Page 7 of Hell to Slay

At that moment, there was nothing in the world but us. She’d saved me, and maybe I’d saved her from the frenzy as well. We belonged together. We matched one another perfectly.

She kissed me like I was everything she’d always wanted, like she desperately needed to taste every inch of my tongue. Maybe, as a newly turned vampire, she did.

Mel continued exploring my mouth as my thoughts refocused on her. My tongue chased hers and I drank her in, letting all my senses devour her as if she really meant this kiss. As if she wasn’t just kissing me because she was hungry for the blood on my tongue.

It surprised me that taking the blood of another vampire had brought her out of the frenzy… or maybe it was because I’d bitten her back?

This never should have happened to her. She’d become the very thing she’d hated for so long. She didn’t hate us anymore, but I had a feeling that once the initial hunger wore off, reality would come crashing down on her ten times worse than the night we’d told her the truth about vampires and our orgasmic bites.

Feeling suddenly protective of her, I squeezed her tighter against my chest. As her legs wrapped tightly around me, I could feel the damp heat between them.

Mel gasped and pulled back, her pupils dilating briefly before shrinking again as they landed on my neck. Horror filled her expression as she locked eyes with me. It made me want to rip someone’s head off.

“Who did this to you?” I growled.

When she said his name, it was almost enough to send me back into the frenzy. My wrath had a target now: Ty, the one she thought she’d killed, the man who’d broken her heart, who’d made her hate herself for killing him, the devil who wasn’t dead after all.

Well, he would be. Soon.

Mel struggled in my arms, bringing back my attention. I set down my coven-mate, her head not even coming up to my chin.

Everything that followed tested my patience. I wanted to strike out into the infernal realm and hunt Ty down. I wanted to turn him around to face Mel so she could watch the life fade from his eyes when I tore his head from his body. I wanted to see the satisfaction in her eyes as we drank the blood from his corpse.

Alas, cooler heads prevailed.

Rye healed my little witch, and we all headed for the stairs leading down off the wall… in the wrong direction, away from the threshold. But where Mel went, I would follow.

“He’ll pay for this, huntress,” I promised.

“I know,” she said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

The certainty in her words filled me with a deadly sort of calm. I would wait. And then we would kill him together.

But then Mel’s gaze caught on mine, and the naked vulnerability I saw there almost overloaded my protective nature again. It felt like I could fall into the frenzy again at any second. That made twice now I’d lost my grip on myself around her. It was getting harder and harder to maintain control, to keep myself on this side of sane.

Which meant… I’d fucked up big time by letting my control slip to begin with. I’d proven I was a danger to everyone around me, just as I’d feared.

Even amid my self-hatred, I couldn’t turn off my bodyguard training so easily. As we took the stairs to the base of the wall, I surveyed the evidence of a battle left behind. Ashes and cinders were all that remained of most demons; however, I also caught sight of a few decapitated bodies of hellvipers in the distance, which never disintegrated after death.

At the foot of the wall, Mel turned to Nimue. “A brave demon hunter lost his life fighting Ty here last night. Can you—”

Nimue nodded. “The Demon Hunter Agency will honor him and his sacrifice. I’ll make sure of it.”

Rye turned to me and asked if he could heal my neck, but I waved him off as Mel walked away. I wanted her mark on me. I felt drawn to her, unwilling to let her out of my sight. And at the moment, in the aftereffects of her blood on my tongue, I didn’t question it.

She followed the twins toward the van, and when I saw the state it was in, I stopped in my tracks. It looked like it had been in an accident… from the inside. The rear now had several dents, as though they’d had a grizzly bear trapped within it.

Jax glanced over at me, his lips pursed, his eyes shadowed with something like fear.

The breath caught in my chest. I’d seen that look before in the eyes of one of my lovers. It was after I’d killed the witches who’d dared threaten Vaughn for dating a vampire. Only he hadn’t thanked me for it. He’d run away in terror.

And now it was happening again.

“Jax…” I started.

“Nico, Jax, get in the van,” Hudson called. “We’ll talk later. DHA agents are on their way here right now.”

The last thing we needed was for them to believe we’d been the ones to kill that demon hunter. I sighed and got into the back of the van with Jax, then realized my mistake… the chairs that had once been bolted to the floor were bent and mangled up against the front wall, directly behind the two front seats.

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