Chapter 730 | The Hero Code, According to a Snake

Chapter 730: 730 | The Hero Code, According to a Snake

It was a small sound, high and squeaky, like a dog stepping on a chew toy, and it knocked her aviator goggles off her forehead so they smacked the bridge of her nose.

I dropped the last ten feet off the ladder. My borrowed steel-toed boots hit the puddle with a heavy splash that soaked the cuffs of my reinforced trousers. Lami shoved the goggles back up into her wet hair with both hands and glared at me over her crossed arms, her toxic green eyes watering in the wind off the channel.

"I did not sneeze," she said. Her fangs clicked together on the last word because her jaw wouldn’t stop shaking. "That was a tactical cough. To clear my lungs of the harbor air."

"You squeaked." I walked to the mouth of the alley to check the street. The Chevy Express was long gone. The only thing moving on Waterfront Boulevard was a street sweeper three blocks south, its yellow beacon flashing on the wet asphalt. "And you’re turning the color of a bruise. Why did you cut the hips out of a diving suit if you were going to wear it in November?"

"Because the silhouette was boxy and it made my butt look flat," she snapped, hugging her ribs tighter as another gust rolled off the black water between the container stacks. The cutout panels at her thighs gapped wide where the cheap neoprene had lost its stretch, and the emerald scales down the outside of her hips had gone dull in the dawn. The skin above them was covered in goosebumps so big they looked like braille. "And it’s a thermal suit, golden boy. It’s supposed to trap body heat. The guy at the thrift store said it was rated for deep sea diving."

"The guy at the thrift store sold you a three-millimeter summer surfing wetsuit from nineteen ninety-eight. Then you took kitchen shears to the only part that keeps the water out."

"You don’t know anything about fashion," she muttered, and took one step toward the sidewalk before her left knee gave a violent sideways wobble.

Her safety-pinned boot hit a patch of oil on the wet concrete. Her brain was running on twenty percent oxygen and eighty percent stubbornness, so she forgot to keep the frictionless field off, and both feet shot out from under her at once. She didn’t even get a scream out. Her back tipped toward the pavement and her arms windmilled as she went down hard.

I didn’t need Blitz. A hundred points of Agility put me there before gravity finished the math, my left arm hooking around the small of her back and my right hand catching the back of her thigh just above the knee. The momentum swung her into my chest with a wet smack of rubber against Halloran wool.

Her hands scrambled at my shoulders. Her fingers slid off the damp fabric twice before she hooked her claws into the collar of my utility jacket, and she hung there for two seconds, her breath hitching against my throat. I felt the exact moment her brain registered how warm I was.

Demigod didn’t care about November harbor wind. My core temperature sat a couple of degrees above a normal human’s whenever my stamina was regenerating, so standing next to me in the rain was like leaning on a radiator that had opinions about your life choices.

Lami’s whole body went rigid in my arms. Then, very slowly, her chin sank into the hollow of my collarbone.

"Oh, you’re cheating," she whispered into my neck, muffled by my wet collar. "You have a heater in your coat. That’s rich-kid school gear. That’s completely unfair."

"It’s just me, Lami. No heater."

"Liar," she mumbled. Instead of putting her feet down like a normal person who’d just been saved from a concussion, she hiked her knees up and wrapped both scaled thighs around my waist in a vise grip that forced a grunt out of my chest.

?Compromising Proximity Event Logged.?

?Note: Subject ’Alya Nagini’ is currently utilizing the Host as a thermal rock. Constrictor physiology detected. The System recommends protecting the lumbar spine.?

I ignored the blue box floating past my ear and shifted my grip under her rear, because if I didn’t hold her up, she was going to squeeze my kidneys out through my ears just to stay off the ground. Her thighs were ridiculous. Under the wet black neoprene and the smooth rows of emerald scales, the muscle was as dense as braided cable, built to crush concrete pilings, and every pound of it was locked around my hips while her cold nose burrowed into the side of my throat. The plunging neckline of her suit was mashed against my sternum, and the soft swell of her breasts squished against my shirt with every shiver that ran through her.

"Put your feet down," I said. I didn’t let go of her thighs, though. Partly because the alley floor was covered in fish-market runoff, and partly because I’m a realistic guy and she was built like a centerfold who did heavy squats for a living. "We have to catch the six-forty across the bridge or I’m going to be late for homeroom."

"Can’t," she said into my skin, her fangs grazing my pulse as she spoke. "My legs stopped working. It’s a snake thing. When it gets below fifty degrees my muscles lock up and I go into hibernation until somebody feeds me a pork bun."

"You’re nineteen and you grew up four blocks from the river. You don’t hibernate."

"I’m cold-blooded, golden boy, it’s in the medical literature, you can ask Dr. Espinoza." She tightened her arms around my neck and tucked her face all the way under my jaw, so the wet ends of her asymmetrical bob tickled my chin. She let out a shuddering sigh that warmed as it hit my skin, and her hips hitched an inch higher against my belt to get the bare cutout panels out of the wind.

"If you put me down on that sidewalk I’m going to die of exposure, and then Dralun will be sad and it’ll be all your fault. You have to carry me to Lin’s. It’s the hero code."