Page 39 of A Velvet Kiss After Dark

Footsteps, wet and splattering through the sludge sped toward them, dozens of them.

"Attack!" Kane shouted.

At once, his group scrambled to fighting positions, weapons drawn, each harboring their own injuries from the drastic fall. The eerie glow of Seth and Alexis's vampiric eyes were soon accompanied by Kane and Graham's own mystical werewolf gazes as they immediately shifted and wielded their axes, bows, and weapons.

Kane ran head first through the corridor and toward the incoming brigade, his werewolf fully formed and his newfound animistic eyes clearly making out dozens of green-skinned goblin-like beings with sharp hungry teeth and reddened, maddened eyes; they looked scrawny and bony as if they'd been starved and hadn't eaten in weeks—and they were fresh meat.

Fur burst from Graham as he howled a menacing sound and launched into a vicious lunge at a nearby goblin. Kane squared up beside him, ax swinging as he lopped up off two goblin's heads in one clean swipe. Arrows whizzed by, sticking in another goblin's eyeball, then another in a forehead, another in a heart as Alexis let loose a stream of rapid-fire shots. Seth crawled up the walls like a chameleon, his sword making clear and accurate strikes, lopping off heads, which were left to splatter in the green muck.

It was pure chaos, and Kane had never felt more at home than he did in that moment.

Small nicks and cuts peppered him as various goblin scourges got minute attacks against his furry body.

Kane tasted foul blood as he bit into one goblin's neck, then cracked another's skull like an acorn in his mighty palm. Pop. The goblin's skull fractured like an egg in his hand. Brain sludge squished between his paw before he swiveled his ax again and tore through bodies making mincemeat of the lot as they fought off the swarm of ravenous beings.

Graham bit through a goblin's face and spit out the evidence into another's eye before grabbing another by the throat, and with a loud roar, tossing the creature into the oncoming tirade. They bounced and waddled backward like a bowling ball striking pins.

It seemed never ending, but as their group fought, they dismantled the goblin's attack, stepping onto their guts and gore like sewage. Eventually, they made their way into an open hive nest where dozens of little caves and alcoves, dark as night, lurked where these goblins slept and lived. Dozens of caged victims, most alive and mewling in agony, sat in the center of their hive like trapped victims awaiting certain foul play.

What must be a hundred dead goblins littered the hallway behind them. And, there inside the hive, he caught the scent, his Tabitha. His werewolf pounced at once and he sprinted across the dirty cave to a cage where she and several other females were stashed inside. Rage tore through him, and through sheer strength, he grabbed the cage's door and ripped it clean off the hinges.

Tabitha raced for him at once and tossed her tiny arms around his furry waist immediately.

"Kane, thank God!" Her face was red stained from crying, her body covered in the same green muck as him.

Kane wanted badly to transform back into his human form to speak to her and comfort her, but suddenly the earth shook with a vehement roar that rattled the walls and quaked his eardrums.

"Ogres, Kane! There are ogres down here!" Tabitha ducked against him in a retreating move, and then he felt her hand slip into the side satchel he carried at his waist. She pulled out one of his guns, removed the safety, and took a gun-wielding pose. He was glad she'd had appropriate gun training classes once upon a time. Now, he needed to get them out of here.

"Also, you stink," she said.

A wooden arched doorway suddenly slammed inward, and there was not one, but three gigantic, enormous ogres. Horned and one-eyed like a cyclops, they carried a dual-edged ax and drooled from a mouth as big as megalodon shark's.

Kane thought quickly as to how to get out of this hell-hole they were stuck in, when suddenly he heard the rapid fire release of an entire magazine clip from his gun. Tabitha looked fierce and predatory, as she shot directly for the closest ogre's eyes.

To hell with this, he thought.

And then he went crazy.

12

Up above the Hell realm, on Earth

Zeke sat crouched before the barred steel door where he kept his fated mate. His fingers were steepled and his energy weak and depleted from exhaustion. He felt as though the weight of the universe forever pressed against him, draining him with every second that dripped by. And, with each day that passed, his lifeforce seemed to recede further and further away. She was his all. He had nothing if not for her, and the life he'd always envisioned giving them was both right at his very fingertips, and yet, irrevocably gone.

She was gone. He knew it.

The relic was a joke.

A wish unfulfilled.

Even if they returned with it, he had no hope of it working.

The time for tears was long over.

The imaginings of her waking beside him, growing a coveted family—hell, an entire clan of his own flesh and blood—of repairing the past wrongs and making them right were never going to be.

And, yet all he yearned to do was shed a single tear. To make the hurt inside his body go away, but nothing could do that.

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