Chapter 2 #2
I glanced at Rae, who stood there stiffly, still gyrating in the air with a dazed look on her face as if I hadn’t just pulled a freaking neck biter off her. Her pupils were blown wide, catching the flashing lights in a way that made her look even more lifeless.
“What did you do to my friend?” I screamed at the guy over the stupid music, which I wished would turn off so I could call for help. The bass thudded against my ribs like it was mocking me. But the guy before me seemed stuck in his own trance, sniffing the air like a dog with his pulsing eyes.
Rae worked here. Surely the bartender or door guy would come to her rescue. Someone had to notice this chaos. But when I scanned the bar, the staff wasn’t moving. They had that same empty expression and were frozen in place like mannequins.
My gaze flicked around to see that nearly every single person in the club had the same glazed expression on their face.
All except for the people attached to their necks.
I blinked rapidly, because now there was some kind of blue mist coming off the clubgoers’ bodies and floating up to the second floor where a VIP section was.
The mist shimmered faintly in the lights, drifting upward in slow curls like steam from hot pavement.
I followed the mist to see a well-dressed man with his arms out, inhaling the vapor through his nose like it was incense.
No. I shook my head, blinking rapidly. This wasn’t real. I was hallucinating. My hands shook, and the room tilted slightly, like my brain couldn’t decide which nightmare to show me first.
“You drugged me!” I screamed at the bloody-mouthed air sniffer before me. Had a drink even touched my lips since I got here?
No.
Maybe they pumped it in through the air vents. The thought made my stomach flip again.
The dude in the three-piece suit cocked his head to the side and inhaled again. When he did, he hissed, like a cat.
“Hunter.” He growled, low and feral as he lunged for me.
I screamed as I stumbled backward, the sound swallowed by the shattering of skylights. Glass rained down like hard glitter as figures dressed in black dropped through the window-like openings in the ceiling and swung down on ropes like some kind of tactical team.
It was a raid. For the drugs. My brain grabbed the most logical idea it could find.
Oh, thank God. I was saved. My knees almost buckled with relief.
“Help!” I screamed as I ran for one of the cops who had just burst in through a lower floor window. The clubgoers were still in a trance, and the lunatic with the bloody teeth was hot on my trail.
When the cop in all black popped up in front of me, I skidded to a stop.
Holy crap. He is hot.
It was a wildly inappropriate thought to be having in the middle of being chased by someone who was clearly on some home-cooked drugs and ready to bite my nose off, but I couldn’t deny this man’s beauty.
He looked about my age, tall, broad-shouldered, and he moved with a kind of effortless power.
His shirt stretched across a chest that clearly spent more time lifting weights than lounging around, but I noticed he was missing a police badge.
My gaze then went to his hair. It was light, like sunlight through honey, falling just past his jaw in that perfectly tousled, I-woke-up-like-this way that shouldn’t have looked good on anyone but absolutely did on him.
But it was his eyes that wrecked me. Green. Not just any green but sharp, electric, arresting, like he could see straight through me. My breath snagged tight in my throat, trapped there by fear and something else I didn’t want to name.
“I need help—” I managed.
“Get down!” the hot guy screamed as he pulled an honest-to-God sword from his waist belt.
I knew cosplay and fantasy role-play was coming back in style, but this was taking it too far, no? He looked like a modern knight without the horse.
“Down!” he barked again.
I hit the floor, rolling onto my back. My palms slapped the sticky club floor, smeared with spilled drinks and glitter.
He leapt over me just as I lifted my head and peered up to see him collide with the man with the bloody teeth who’d been chasing me.
One second, the bloodstained teeth guy was doing his cat hissing thing, and the next, his head was on the floor, severed from his body.
What. The. Hell?
Bile rose in my throat as I pinched my eyes shut. The music crashed in my ears, muffled by adrenaline.
I’m hallucinating.
I had to have been drugged, and now I was stuck in a bad trip or something. Maybe it was the Top Ramen…
The sounds of chaos around me forced me to open my eyes as I sucked in a breath at the sight of absolute carnage.
The people in the black SWAT team suits were beheading people left and right or stabbing them right in the chest. Bodies hit the floor with soft thuds as the music mercifully skidded to a stop.
