Page 60 of Midnight Kiss
“I need you to come to my office immediately. The elders want a personal meeting with you regarding the book.”
I stared at the text.
“Now.” The second message came through.
If I didn’t go up there and see them now, my career and life at the U.C. were done. If not, Emily was in danger.
21
EMILY
Ascream tried to rip from my throat, but it rebounded against the wedge of nothingness in my mouth. Please! Please, somebody help me!
Yulia tilted her head to one side, a vicious smile toying with the corners of her lips. “I know this must be terrifying for you, darling,” she said. “But it will be over soon. Once you are dead?—”
A bang sounded, and I caught a glimpse of Yulia’s shocked face before I dropped to the ground. I landed heavily on the tiled floor, the impact knocking me senseless for a moment.
I rose and found Michael standing in the bathroom. Yulia glared at him, her teeth bared, and— Her teeth! They were fangs. Actual fangs.
She sped toward Michael, and he dodged her attack as if he’d seen it coming, even though she was lightning fast. He darted left and then right, and then brought out a wooden spike from a loop on his belt.
“You think you can defeat me, petty mortal Hunter? You think that?—”
Michael stepped toward Yulia and rammed the stake through the left side of her chest. “Too much talking, too little fighting.”
She crumpled in on herself, slowly morphing and dissolving. A cloud of ash rose where she’d died, and the stake clattered to the tiles, where Michael retrieved it. He blew ash off the end.
I coughed and spluttered, pressing myself backward against the bathroom wall, my eyes wide.
Michael dropped to his haunches in front of me. “Come on, Em, we have to go.”
“How did you?—?”
“No time to explain now. There will be more of them. We need to get you back to my apartment. It’s safe.” He put out his hand.
I took it, and we darted out of the bathroom together.
I was still in shock when we arrived back at the apartment.
A vampire. A real vampire. I couldn’t be imagining it. And Michael had stuck a stake right through its heart and killed it. That had been real too?
“How is any of this happening, Mike? What the hell is going on?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” he sighed, and came over with two mugs. He set one on the coffee table in his comfy apartment. “Drink it. It’s hot chocolate. It will make you feel better.”
“I doubt it. I just watched a woman turn into a cloud of dust. And there was the whole part where she smelled me and tried to kill me right before that.”
“She smelled you?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s worse than I thought. You’re giving off an aura that attracts vampires,” Mike said, taking a sip of his hot chocolate. He was so relaxed that it made the situation even more bizarre. “I don’t know what happened to cause it, but here we are.”
“Uh, you’re going to have to explain this in more detail. How did you even?—”
“Stake her through the heart?” he asked. “Yeah, that’s because I’m a vampire Hunter. I come from a long line of them. Look, Em, I know this is a lot, but I’m going to do my best to explain. There are vampires, werewolves, and Hunters.”
“Werewolves!”