Night Kissed (Chosen Vampire Slayer #1) - Mila Young Page 0,19

myself to the first culprit, scrambling to pull the stake from his back.

A shadow fell over me.

Frantically, my fingers snatched the weapon, my muscle tightening, heaving out the stake.

I whipped around in a sliver of a second, weapon raised and swinging around toward my attacker.

Silvery eyes shone.

Lips peeled over razor-sharp fangs, his snarl echoed through the night.

No hesitation.

I plunged the stake right into his chest as he rushed into me, throwing me off my feet once more.

My lungs emptied of air, and I gasped as the dead weight slumped over me, trapping me. He gurgled over me, blood dripping into my hair.

Seconds was it all it took for such a fatal blow to a vampire to render them useless.

“Fuck!” With all my strength, I drove my palms into his shoulders, rolling him off me.

He slumped onto his back like a sack.

Up on my feet, I dusted myself of snow and used it to clean the blood out of my hair.

I stared down at the two vampires. That was what I should have done earlier when I crossed paths with Orion, not drooled over him.

I sighed at myself as I collected my stake and took out my phone to call the cops. I would report bodies found in the alley so they were collected before anyone stumbled over them. Dead vampires once staked remain withered husks of themselves, fangs withering away and only their human body remained. Meaning discovering they were vampires was close to impossible. Sure, there would be inconsistencies in the results, but not many humans jumped to the conclusion of vamps in autopsies. So, I did my best to clean up after myself as much as possible at each fight.

I walked away, the cellphone pressed to my ear, and headed back on the street to continue my checks.

The moment I hung up from the police, my phone suddenly buzzed in my hand, and I checked to find it was Lian. She checked in with me every day, to ask about my progress and make sure I wasn’t going totally insane. “How are you?” she asked, barely veiling the concern in her voice. “Find anything useful?”

Inevitably, I sighed and shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. “Not yet. All I know is, they’re a different breed up here. There’s got to be something in the water.”

“It wasn’t always like this.” Lian said that a lot, and always with the same combination of morbid wonder and disbelief. “I mean it. It had gotten worse recently.”

“Even more reason then, I should get back to work. Got a couple more places to visit.” It wasn’t a lie. She still understood my meaning perfectly.

“Right. Let me know if you need anything. I’ll call if I don’t hear from you.”

“Thanks, Li. Love you.”

“Love you too, girl. Be careful out there.”

I slipped my phone into my pocket and thought about how badly I could use a long, hot shower, and a drink. For some reason, I hadn’t expected my return to Anchorage to be so fraught with complicated emotions. I saw now how naïve I was being.

The last of the crime scenes I visited provided a welcome distraction. I had followed them in chronological order from least to most recent, which meant the intersection leading away from the Golden Klondike gentlemen’s club practically reeked of vampire-scented brutality. A few cars cruised through as I walked along the tree line off the side of the road. As soon as I was within range, I closed my eyes and began the reconstruction.

When I opened them again, the images I saw gripped my heart in an iron fist. There was no blood to speak of, but the ghostly afterimage of the body splayed in the middle of the road was so grotesquely clear compared to most of the others. The head, twisted around on a clearly broken neck, stared blankly toward me. All of a sudden, the breath caught in my throat.

“A vampire?” That was new. The previous victims had mostly been bear shifters, just as Lian had said, but there was no mistaking the sickly pallor or the metallic irises of the corpse, clouded in death as they were. He looked a lot more like the vamps I was used to—that is to say, like he’d crawled out from under a rock.

And straight into the true embrace of death.

Another car zipped along the road, passing straight through my vision. I crouched down in the snow to get a better look across the pavement, waiting for