“If you had killed me at once, you might have lived another few days,” Mencheres said coldly. Then he flexed his power in a short, controlled burst. A popping sound preceded six heads rolling away from the ghouls’ bodies in the next moment.
Footsteps approached the warehouse. Mencheres paused, glancing over at the woman. She’d regained consciousness, and she was staring at him, her pale gaze riveted with shock and horror.
She had seen his fangs. Watched him kill the ghouls. She knew too much for him to leave her here.
“Police,” a voice called out. “Anyone injured in here . . . ?”
Mencheres snatched up the woman and flew out of a broken window before the officers had a chance to gasp at the carnage they found inside.
Chapter 2
Kira knew she wasn’t dreaming, or hallucinating, or crazy. And that was the bad news. It meant everything she’d seen was real, which meant the man who’d kidnapped her couldn’t be human. As impossible as the notion was, it was the only logical explanation. Humans couldn’t recover from the butchery she’d seen when she’d gotten her first clear look at the man lashed to that pole. Humans didn’t have fangs or eyes that glowed fluorescent green. And humans couldn’t tear people’s heads off without even touching them.
Even if she wanted to rationalize that all of the above had been her hysterical misinterpretation of a traumatic event, humans sure as hell couldn’t fly. Yet her kidnapper had flown away from that warehouse, then performed several impossible roof-to-roof leaps while holding her as if she weighed nothing.
Kira had always been afraid of heights, so that fear, combined with dizziness, shock, blood loss, and vertigo, proved too much. At some point during the roof-jumping, she passed out. Now she found herself awake in a very normal-looking bedroom, still in her ripped, blood-spattered clothes, her stomach wound miraculously healed and her kidnapper sitting in a chair across from the bed.