Page 61 of Fated In Blood

When I turned, he watched impassively from the other side of the room, that faint hint of shadow curling around him, with a smile as cold as death. “So fucking slow. You should slink off into the night and disappear. Nobody will even miss you. I’ll bet your sister’s forgotten you already.”

Rage urged me to lunge toward the bastard again and rip his eyes out, but years of training held me in place while I evaluated the situation.

He was older. Faster.

Knew how to move better than me.

I’d toyed with enough inexperienced fighters to know I was completely outclassed right now.

I couldn’t overpower him with brute strength or skill. That didn’t mean I couldn’t use another tactic to hurt him, though. My father had taught me to wage many kinds of war on my victims. All I had to do was find his weakness.

“Have you ever heard of something called projection, Blake? That’s when you take all your little insecurities and project them onto someone else to make yourself feel better.” I relaxed my stance, settling onto the balls of my feet. “Were you a shitty big brother?” I mocked, knowing I’d hit the mark when the shadows around him turned darker.

“Is that what’s been eating at you? Did you fail your sister the day she died? Or was it all those times before when you let her down?”

I never even saw him move.

One second, Blake was a safe distance across the room. The next I was pinned down beneath his heavy body, his fist slamming down beside my head with enough force to splinter the parquet into pieces.

Shadows surrounded us, every tendril thrumming with magic, skating over my skin with sharp, greedy claws, as if deciding where to dig in first. This was his magic, not an illusion.

These shadows weredeadly.

“One more word, Slayer, and it will be your last. I should have let you bleed out on Tyrell’s floor and never looked back. I will curse my decision for the rest of my days.”

I didn’t give him an inch, all my rage from these past days spilling over into my glare. “So will I, asshole, so will I.”

I shifted, trying to wiggle out from beneath him, my bare legs twisting against his, and then he was gone, chest heaving, more of that odd gray smoke curling around him, eyes…solid black.Holy fuck his eyes were black, like in a horror flick.

I pushed up off the floor, never taking my gaze off him. “Get out.”

“You are my enemy.” His soft voice warped and bent, like the sound was echoing down a long hallway. “If you ever speak of my sister again, I will kill you where you stand, and I won’t lose a second of sleep.”

Fear clenched inside my chest, leaving an echo of pain wrapped around my heart and thieving my vision until the only thing I saw was his cold expression and glittering, frightening eyes.

He meant every word.

I wasn’t often so cruel, but he’d hurt me. Taken something that was precious and tossed me away, like I meant nothing. His cruel words fed all my guilt and fear and regret, and in return, I’d pushed him too far.

I lifted my chin. “When this is over, I’ll be glad to put this shithole town to my back and never see any of you again. I only came here to find my sister. Once Tyrell’s dead, I’m taking her away from here forever.”

His cold expression turned speculative, but some of the darkness leached from his eyes, enough I saw a flash of hazel-gold. “How did you find her in the first place?”

My hands clenched tighter while I debated with myself whether to lie or tell him the truth. But the sooner we got this over with, the sooner he’d be gone.

“She was taken in Ohio, but I tracked her across Pennsylvania to western New York.” I left out the gritty details.Hitchhiking at night, sketchy truck stops, freezing in the woods last winter.

“I…I’d heard rumors about Thorndale, so I hung around for a few days. Then someone mentioned Vincent knew everything that went down in this town. I got a job waitressing and a few weeks later learned everything I needed to know about Laurent Tyrell and his spooky castle on the edge of town. It didn’t take me long to deduce that’s where Angel was.”

Well, my keen powers of observation combined with cage fighting for scraps of information from Vincent. But I’d found her.

“You knew it was vampires who kidnapped her?”

“They left their scent all over our apartment in Cleveland. But because your kind moves the way you do…it took me months to track them here.”

Their rank scent had overlaid the droplets of Angel’s blood, the residual sourness of her terror. They’d killed the security guard and a neighbor to get to her. I’d arrived moments after they took her, and still, it took months of painstaking work to follow the trail here. Only a lucky guess and some half-remembered comment of my fathers about Thorndale being a hotbed of vampire activity brought me to the right place.

But I wasn’t about to tell this asshole that. Better to let him think I was some expert tracker. There was added value in that.

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