Motherfucker! The spiked tail darted out of the smoke and struck my chest, stabbing me hard just as it sent me flying several feet away. My head hit the ground with a crack that reverberated around my skull, and I almost blacked out.

Ears ringing, I blinked to clear the stars from my vision. I was gonna kill that bastard when I could see it. God, my chest hurt. I grit my teeth against the streaks of burning pain as, for the third freaking time, I awkwardly got to my feet. I needed to get to Butch, needed to ignore the pain and just hope I didn’t heal too slowly or—

A strong arm looped around me and began dragging me backwards. I would have struggled like crazy, except the unexpected scent made me freeze in surprise. “Marco, what the fuck are you doing here?” He kept dragging me away. I twisted in his grip. “Let me go!”

“No, we need to get you out of here!” he growled into my ear.

“Let go of me, you bastard! I need to—”

Everyone brace yourfuckingselves!

Before I could wonder at the panic in Jared’s warning, I felt the buzz of Sam’s energy leave the air. Her shield winked out. Oh, shit.

As the smoke began to clear, I watched as three dragons shot high into the air. Or, at least, they tried. One screeched as it was hit by a telekinetic blast that sent it crashing somewhere. The second shook as sparks of high-voltage electricity assailed every inch of its huge body. The third halted as a silvery-blue energy whip lashed out of the smoke and wrapped tight around its throat, yanking it back down.

They weren’t the only ones that tried to flee. They might have succeeded, but the problem for them was that since Sam no longer had to concentrate on keeping her shield in place, she could use her gift in other ways—ways that were causing the dragons to hit the ground.

“Hurry before he comes for her!” Marco shouted to a vampire on his right. That was when I saw a large, swirling portal. I’d be damned if I let Marco take me anywhere.

I kicked and punched at him, but all the struggling in the world didn’t make him release me. “Put me down, you fucking bastard!” I thrust my psychic hand into his mind, but it was tired and half-numb; flicking his blood-bond to his Sire did nothing more than make him wince.

“Imani, enough! We’re leaving now!”

“I’m not going anywhere!” I was about to telepathically call out to Jared when Marco sharply turned me in his arms, making my head spin. I’d sustained too many head injuries tonight.

“I’m not here to hurt you. I told him to keep you safe, and he didn’t!”

I realised he was talking about Butch. “He’s hurt, I need to—”

“What we need is to get you to safety!” Ignoring my struggles, Marco carried me toward the portal—a portal that abruptly closed as the vampire controlling it hit the ground with a thud.

“Let. Her. Go.”

Stilling in surprise at the familiar male voice, I looked over Marco’s shoulder. It wasn’t so hard to see now that the rain was putting out the fire and Sam had taken down her shield, allowing a lot of the smoke to clear. And there was Lazarus with a small group gathered behind him. I blinked. “What are you doing here?”

“We teleported to you so we could partake in the battle,” he replied. “My vampires are joining it as we speak. Marco, release her.”

Marco’s arms slowly slipped from around me and he turned to face Lazarus. No, he positioned himself between me and Lazarus. Like a protective barrier. Marco’s vampires flanked me, glaring at those that stood with Lazarus.

The Master Vampire held out his hand, a sense of urgency in his manner. “Now come along, Imani. You should not be part of this. Not when you are half-human.”

I would have pointed out that I actually wasn’t half-human, but this whole scenario felt distinctly wrong. “Marco, what’s going on?”

He didn’t take his eyes from Lazarus as he responded. “I told you, Imani. Good people do bad things sometimes.”

Realisation quickly dawned. And it hurt almost as bad as the burning pain in my chest. “Lazarus is one of the people you suspect injected me with the serum?”

“No, sweetheart, it wasn’t Lazarus. But he ordered it done.”

No way. “I don’t have time for games, Marco.” Butch was lying somewhere, wounded. Jared, find Butch and Paige. I think he’s hurt bad but I can’t get to him—I’m watching Marco and Lazarus have some kind of standoff.

“I knew it had to be one of two people,” Marco went on. “Him or Eleanor.”

I frowned. “Eleanor?” And then I saw her, standing slightly behind Lazarus. There was a seriousness in her expression that took me by surprise. She was usually always so animated and jolly.

“They both want the same thing so badly that they’ll do absolutely anything to get it. It was Eleanor’s mate who told me the truth…though he took some persuading.”

Eleanor gasped, eyes widening in horror.

I might have told Marco to just shut the fuck up because I wasn’t in the mood for games, but something occurred to me as I looked at Lazarus, whose expression was carefully blank. “You should be denying this. He’s accusing you of trying to kill me.” Yet, Lazarus hadn’t said a word.

“Lazarus didn’t want to kill you,” Marco said. “Oh, he’d known you could die, which is exactly why he’s going to suffer for what he did to you. But he didn’t want you dead.”

Confused, I shook my head. I didn’t get what was happening. I didn’t get why the air pulsed with some kind of strange energy, or why I thought I could hear bullets being fired. I thought I could but wasn’t sure, because distant sounds seemed weirdly muted, distorted, and crackly.

Marco cocked his head at Lazarus. “You theorised that a vampire was more likely to get through the transition if they could feed on powerful vampires during that time, didn’t you? You knew that if Imani was injected, she’d be taken straight to The Hollow where the Grand High Pair and other powerful vampires would give her blood.”

Lazarus hissed. “You’re suggesting I was using Imani as a guinea pig?” The outrage in his voice sounded very genuine…but the emotion was absent from his eyes.

“It worked, didn’t it? She got through it because she had access to very potent blood. Congratulations. You were right. But I won’t let you take her.”