We run for the door.
The poison hogweed swipes at me, its thorns missing my face by a hair’s width.
Pucking puck. Remind me to never break into a dryad’s home again.
I glance back and see Erato stumbling into the deadly embrace of the bug trap flower. The flower’s giant trap closes, muffling the dryad’s confused cry. Before I can celebrate our narrow escape, the pods of the acid seed okra turn toward me, moving as if in slow motion.
I don’t even get the chance to think the word “duck” before an acid seed flies at my chest like a bullet.
Chapter Ten
Only it doesn’t smash into me. With the speed a Secret Service agent would be proud of, Valerian yanks me behind him, taking the projectile in the chest in my stead.
The material of his outfit begins to sizzle, and terror rips through me. Pucking idiot! What was he thinking? Who made him my bodyguard? I want to yell at him, but there’s no time. Hands shaking, I grab my hand sanitizer and squirt the cleansing liquid at the spot where the acid is attacking Valerian’s suit.
The sizzling seems to lessen.
Valerian tears at the front of his suit, ripping a chunk away.
There’s a nasty burn on his chest, which I squirt with more hand sanitizer.
I’ll live, he informs me via LEGO letters. We have to go.
Grimacing in pain, he grabs my hand and pulls me toward the door as Erato’s knife slices open the side of the bug trap.
We sprint for the elevator. Erato is on our heels, and the plants in the hallway try to stop us—except these are regular, non-deadly plants, so they fail.
As he summons the elevator, Valerian must spare a second to make Erato see something that isn’t there because she hurls her knife in the direction opposite us.
We leap into the elevator, and he punches the button for the roof.
The doors close, shutting out the dryad, but I don’t exhale until we get all the way to the top, where a flying car is waiting for us. As soon as we jump inside, it lifts off the roof.
I rip the stupid mask off my face and squirt more sanitizer at the burn on Valerian’s chest. He won’t die, I know that now, but I’m still furious that he took that kind of risk.
“What were you thinking?” I say through gritted teeth. “You could’ve—”
“It’s okay.” Removing his own mask, he covers my hand with his. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“But why did you even—” I stop short because he pulls out a small vial and takes a sip.
His eyes close in that blissful O-face expression, and the wound instantly heals.
I narrow my eyes at the vial. “Vampire blood?”
He puts it away. “I only use it in case of emergencies.”
I take a deep breath, some of my fury abating. If he had that with him, then he wasn’t in as much danger from the acid seed as I thought. Still, the idea that he took that deadly projectile for me…
“Don’t do that again. Ever,” I say grimly. “The risking your life for me part, I mean. And be careful with that blood.”
He arches his eyebrows. “I’m always careful. Do you have a problem with it?”
“I almost did.” I tell him about my recent troubles with that highly addictive substance, and when I finish, he takes out the vial and demonstratively pours it out the car’s window.
“No need to have that sort of temptation around you,” he explains. “I don’t need it that much.”
Before I can process that, the car descends onto a landing strip on a rooftop. Distracted, I peer at it. It looks like a private rooftop, in which case Valerian is even richer than I thought.
We land, and as we exit, he tells the car not to expect us for a while.
I blink up at him. “It’s your personal car?”
Most citizens of Gomorrah share rides—both driving and flying ones—which is how we don’t have traffic the way they do in New York and other Earth cities. Only one percent of the richest one percent bother with private rides.
He lovingly pats the shiny surface of the vehicle. “Sometimes you order a ride, and it takes time to arrive.”
“Sure. It makes sense to spend a fortune to avoid wasting those valuable milliseconds.”
He grins and leads me to the elevator.
Surprise surprise. We only descend one floor, to the penthouse of this skyscraper—the most expensive dwelling you can imagine. He waves his hand, and the shiny black door quietly slides open, revealing an expansive loft-like space with twenty-foot-high ceilings made almost entirely of glass.
Talk about skylights.
That’s not what makes my breath catch in my chest, though.
Someone put a thirty-foot-wide water pond here, smack in the middle of the penthouse.
Is this real? I’ve never seen such a thing. Then again, I guess if you can have a pool, you can have a pond—if you’re into throwing money away, that is. Unless this thing is an illusion, Valerian must own the floor below this one just to make room for the bottom of this body of water.