Page 66 of Hunting His Vampire Mate

He was slow and unskilled, though. And Danny wasn’t.

Before I had made it five feet, Danny zipped around the guy, so fast he was nearly a blur, ducked under the outstretched arms that surely would have crushed him, and sank his wooden stake deep into the vamp’s back.

The burly vampire’s eyes widened in disbelief. Then they glazed over. His skin began to wither. He fell forward, hitting the ground with a sick thud.

Danny looked up, meeting my gaze with an impish smile, and flashed me a thumbs up.

I felt myself relax.

Two vamps, both of them males with their faces crusted in dried blood and insanity burning in their eyes, rushed me.

I readied my machete, a dangerous smile twisting itself into place on my lips.

After that, the chaos of battle overtook me. I destroyed three of them in quick succession, swinging my machete in an ugly, macabre dance of death. The grim satisfaction of their overconfidence becoming stunned disbelief in the instant before I destroyed them didn’t come this time. Instead, I felt every life I took. The fact that they had murdered innocent people, destroyed countless lives, and would do it again and again was little comfort this time.

The hatred I had felt made it easier to kill. Now that the last threads of it had vanished from my heart, taking life—even monstrous life—was far harder to stomach.

It was worse that they were new. I could tell they were. They hadn’t picked up any finesse yet. They were used to using their brutal strength and speed. They weren’t used to having to use any level of skill in combat. They weren’t used to their prey, who looked like a big dumb jock, suddenly tumbling into an acrobatic somersault, just under their outstretched hands, popping up behind them, and swinging his razor-sharp machete with murderous precision.

And I couldn’t stop, even for an instant.

Because if I did, they wouldn’t hesitate to snap my neck. Or tear out my throat. They were monsters, but they had been people once. They were victims, too. If Thierry had been telling us the truth about how these kinds of nests operated, they hadn’t stood a chance to be anything else.

There were three people locked in a massive iron cage in the back of the cavern—human captives, presumably—and they’d helpfully signaled their presence by screaming and yelling bloody murder once the fighting had started. Neither Bryan nor Tobias attempted to kill any of the vampires. Instead, they went right for the humans, clearly intent on rescuing them. Though, when a scraggly-haired female vamp got too close to Tobias, clearly intent on stopping him from performing his spell tounlock the cage—or any other spells ever, for that matter—Bryan zipped behind her and snapped her neck without any hesitation at all.

But even that didn’t kill her for good, of course.

However, the young vampire and the warlock didn’t need to kill any vampires.

Because when it came to killing, Thierry was a true artist and death was his medium.

Vamps get much stronger and faster, the older they get. And he tore through the younger vampires like they were made of wet paper, without hesitation. His body rippled with lithe grace, his blows almost like a dance, armed with only a simple wooden stake and absolutely lethal.

Then, when I caught sight of a vamp backhanding Danny with a sickening crunch, causing him to go spinning into a stalagmite as large as a person, I got distracted.

The vamp I fought—a guy about my age who probably would have been handsome if there hadn’t been a grotesque mess of blood all over his face—grinned at me and reared back his fist.

I dropped to the ground like dead weight.

His fist swung into the empty air I’d just been occupying an instant before.

Startled, he looked down at me and growled.

But I made the mistake of looking up at him and seeing a person. Or, rather, the person he had once been. And I didn’t reach for my gun the way that I should have. Instead, I hesitated for a split second.

He reared me up by my lapels one-handed, my feet dangling uselessly off the ground.

His grin seemed to widen even further, like it was in danger of splitting his face. But there was nothing human at all left in his eyes. It was like looking into the cold black eyes of a great white shark, right before it bites you in half.

Devoid of emotion. Empty. Merciless.

A stream of profanity poured out of my mouth, and I brought my machete up. With his free hand, the vamp struck my upper arm with enough force to fracture bone.

I heard it before I felt it. The sickening wet snapping sound.

Then pain.

I sucked in a breath and had to grit my teeth to avoid screaming out loud. Nausea swept through me. Sweat beaded on my brow in an instant. The moments seemed to drag, drawn out by the white-hot pain radiating through my entire arm. My body felt abruptly too cold, which was impossible, because the pain burned through me like fire.

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