MADDOX

I tore the hand from one of the vampires as they reached out to grab me. They’d been trying to get their arms around me to hug me, but I’d fought hard to keep them from doing it. I knew if one of them got a hold of me, the others would tear me apart, and Missy would be gone. I could hear Charlotte threatening Missy, and I needed to get to her. These vampires were frustrating me, though, because they’d trained to fight as a team. These weren’t the same vampires we’d fought the first time when Luna and Missy were kidnapped. They were organized and well trained. I was stronger, but I was having trouble finishing one while the other three attacked me. I worried what this meant for the rest of the pack, but these were older; the woman handpicked them to come with her to kill me. From what we knew about the rest of the vampire forces, they were mostly young new vampires. I hoped that was true. If it weren’t, only our warriors would be able to fight them, and there weren’t enough of us in the pack. That’s why we asked for help from the other packs.

I shifted back to my human form, letting one of the vampires hit my now bare chest. As he tried to pull his hand away to strike me, I grabbed his wrist and pulled him to me as I struck out with a punch of my own. His jaw crunched loudly under the weight of the blow, and the other vampires started to try to attack me as a team again. This time, I used the vampire I’d now captured to absorb their blows. Their rhythm was broken, and I could tell they were having trouble fighting me in human form, just like Bygrave did. I was right; they weren’t training to fight us like this.

“Alpha, they have trouble fighting us unshifted. They expected to fight us like wolves.”

“Thank you, Maddox. Is she safe?”

“She will be.”

With that, I focused on killing the leeches before me. I’d turned the vampire I captured around to face his comrades and held him by the back of the neck with my right hand while my left controlled his wrist of the same side. As his friends attacked, I used him like a puppet to intercept them. They were getting frustrated, but I didn’t have time for a prolonged fight. I could hear chaos inside the house. The one to my right sprang forward, trying to deliver a killing blow with his hand bladed like a knife towards my chest. I stepped back and brought the other vampire into his path at the last moment, and he pierced through my captive’s chest easily. The vampire’s arm was buried past his elbow in the trunk of our shared victim, so I let him go this time. I jumped forward, shifting mid-air into my wolf and ripping the vampire’s head from his shoulders before shifting back as my feet hit the ground. There were two left now. I was outside their range, though, and they couldn’t surround me. I bolted for the door. I could hear them right at my heels, so when I reached the front door, I snapped off one of the 4×4 support beams to the small porch. I turned and dropped to my knee, letting the first vampire behind me impale himself on the broken post fully. I stood then, kicking the post and impaling the second vampire who was close behind him. I grabbed the post in the small space between the two vampires and pivoted towards the house to pin them to the wall with it. They were screaming in pain and still alive but incapacitated. I had to get to my mate.

Charlotte smiled wickedly at me from the back of the room as she held Missy by the throat, “You’re just in time to watch.”

MISSY

The other vampires spread out, intent on attacking my friends. Before I could move, Emmett and Sulien blocked the view of us girls. Julie pushed Emmett aside, “I don’t need you to save me.”

“Never said you did,” he retorted, annoyed.

There were only three new vampires, but our friends weren’t warriors. I was afraid one of them was going to be killed or bitten. I wasn’t sure which was worse. I felt my fur sprouting from my skin and my body getting larger as I shifted behind the fray. The sound of breaking glass caught my attention, and I saw another vampire joining our fight to attack Sol and Allie. I snarled and leapt toward that vampire, wanting to protect my friends who weren’t built for fighting. I pushed themout of the way with my body and met the vampire head-on. She tried to jump over me, but I reared up on my back legs and met her in the air. I bit her neck, latching onto her shoulder. I pulled up, shaking her in the air hard before slamming her to the ground, where she escaped my teeth. She was bleeding badly now, but she didn’t look like she would stop attacking me. She ran at me with her arms outstretched wide, and I realized she was trying to hug me. I ducked under her arms and bit one of her ankles, jerking my head viciously and ripping her from her feet. I used my grip on her to repeatedly smash her into the ground until I felt her stop resisting. I dropped her and stepped on her back to make sure she couldn’t get up and then tore her head from her shoulders to make sure she was dead. This wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, but that felt like a trap.

