Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Being unsure of her whereabouts had made him antsy.
But then he couldn’t hold himself back any longer. Busting out of his front door, he started picking off the enemy with bullets, dropping them like flies in the forest—except as a strange sense tingled at the nape of his neck, he glanced back.
He immediately shit himself because surely it was more lessers.
Except no, it was not the enemy.
It was the Brotherhood. And they had come to fight.
Nalla must have called her sire—and Z must have not let her down.
Like the good father he was.
As Nate continued to engage, he totally did not hate the backup. Before he’d been with Nalla, he would have gotten his dick in a crack, but with her on his land? He was grateful for the help, especially because he knew, going by the pain in his shoulder and his side, that he’d been plugged at least twice—
A lesser jumped out in his path and started rushing for him—and all he could think was: You want to dance? Let’s fucking dance.
Meeting the undead chest to chest, he shoved his barrel into its face, and discharged a pair of bullets to blow the back of the skull out. Then he let the slayer drop to the snow. The thing wouldn’t be dead until someone stabbed it back to Lash, but there’d be time for that later.
On to the next one. And the next.
As he worked, he smelled his own blood mixing with the stink of the enemy, felt the sweat from his body’s efforts, knew the strength that came from doing what he was best at as he controlled his guns and heard the pop!s not just of his own weapon, but those around him. The fighting was dangerous. It required a level head. It consumed all of his attention, except for that wedge of his consciousness that would always be with Nalla now.
But in a weird, fucked-up way, he was reminded of how much he loved his job with the Brothers—
Except then everything changed.
When there was an explosion at his barn.
Jerking to face the loud, unexpected sound, Nate stopped dead in mid-stride… because he couldn’t believe what he was looking at.
His monster fucking truck, the one that he hadn’t fired up since the fall, that had sat in an unheated shed, that should have been drained of oil and gas and all fluids—and why the fuck hadn’t he done that!—was blasting out of the barn, the doors splintering apart.
There was only one person who could be behind the wheel.
Nalla was all fury and pedal-to-the-metal as she plowed into the ground game. How she managed to only go bowling for lessers, he didn’t know. But somehow, she didn’t target the Brothers. Only the white, soulless killers who had come on the attack—
“Fuck!” he hollered as he was struck by a bullet.
Turning to the lesser with the point-blank aim, he ducked into a roll, and came up shooting on bended knee. The slayer wasn’t prepared, that pasty-ass face registering all kinds of what-the-fuck! as twelve pounds of lead was pumped into him.
As Nate jumped back to his feet, he intended to go after Nalla—yeah, and do what? flag her down and issue her a self-preservation ticket?—when he saw something out of the corner of his eye:
A black dagger in the hand of a female slayer.
And as she lifted it over her head, the incapacitated fighter she was about to kill came into sharp focus.
“Nooooooooooooooo!” Nate screamed.
Throwing all his strength into his legs, he surged forward, racing through the hail of bullets, zeroing in on that blade to the point where he didn’t see Nalla’s father on the ground or the hatred in the slayer’s face. Just the blade.
Just that one blade… that seemed to hold everything that was important to him in balance.
Nate leapt into the air a good ten feet away because if he kept running, he wasn’t going to get there in time. But fuck, his superpower was immortality, not being able to fly.
He wasn’t fast enough to grab the blade.
But he sure as hell got under it.
Just as the black steel point reached terminal velocity, he somehow managed to slide his body in between the weapon and Zsadist’s chest so that his back was what got stabbed.
And then shit was fucking on.
In spite of the blazing pain, Nate rolled over and took control while on top of the Brother. Swinging his fist, he punched the slayer in the head, where a raw wound was showing parts of her brain. Then he incapacitated her instantly by pushing his fingers into a gaping hole in her throat.
Just as he grabbed a silver blade from her belt.
“That’s my fucking father-in-law, bitch!”
With a single, vicious movement, he plunged the knife into that empty-ass chest cavity.
The pop! was loud, the blast of light was bright, and the smell was a sting in the nose that he relished.