Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
The aftermath of such violence was as always so quiet and strangely peaceful: Dripping. Subtle shifting. Twitches.
Like after a thunderstorm, nothing but damage and rain drops left.
Although in this case, there was a lot of panting. One by one, the wolves lifted their bloodstained muzzles and set their sights on him. So yup, hello, boys, he lifted his knife, such as it was, into position. Because by all means, face off against a pack of carnivores with something better suited for a hamburger—
“Now what, Cousin.”
Apex glanced over his shoulder. Lucan had come up behind him, and the male was making a show of keeping his gun down by his thigh. Good job only the pair of them knew that there was no lead left in the chamber of that autoloader.
When he looked back to the other wolven, he witnessed the change that he had heard about, but had never seen up close and in person—and it wasn’t anything that he’d expected. Instead of some agonizing contortion, the wolves assumed humanoid form in a sudden burst, their fur retracting into their skin, their torsos expanding, their arms and legs breaking out in a smooth series of shifts. And when they stood at their full heights, curls of white smoke released into the thin air off their shoulders as if the energy required to alter was the combustion kind.
What do you know, they were all still bloodstained.
Apex marked each one with his eyes, moving sequentially from right to left, memorizing them. No surprise, their features were cataloged more easily in this form. As wolves? They’d looked the same with their white, gray, and brown fur—
He stopped at the last one—and not just because there were no more to take visual impressions of.
The male at the end of the lineup was especially broad of shoulder and tight of waist, the inverted V of his torso balancing his powerful thighs and calves. With white hair and what appeared to be pale blue eyes, he was both ethereal—and, with all that muscle, very, very corporeal.
And he was hung like a…
Well, yes, a horse, as the saying went. Which, considering the sonofabitch had just been a wolf, felt inappropriate. Too many farm animals.
Especially as Apex was staring at the guy’s cock.
To maintain a decorum he didn’t actually care about, he ran his stare back up over the abdominals, past the pecs… and to the face.
The male was staring back at him.
“Callum?” Lucan said. “You going to speak? Or is that blood all over you yours and you’re about to cardiac-arrest on us—”
Off to the right, one of the uniformed bodies twitched. It was such a small movement, the kind of thing that could just be part of the parasympathetic nervous system shutting down for good. But as Apex’s eyes shifted over—
“Gun!” he barked as he leaped into the air.
While everybody else took cover, he threw himself at the guard and led with the tip of his blade. Just as the male who was covered with blood sat up and pointed his weapon at where the white-haired wolven had been standing, Apex grabbed the wrist, slammed it into the asphalt, and struck the center of what should have been a corpse’s open wound of a chest cavity.
The steel went where Apex wanted it to, directly into the heart.
But he was a guy who took pride in his work. Always had.
And something about the idea that the fucker could have killed that wolven made him cranky.
Giving into his fury, and in spite of his busted ribs, he continued to stab, and stab, and stab—and then as he yanked the knife free again, he took that gun out of a very non-resistant grip.
After that, things got a little hazy, but he dimly noted the scent of gunpowder overpowered all the fresh blood in his nose.
Unlike Lucan, the guard had plenty of bullets left in his chamber.
* * *
All things considered, Lucan could not be surprised about the carnage. Apex had always had a nuclear switch, some level over and above what any normal male brought to a fight. And the fact that in this instance, what he was doing was more a case of mutilation of a corpse didn’t seem to matter.
The unhinged SOB stabbed that dead guard with some kind of knife, the arms and legs flopping each time a new entry was made, the blood splattering his prison tunic and loose brown pants until it was like he had joined the leaking artery club.
When it was finally over, the prisoner just stayed where he was, straddling the hips of the mess, his own chest pumping, his blood-speckled face something out of a nightmare.
“Good job,” Lucan muttered. “He’s really not coming down for breakfast now.”
The vampire looked over and there was a lack of recognition that, for a moment, was concerning, considering what he’d just done. But then Apex blinked, dismounted what was left of his prey, and seemed to wait for some kind of direction.