• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Kade!” she cried, and leapt off her sled to run toward him. Luna circled in front of her, blocking her way as she barked in a high-pitched whine, a warning to her, or maybe even the dog could see that something was very wrong with him.

“Kade, what happened to you?”

He cocked his head at her and stared as though transfixed, his black hair wild about his head and slick with wetness. Even from the hundred feet that separated them, Alex could see that blood splattered his face, streaked off his chin in gory lines.

Why wouldn’t he answer her?

What the hell was wrong with him?

Alex paused, her feet suddenly refusing to move. “Kade? Oh, my God … please, talk to me. You’re hurt. Tell me what happened.”

But he didn’t utter a single word.

Like a creature of the forest himself, he bolted away from her, vanishing into the dark woods.

Alex called after him, but he was nowhere to be seen now. Her sled’s headlight cut deep into the trees where Kade and the wolves had been. She took a couple of hesitant steps forward, trying to ignore the knot of dread in her gut and the low, tentative warning of Luna’s growl beside her.

She had to find Kade.

She had to know what had happened.

Alex’s uncertain steps became a jog, her boots dragging in the snow. Her heartbeat was racing, lungs squeezing for each breath as she ran through the frigid darkness, following the piercing beam of her snowmachine’s headlight.

She sucked in a gasp when she saw the bloodstains in the snow. So much blood. Kade’s footprints tracked it everywhere. So had the pack’s many paws.

“Oh, God,” Alex whispered, feeling sick, about to retch, as she ventured deeper into the forest, following the trail of gore.

The snow was stained almost black the farther she went. Blood as she’d never seen. Far too much for Kade to have lost and still be able to stand upright, let alone run off as he had when he’d realized she was there.

Alex walked numbly, all of her instincts clamoring for her to turn around before she saw something she would never be able to purge from her mind.

But she couldn’t turn away.

She couldn’t run.

She had to know what Kade had been doing.

Alex’s feet slowed as she reached the place where the carnage had begun. Her vision swam as she stared down at the bloodied aftermath of a vicious attack. A vampire attack—worse than any savagery she’d witnessed before. Another human being, another innocent person, brutalized by the monstrous killers of her nightmares.

By Kade, though she never would have believed it had she not seen him with her own eyes.

Alex couldn’t move. God, she could barely feel a thing as she stood there, numb with shock and a horror so profound she couldn’t even summon the breath to scream.

Kade felt the oddest sensation in his chest as he and the other warriors pushed farther into the corridor of the mine’s shaft. He crept forward in the dark, weapon held at the ready, trying to dismiss the chill feeling that was knotting up tight behind his sternum.

Jesus, had he taken a chest hit in the earlier fracas?

Surreptitiously, he felt around for a wound or the stickiness of spilling blood but found nothing. Nothing but the phantom ache that seemed to want to suck a lot of the air out of his lungs. He shook it off, struggling to keep his attention on the pitch-black cavern that stretched out ahead of him and the other warriors.

The alarm sirens continued to wail from behind them; nothing but quiet awaited in the depths of the mine shaft. Then—the most minute scuff of a footstep came from somewhere deep within the shadows. Kade heard it, and he was certain all the rest of the warriors had, too.

Tegan held up his hand to halt their progress in the passageway. “Looks like the damn place is empty,” he said, fishing for Dragos’s lieutenant as he cast the line into the murky abyss ahead. “Hand me some of that C-4. Let’s blow this mother—”

“Wait.” The detached voice was begrudging and arrogant, an airless grunt of sound in the dark. “Just … wait, please.”

“Show yourself,” Tegan ordered. “Walk out nice and slow, asshole. If you’re armed,