Page 78 of Just the Pool Boy at Vampire Mansion

I’d never been so happy to see someone I hated in my entire life.

The Jeremy creature screamed. Its limbs unraveled from my legs and lashed toward Bentley.

I rolled over and scrabbled forward on my hands and knees toward the broken piano. Animal sounds filled the room behind me. Growls, snarls, and the sounds of snapping wood. I didn’t want to look, didn’t want to know. An explosion of glass brought an end to the growls.

A root tangled around my leg again.

“Then your living blood will have to do, pool boy!”

Yanked out of my escape attempt again, the floor rushed under me. I grabbed the nearest thing I could use as a weapon—a piano leg—and twisted.

Bentley was gone, thrown through the shattered windows, I assumed.

Jeremy hauled me close, his hideous mouth leering.

I swung the broken piano leg like a bat, putting all my strength behind it, and caught the side of Jeremy’s face. His dislocated jaw hung sideways by a few inches.

Ew.

Salt wasn’t going to cut it this time.

How the heck was I going to survive this? I couldn’t fight monsters. I didn’t even like confrontation.

A splintery limb came at me. I swung for that too, batting it away. My heart raced, body hot and buzzing with adrenalin and fear and anger. “Yeah! C’mon then!” The old, feral part of me was waking up. The part I’d buried deep. I swung the piano bat like a wild man. “You wanna piece of me!?”

Jeremy huffed, grabbed my leg again, and turning, dragged me behind him, across the floor.

Oh, okay. Outside it was.

To the pool . . .

I tried to sit up, to grab at the root around my ankle, but that’s easier said than done when you’re being hauled on your ass across the floor like a trash bag.

Bits of shattered glass dug into my leg and thigh, cutting through my jeans. Jeremy dragged me through the broken window frame, out onto the patio again.

I was getting pretty damn sick of seeing that pool.

“Hey!” Theo yelled.

I swung my gaze around, trying to find him.

“That’s my pool boy!”

He came along the edge of the pool, lit up from below by the rippling lights. His nails glittered, long and deadly. Fangs bared, hair wild, eyes dark but electric. I’d seen him fight Bentley, but he’d been weaker then. Now he looked vicious, half wild, and on the hunt.

Holy heck, he really was a vampire.

Jeremy dropped my leg and grinned. He had the real prize in sight.

“Theo, no! Stay back!”

Theo ignored me, cheek twitching. “I am so goddamned tired of people telling me what to do!”

“There’s the one I want,” Jeremy hissed.

“Now you’ve started something,” Bentley growled, coming from the other side. Like his brother, he’d gotten his vampire on. The pair of them converged on Jeremy, closing in on their prey.

“Vampires,” Jeremy laughed. “So full of their own importance.” His raised his spindly limbs, growing more. A whole mop of them sprouted from his back. They whipped and writhed like the roots in the garden. The limbs grew bigger. He got bigger. Dwarfing the Witherborne brothers now.