Fatal Sight (Harbingers Of Death Book 2) by LeAnn Mason (book club reads .TXT) 📕

me, leading the rest of our procession to a back exit through the hallway where the bathrooms were situated. I took up the rear.

The moist, night air didn’t do much to shock Cole’s mind into sobriety, but I personally preferred it to the stifling heat and intense noise on the dance floor. A headache was brewing.

“I need you to think. Did you see Ember or Raven leave?” Seke asked as though he had a well of patience and had only scratched the surface. “Were either of them with anyone? Did anyone seem to be paying special attention to them, or to you?”

Having paced back toward the group, I spouted off when my eyes met with Cole’s dilated ones. “How could you leave your teammates alone to get your jollies?! I thought they were “your girls.” I used air quotes to punctuate my annoyance. “We’re on a mission, for fuck’s sake, and now Ember’s been taken, and Raven might have too, and we don’t know where!”

I had to turn away again and found myself facing a tall, pale woman — the woman Cole had been sucking face with.

Dang, was he so good she followed him? Hellhound’s got game.

Her hair was styled in golden waves that fell past her shoulders and all the right curves accentuated by her barely-there dress. But it was her eyes that caught all of our attention.

“Wasn’t getting my jollies,” Cole growled, and I realized he’d been faking his condition. He had been working on the mission. And we’d stormed in there and torn him away from a potential interrogation subject, revealing his intentions right to her face.

Whoops.

“Hello there,” she purred in a voice I was sure she thought was impossible to resist. Having experienced Jessica in full siren mode, this undead blood-slut was a piss-poor imitation.

Noticing that her introduction didn’t seem to have shaken us, she switched tactics, moving away from alluring and toward threatening as she made herself known with a hiss, her fangs exposed.

The small, smelly alley was quiet in the wake of her display. The sounds of the main street and the club seemed so far away as to resemble a distant party, easily ignored. My group stood at the ready, bodies tall and loose, ready to fight, except…

A snigger, which resembled more of a snort, left my body. I brought a hand to my mouth in an attempt to stifle it, but I felt another rising up my chest. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Go on. Please. Oh, and do the hiss again. That was classic.”

I rolled my lips inward, clamping them tight to keep more of, well, anything from escaping. But the effort was enormous, and my own display traveled up my face, first reaching my nostrils and making them flare. My eyes were wide and watering as the mirth fought its containment.

Another awkward moment ensued, and then each of my team pitched forward, their own laughter breaking free of the constraints they’d placed upon it.

I noticed that the vampire woman was affronted... and that none of my teammates took their eyes from the woman.

Never cow to a threat.

Never be predictable.

We’d accomplished both lessons at once without meaning to, at least on my part. Ever vigilant, we used this unease to knock the hissing seductress of the night off her game and prepare for the next move.

She thought we’d be intimidated? Time to show her how the HDPU handles business.

With the synchronicity of a well-oiled machine, we moved into action.

A distressed gasp left the woman’s puffy, red-tinted lips, and her jaw dropped in surprise as her hands rose. Cole must have taken her sight from her. She was operating on one less sense, and we needed to capitalize.

The hellhound’s shift was too fast to be seen. He’d stopped swaying the moment the woman had revealed her nature, no traces of inebriation lingering in his features, stance, or words. He was now a giant black mass with glowing red eyes as he streaked toward the woman.

Unfortunately, the vamp planted her weight in preparation for an attack. She was not, however, expecting the teeth that accompanied the linebacker-worthy hit she took, and her screams rent the air, punctuated by Cole’s ferocious growls. Maybe she could feel more than the dude I’d run into at the druid’s house, or maybe it was still reflex, but she certainly seemed to feel the teeth renting her dead flesh.

Seke called the abundance of shadows toward where our target lay on her back, fighting to release the hellhound’s vise grip on the arm she’d brought up to protect her pretty face.

Work together. You are always more effective as a team.

That was a Seke lesson, not one my dad taught, and I spun, realizing that the woman wouldn’t work alone either. I dropped to a crouch just as another vampire joined the fray, jumping from the roof of a nearby building.

He landed across Seke’s shoulders. The god grunted, sending the shadows scattering. The impact had caused him to lose his hold on the darkness, but it didn’t drive him off his feet. He threw his elbow backward into the assailant’s ribs with little effect.

Teamwork, Aria! Don’t just watch the gorgeous man fight. Move!

I lunged in a sort of flying arrow in order to get the height and momentum I needed. In a swift move, I’d snuck the dagger from my boot and extended my knife-arm. With clarity and calm, I watched as my blade sunk hilt-deep into the man’s eye, pushing him bodily away from Seke.

Vamp number two slammed into the club’s brick exterior where my weight and the extremity of his new injury sank him to the ground, screaming. Maybe they did feel, just more muted than a living body?

“Not bad,” I commented of his scream.

A yelp drew my attention back to Cole’s fight in time to see the scrappy female vamp punch him in the side of his dark canine face, eliciting another yip and allowing her the movement to wrench her forearm from between his massive jaws.

But Gunhilde