Chapter 8 #2
“What is it?” Vash inhaled again, but her sense of smell wasn’t as acute as a lycan’s.
As she shoved her phone into her top, he looked at her, his face grim. “An infected. No more than two blocks over. Somewhere to the north of us.”
Yanking his shirt over his head, he toed off his boots and dropped his jeans. In an instant, he was wolven—a big and beautifully regal beast. A moment beyond that, he was gone.
She was right on his tail, tracking the scent of him that seemed embedded in her senses.
Distantly, she was aware of Salem at her side.
They’d been hunting together so long it was effortless.
He feinted in counterpoint to her, darting around obstacles like dumpsters and discarded cardboard boxes.
With nary a signal between them, they took to the walls, racing opposite each other down an alleyway.
Her hair whipped in the wind, her steel stilettos bit into the stucco, breaking off chunks to crumble to the ground below.
And in the back of her mind, she was aware that Elijah had thrown himself into a hunt for a vampire without a second thought. One of her people, as they were all hers. As if it was instinctive for him to do so when in truth he’d simply been well trained. By Adrian.
How could that have slipped in importance in her mind?
The shattering of glass preceded her turning a corner.
Elijah’s tail disappearing through a broken window led her, guided by his scent.
It was a building under construction; most of the windows still bore the manufacturer’s sticker.
Salem bounded through first, widening the opening.
Vash sailed through after him, tucking and rolling and springing up onto her feet. And froze.
The construction workers who should have been all over the site were instead all over the floor. In pieces.
Salem cursed. Elijah crouched low and growled.
The bare concrete was covered in blood and entrails. Limbs and heads were scattered across the floor or lifted to the ravenous, foaming maws of at least a dozen wraiths. Bloodshot eyes glittered, nostrils twitching as they smelled fresh meat.
Vash had seen such carnage before, when a rogue minion, driven insane by the deterioration of his mortal soul, had Changed everyone in his family. Lost to the initial bloodlust of the Change, they’d gone on a rampage, slaughtering their entire neighborhood.
God. It never got easier to bear.
One of the wraiths stood apart from the others. Hunched and shuffling, he darted back and forth swiftly, wearing a semicircular path in the blood. His gaze was riveted to Elijah, who paced with restless energy. With his ears flattened to his head, the Alpha snarled a threat.
The sickened vamp glanced at Vash and Salem. “Go. Away.”
The words were uttered in a voice so guttural it took her a moment to figure out what he’d said. “Fuckin’ A. Did that wraith just talk?”
Just as she processed the possibility of higher brain function, the wraith leaped a good twenty feet across the room…directly at her. Startled, she raised her katana, knowing she was a split second too late and steeling herself for the impact.
Elijah blocked the assault in midair, jaws first, catching the wraith in the juncture between the shoulder and neck. A sickening crunch reverberated through the space, inciting an unexpected reaction—the bloodpack abandoned their feast and lunged at the powerful lycan en masse.
Vashti leaped into the fray with a scream of rage, cutting anything that got in her way.
Salem waded in barehanded, cracking heads and necks as he progressed.
None of the wraiths came after them. They remained dogpiled on Elijah, ignoring the incoming vamps with a complete lack of self-preservation.
Tossing his head, Elijah threw one after another over the writhing bodies surrounding him, his growls and barks lost amid the mindless screeches of his attackers.
She sliced through the frenzy toward the center, her heart pounding when she lost sight of him completely. Spurting blood obscured her vision as she hacked her way deeper. She swiped at her eyes, searching for Elijah amid the massacre, yelling his name.
His yelp of pain seized her lungs. His pained howl broke her paralysis. “Salem! Goddamn it. Help him.”
“I can’t get to him. Shit. I’m fucking trying!”
Yanking heads back by fistfuls of gray hair, she ripped wraiths off her lycan and decapitated them, her stomach knotting at the sight of chunks of bloodied fur clinging to their foaming mouths.
An agonized scream rent the air, followed by another.
Not Elijah. The tone wasn’t deep enough. Jesus. The room was spinning around her in her panic.
She hauled another wraith back and saw Elijah in the space she’d opened up. The wraith’s body went limp in her grasp, then began to convulse. Another wraith jerked away. Then another.
Suddenly, what was left of the bloodpack fell away from the downed lycan.
Flopping on their backs like fish out of water, they writhed, foam pouring from their mouths and their eyes rolling back.
The one who’d spoken clutched his head, wailing.
Abruptly, he ceased, crashing to the ground in a dead faint.
Or just dead, period.
When nothing moved in the lake of blood, Vash dropped her blade and sank to her knees beside Elijah, who lay panting on his side, his fur matted and his flesh torn away in deep gouges. She reached out, wanting to comfort but unsure how.
“Don’t touch him!” Salem kicked bodies out of the way as he approached.
Elijah gave a low warning growl.
“He’s a wounded animal, Vash. You know better.”
Yes, she knew. Lycans were at their fiercest when they were most vulnerable. But as she looked into the green eyes of the wolf, she saw the man. The man who’d mastered her during the long night, then surrendered to her touch in the morning.
“Can you shift?” she asked softly, knowing that the process of shifting forms would knit some of his injuries and staunch the copious amounts of blood draining from his body.