“Did she only bring young vampires with her?” I wondered as I turned to look at Sol and Allie. Their looks of terror as they looked between the vampire and me made me feel bad.

I heard a cry of pain from behind me, and when I looked, I saw Emmett with a wound in his neck that was pouring b***d, and the vampire he was fighting had b***d all over his mouth.

“Oh no…”

Emmett had been bitten, and he looked like he was starting to lose his fight. Sulien wasn’t faring much better, and Julie looked like she was holding on by a thread. They looked exhausted. Knowing Emmett was in trouble, I moved to help him. I saw a shadow from the corner of my eye leap toward me, and I jumped back, thinking it was another vampire. I was surprised when I saw it was a blonde wolf. I’d never seen a wolf like this before, but Allie wasn’t with Sol anymore. As the vampire got closer to Emmett, the wolf bit his arm and pulled him away from our friend lying on the ground, spent and bleeding. The wolf growled and dug its paws into the living room floor as it struggled against the vampire’s continued punches with his other hand. I jumped in to help, biting the vampire’s leg as I did with the other and pulling him from his feet to fall on his back hard. I tore the leg in my mouth from his body as the blonde wolf was finally able to rip the arm in its maw from his shoulder. We tore him apart together, ending with the other wolf removing his head. I looked at the wolf quizzically, but it shifted back to reveal it was Allie. She dropped to her knees next to Emmett and grabbed a blanket from the now broken couch to press to his wound. He opened his eyes to look at her, and he visibly blushed as he realized she was naked, averting his eyes.

“It’s okay,” she told him.

“Th… Thank you,” he stuttered, still unable to look at her. She carefully pulled him over to Sol, and continued to tend to Emmett. If she could stem the bleeding, maybe we could save him.

“Don’t come back into the fight unless you have to,” I told Allie. “Keep him alive.”

“I will,” she promised in a determined tone; I hope she’d be able to keep it.

Sulien looked like he was getting the better of his vampire now, so I went to help Julie. I’d looked towards the woman in the doorway multiple times since this started, and she just seemed to be watching in amusement. There was no sign she was going to join us, at least not yet. Broken furniture scattered all over the floor, so I shifted back to my human form. As the vampire tried to jump over Julie as the first one had done with me, I front kicked him in the h*p right as he left the ground. The kick launched him into the wall, leaving a ragged hole and sending him into the next room. Julie looked like she was going to drop at any moment, so I linked her, “Go to Sol and Allie. Help them get Emmett out. I’ve got this one, and Maddox will be here soon.”

I really hoped I was right. Maddox’s absence was terrifying, but all I could feel through our bond was anxiety and rage. He was still alive and relatively uninjured. I couldn’t think about that now, though. The vampire I’d kicked was getting up slowly on the other side of the wall in the kitchen. I may have broken his h*p because he couldn’t quite stand on both legs. He winced if he tried to put pressure on it. I heard a roar behind me, and I turned in just enough time to see the vampire Sulien was fighting break free from him to run at the others.

“No!” I yelled, my legs coiling to try to jump forward and catch him, but it was too late.

The vampire was using the girls to bait Sulien. Just as he reached Sol, the vampire turned sharply and plunged his hand into Sulien’s chest, where it broke free on the other side through his back. Sulien’s cry of agony was awful, but it died quickly. The vampire dropped him to the ground at his feet, lifeless. Sol was screaming, punching at the vampire who had just taken her brother. Her punches weren’t even registering with the vampire, and he turned toward her, smiling. Allie was under Emmett and not able to shift, and Julie hadn’t made it over to the girls before passing out face down on the floor. Until I saw her shifted back, I didn’t realize how injured Julie was or how much she was bleeding. B***d was everywhere. All I saw now were the people who had given me nothing but friendship, laying dead, beaten, and broken in front of me. I wasn’t willing to let them all die. Not one more.

“Hey!” I yelled at the vampire facing Sol.

“Wait your turn,” he said dismissively.

“No,” I growled.