This wasn’t a bad trip; it was a nightmare.
Oh hell no. I had to get out of here.
I stood on shaky legs, and the hot dude with the samurai sword called out to me.
“Wait!” he screamed.
Nope. Nope. Nope. I’d seen plenty of horror movies, and I was not that girl. I was smart. When multiple people started getting killed, I didn’t wait to learn my fate. I ran. I was getting the hell out of here.
I scurried across the space and leapt through the open window that he’d broken to get in here. I hit the ground hard, the impact rattling my bones. A jolt of pressure shot up my calves, and then I ran, my legs pumping faster than ever before.
“Stop!” the hot guy called after me as I turned to see that he was chasing me, bloody sword in his grasp. The sight of it made something primal in me spike with terror.
I ran like a wild animal, with no thought or purpose, weaving through the alleyways in a blind panic. There were a few people out and about, and I screamed for help, which caused them to stop and turn my way.
But then he was on me.
Hottie head decapitator.
He gripped my upper arm, gently pulling me to a stop.
His fingers were warm, almost too warm, searing through the thin fabric of my shirt as my boots scraped on the gritty pavement.
Laughing nervously, he waved at the people who had turned my way.
“She smoked a bit too much.” He pinched his thumb and pointer finger together and put them to his lips, and the people laughed, heading back inside the bar next door, the door thudding shut and muting the distant thump of music.
I scoffed. I didn’t smoke weed. I was way too worried about being out of control of my thoughts and emotions, worried I’d have a bad high like I obviously was right now. My heart was still racing from the run, breaths coming in sharp pulls that made it clear I did not regularly work out.
He dragged me to the end of an alley and then let me go.
I panted, noticing that I was conveniently trapped.
A brick wall at my back and sides and this tall, sword-wielding Adonis in front of me.
The alley smelled like old garbage and damp concrete, and there was a sticky chill clinging to my bare legs as a light breeze moved through.
All my self-defense training suddenly rushed to the forefront of my mind, and I thanked God that Rae forced me to enroll in classes when I was fifteen.
She’d been attacked in a parking lot and the next day made all the girls at the group home fourteen and up start classes.
This guy was about to go down. Eyeballs, ears, mushy bits between the legs. Nothing was off-limits.
His gaze flicked to my forearms, and he frowned.
“Where are your hunter runes?” he said in a silky, deep voice.
I cocked my head to the side, mirroring his confusion. Was I dreaming? Maybe I fell asleep at Rae’s and never woke up. Except I didn’t remember falling asleep, and this felt very real. I stepped to the side to bypass him, but he blocked me by moving as well.
“Let me go,” I growled, fisting my hands and readying to fight him if he didn’t let me pass.
Even if I couldn’t overpower him with three years of self-defense classes, I would at least get some of his DNA under my fingernails before he beheaded me.
Let there be justice and honor in my death when the local detectives figured out he was the unhinged club murderer from one scratch of my nails.
He frowned again. “My name is Asher. Are you on some lone assignment with another academy? Where is your partner?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about, but you better get out of my way before I make you regret the day you were born,” I told him. It sounded cool, and I felt very badass delivering that line, even if my voice shook a little at the end.
Until he laughed.
He full on cackled in my face. Then he sobered. “Oh, you’re serious?”
I attacked then, lunging for him, knowing he would come for me, and when he did, I drew my nails down his face until his skin bled. The satisfying drag of skin under my nails was met with a warm, tacky wetness that told me I’d definitely broken through.
DNA acquired.
In one swift movement, he threw me to the ground on my back, straddling his legs over my waist and pinning my arms above my head.
The impact knocked the air from my lungs, the back of my skull stinging as it hit the concrete.
His eyes were wide, mouth popped open slightly as if he were staring at a wild creature.
“You attacked a fellow hunter outside training?” He sounded perplexed. “That’s against the codex.”
Hunter? Codex? Rune? What kind of role-playing crap was this?
I could no longer blame bad Top Ramen.
Being on your back, arms pinned, was one of the worst holds for a woman. But I wasn’t going down that easily.