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“Mina, careful!” Aria gasped, but it was too late. The branch snapped under her weight.
Mina felt her body drop, and a yelp slipped from her lips only a second before the branch cracked, hit another on the way down, and her gut collided with the cross-section, knocking all the air from her lungs.
Grunting, she slipped further, and her body hit the ground with an abrupt thud. Mina lay stunned for a few seconds, and then rolled over, coughing as she forced herself back to her feet.
Above her she could hear Aria calling after her, scrambling back down the branches, but she couldn’t get her voice back long enough to say anything. From one cough to the next her throat only seemed to burn more and more.
She’d be bruised in the morning, that was for sure, and scanning around her she couldn’t see her binoculars anywhere. So on top of the bruises she was in for a lecture from Corrigan. It took everything she had not to groan. The tinkerer was nothing if not protective of his gadgets. She had no doubt he’d go mad the moment he found out she’d lost them.
Stepping out from the debris that had fallen to the ground with her, she scanned the tall grass. They couldn’t be far, could they? She usually kept her hand wrapped in the strap to prevent such things from happening, but it was as if watching for the vampires had robbed her of all sense. Either that or they’d consumed all her senses. Even from the ground, she could feel them hovering in the distance and it made her insides quiver.
Aria dropped down within earshot and stage whispered to her. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Mina said, waving her off, moving a group of branches around to check under them for the binoculars.
“What’s—” The wind caught the folds of Mina’s cloak, drawing it around her legs, and she felt herself being towed a few steps to the left. She felt it, and she cursed the breeze when she saw what waited for her, hovering on the far side of the tree, sniffing along the bushes she’d broken through to get this far.
A bone hound. Of course, a monster would’ve followed the vampires across the border, but at least this one she knew how to kill.
Mina pulled the crescent blades from her belt and flexed her hands around the handles as she called out to her friend. “Stay in the tree, Ari.”
At the sound of her voice the creature’s head snapped up and its lip curled, stretching what remained of its blackened flesh. Shaped like a wolf, the animal had gotten its name from the large patches of bleached white bone visible in the moonlight. Its claws dug rivets into the ground, and its jaws were full of razor-sharp teeth that could tear through a femur in one snap.
“Mina? What’s—”
Aria’s words were lost as the creature threw back its head and howled with a deafening shriek. Mina’s breath caught in her throat, and she stood frozen for a moment. She’d never faced a creature like this on her own before. They were a nuisance saved for the grand hunts her father planned, and during those she was typically surrounded by soldiers that would help her weaken the beast before she went in for the kill.
Either way, the only way to kill one was to sever its head or burn the body. She didn’t have the fire, just her crescent blades, so her only options were behead the damn thing or die trying.
The creature sniffed the air as it turned to face her, creating another deep gouge in the dirt. Mina’s stomach turned, but she kept her shoulders straight and brandished her blades. Cutting off the beast’s head would’ve been easier with a long sword, but she’d never been good with those. Her compact blades gave her room to move. They allowed her a chance to use her size and speed as an advantage.
Aria whimpered over her head, and the animal launched itself at Mina, thundering across the ground. She clenched her fists, shifting her weight to one side, preparing to feint as the beast lunged but before she could, something hard smacked into the back of her rear foot, and her legs were swept out from under her.
Mina’s ass smacked into the ground, and she caught herself just in time to see a dark figure sweep past. The man’s dark cloak swept out around his body like wings, but it wasn’t enough to mask his pale white hand as he grabbed the hound from the air by the neck. One of them let out a vicious growl, and the animal flipped over, letting the newcomer drive its back hard into the ground. Its spine gave a sickening crunch.
The bone hound let out a guttural cry, and the man…no, the vampire before her let it go, rising once more to his full height.
She watched as he swept a hand through his wavy dark hair, and the gesture turned her fear into something more akin to excitement. Who was this man? Was he really a vampire? He had to be given how he’d taken down the bone hound. It was the only explanation that made sense.
The figure dropped its hand and began to turn towards her, but the creature on the ground writhed, its bones letting out a loud crack as it leapt back to its feet, snarling once more.
“How…that’s not possible,” she said, staring in horror. “You…you killed it.”
“A lot is possible these days,” a gruff voice answered, and Mina let out a yelp scrambling across the ground away from the massive gray wolf lumbering out of the shadows.
The wolf shuffled past the vampire and huffed out a breath that shook its body from nose to paw. “Allow me, Milord.”
Thelordlooked down at the animal and nodded backing away, turning to face Mina, but she couldn’t take her eyes from the talking animal. His voice seemed to come from his maw, but it never moved. She heard it, and it had tingled in her ears, but how?
Frozen to the ground, she watched as it raced forward, and it clashed with the bone hound.
She couldn’t believe her eyes. She’d seen bone hounds before. She’d seen many of the monsters that crept across their borders. Most were dead when she saw them, of course. Corrigan loved to study them. But this…this wolf was a creature she’d only seen in her history books. Right beside their vampire counterparts. A werewolf. A shifter. She could tell because of its size and the bright spotless shine to its gray coat.
A werewolf? Vampires? All the nightmares she’d been raised to fear were within reach, yet her gut wasn’t twisted in terror. Watching the wolf dispatch the bone hound, she could feel her heart racing. Her fingers itched. She craved that kind of power. She craved the ability to defend her people as fiercely as that wolf defending its territory.
“Mina look out!” cried Aria, and before Mina could blink, her instincts took over. She threw herself out of the way as the wolf tossed the carcass of the bone hound to the side.
She scrambled back into the shadow of another tree, and two cold hands slipped under her arms lifting her off the ground.
