Page 54 of House of Crimson Hearts
“I don’t have to. And thankfully, now, I won’t have to. Lads… GET HER.”
They run at me. I brace myself, let my fangs drop, and ready for the ambush. They’re fast, but they’re also drunk. I am decidedly faster.
A punch wallops me in the stomach but I’m spinning out of the way, flinging my fists into jaws hard enough the bones crack and break, echoing in the alley like a symphony. And fuck is it glorious music.
Someone slips underneath the tangle of limbs and delivers a kick to my knee. Pain explodes up my leg as my kneecap wrenches out of place. I stumble back but manage to keep upright as I swing my leg the opposite way despite the excruciating heat searing through my bones. My knee locks back in, the muscle fibres and ligaments already knitting back into place as I throw a punch so hard it drives right through the perpetrator’s rib cage. His eyes flare wide. But it’s too fucking late.
“N—” he starts to screech but I’ve already torn his heart out of his chest. Warm blood spatters my face. He dies standing, watching it beat its last beat. Then he drops to the floor. I lick my lips, the blood urging me on, giving me strength they’ll never possess.
But the confidence is short-lived. I’m knocked forward, crashing to the cobbles with three men piled on top of me, screaming and hurling obscenities. They clear off me, but another three take their place, battering me with spades and bats. Then one of them slams the pitchfork into my gut and that…
It hurts. Like really hurts. The kind of pain that shoots white across my vision and then explodes in a burst of fury.
“Oi,” a woman’s voice screams from behind me. The men freeze their assault. That was their second mistake. I tug the fork out of my gut and slam it into the side of the man who wielded it. He drops like a stone to the cobbles. It focuses the others’ attention back on me.
“What in Blood’s name is happening?” the woman screams. But the group doesn’t care, they’re focused on me. On taking me apart piece by piece. This is why I hate humans.
“YOU NEED TO STOP. IN THE NAME OF THE CHIEF, I COMMAND YOU TO STOP.” Her voice drops an octave as she bellows and my heart sinks.
Just what I didn’t need. A fucking hunter meddling in this business. She will probably finish the job.
“Fuck off,” someone shouts at her.
A growl rips from a man’s chest, I can’t tell who, and then one of the guys stops his assault on me and heads towards the voice behind me.
“I said stop,” she bellows. There’s a crunch of fist on body; a hollow, cracking thwack joins the echoes of bone breaks and spluttered cries of pain. I don’t know if it’s her or the guy who was attacking me, but I can’t spin around until I’ve dropped these last two idiots.
Something clatters behind me, like a body landed against a dumpster. The hunter girl moves like water through the air, graceful waves and flows of her limbs as she disarms man after man, knocking each one out.
The man charging at me draws a knife. My jaw flexes. I’m tired of this. I spin out of the way as he lunges at me, then I spring forward, sinking my teeth into his neck and bite down and tear. A chunk of his neck comes away with me. I’m showered in blood like the warm splatters of monsoon rain.
I close my eyes, savouring the taste and sensation of blood as it coats my skin when a gasp rips me from my reverie.
I open my eyes as the hunter girl screams, “Watch out!” She flings a blade at the man whose fingers are inches from mine. I spin out of his reach as the knife sinks into his chest.
She saved me? Or at least stopped me getting knifed.
A hunter?
What the fuck?
I turn back to the girl, wondering who the hell this hunter is, and why in the name of sacred blood she would protect me. But the attacker she flung into the dumpster has gotten up and thrown himself at her. He raises his hand and plunges a knife into her gut.
I move instinctively. My body flinging itself through the air at vampire speed. I sink my fingers into his arm, my nails plunging through his shirt and straight into his skin and I yank, tearing his arm out of its socket, detaching it from his body.
He screams, but I halt the sound as I sink my mouth over his throat and tear it out. I fling his carcass away and drop to my feet, cradling her body. She’s warm, her green eyes pierce right through me, as if she sees something in my soul even I can’t.
The hunter girl lurches, curling into me as she holds her stomach. A strange smile on her pale lips. “Ironic isn’t it… a hunter dying to save a vampire.” She laughs.
Laughs? As if dying is nothing. Then she looks down at her hands, and her face pales as she pulls them up and blood pours from her gut.
“Shit.” I put my hand over her stomach and apply pressure.
“Let go, I’m finished,” she says and then she catches sight of my eyes. “Oh.” Only she doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t recoil, she just smiles. “It’s you…”
“And now you understand why they were attacking,” I said.
She shakes her head. “It… It was unprovoked.”
