Page 53 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

I looked around the street, hoping that nobody was watching, because this would probably look very strange to any bystanders. Thankfully, there was no one nearby and the windows in the house next door were all dark.

A moment later, Tobias blinked, then pushed himself back up, stepping out of my arms. There was a grave cast to his expression. Then he glanced over at me and added, “You should kick the door down.”

I nodded and launched a swift kick at the door, near the knob, using my enhanced strength. The wood shattered and the door swung inward, revealing a living room that had been torn to pieces yet again.

Tobias stepped past me, already casting a spell that caused violet energy to swirl between his palms.

The two hunters were trying to stab at the spirit with what appeared to be cast iron fireplace pokers. They didn’t seem to be harming it, though. Instead, the wraith just looked royally pissed off.

My stomach did flips when the creature looked up at Tobias and I and grinned. I saw immediately that Lisa hadn’t been wrong. This creature didn’t look like it had ever been human at all.

It had the body of a woman dressed in gray rags, except grotesquely elongated and impossibly thin. Her—its—mouth was wide open and stretched far larger than a person’s should have been. Its fingers were inhumanly long and they scraped the ground with a sound like tree branches against glass. The sound coming from its lips was more of that high-pitched, deranged laughter, utterly inhuman.

“Get down!” I yelled.

Danny turned and saw us, his eyes going wide with surprise. To his credit, he did throw himself to the ground an instant later, as the wraith swiped at the place where his head had just been.

In the same moment, Tobias threw his spell and it instantly formed a net of shimmering light around the spirit.

The wraith shrieked with fury, slamming its hands to the ground. Tobias’s enchantment began to dissolve around it.

“The iron!” he yelled, still holding his hands up in his casting position, like he was struggling to maintain the spell. “Stab it with the iron!”

Michael glanced over at us for the first time, his eyes widening, as though startled to find us there.

The wraith used his momentary distraction and wrenched one of its claws free of Tobias’s spell. It hit Michael with a savage backhand that caused a sickening crunch. The hunter wheeled several steps back. Blood dripped from his nose. He swayed on his feet, looking like he was seeing little cartoon birdies swirling around his head, but he remained standing.

I lunged forward, holding the iron spear in both hands.

My mind blank with fear, I stabbed it into the wraith’s chest.

For an instant, nothing happened. Then the creature began to scream. Where the iron touched it, white light began to spread beneath its skin. Pieces of it began to break off and hit the floor, where they turned to ash.

I turned away, realizing that I couldn’t watch this. The creature was a killer, an entity that had clearly wanted to take more lives—perhaps as many as it could. It had torn Lisa’s family apart, seemingly without remorse. It had murdered her husband in front of her. It had robbed Lisa’s daughter of her father.

But I still couldn’t bring myself to watch it die.

It didn’t go easily, either.

The spectral wind howling through the house, seemingly from nowhere, increased its fury, picking up shards of broken glass, bits of paper, and heavier objects. A lamp went sailing into the wall, where it shattered into a million pieces.

A coffee table flipped up onto its side, then went sailing into Danny, slamming him into the wall with enough force to make the entire house shudder.

He collapsed at Michael’s feet, unconscious.

“Danny, get up!” Michael yelled, his eyes still unfocused. He probably had a concussion.

The creature stopped screaming. Though I was avoiding looking directly at it, I saw from the corner of my eye that the last of it had disintegrated into ash.

Then, from the ring of ashes marking where the wraith had stood, smoke began to rise up from the floor. A charred scent rapidly filled the air. A charged static-electricity type of feeling skittered over my body, setting my teeth on edge.

“Fuck,” Michael said, dropping to his knees next to Danny and trying to shake his partner awake. “It’s going to set the whole goddamn house on fire.”

Then, as if his words had made it happen, each one of the walls of the house abruptly erupted into flames in unison, as though they had all been doused in gasoline and someone had thrown a match.

The fire was blindingly bright, and it felt like a wall of heat slamming into me from all sides. Instinctive fear tore through me. Very few things can kill a vampire. Fire is one of those things.

“We have to get Danny out of here,” Michael told us, his eyes still unfocused. A thick sheen of sweat broke out across his brow and he looked even paler than normal. But his jaw tightened with determination, and he grabbed Danny under the arms and pulled him across the floor, toward the front door.

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