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knowing from experience that the undead had many traps and deceptions and that they always tried to
take those hunting them with them to their death. With the undead, nothing was ever as it seemed.
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He found Julian's soft, gentle approach to the vampire interesting. Darius was more direct, hunting the
undead down and quickly dispatching them in a brief, ferocious battle. Julian was a bit like the vampire
himself indirect, deceptive, undermining the confidence of his opponent, sidetracking him, throwing him
off, reminding him of his earlier, better days. Darius shook his head but remained silent and unseen. His
sister's mate was an interesting man, a renegade, going his own way in all things, a careless, sardonic
humor spilling over when least expected. Julian appeared to be afraid of nothing, to respect few, and to
be a law unto himself.
Darius's curiosity stemmed from more than merely wanting to become better acquainted with the man
who claimed his sister for his own. There was something eluding him about his sister's chosen lifemate.
Something dark and mysterious that nagged at him.
The vampire was moving in a circular direction, trying to position himself closer to the exit. Julian was not
giving ground, merely turning with the monster in a strange, flowing dance. Julian could have been
performing a minuet for all the stress he portrayed. "You know that I cannot allow you to live, Renaldo. It
would be inhuman of me."
"You have no regard for humans, Julian," the vampire pointed out. "You follow no one, not even the
Prince of all Carpathians. You think I do not feel the shadow lengthening and growing within you? You
are of our blood. My challenge was not issued to you but to another, one not known to the people of our
homeland. This one hoards more than one eligible woman for himself. This is against our laws."
Julian's white teeth gleamed in the darkness of the chamber. "And you follow those laws?" He asked it
with deceptive mildness, but the vampire's words had struck deeply. "You are of our blood."
Even as he spoke, he felt the slight shift in the earth beneath his feet, the undead's next deadly desperate
assault beginning. At once he moved with lightning speed, going from a loose standing position to lunging
straight at the vampire, his hand diving deep into the chest wall, extracting the pumping heart as he leapt
away.
His image was so blurred, his speed so swift, even for one of their kind, that Darius thought for the
space of a heartbeat that he might have imagined Savage's skillful charge. The vampire swayed
uncertainly, gasping from the blow, his grotesque features contorted into an even more grotesque mask.
He fell in slow motion, landing nearly at Julian's feet.
Julian tossed the heart some distance from the body and immediately gathered energy in his hands to
cleanse the blood from his skin. He then directed an orange flame at the still-pulsating organ, incinerating
it to a fine gray ash. The flame then leapt from his hand to the body, instantly cremating the remains so
that the vampire could not possibly rise again.
The earth beneath his feet rolled, heaved, and bucked.
There was an ominous creaking of rock, a grinding of layers of stone as slabs of granite began to slide
toward one another. Darius appeared and sprang toward the shifting crevice, his hands weaving a strange
pattern as he sang something softly beneath his breath, slowing the vampire's lethal trap. Julian didn't wait
for an engraved invitation. Shape-shifting on the wing, making himself as small as possible, he streaked
through the closing crack toward open air and the night, Darius right beside him. The two burst out into
the freedom of sky, the open expanse of air, just as the two sides of the crevice thunderously crashed
together.
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"I thought you were planning on talking him to death," Darius informed the golden bat dryly as he himself
shape-shifted from a black bat to a feathered and much more powerful predator.
"Someone had to do something while you were playing with your rock patterns," Julian replied easily,
allowing iridescent feathers to erupt along his own body, becoming a raptor more than able to keep up
with his companion's aggressive flight.
They began to fly side be side easily toward the forest where they had left Desari. "I could do no other
than protect the man of my sister's choosing." Darius managed to make it sound as if his sister had a hole
in her head.
Julian snorted. "Protect me? I do not think so, old man. You were the one standing back in the shadows
while I destroyed the beast." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]