Total pages in book: 182
Estimated words: 165649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 828(@200wpm)___ 663(@250wpm)___ 552(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 165649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 828(@200wpm)___ 663(@250wpm)___ 552(@300wpm)
Ferro, the bait to draw out the entire pack, dissolved into mist and went down, not up, going low between the legs of the master vampire and coming up behind him. Sandu, Petru, Fane, Aleksi and Dragomir surrounded the master vampire and his pack. The last three ancients, all brethren from the monastery, had arrived to join in the hunt against the master vampires.
Ferro slammed his fist straight through Ambrus’s back. Ferro was a big man and enormously strong. The blow shattered bones and drove through muscle, half turning the vampire toward him. Ambrus tried to reach him with his arms, curling back toward his opponent while all around him his servants fought for their lives against battle-experienced Carpathian hunters.
These were not men concerned with ego or whether or not anyone noticed how many individual kills they made, or even if they fought the most difficult of the vampires. They simply sought to remove the vampire from the world. That was the sole purpose of the Carpathian hunters.
Plants erupted beneath Ferro’s feet, long, hungry, eel-like tubes with teeth, latching on to his legs, attempting to drag him beneath the ground, wrenching at his body so hard the creatures yanked him away from Ambrus, allowing the master vampire to stagger free. Black acid coated Ferro’s arm and hand, eating at his flesh, while the hungry creatures sawed at his legs, continually trying to pull him back toward their wormhole.
Ferro reached toward the sky with his uninjured hand and lightning responded, slamming into the creatures’ bodies right where they emerged from the hole, slicing them cleanly in two. At the same time, he bathed his injured arm in the spray of white-hot energy, cleaning the acid from it, removing the vampire’s blood to prevent it from eating its way to the bone.
As the creatures dropped away from his legs, Ferro snapped the lightning whip at Ambrus’s head, dropping loops of sizzling-hot energy around his neck, leashing him to prevent him from shifting and getting away. With a snarl, Ambrus turned back to face him, the coils of lightning slipping around his entire body, spinning, holding him in place, exposing him as he truly was, not as he preferred to appear.
Rotted flesh hung off skeleton bones. What seemed a fit body was no more than an illusion perfected over centuries. Ambrus might not appear to be as vain as any other vampire, but clearly he wanted to appear to the others as a mountain of a man with a muscular, battle-scarred body. That was worth noting—that Ambrus had included scarring when forging an appearance. He hadn’t made himself as the Astors had, flawless and handsome.
Instead of the long hair of the traditional Carpathian warrior that Ambrus favored, his skull had great scaly patches of some gooey substance that oozed from inside his brain to dribble in a steady stream down his head and trickle out of holes where his ears should be. His eyes were sockets of flaming red. He had no nose, only twin sunken holes, and his mouth was filled with jagged, pointed teeth so stained with blood they appeared black.
Elisabeta, in all the centuries Ambrus has appeared to the Malinovs, has he always appeared as you have seen him? With this image? He showed her the copy of a very fit Ambrus, trying to spare her the true rotted soul of the vampire.
Within the coils of the lightning whip, Ambrus began to sway back and forth, murmuring to himself, his long, bony fingers tapping a rhythm on his thin, emaciated leg.
Always.
As the coils dropped from Ambrus, Ferro flicked his hands casually toward the vampire, surrounding him with mirrors, above him, below and completely circling him. There was nowhere the vampire looked that he didn’t see himself reflected back in his true, hideous state. He stretched his thin lips in a wide protest, screaming in horror, throwing up his arms to cover his eyes while maggots and a wealth of parasites tumbled from his mouth and throat to spew against the reflective glass.
Ferro slammed his fist deep into the chest wall, breaking through the brittle bones without the armor of Ambrus’s woven muscle and dense bone he most likely threaded with other things to make it much more difficult for a Carpathian hunter to get to his heart. His fingers sought the withered organ, but it wasn’t where it should have been.
He has moved it lower, to the base of his spine.
Ferro didn’t hesitate. He withdrew his fist and slammed into him a second time, searching for the heart, fighting to get to it. Ambrus was already recovering from the momentary shock of seeing his true image after centuries of convincing himself of what he looked like. The master vampire leaned forward and bit down viciously into Ferro’s shoulder, tearing great chunks of his flesh from his body, and gulped at them, gulped at the rich, ancient blood that would give him a burst of strength.