slammed painfully back onto the ground, again knocking the breath from his lungs.
Pain coursed through his body, and he felt a wave of nausea roll through his stomach. A hard set of fingers grabbed his hair from behind and drew him face-up from the ground, sending a fresh wave of pain through his neck and shoulders. He managed to use his aching arms to push himself up from the ground, while at the same time he felt a knee press into his lower back. His body was spent, and all that he wanted was for the pain to stop. Mercifully, he began to feel himself losing consciousness.
“I love you, Kat,” he whispered desperately as he willed his final thoughts to be of the woman he loved.
His body was dropped face-forward back onto the ground following the sound of a speeding truck impacting a meaty wall. He managed to keep his face from impacting the cold earth as he heard intense hissing and snarling and what sounded like breaking tree branches. He reached behind him to rub at the back of his head with his right hand as he tried to focus on the commotion going on in the darkness around him.
He managed to spot his flashlight on the ground nearby and painfully crawled over to it. Grasping it tightly in his hand, he shined it in the direction of the hissing and growling.
Caleb watched as the burly vampire rushed at Katrina only to crash into the trunk of a large pine tree as she darted to the side. She raked some sort of blade across his upper shoulder and darted just out of arm’s reach. Devon roared with rage and rushed her. It appeared that, while very fast compared to a human, the large-framed vampire’s dexterity was much slower and more sluggish than hers. The advantage was clearly in Katrina’s favor, and she used each opportunity either to slash or stab her blade into her opponent. To Caleb’s confusion, each cut or stab she used seemed intended upon progressively disabling her opponent without actually making a fatal killing strike.
A loud snapping sound startled him as he propped himself up with difficulty. He heard a whooshing noise followed by the sound of another tree trunk’s breaking. With a sudden burst of speed, Katrina appeared less than twenty feet from Caleb in some sort of combat stance, wielding a large military-style knife in her hand. He spotted Devon standing beyond her as he brandished part of a tree limb in his right hand. The huge vampire was dripping blood from multiple locations on his body, including a steady stream oozing down his dangling left arm and dripping off of the fingers of his hand.
“This was a mistake!” the hulking vampire barked as his violet eyes burned brightly in the darkness. “He was easy prey, that’s all!”
“Did he tell you he was a vampire’s mate?” she demanded savagely.
“Maybe he said something about that,” Devon countered. “But I didn’t believe he was telling the truth at the time.”
Her eyes blazed bright green as she decreed in a cruel, flat voice, “Your last mistake.”
“Whoa, whoa!” Devon insisted as he held the tree limb out to his side in a less aggressive stance. “Let’s just calm down. This was all a horrible misunderstanding!”
Caleb issued a dry-throated cough and rasped, “You shouldn’t threaten her with a tree branch, idiot.”
His mind flashed to the time Katrina had revealed her vampire nature to him, and he had fearfully brandished a tree branch at her. She had neatly disarmed him, although at the time she had meant him no harm, unlike with the vampire before her.
“Huh?” the large vampire asked with barely a glance at Caleb.
Devon tossed the branch down beside him and held his hands up in a more peaceable gesture towards Katrina, who seemed to be selecting the optimum moment to attack. “Please, just for a moment, let’s just stop,” he entreated.
“You didn’t grant Caleb that benefit a moment ago,” she noted in a flat, lethal voice. Her focus swtiched to dispatching the opposing vampire and seeing to Caleb’s injuries as soon as possible.
The vampire’s eyes momentarily flashed with surprise, and he apologized, “No, you’re right. That was a bad mistake, and I’m sorry. This doesn’t need to get ugly for either of us. Really.”
“You don’t know ugly yet,” she seethed through fury-lit eyes as she maneuvered closer to the hulking vampire. She had selected the preferred entry point under his guard and was ready to initiate a