I stared down at the man’s ass. He had heart-shaped stitching on one of the back pockets. “Niko keeps a spare blade in the van. I’ll take care of him. Get out of here! Now!”
The group shot up the ramp in a flash. Once the fireworks ended, we would no longer have that blanket of protection. Sparrow might check on Hunter and Kira, and if so, we needed to haul ass before the search began.
I opened the back of the van, reached for the sheath under one of the benches, and pulled out Niko’s sword.
“Don’t think about it,” I whispered. But how could Inotthink about it? I’d killed men a number of ways, but this felt medieval.
When I placed the blade against the back of his neck, I remembered his handsome face. Maybe he’d gotten mixed up with the wrong guy, or maybe Sparrow had made them promises. What kind of villain had a heart stitched onto his pants?
Being a coldhearted killer was easier when I knew something about my target.
I raised the blade, but the breath got knocked out of me when someone tackled me from behind. We hit the floor, and I lost the sword. When the man reached for it, I bit his arm and frantically tried to crawl out from beneath him.
“Oh no you don’t,” he said, his gravelly voice rife with malice.
I whipped my head back and knocked him in the face. After a hard elbow jab, I scrambled free. When I turned, I expected to see a garage filled with Vampires. But it was just a thin man with a wiry mustache and dimples.
Niko’s words entered my mind:Never underestimate your enemy.
Dimples grinned at me, blood gushing from his broken nose. He reached up and pinched his bones back in place. Before he had a chance to wipe the blood off his hands, I swung the sword in a crisscross motion. He hopped back, away from his unresponsive friend. If he removed the impalement wood from his buddy, I’d be in a world of trouble.
Swords weren’t a weapon I was used to handling, but I tried to look experienced with a blade to keep him moving. I needed to buy time for Gem and Claude to escape. The Vampire hissed when I speared him in the kidney. He raised his arm to break the weapon, so I jerked it away. It was only a matter of time before he snapped the sword in two.
Remembering Viktor’s workbench, I flashed over to it and grabbed the hammer off the wall. Then I torpedoed across the garage. The fanghole was bending over his fallen comrade.
“Hey!” I shouted.
When he turned, I threw the hammer and it spiraled toward him. I’d tossed knives a million times at our target boards, but hammers moved slower. Instead of striking him in the head, its trajectory had a more rapid descent, and it hit him in the sternum. I needed to use Christian’s blood and take this guy out with my bare hands before he used the sword against me.
I tossed the sword aside and made a wild lunge. When we hit the ground, I pinned him. His fangs were out, and he gnashed his teeth as he struggled to get free.
“Get off me, you cunt!”
“You’re new, aren’t you?” I said, staring at his pearly whites. They were so straight that I was certain he’d had braces at some point in his human life. “Usually the old ones call me a wench or something more colorful. Why would you follow a Mage?”
“I’m going to tear out your heart and eat it!” he growled.
How the hell was I going to get out of this? A sword wouldn’t help me at close range, and I didn’t have any more impalement wood to immobilize him.
I kept his wrists pinned as he attempted to buck me off. There was only one option.Dammit.I needed to drink his blood and drain him. It was the only way to weaken him. I’d done it a million times before, but a Vampire was powerful and wouldn’t make it easy.
With a quick shift in my hips, I gently grinded against him.
He stilled.
When I did it again, his eyes dragged down to my breasts, heaving from the motion of my body.
“You like that?” I asked, my tone sultry. I drew closer to his face, my breath on his jaw. “Want more?”
He smelled like old leather. The thought of drinking his blood made me sick to my stomach. But he was dangerously close to my own neck, and this plan could go down in flames if he started using his brain.
Men make stupid decisions when aroused.
“I want to taste you,” I whispered in his ear.
All I needed was for him to bend his neck and relax. When he complied, I stroked my tongue over his jugular—an erogenous zone for Vampires. His body went limp beneath my grip, and he groaned. With expert precision, I sank my fangs into his neck and quickly retracted them. In the early days, it would take me a few tries to hit the right spot. Some people’s sweet spots were deeper than others. A vein took longer than an artery to drain, and arteries were messy if you weren’t careful. Knowing where to bite came instinctually. Now I penetrated a vein like a pro.
Vile blood filled my mouth, and I drank hard and fast. Reading blood was indescribable—like putting a bunch of different foods into a blender and then guessing what they were. Some I could make out distinctly while others proved more difficult. I drank deep, acutely aware of his darkest secret. He’d killed his parents. How could I know something so specific? Blood usually conveyed emotions, but Christian said that sometimes it could reveal so much more. I drained him so fast that he didn’t know what hit him.
