Demonic Vampires (Supernatural Shifter Academy #3) - G. Bailey Page 0,42
spell, an artifact, something -- but nothing is coming to me. “Mollie-”
She grabs onto my arm with surprising strength for someone bleeding out on the floor, pulling me close enough that I can feel her weak breath against my cheek. Her voice is barely above a whisper, but I can still make out the one command that she gives me.
“Run,” my former foster mother says just before she dies.
Chapter 17
I want to scream. I want to tear my hair out. I want to cry. But instead, I just linger there as if the flat isn’t burning and we aren’t in the middle of a war zone. It feels like the wind has gone out of me, like I can’t catch my breath, and it’s not just due to the thick haze of smoke that’s filling the apartment. I stare down at Mollie. Her eyes are wide and staring now, and her hand has dropped from my arm, frozen in a clawing gesture that makes me want to explode when I look at it.
The closest thing I ever had to a parent, and she’s lying dead on the floor in front of me. Because we brought them here.
There’s a low moaning sound, and it takes me a moment to realise that I’m the one making it. I slump onto the floor in spite of the voice in my head that’s crying out for me to leave, leave now or I’m going to die. The fight has gone out of me. My eyes close for a moment, and when I feel a hand gripping my shoulder, I try desperately to shake it off. “No!” I yell, lashing out with my hands at what I can only assume is another one of the Academy representatives. “Let me go!”
“Millie, Millie, it’s me!” I recognise Hunter’s voice. Isn’t that just dandy -- the man who broke my heart is now trying to pry me away from my dead foster mother. “Come on, we have to get out of here!”
“Get off me!” I shout, leaning forward over Mollie’s body as if that will somehow change the outcome.
“Millie, please.” He’s imploring now, that same voice he used when he tried to talk to me last night, and god, it hurts. Everything hurts, from my pounding head to my heart, and I’ve never been so tempted to just curl up on the floor and let death come to me as I am in that moment. I’ve not only managed to drag a bunch of innocent people into my mess; I’ve also gotten one of them killed. “Come on!” He leans into me, using his vampiric strength to haul me to my feet. I struggle futilely against him, but I don’t have the energy to fight him off, my eyes still lingering on the corpse on the floor.
“We can’t just leave her,” I protest, tears streaming down my face and leaving clean trails in the soot on my cheeks. “We can’t -- we have to do something, we have to…”
“Boots.” Hunter takes me by the shoulders and forces me to look at him. “She’s gone.” His normally blue eyes have gone red with his transformation, making him look borderline inhuman, and I want to scream at the injustice of it all.
Still, something in the way he’s looking at me pierces through the cloud of grief that’s surrounded me, and somehow I’m able to make my legs work. Nodding curtly to him and wiping my streaming eyes, I allow him to lead me to the door, guided by his superior vision. One by one, we rush out of the apartment, Hunter and I in the lead, and the guys following behind. Xander and Hazel are already outside, and it’s not until I hear an explosive roar from behind me that I realise Ruby has been singlehandedly holding the rest of them off. She unleashes a last burst of flame from her powerful jaws to cover us while we make our exit, but moments later I hear a different roar. They have a dragon of their own.
Ruby goes flying out the front door, thrown like a ragdoll and suddenly back in her human form. “Ruby!” Xander yells, letting Hazel go to run to his sister and help her to her feet.
“Too many of them,” she pants. “Where did they come from?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he replies. “We have to -”
But the sound of a telekinetic burst -- Edith’s doing, I’d bet a fiver -- makes it impossible to hear the rest of