Flutter (My Blood Approves #3)(89)

Stellan was on me instantly, pulling me off Bear. He threw me onto the ground and sat on top of me, pinning my wrists back. His mouth was stained red, and he bared his teeth at me, showing his bloodied incisors with bits of flesh still clinging to them.

“Stellan! Don’t kill the girl!” Gunnar shouted. “We need her! Just scent the ground with her blood!” Keeping his dead black eyes locked on me, Stellan yelled something back at Gunnar in Finnish.

I tried kicking at Stellan, but he refused to budge, and he had my wrists locked into the cold slush. Dodge and Jack were still fighting, but now Dodge was holding Jack back from getting at Stellan. Milo had managed to get Bear to the ground, but he wasn’t free yet.

Through it all, Gunnar didn’t enter the mix. He just stalked around, observing our futile attempts at escape. Bobby was screaming at us, but I doubted that Leif was hurting him.

Stellan bent down and head butted me incredibly hard. Shooting pain shot through my skull and everything went black for a second. Had I been human, I’m sure he would’ve killed me with that. I could hear him saying something to me in Finnish, but I couldn’t see him or understand him.

When my vision started clearing, I was holding my head, my natural reflex. Belatedly, I realized that that meant he’d let me go. He was standing over me, repeating the same word over and over again.

“He’s telling you to run, Alice,” Gunnar told me. I was curled up on the ground, and I could see Gunnar through Stellan’s legs. His expression was blank, and that was strangely disturbing. “I suggest you listen to him. Stellan loves a good chase, and believe me, you want him happy when he catches you.”

I didn’t give a shit what Stellan wanted, but if I ran, he would chase me. I was what they were really after, so maybe they would all follow me away. They would leave Jane and Bobby behind for sure, since carrying humans along with them would just be cumbersome, but maybe even Milo and Jack. And even if they didn’t, it was the only plan I had.

My head stopped hurting, but I still felt dazed. I tried staggering to my feet, and immediately slipped and fell onto my knees. Stellan laughed, so I tried again. This time, I got up, and I ran.





- 34 –





Sliding through the grass, I fell more than I actually ran. Stellan was clearly giving me a head start, because I wasn’t making it very far. He was going to be awfully disappointed when he caught me, but I didn’t know what more I could do. I was running as fast as I could. If he hadn’t head butted me so hard and the ground wasn’t so slushy, I might’ve actually made it somewhere.

I only made it about twenty feet before I felt him pounce on me. It was how I imagined a tiger attack would be. His claws dug into my back, and then I was down, the wind knocked out of me. He pressed my face into the ground, so I was drowning in the watery snow and grass.

When he finally let my head up, I spit out chunks of grass and dirt. I tried to push myself up, with him on my back, but he was too strong and the ground was too slippery.

In the distance, I heard police sirens wailing. It seemed very far in the distance, but that was because my level of consciousness was changing. The adrenaline and panic changed my thirst into something different. I wasn’t blacked out exactly, but I felt like I was fighting underneath water.

Stellan laughed, and I felt the weight move off me. His hand went between my legs, and I scrambled to crawl away from him, but that just made him dig his fingers into my inner-thigh.

When I say “dig into” I mean literally dig. His claws and fingers tore through my jeans and flesh into the muscle. I screamed as the searing pain shot through me. I turned around to fight him off, and he jerked his hand back, taking a massive chunk of my leg with him. He laughed, showing me his handful of flesh, and then disappeared.

I tried to sit up and look down at my leg, and it was then that I realized what he’d done. The femoral artery runs through the inner thigh, and if severed, a human would bleed out in a very short time. Unfortunately, it’s not that much different for vampires.

In an ordinary situation, my heart would be beating much slower, which would give my body a chance to heal before things got out of hand. But I was scared as hell and my heart was beating to match that. My blood was spilling out all over the ground, and I could feel it.

When I bled as a human, it had never felt like this. It was pressure and pain and weakening. It was almost like a vacuum, and I could feel my life being sucked out of me with every drop of blood.

Jack appeared at my side. I might’ve noticed him approaching if I wasn’t so focused on the blood. I held my hands over it, trying to stop the flow, but there was a big gouge in my leg. My hand wouldn’t cover it. The blood just flowed out over it, and it was coming too fast for me to heal.

“Oh, hell, Alice.”

“Where’s Milo?” I asked, and my voice sounded weak. Jack put his hand over mine, trying to stop the blood. “Is he okay?”

“Yeah, he’s with Bobby. They’re fine,” Jack bit his lip and looked back over his shoulder. “The lycan took off when the cops showed up. We gotta get out of here before they find us.”

After the lycan attack, dealing with the cops didn’t seem like that big of deal. Except that I was bleeding like crazy. They would take me to a hospital, where everything would get very, very complicated, and I couldn’t handle that.