heels up through the roof. Brass rivets popped and strained. He kicked again. Light shone through.
"Or we could do that," Charlie muttered below him.
"Follow me," Obsidian called, and hooked his legs up through the opening he'd created before curling his body up after him.
* * *
The throne roomdoors were blown off their hinges, smoke pouring through them.
"Caleb!" Ingrid slid to the side of her fallen husband, trying to discover where he was bleeding. Byrnes gritted his teeth and clapped a hand against his side, dark blood staining his fingers.
"Couldn't take her down," Byrnes gasped. "She was trying to kill me."
And Byrnes had been trying to merely incapacitate her.
"I need you to get one of those electric stunners the guards use," Obsidian told Charlie and Ingrid, because the last thing he needed was someone else getting in the way. "I'll stop her from reaching the queen, but I need the stunner to destroy the neural implant's hold on her."
A dozen guards in blue and gold were hovered around the queen on the dais. Blue blood lords and their ladies screamed and scrambled to get out of the way as Gemma advanced, scattering like a flock of rampaging peacocks.
But Gemma herself moved like a lethal vision, bending to roll a handful of her smoke bombs across the floor toward the line of Coldrush Guards that remained the last line of defense for the precarious human queen.
"Ready," shouted a Coldrush lieutenant as the line of his guards knelt and locked their rifles upon Gemma. "Aim—"
She'd never survive.
Obsidian was sprinting before he knew it, fists pumping at his sides.
She stared to turn toward him, pistols coming up, but he smashed into her.
"Fire!" someone bellowed.
They slammed into the marble floors, sliding into the brass circle where blue blood duels were fought. Bullets spat past them, whining through the air.
Then the bombs exploded, and suddenly the air was thick and roiling with black smoke as the chemical elements inside them mixed. Several of the guards started coughing and spluttering.
"I can't see her!" someone yelled.
"Get the queen out!"
"Did you miss me?" Obsidian asked her, as Gemma stared up at him for one breathless second.
He urged her to see him.
