This time, she was unable to hold back a cry of pain as agony burst through her body. The man had telekinesis, she realized as she grasped at the rebar and tried to lift herself off of it. Pinned like this, she wouldn’t be able to fight against the two Hunters stalking her. Blackness swarmed before her eyes as unconsciousness threatened to drag her under. If she passed out now, they’d kill her.
Muscle and skin gripped at the foreign object piercing her. Her hands slipped in the blood coating the broken metal, and she fell back down it. Despite the heat of the fire blazing against her back, an icy sheen of sweat coated her. Through the thick smoke, the battered man steadily approached her, but this time he had a crossbow in hand.
“We saw what you did to the others outside,” he said, his voice raspy from smoke. “They want me to capture you, but I think that’s a very bad idea.”
“You won’t make it out of here alive,” Quinn choked out.
The man smiled maliciously as he lifted the crossbow and aimed it at her heart. “Maybe not, but neither will you.”
A roar rent the air. It reverberated off the walls and caused the rebar to vibrate within her flesh. Something charged out of the thick smoke, materializing from another side tunnel she hadn’t seen before.
She got only a glimpse of Julian, bloody with his pants hanging in tatters around him, before he crashed into the man. The impact caused a bone to snap in the man’s body with a loud crack and the crossbow to fly out of his grasp. The weapon skittered away, coming up against the woman’s feet. She lurched toward it and snatched it from the ground before swinging it toward Quinn.
They were no longer touching, but Quinn could still feel her tendrils of power interwoven within the woman. Quinn clamped down on the woman’s life force as she fired the bolt.
CHAPTER 26
Julian lifted the man up and drove him onto the pile of debris. The release of the crossbow broke through the buzzing and fire roaring around him. His head snapped up. The woman stood unmoving before him, her legs shaking before she sank onto her knees. Her head bowed, her shoulders heaving as she gasped for air.
Quinn jerked to the side in time to take the bolt from the crossbow to her shoulder. She rolled and yanked at the rebar until the metal gave way. Reaching up, Quinn yanked the bolt from her shoulder, but the rebar remained embedded in her side as she rose. She braced her legs apart and grasped the end of the rebar. Sweat coated her forehead and slid down her cheeks as she gradually pulled the piece of metal from her. Blood coated the side of her shirt as the rebar clattered onto the concrete beneath her.
Her red eyes flickered to their beautiful honeyed color when they met his. A smile curved her full mouth. She took a step toward him just as he felt a flash of power beneath him. Julian’s hand tightened on the man when an invisible hand seemed to hit Quinn in the chest and shot her backward.
“No!” Julian roared when she was flung into the fire.
She’d been right there! Quinn! Right there!
His thoughts tumbled riotously over top of each other as sorrow tore at his heart. He kept expecting her to rise from the flames, to rush back out of them, but at fifty feet away, he could feel the blistering heat of the inferno against his skin. No matter how badly he wanted to deny it, he knew one truth: vampires didn’t survive fire.
The inferno surged further upward as her body fueled it. The flames rolled over each other to cover the place where Quinn had vanished into them. Fury and anguish tore through him, shaking his muscles and shredding his heart as a hollow pit of despair opened within him. His fingers dug into the man beneath him, tearing into his flesh.
The man howled and placed his hands against Julian’s chest, shoving with his mind and body in an attempt to dislodge Julian from him. Julian’s grip on the man’s flesh made it so he wasn’t thrown off him, but realization pierced through the rage turning everything before him a blood-red hue. This man had shoved Quinn into the fire with his ability; he’d been the one to push her in there.
Dead. Quinn is dead.
Julian didn’t look at the man again as he gripped the top of his head and his chin. The man’s neck cracked loudly when Julian yanked it to the side and tore it from his body. The man’s body fell limply beneath him as Julian rose to stare at the place where Quinn had vanished into the fire. The head fell from his limp fingers.
Dead.
It was all he could think as he ran toward the flames. The fire blasted against him, blistering his skin. He tried to grab the flames as if he could open them like curtains in order to reveal her. They closed over his arms, searing his flesh to the muscle, and blocking anything he may have been able to see beyond.
He’d plunge into the fire after her and pull her body free; maybe he could somehow figure out a way to funnel his life into her. He just had to find her first.