Bound by Night(20)

Hunter’s obsidian eyes narrowed to slits. “You fed from her? You can track her?”
Nicole’s heady wine flavor lingered on his tongue, but a large amount of ingested blood was needed to track the donor. “I didn’t feed, but I tasted enough to get a general feel for her.”
The leather thong around Hunter’s temples held his midnight hair out of his eyes, emphasizing his Cherokee ancestry as he inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Good hunting.”
Riker took off, his adrenaline surging hotly through his veins. He loved a good chase and takedown, and this one was going to be especially gratifying.
He smelled her before he saw her, two miles from clan headquarters. Her pear-and-ginger scent made his mouth water . . . until he caught more scents. Human.
Male. At least ten. And from the unwashed stench of them, they were poachers, the worst kind of vampire killing scum.
He went balls to the wall in a massive burst of speed, leaping fallen logs and cornering hard by pushing off trees. Nicole was ahead, making enough noise to alert a deaf man to her presence.
A flash of strawberry-blond hair between a pair of firs put Riker at thirty yards from his prey. But the stink of a couple of poachers came from maybe a hundred.
They were close. Too close.
He sprinted the final distance, catching Nicole as she tried to navigate a gully lined by thick ferns and gnarled berry bushes.
“Riker.” She gasped, as he swept her up and over the gully, taking them both to the forest floor on theother side.
“Disappointed to see me alive?” He rolled with her, pushing her beneath him as a bullet sailed over their heads. “You might get your wish soon enough.”
“What the—”
“Poachers.” A spark of hope lit her pretty wide greens, but he was about to dash it. “Chill, Sunshine. They’ll only chop me up for body parts. If I’m lucky, I’ll be dead when they start. But you? It’ll be a while before they put you down.”
“But I’m human.” Her dry swallow made the wound he’d sealed on her throat writhe. “I’ll tell them who I am. That they’ll get a reward if they return me safely.”
“You can try that tactic.” He yanked her to her feet and dragged her behind a massive tree. “But more likely, they’ll say they found you dead and ransom your body. What they’re doing is illegal, and they won’t want you alive to tell anyone what they did to you or what they were out here for.”
“I don’t believe you,” she ground out.
Two shots rang out at the same moment that three men in camouflage burst from the brush. Nicole, the slippery minx, took advantage and wrenched away from him to dart toward them.
“Nicole, no!”
Riker ducked the swing of a machete, only to be nearly laid out by a baseball bat from behind. The blow smashed into his lower back, knocking him off balance.
Gnashing his teeth against the pain, he palmed two daggers and struck out at the nearest poacher with a devastating one-two slice that took both sides of the man’s neck down to the spine. As the human’s spasming body hit the ground, Riker dodged more gunfire in an effort to catch Nicole, who had tripped and was scrambling to her feet.#p#分页标题#e#
“Help me!” Nicole reached for a burly, black— bearded dude who held an ax like a lumberjack.
Lumberjack’s smile was psychotic, as if he’d just struck gold and was going to take out everyone who knew about it. He put out his hand . . . and slammed his fist into Nicole’s face.
Riker snarled, his anger sparking to insanely dangerous levels. With a roar, he dived into Lumberjack, not caring that several other assholes were closing in.
His focus had narrowed to a needle-thin pinpoint that would only end in the ax-wielding poacher’s bloody death.
The man grunted as he hit the ground with Riker on top of him. Riker plowed his fist into the human’s throat, but as he reared up to deliver the death blow, pain lanced Riker’s chest, nearly as intense as what he’d experienced back at the den. Exhaling on a curse, he looked down at the hilt of a throwing knife vibrating between his ribs.
Riker spared the thrower a glance, judged him to be a lesser threat than the poacher beneath him, and prepared to finish him off. In a single powerful motion, Riker drilled his fist through Lumberjack’s breastbone and ripped his beating heart from his chest.
“Riker!”
Nicole’s breathless shout for help came from a distance. Riker burst to his feet, barely avoiding a crossbow bolt aimed at his head and another chop of a machete.
“Enough with the fucking machete!” Twisting, he ripped the blade from his attacker’s hands and spun, turning the machete into a blender that sliced into two men. Both fell. One wasn’t going to get up. The other would be lucky if he ever ate solid food again.