Scorched Ice (Fire and Ice #3)(61)
Something primitive and savage within him broke free, something darker than even the most twisted part of him had ever been as he poured on the speed. He’d tear every one of those men apart piece by piece and carve those pieces into tiny bits if they hurt her.
Despite the fact Julian was still a couple hundred feet away, the man stumbled back when he spotted Julian racing toward him. Quinn’s head swayed to the side, and her eyes opened as the man stepped toward her again. For a second, all Julian could see was the honeyed hue of her eyes before the man bent over her. The man pulled his arm back and drove the stake into her chest.
***
Quinn clenched the man’s wrist seconds before he drove the stake through her chest. Her ribs crunched as they gave way beneath the sharp wood piercing through her body and plunging toward her heart.
The stake grated against her bones. It twisted in her muscles as splinters of wood broke free inside of her. She kept a firm grip on the man’s wrist as she tried to hold him back from delivering the killing blow. Weakened by blood loss, her muscles trembled from the force it took to keep him from killing her. Instinctively, the tentacles of her ability lashed out and seized him. Her power pulled the life from the man as it sought to heal her broken body.
Hunter! The amount of life he possessed meant he could only be one of her kind, but there would be no trying to reason with this man if she wanted to live.
A scream strangled in her throat when the man twisted the stake deeper. Panic caused her ability to flare up. It crackled in the air between them as it became a living entity that shot sparks around them while it sucked deeper from his life force.
The man’s lips pulled back in a grimace. He tried to jerk his hand away from her as a gurgled noise escaped him. The broken bones of her legs twisted and came back together with a crack that caused the scream she’d been suppressing to rip from her.
The man tugged more violently at his wrist as his grip on the stake lessened. His eyes bulged from his head; his skin took on the yellow hint of jaundice before slipping away to the gray shade of death. The broken bone in her ankle shifted and locked into place, causing her to scream again as it fused back together.
Her right leg, which had been lying in ruin only seconds ago, now had flesh knitting itself closed over the hole her bone had created in it. Strength flooded her as the man continued to perish before her.
The man’s face hollowed to the point that all it consisted of were the harsh angles of his cheekbones and his bulging blue eyes. A sickly yellow color crept through the whites of his eyes. She had been so unbelievably close to dying, she could feel the tip of the stake against her heart, but life flooded her system.
Beneath her grip, the leathery feel of his skin became rough against her fingertips. The spark of life filling his eyes dimmed considerably. The knowledge of his impending death radiated from him as he gazed at her.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” she choked out.
His mouth parted on one last breath before his eyes rolled up and his body slumped forward. The sluggish pull of what remained of his life slipped into her body before the wrist within her grasp collapsed completely into ash and fell away from her fingertips.
His remains fell about her like fine soot. She had only a second to process what had happened before agony tore through her chest once more. Blood pooled into her mouth; her fingers clawed at the stake. The influx of the man’s life had worked to heal her other wounds, but with the stake still embedded in her chest, it wouldn’t heal until the wood was free of her.
Her fingers felt thick and heavy as she tried to get them around the stake. Her blood loss and the discomfort of the stake embedded in her made pulling it free difficult. Every attempt she made caused the tip of it to scrape against her heart. One wrong move and she might drive it in deeper.
Julian! He wouldn’t survive without her, and if he did, he would go on a path of destruction so brutal he would make Vlad the Impaler look like a kitten. Tears clogged her throat, her sorrow for him outweighing her pain.
Splinters embedded into her fingers when she tugged at the stake, scrambling to pull it free. Her back bowed as blackness loomed up to drown her within its depths. Then hands fell on her shoulders. Tentacles of her power whipped out and latched onto the vibrant source holding her.
Screams echoed in her head, and perhaps she released them too, she couldn’t tell as something twisted within her chest. A pulling, sucking sensation filled her. She was lifted up before something within her body gave way and she fell back to the earth.
Feeling returned to her fingers. Her limbs were no longer heavy or numb. Warmth seeped through her while her body worked to close the hole torn into it. Her eyelids fluttered open to find Julian leaning over her. His blood-red eyes were filled with a fury the likes of which she’d never seen before, but there was also love there and a fear so intense it rattled her already shaken bones.
“Don’t you leave me,” he growled.
She tugged at his wrists when she realized the source of the vast life flooding her. “Let me go,” she croaked.
“Never,” he vowed as his normally pale, vibrant skin took on a sallow hue.
“Let me go!”
“Shh.” He ran his fingers over her face before bending to kiss her forehead. “Take what you need from me, Quinn. Take everything you need.”
She struggled to break free of his ironclad hold. He refused to release her as he pulled her closer and moved her protectively toward the shadows of the building. Over his shoulder, she spotted some of the vampires still standing in what she now realized was a minefield.