“Rowan!” I called for him as I ran. I wanted him to know that I was there, that I was coming, that I had his back, that he wasn’t alone.
Then the idiot turned to look at me, like he forgot he was in the middle of a back alley brawl.
What happened next. . . I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
I expected the three of them to wrestle around on the ground: punching, kicking, grappling. Maybe one of the twins would pull out a knife. I saw Rowan gouge out an eye, and I winced from the scream that followed.
What I wasnotprepared for was discovering that vampyres really did exist by watching two of them bite down on Rowan’s throat.
The world tilted. My mind rejected what my eyes insisted was real: twin mouths latched onto Rowan’s neck, their faces transformed into something predatory and wrong. Not metaphorically predatory. Actually inhuman, with features that had shifted into angles that shouldn’t exist on a human face.
I didn’t think. Thinking would have paralyzed me. Instead, I let muscle memory take over, launching myself at the nearest twin’s back. My arms snaked around his throat in a perfect rear naked choke, my bicep pressed against one carotid, forearm against the other. My legs wrapped around his waist, heels digging into his hips for leverage.
Ten seconds or less. That’s all it took to put someone out when you cut off blood to the brain. I’d practiced the choke dozens of times on the mats and always secured the nearly immediate tap from partners who didn’t want to black out. The science was simple: compress the carotid arteries, stop blood from reaching the brain, lights out.
I squeezed harder than I ever would while rolling on the mat, putting every ounce of strength into the hold. My bicep burned. My forearm ached. Almost as if it were staged, the sky opened up, and it began to downpour. I counted in my head as I waited for his body to go limp.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.
He didn’t even notice I was there.
Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi. Six Mississippi.
His throat felt wrong under my arm. Too cold. Too hard. Like trying to choke marble wrapped in silk.
Seven Mississippi. Eight Mississippi. Nine Mississippi.
He kept feeding. The wet, sucking sounds continued. Rowan’s blood ran down the creature’s chin, mixing with rivulets of rain, dripping onto the alley floor into water and rotting garbage.
Ten Mississippi.
Nothing. No slackening. No tap out. No sign he even felt my arms around his throat.
Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.
My arms shook with effort. Sweat mixed with rain, making my grip slip. The vampyre reached back with one hand, casual as swatting a mosquito, and grabbed my wrist. His fingers were ice against my skin.
He pulled my arm away from his throat like I was a child playing at violence.
The strength in those fingers defied reason, defied physics. I’d grappled with men nearly twice my weight, learned to use leverage and technique to overcome raw power. But this wasn’t human strength. This was something else entirely, something that made all my training worthless as a paper airplane in a hurricane.
“Please,” I gasped, abandoning technique for desperation. “Please stop. You’re killing him.”
The vampyre’s twin pulled his mouth from Rowan’s throat long enough to laugh. He looked at me with his one good eye. Blood painted his lips, turning his teeth into crimson daggers. “That’s rather the point, love.”
I tried to wrench free, to throw myself between them and Rowan, but the one holding my wrist yanked me off his back and tossed me aside. I hit the alley wall hard enough to drive the air from my lungs. My vision sparked white, then gray, then cleared.
The road flare had rolled into a gutter and was being swept away in a river of sludgewater. As the flickering red light faded, I saw how pale Rowan had become. His skin looked like snow, his lips tinged blue, his eyes rolling back to show only white as he fought to stay conscious.
I scrambled forward on hands and knees through the garbage and water. “No! Please, stop!”
I knew this feeling. This helplessness. This watching something terrible happen while being too weak to prevent it. In that other life, Edward had kept me ignorant and isolated specifically so I would feel this way. So I would know, bone-deep, that resistance was pointless. That I was nothing. That my struggles were entertainment at best, annoyance at worst.
And that part of me watched Rowan die and knew the same truth:I am powerless.
Rain began to slice down harder in razor sheets, cold and sharp against my skin. It plastered my hair to my face, mixed with tears I hadn’t realized were falling. The vampyres kept feeding, their throats working as they swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed.
Arms wrapped around me from behind before I could throw myself at them again. Small arms, but strong as steel cables. Jules. I hadn’t heard her approach, but suddenly she was there, holding me back while I thrashed and fought and screamed.
