Dragon's Fake Wedding Date - Riley Storm Page 0,60

be away from her. All Rann wanted to do was—

Something hit him from the side.

He had no warning at all. His thoughts were too jumbled, his mind too distracted. He wasn’t looking for danger, wasn’t aware of his surroundings.

Rann had been perched on the peak of the house next door, and the impact sent him crashing to the ground between houses. Thankfully, the older builds didn’t have fences between them, and he landed on nothing but grass.

The air was partially driven from him, but he rolled away from his landing zone and then got to his feet just as someone dropped from the roof. If he’d not retained his wits and moved quickly, they would have landed right on him.

The tall, lean, powerful figure rose to its full height. A pair of empty black eyes focused on him. They were the only sign, other than the nearly ethereal grace of its movements, that the creature he was facing wasn’t human, but was in fact a vampire.

Rann snorted wryly.

“What do you find so funny?” the creature asked in heavily accented English.

“You,” Rann said, fire blossoming just under his skin, his powers ready to come to his call. “Here I am, chastising myself for not being out there hunting you down, and what do you do? You come to me. Now that’s what I call irony. Making my job easier.”

The creature tilted its head. “I see. Well, we shall do our best not to disappoint you.”

We?

Rann’s head whipped around. This time, he had half an instant to brace himself before another vampire hit him from the left. He managed to snag part of his attacker’s clothing, and together they went for a tumble, though the momentum meant that the second vampire bounced and tumbled a good distance more.

“It really wasn’t a challenge to find you,” the second vampire said as it got to its feet, collecting itself, brushing some grass from its shirt. It was the former preacher. “Not when you know exactly where to look.”

Rann stiffened in alarm. They knew about Gayle!

“Oh yes. We know about the woman,” the vampire-preacher said with an ugly grin. “Our agents informed us.”

Rann snarled. “I knew that the Church was in league with you. I knew it!”

The preacher laughed, confirming Rann’s suspicion that they must have found out about Gayle the day before during the incident at the tent city. One or more of the vampire-sect hidden within the Church of the Anti-Wyrm must have reported back to them. Informed them about her.

“You can’t get to her,” Rann growled. “She’d behind a threshold. There’s nothing you can do to her.”

The first vampire spoke again. “Who says we’re here for her?”

Rann snorted, and fire burst into being in his hands as he clenched his fist. “Then you should have brought some more friends.”

Something slammed into Rann from behind. He stumbled forward even as the creature vaulted up over his head. It raked a hand across his face and lines of pain bloomed as its nails dug through his skin, drawing blood.

“Well, if that’s not an opening, I don’t know what is,” the woman from the news video, Isabella, drawled lazily. She sauntered away, perfectly confident in herself to the point she even turned her back.

“That’s the thing about humans,” Rann said, picking himself up. “Former humans, in your case, lady. You think you understand what you’re dealing with.”

He flung a blast of flame at the older vampire, the Hunter, and charged at the female. Rann had to force himself not to think of her as a woman. She was a vampire and therefore the enemy. The woman who had existed before was gone. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, there was precisely no way to reverse the process.

She was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.

Rann had begun his attack when her back was still turned to him, but despite the surprise, the enhanced speed of a vampire allowed her to react before he hit her. All of which meant that Rann got to savor the look of incredulous surprise on her face before he ran right into her.

The shriek of anger was worth it as well as she went flying through the air, slamming a leg off a tree and pinwheeling out of sight.

There was no time for Rann to appreciate the beauty of the moment. He flung himself forward into a dive roll just as something swooshed through where his neck had been. Coming out of the roll, he thrust his arms out wide, spinning