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

was what I’d been trained for, right? I’d find out soon if I’d passed the class.

Hopefully, my mother was still safely ensconced beneath the soggy mattress and now free to begin her own escape with Gunhilde. They could follow me through the sewers without pursuit instead of having to head back through the flames. She would be free. And if I couldn’t get free of the tunnels, at least my mother finally could. And the team — they’d be fine. They never really wanted me anyway. They’d even have a functioning banshee should they decide they liked the idea.

“Nowhere for you to go, youngling,” the baldie taunted from behind, the voice bouncing menacingly through the tunnel. Other jeers joined the first, telling me that there were now several creatures in pursuit. I didn’t think they knew this system any better than I did, so when I came to a fork, I picked up on the echoes seeming to filter outward, away from me, like a T, and turned left and prayed.

When I didn’t knock myself into oblivion by running face-first into concrete, I assumed my assertion to be correct. The tunnel had split. I stopped just out of sight, reaching to pull the knives from both my boot and my bra. Palming the smaller dagger in my left hand, I prepared to use the large, serrated hunting knife on the first thing to turn that corner.

I only hoped I’d hit it.

When one of your senses is out of commission, rely on the others. Just as a team would adapt to one fewer, you can still make it without sight.

Not more than a breath later, baldie made his appearance. I aimed upward toward where I heard hissed breathing, praying my aim would be true. I felt my big-ass blade embed in his throat. Gurgling up his stolen blood, he fell to his knees when I jerked back the weapon just in time for the next pursuer to attack.

Using the downed vamp to my advantage, a physical block to the new attacker, I waited for her to stumble over his body. I heard her growl, felt the tips of her fingers on my skin, using those indicators to gauge her location. The thud and subsequent splash, mere feet from me, and the fact that her nails had hit me in a downward arc led me to believe she had at least tipped forward over her comrade.

I thrust my arm in an arc I hoped would push the smaller dagger through the back of her neck. Her strangled yelp told me I’d at least hit something. Yanking hard to the side, I tried to sever the spinal cord.

Two down.

I turned and fled farther down the new section, hoping I’d gained enough time to make it out. I didn’t know if I was lying to myself. I could still feel them behind me, gaining, enraged that two of their brethren had fallen.

“Please, gods, let this not be for nothing.”

Seke couldn’t run fast enough. With the vampires on the ground level escorted across the veil, there was just one place left for him. He’d wanted to head there first, but if they didn’t want the vampire’s souls resorbing, his priority had been handling the souls.

But with each trip across the veil, it was a few more minutes he was away from Aria.

For the umpteenth time, he shifted into his hawk the moment he cleared the threshold of the front door. This time, it was for speed. The humans gawked as he swooped past Torgny, careening for the shore. All the way, his heart hammered.

The insufferable banshees had insisted everything would be all right with this plan, that this way, everyone would live. He’d had to trust them, but there had been a hesitation on Aria’s behalf, and he feared there might still be consequences to their mode of attack. Even if they did all survive.

He was forced to shift back to human when he reached the pipe, the opening too small for his oversized bird. The change quenched the red glow that, for a split second, illuminated the tunnel, and he immediately regretted it. The sight he’d seen briefly in that scarlet glow vanished. There was too much noise to pinpoint exactly what was happening after that snapshot; heavy splashing, grunts, and pants met his ears from somewhere further into the black system laid out before him.

“Aria!” His shout preceded him, reverberating throughout the tunneled space as he sloshed toward the scuffle he heard ahead of him.

“Seke!” Aria’s melodic voice boomed toward him, and with his heart in his throat, the shadows responded without his thinking. They spiraled back just enough to allow a beam of light that enabled him to see a woman with long silver hair being dragged through the sewer, a pale hand over her mouth.

He cursed the deep water that slowed his movements as he struggled to reach where he’d just seen her.

When Seke didn’t overtake the pair of bodies before a fork, he presumed the vampire must have known he was there. He must have altered their direction, heaving his quarry… heaving Aria down a different pipe.

But which one?

His emotions were overcoming his logical thinking. He tried to compose himself and think like the leader he was.

The echoing sounds of water sloshing and dripping confused his senses, and his eyes darted around the new shadows blindly. A foreign sense of panic was blooming in his chest, right around his heart. It was as if it was swelling to burst with adrenaline the longer he went without seeing Aria. His lungs, on the other hand, couldn’t take in enough air, and he took quick, shallow breaths, wheezing to keep up with his heart’s galloping. His eyes began to fuzz.

Not good. You are no good like this. Snap out of it!

Getting a grip, Seke forced himself to take a slow, deep breath, then called the shadows to him. Pulling the darkness together into a ball, he siphoned them