Page 34 of Bite of Passage
“I did it last month.”
“You should be doing it every single day, not once a month.”
Once home, Gemma checked the disc every hour, through the afternoon into the evening.Had Skarde accepted one of those jobs?Had he faced off with VanFliet?Had he fallen into Petra’s bed?
He wouldn’t be stupid enough to screw the witch.Or would he?Others on the show insinuated the combination of him, boobs, and the offer of sex never seemed to add up to anything but naked time.
Except with her, apparently.
Skarde had denied her, and although she respected him for his restraint, she hated that she didn’t have enough influence over him to get him naked like all the other women in his life.
Then there was the whole crystal thing, which no doubt would climax when the Hunters tried to stop Petra from bringing forth a demon army.
Midnight.One last check before she went to sleep.She seriously had to sleep better tonight.
A new episode appeared on the home screen.
Why had it taken so long to show up?This was well past twenty-four hours.
Even though there was no guarantee of a portal to take her to his side, or a need for her to go over there again, she prepared for a just-in-case situation before settling in to watch.She stuffed things she thought she might need into a backpack.
Ready, she pressedplay.
The scene opened in the dark of night.Raining.It looked cold and muddy.Was it evernotraining there?
Her stomach twisted when she recognized Skarde and the Vorche mountains in the background.
What was Skarde doing in dwarf territory?Most areas around it were controlled by…
VanFliet.
Her heart rate kicked up.
Six of VanFliet’s vampires flanked him.
The young vampires were sweating, clearly nervous as they worked up the courage to attack Skarde.Their prey leaned casually against the trunk of a gigantic tree.
Faster than the eye could follow, Skarde was across the wet space, standing behind the young vamps.He clapped a hand around the shoulders of two, and before they realized what was happening, Skarde had them pinned.He gripped their necks right at the base of the skull and cleanly removed their heads.
Gross.She wasn’t big on heavy gore or gratuitous blood.But she couldn’t stop watching the blood bath.
The other four fledglings barely realized their comrades were dead before Skarde moved.He drove his fist into the sternums of two.Their faces grew purple, eyes panicked.One tried to say something, but Skarde decapitated them in a blink.The last two vampires ran.Another blink and they were in shredded tatters.
VanFliet cackled from his rocky perch on higher ground.The noise he released wasn’t a laugh, but an inhuman, humorless noise—as if this was all part of his master plan.
Skarde swiped at his forearm and plucked out a small arrow.“A poisoned dwarf dart?That’s cheating, Fliet.This isn’t you.”
“There’s no cheating in victory.This time, I win.”VanFliet did his own super speed move to plunge his knife into Skarde’s chest at least ten times.
“No!”Gemma screamed, but the noise petered out as air stopped moving through her chest.
“There’s no honor in cheating,” Skarde wheezed out as he clutched his chest.
VanFliet pulled him close and whispered something she couldn’t hear.He threw Skarde over the cliff.
He couldn’t be dead.He wouldn’t dare die.She waited for his hands to appear on the edge of the cliff like a great moment in an adventure film.But they didn’t.The seconds ticked by.
VanFliet leaned over the edge.“Try coming back from that before the sun rises in fifteen minutes to ash you into oblivion.”
