Page 1 of Queen of Darkness
Chapter One
“Look out!”
At my shouted warning, Aaron ducked, dropping his shoulder and rolling underneath the tentacle-like arm of our Plant-Fae attacker. The green leaves twisting off the ends of the long appendage narrowly missed the master vampire, but its millions of tiny barbs left the barest of scratches down the back of his suit, shredding his fine Italian silk with ease.
I knew he’d be sour about that.
“How do we stop this thing?” he called back, dodging to the side as another leafy attack came whistling at him.
“Working on it,” I muttered as the Plant-Fae whirled on me and lashed out with two of its “arms.”
I flung myself away, anticipating the strike. The sentient tree-trunk-like Fae was dangerous, but it had a habit of giving away its attacks. Its four yellow, oval eyes blinked angrily at me from where they sat about eight feet up the trunk, and it tried to strike me again.
I grunted as the vine slammed into my stomach, knocking the wind from me while flinging me across the street.
“Ow,” I wheezed, getting to my feet as fast as I could.
I wasn’t fast enough. The vine snaked around my feet and up my calves, its barbs tearing at my skin, opening a million tiny cuts as it slowly tightened.
I reached around frantically for something,anything, to use, and my fingers closed around the slatted grates of the storm drain sewers at the edge of the curb. I gripped tightly as the Plant-Fae tried to haul me in closer, to where its shorter vine-tentacles could grasp me. I didn’t know what the whirling mass of them hid, but I doubted I wanted to find out either.
“A little help here!” I shouted at Aaron, wishing the vampire would hurry up and do something to distract our attacker.
“Working on it,” came his reply, uttered word for word like my earlier response.
“Very funny, but work faster! This thing seems rather determined to collect my stupid Blood Letter! I’d rather it didn’t.”
My fingers squeezed tighter around the sewer grate as the Plant-Fae hauled back, trying to pull me toward it.
“I don’t think so,” I growled, staring at it. “My life is my own.”
Although it was by far the weirdest thing to come after me in the past two weeks, it certainly wasn’t the first. A Blood Letter had been put on my head, and all manner of bounty hunters were out there trying to collect the reward for killing me and bringing proof of it to the Bounty Hunter’s Guild.
At least I didn’t warrant a huge bounty, thanks to being a relative unknown in the paranormal world. That meant I didn’t have to fear any of the truly scary bounty hunters. It simply wasn’t worth their time.
But this one seems particularly persistent, I observed.
Something heavy came flying out from the far side of the street, slamming into the Plant-Fae and causing it to loosen its grip on me. While it recovered from the attack of the flying landscaping stone courtesy of Aaron, I yanked on the sewer grate, lifting it. Then I scrambled a few feet away from the Plant-Fae.
“Takethis!” I screamed, just as the creature started to tighten its hold on my legs again, and slammed the grate closed with every ounce of strength my mutant vampire-shifter heritage granted me.
The metal whipped down, slicingthroughthe vine-like arms as itclangedback down.
The Fae went berserk, whipping vine-arms around everywhere, while tree-sap-like blood leaked from its severed arms, splattering everything and everyone.
“Ew!” Aaron exclaimed as he came to my side, trying to flick the sticky droplets off him. “That isnotgoing to wash out.”
“Your suit is destroyed anyway. Stop bitching,” I said, untangling the dead ends of the vines from my legs and getting to my feet as blood dripped down my bare legs.
Thankfully, my own blood didn’t spur any reaction from my vampire heritage, or I would have been in a tough spot just then.
“How do we stop this thing?” I asked as the Plant-Fae recovered and turned toward us.
“Same way you deal with any weed,” Aaron said, brandishing a pair of hedge clippers he must have found alongside one of the abandoned houses in this section of my hometown of Seguin.
“I’m not sure that weed killer from the hardware store is going to be strong enough for this,” I said as we split apart, a vine whipping through the space between us.
Aaron became a blur as he moved, and the hedge clippers sliced down like oversized scissors, severing the vine.