I picked up one of our fire pokers from the ground where it lay in all of the mess the room had become and charged over to the vampire with it. He grabbed Sol and opened his mouth to bite her. It felt like time was moving slower, and I could see every minute detail of what was happening. I could see the venom dripping from his fangs as they were about to pierce Sol’s neck. I could see Sol’s tear-filled eyes looking down at her brother as she accepted her fate and dropped her arms by her sides to quit fighting. Then, I saw the poker pierce the vampire’s skull, splitting the back of it open and driving it away from Sol’s neck. It plunged through the vampire’s mouth and deep into the wall as the vampire reached behind his head, trying to grab the poker. I shifted, closing my teeth around his neck and ending his life.

Shifting back, I looked towards the female in the doorway, “What do you want?”

“You,” she said with a laugh, and then before my heart could even beat once more, she was in front of me, her hand closing on my throat.

I couldn’t breathe, and it felt like she was going to crush my throat. I was holding on to her wrist with both hands, trying desperately to breathe and pull her hand away. She was stronger than the vampire that tried to kill me in my cell, and I couldn’t break her grasp.

I heard her taunting Maddox, “You’re just in time to watch.”

“We can’t let her use us to kill him,” Holland chided, angrily ready to fight.

She was right. I had to break free from this and help Maddox fight. I told myself I wouldn’t be a victim after I was kidnapped, and I needed to keep that promise. I wasn’t as strong as her, but as I knew from training with Maddox and some of the other warriors after the kidnapping, that isn’t all that mattered. I needed to use leverage. She was holding me by the throat, and I was sure she could hold me up in the air with one arm too. I jumped into the air, my head skimming the ceiling, and turned myself perpendicular to the woman. As I thought, it made it harder to hold me up, and I plummeted to the ground. With my right hand on her wrist, I reached out and grabbed the back of her head, pulling her to me. I threw my knee across her body, my shin resting across her waist. As my shoulders hit the ground, my leg crossed over her face. I extended my h**s, and I felt her arm snap under my h**s. She tried to crush me, her mouth opening to bite the leg that was now over her neck. It was compressing me into a ball with her arm in my grasp, where I wrapped my body around it. Anything near a vampire’s face was dangerous, but we’d trained for this. As she pushed into me, I extended my h**s and then rolled over my shoulder to force us to both be face down. I shifted my leg from over her face to behind her head, hooking my foot behind it and narrowly missing her teeth.

I now had her face down with control of her head. I forced my h**s into the ground and felt her arm snapping in more places. With it shattered, I pulled her arm towards my face as hard as I could until I felt it rip free. She screamed, trying to get away, but I pushed myself up and was now kneeling on the back of her head. It was all I could do to keep her pinned without biting me, but Maddox appeared next to me. The look on his face and the feeling from our bond was nothing but relief and admiration, and it eased the anxiety and terror I’d felt since this started.

“You ready?” he asked.

I just nodded as I shifted my weight from her neck to the back of her head and gave him better access to the former. I saw the claws extend from his fingers, and in one s***h, he ended our fight.

I collapsed on the floor next to the disgustingly beautiful vampire body. Maddox hovered over me. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yea,” I breathed out. I looked around at the devastation that was our home. Sol cried over Sulien, Allie held Emmett, and Julie still lay on the floor unconscious.NôvelD(ram)a.ôrg owns this content.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to you faster,” he grimaced, looking around. I shook my head.

“We need to make sure everyone is okay and help my dad. Those won’t be the only ones. We have to help the pack,” I said, getting to my feet shakily. Maddox grabbed my waist, steadying me. I looked up into his eyes as he leaned his forehead against mine.

“I’m so glad she didn’t hurt you,” he whispered. I reached up and grabbed his face.

“Other pack members will need our help,” I whispered. He nodded.

“Let’s get Emmett and Julie upstairs. We can burn the vampires later,” he whispered.

“What do we do with Sulien?” I linked.

“Cover him for now. Let’s get Sol away from his body,” Maddox said. I nodded. Maddox leaned in and gave me a chaste k**s. “If we go fight, you can’t leave my side. I have to know you are safe with me.”

“Let’s help our pack,” I told him. “Together.”