Page 73 of Burn for Her
At least his hearing had improved. Was it the king’s blood or Lena’s closeness making him stronger?
Or was it something else?
A loud thump raised Dorian’s hackles. Lucian hollered from outside and Dorian ran towards the front door, only to find Lena already beating him to the chase.
Shit, was he slowing down, or had she sped up?
What the fuck was going on here?
“Down there!” Lucian roared. “The other went this way!” He started running in the opposite direction.
The sun would be rising soon, the streets were beginning to lighten. They needed to catch this bastard and kill him before they had witnesses waking up to make their coffee and go on their morning walks.
Dorian couldn’t run with Lena trying to keep up. And he couldn’t leave her at the house unguarded. While he tripped over his conscience, Lena dashed down the road. Dorian sped up and stopped her. “Take the car and go,” he ordered. “Now, Lena.”
“Key?”
“Already in there. Center console” Lucian always left a spare fob in the car in case of something like this.
Dorian watched her jump into Lucian’s car, and he let out a sigh of relief when the engine roared to life.
“Go! Go!” She peeled wheels, leaving Dorian to run after this bastard on his own.
Dorian picked up speed and ran down the street, cutting through yards, eagerly trying to catch a scent trail. Only he couldn’t find one that marked it as a Savag-Ri.
To his left, one block up, wheels screeched. Dorian’s breath caught. Cutting across the street, he saw Lucian’s car parked in the middle of the street, the driver’s side door open.
No Lena.
With a loud, animalistic roar, Dorian kicked into high gear and followed her scent. She went south, towards the main road. Lucian was hot on his heels—his speed far superior than Dorian’s right now. Blades out and ready, the two vampires beat feet across the yards with enough speed to go undetected by humans. “Over there!” Dorian hollered.
Lena was on the ground, fighting against someone nearly twice her size.
Dorian. Saw. Red.
The attacker’s hooded head popped up just as Dorian and Lucian closed in on him. He yanked Lena by her hair and held a blade to her neck. Dorian couldn’t move without risk of this fucker slicing her throat wide open.
It was a sacrifice he couldn’t make, even after Lena yelled, “Do it!”
Dorian hesitated. But when the bastard’s blade began to slide across her neck and Lena’s eyes squeezed shut, Dorian dropped his blade and pulled out his gun. Popping off every round in his chamber, he blasted the attacker’s face into ground meat. The headless sonofabitch shook and convulsed on the street then caught fire, leaving nothing of his remains but ash and smoke.
Vampire.
Dorian’s heart slammed into his throat, mortified. He grabbed Lena to get her away from the remains. Holy shit, how was this possible?
Lucian rushed to their side and skidded to a halt. “A vampire did this?” His words were laced with venom.
No sense in answering, they both knew what they were looking at. Since Dorian had used the Savag-Ri specific ammo on the cocksucker, his ashes swiftly melted into sticky goo on the street, making him completely unidentifiable. They had nothing to go on.
Lucian swiped a hand over his mouth before saying, “I couldn’t catch the other one. They got away.”
“Any scent?”
“None I recognized.”
“This could be Marius’s doing,” Dorian growled. He didn’t want to assume the old king would go this far, but, “He’s gunning for me and I have no idea why. Those guys were strong enough to flash, that’s why you couldn’t catch them.”
“Then why didn’t they flash completely away from us instead of hanging back?”