My gaze darted back to where Ruby had gone to get a drink. A vampire charged at her, and she took the stem of a champagne glass, snapped it off, and shoved it into the vampire’s eye.
Holy crap. It was mayhem.
I glanced at Sterling, who had his katana out, full on beheading the bastards left and right, but there were so many I could barely track what was happening. They just kept coming, which meant that Maz was right: one of the hunters was in bed with a vampire and gave up our location. This was a planned bloodbath, all in an effort to take out our top ranks.
Not on my watch.
A figure zoomed bedside my table, going right for a human waiter, when I leapt off the top and jumped onto his back. My arms hooked around his neck and he leaned forward as if to bite my wrist, but I’d already rammed my stake into his heart, right through his back between the fourth and fifth ribs. I jumped off of him as his body started to decompose—these stakes weren’t laced with the preserving serum.
I yanked my weapon out and spun, ready for the next.
Oh, God, help us.
They just kept coming. Their sheer numbers dwarfed us, and I felt defeat settle into my bones.
‘What’s happening? You feel … terrified?’Luka’s voice boomed in my head.
‘We’re under attack. Your good ol’ buddies are about to exterminate my people,’I growled at him, unsure why I was placing blame on someone who had nothing to do with this in the first place.
“Aspen!” Maz shouted, and I turned just as a female vampire slammed into my chest. I was launched backward, sailing through the air, and landed hard on a chair. A scream ripped from my throat as one of my ribs cracked. I sucked in a breath, only to regret it once my broken rib expanded.
Get up!I told myself.Hunters die on the ground. I didn’t plan on going out like that. The female who’d chucked me was gunning for me, blasting through the place with her curly brown hair trailing behind her.
Ignoring the pain in my ribs, I popped to my feet, stakes in each hand.
“Let’s dance, demon!” I snarled as she skidded to a stop with a feral grin. She inhaled, and then something in her face changed—confusion set in, then disbelief.
“You smell of a Drake.” She barely got the words out when I charged.
Running full speed, which was about half of what a vampire could do, but way faster than a human, I held my left stake hand low and my right stake arm high. This way I could stab her if she dropped to the ground or tried to jump over me.
She hissed, jumping up to go high, and tried to kick me in the face, but I was ready. With my right stake I stabbed her in the abdomen, and my left stake sank into the meat of her thigh. Using all my modified DNA strength, I yanked her down and she slammed into the ground, hard. I was about to remove one of my stakes and pierce her through the heart, when Sterling’s katana came down on her neck, removing her head.
I looked up to find him covered in blood that didn’t seem to be his.
“Thanks,” I panted, and Sterling growled, looking over my shoulder.
There were more. Way more.
My gaze flicked to the two exits signs. Five vampires were posted in front of each. They were blocking us in. Those bastards. This was a bloodbath.
“New mission. Take out the demons at the exits, give others a chance to escape,” I told him.
A hardened look came over Sterling and he nodded once. We weren’t all making it out of this alive. That cold, hard, fact had settled in.
“Retreat!” I called out in the loudest voice I could muster over the sound of my fellow hunters getting slaughtered. It’s like I’d woken them from a dream. One by one, the hunters must have realized there were too many. We were bred for war, born to fight, but sometimes you had to live to fight another day. The injured and alive started to work their way to the exit doors just as Sterling and I reached them. Maz and Ruby were fighting back to back, and if I weren’t in total survival mode, I would have been in awe because it was a sight to behold.
Sterling shoved his sword at me. “Take my katana.”
“No!” I pushed it back, holding up my stakes. “I’m fine.”
He snarled, but he knew better than to tell me what to do. Reaching down I pulled the caps off the ends of my stiletto boots to reveal the small, spiked stakes there. I had to keep the weight on my toes so they didn’t get stuck in the carpet, but I was ready to party now. The heel stakes rarely got use, and if I was going to die tonight, I was going to go out in style, after sticking one of these in the neck of one of the bloodsucking bastards.
With a battle cry, Sterling and I ran forward, attacking the five guards at the left exit door with precision and unyielding fury.
I slammed the stake of my left hand in one of their chests just as the other wrapped his fingers around my throat. Reaching up with my left leg, I threw a high kick into his ribs and grinned when the heel stake entered his flesh. He stumbled backward with a shout and we pressed on, moving them away from the exit doors.
“Aspen!” Maz shouted and I used one second of my free attention to glance at her. She was in the open exit doorway, helping others escape.
