Page 49 of Cold Sacrifice

Protect my people.

Sam was abruptly at my side, tossing me a feral smile as he sliced into vampires that had once been allies—or at least vampires who hadn’t tried to kill us. Once, they’d belonged to Bastien. But right now, they belonged to the necromancer.

Sam held two long, silver blades, and I had no idea where he’d gotten them. He was fighting like Zach, twisting and slashing and killing, joy in his eyes.

We were all fucked up.

Rick had put away his gun in favor of stakes, and he fought with Jared. Jared had shifted, just as all the wolves had, but he didn’t leave Rick to face the vampires without backup. And Rick, though the most vulnerable of all of us, wasn’t falling behind or being overwhelmed, even though he was a human fighting vampires.

He was getting faster, stronger, and better with each battle. Sure, if he’d been alone and a single vampire had focused on him, he would have been killed. But he wasn’t alone, and the vampires were fighting the wolves. To them, a single human with a couple of stakes wasn’t a threat, so mostly they ignored him.

Because of that, Rick killed them. He shoved stakes into their backs like he’d been born a hunter, and they began to notice.

Even as I ripped through vampires, my blade so hot I felt like it was welding to my hand, I saw a vampire start toward Rick. There was deadly focus in his eyes as he bared his bloodstained fangs, his sharp claws up. He would eliminate the pesky human.

The fighting vampires and wolves got in my way, and I lost sight of him. “Sam,” I yelled, and without a second thought, I flung my blade to him. He dropped one of his blades to catch mine, and then shoved it into a sheath before scooping his blade off the ground and turning to drive it into the heart of an attacking vampire.

My blade was safe.

I called my shapeshifter, but I didn’t shift into a huge bear or another person or a deadly tiger. I shifted into the butterfly, the one that had cut Sam’s face when I’d simply meant to caress him.

From the air, I saw Rick and Jared, and even as I raced toward them, I saw Jared’s wolf ram his body into the vampire determined to get to Rick. As they fought, another vampire flew toward the detective. And Rick had no one at his back.

Just seconds, that was all it was, but time slowed down for me. I didn’t flutter through the air like a normal butterfly—I streaked toward him like a guided missile.

Everything I did then was pure instinct. I got to the vampire before he so much as touched Rick, but just barely. I sliced his chest with my lethal wings, dug into his heart with not-so-tiny claws on my feet, then bathed in the blood that burst from the wounds. The thick wetness did not weigh me down. I burrowed through the wounds, absorbing blood like I was dry desert ground and his blood was rain, quenching my thirst, filling me with life.

Oh, I felt good. For a moment, I might have been a vampire, and the blood was my heaven. And my butterfly was a savage, vicious little thing, shooting like a bullet from one vampire to the next.

Even when Bastien returned and stood in the midst of us all, his stare blazing as he attempted to regain control of his still-living vampires, I did not stop. And when he did regain control of them, ripping their minds free of the necromancer’s influence like a master should, I did not want to stop.

I heard him roar a command to his people. I saw them drop to their knees, heads bowed, bloody and horrified and bleak, but I did not stop killing them. My butterfly might have been beautiful, if Sam were to be believed, but she was fucking mad. It was like all the madness that had ever been inside me was bundled into that one tiny package, concentrated and lethal.

She was my beautiful madness personified.

And I’d freed her upon the world.

Maybe because of the high stress of the moment and the buckets of blood and the death and the violence, she seemed to have not only fully awakened but taken control of me. Shifting back to myself wasn’t something I wanted to do, because the butterfly wanted to keep killing. She wanted to drink the blood.

And there was nothing in the world like flying.

In the end, it was my demon blade that brought me back. My demon blade and Sam did what Bastien’s helpless sorrow and the silence of my people couldn’t do. As though he somehow knew what he needed to do to bring me out of the darkness that gripped me, Sam yanked my blade from his belt. As I perched upon the vampire I’d just killed, sipping his blood, Sam drove the point of the blade through one of my wings and pinned me to the vampire’s chest.

“Kait,” he roared. “Shift, you monstrous bitch!”

The pain was immediate and overwhelming. My wing caught fire, and I only made it worse by struggling to rip it from the blade. I would burn and die if I didn’t shift. I might never understand why the blade held me captive, but I couldn’t escape it.

I shifted.

First to my wolf, to heal some of the damage, then quickly to my woman.

And my senses came back to me. I stood slowly, my arm charred and my hair singed, blood clinging to every part of me.

“God,” I whispered, looking at the dead littering the ground. I remembered enjoying the death, the blood, the torment. I remembered wanting only to kill, to eat. “I really am a monster.”

No one said a word. Not Bastien, who mourned his dead. Not the alpha, who looked at me like he wasn’t sure who I was. Rick didn’t look at me at all. He turned and limped away, Zach at his side.

Only Remy stared at me with something besides careful blankness in his eyes. His smile was slight, but it was real. He would always believe the vampires should die, and he wasn’t going to judge me for killing them.