THE SUDDEN OVERWHELMING pressure on my neck came before I could even attempt to run, not that running would have done any good. Mencheres didn’t need me to stand still to rip my head off.
But just as quickly as that awful squeezing started, it stopped. A red dot appeared on Mencheres’s forehead, darker gore spattering the doorway behind him. He dropped to his knees, the strangest look on his face as he slowly pitched forward.
“Nice shot, Ian,” I muttered, and then ran toward the door. The single silver bullet wouldn’t kill Mencheres, but silver took much longer to heal, buying us precious time until his brains unscrambled and he regained consciousness.
And once that happened, if we were still here, we’d be toast.
Someone crashed into me right as I cleared the threshold. It happened so fast I didn’t see who it was, but the softer flesh made my attacker either Annette or Kira. Her momentum propelled us into the nearest wall and pain thudded through me from blows I made no move to defend against. Blond hair caught my eye as my attacker bent to rip her fangs through my shoulder, missing my neck because I twisted away at the last second.
Kira, then. She wasn’t armed, though, so while this hurt, it wouldn’t kill me. I let her tear into my skin and pummel me while I reached around to grab the Glock from the back of my jeans. Then I whipped the gun up and shot her through the head.
Her instant flaccidity was replaced with a larger, harder form barreling into us next. Kira’s bloody head pressed against my face, blinding me from seeing my latest assailant. But brutal punches that snapped my ribs and reverberated through my body in fiery waves told me who this was. Only one person hit that hard.
Bones.
“Now!” I screamed, wedging Kira’s limp form out from between us.
Glass shattered in rapid succession as Ian shot the percussion grenades through the downstairs windows. The subsequent explosions felt like bombs going off in my brain, but I’d packed enough wax into my ears to take the edge off the worst of the effects. The other vampires, with their supersensitive hearing, weren’t as lucky. Bones stopped pureeing my insides to clutch his head, blood leaking out from his ears. Behind his bent form, I saw Spade, Annette, and Wraith doing the same thing. Denise wasn’t down here. Fabian had snuck into her room last night to warn her to stay away from the main floor once the action started.
I used that second of distraction to plug a bullet into Wraith’s head next, watching with extreme satisfaction as crimson exploded onto his long, blond locks. If only I could finish the job with the bone knife, but I needed the spell reversed, so Wraith had to stay alive.
Bones lifted his head. Blood still stained his ears, but he’d recovered from the debilitating effect of the percussion grenades. Green sizzled from his gaze, and his mouth opened in a snarl as he launched himself at me. Over his shoulder, I saw that Spade and Annette were also shaking off the effects and coming at me with murderous expressions.
I raised the gun, but before I could pull the trigger, the Glock was wrenched from my hand with a snap of power that broke my wrist. Goddamn it, Bones was using his fledgling telekinesis against me! I could only hope he didn’t have enough of it to take off my head, or shooting Mencheres would have been a waste of time. That concern cleared out of my mind when Bones vaulted upward the instant before he was about to crash into me. I’d braced for the impact of his tall, muscled frame flattening me against the wall, but instead got a kick to the face that snapped my neck and filled my vision with red.
Agony flared from every facial nerve ending, combined with sickening crunching noises that confirmed my bones had shattered as thoroughly as the glass from the front windows. I resisted the instinctive urge to protect myself from further injury, knowing Bones would move in for the kill. Instead, I flung myself forward, smacking my face against a rock-hard chest. The contact shot more fireworks of pain into my skull, but tucked me under the deadly arm that had been arcing toward my neck.
My vision might be bloody and my face in ruins, but my legs worked fine, and Bones had made an unusual mistake by widening his stance when he tried to wrest my head off. I took advantage of that and slammed my knee upward, using all my supernatural strength to make merciless contact with his groin. That brought him to his knees, but before I could pull out my other gun, something hard slammed into my still-healing face.