He forgot all about taking out the other hunters as red clouded his vision. He’dkillMateo for hitting her.
Mateo was dragging Elena forward when Logan leapt into the air and landed on Mateo’s back. The crack of a gunshot echoed through the air as a bullet whizzed past his ear. The window in Elena’s room shattered, and glass rained down across the wooden walkway.
The other hunters were shooting at him, but that didn’t deter him as he fisted his hands and hammered them into Mateo’s back. Mateo fell to his knees, and Elena cried out as he jerked her hair forward.
Seizing Mateo’s hand, he squeezed until bones shattered and his limp fingers released their hold on Elena. As soon as she was free, Logan delivered blow after blow to the side of Mateo’s head. The hunter barely had time to get his arms up to protect himself against Logan’s ferocious beating.
The scent of Mateo’s blood on the air only escalated the demon’s bloodlust. Logan didn’t feel the bullet that pierced his shoulder, but he felt the hands scrambling over him, and his head shot up.
Elena released Logan’s arm and staggered back when his white-blue eyes met hers and his lips skimmed back to reveal his elongated fangs. Vampires had always been a thing of hate for her and something to dread, but she’d never seen one with their fangs fully extended and looking as if they were going to tear out her throat.
“Logan,” she whispered as she held up her hands to ward off his attack.
She’d defend herself, but after what he did to Mateo, she didn’t have much of a chance.
Another bullet striking him in his upper arm caused him to lurch forward a little. His head swiveled toward his attackers. Elena couldn’t deny she felt more than a little relieved when he decided to go after them instead of her.
She bit back a sound of dismay when Logan ran in a zigzagging pattern back toward the other hunters. Only three of them remained standing, and they were all focused on him as they repeatedly fired, but none of them hit him again.
Asher took down another hunter with a Taser. At the same time, Logan clotheslined the closest hunter before hitting the next with an upper cut so hard he lifted off his feet and flew into a car. Metal screeched as it twisted and dented from the impact. For a few seconds, he remained hanging against it before slipping to the ground, unconscious.
Elena stood there, with her hand still flattened against her stinging cheek as she gazed at the carnage in disbelief. She’d never dreamed this is what would come of everything when she received her mother’s call about her father’s death.
She’d never dreamed she would find herself standing on the side of a hunter who was not a part of her compound and avampire. The stench of blood, fear, and gunpowder burned her nostrils as self-loathing boiled inside her.
It didn’t matter that Mateo and these hunters had most likely helped plot her father’s murder. Two wrongs didn’t make a right, and her father never would have approved of all this death. And maybe they weren’t all dead, but some of them had to be.
She didn’t move as Asher and Logan walked through the bodies, examining each of the fallen. The breeze drifting across the land caught her hair and blew it away from her face. The freshness of that breeze did nothing to dispel the stench surrounding her.
And then, Mateo moaned. Elena almost screamed as she took an abrupt step back. She’d been certain he was dead. She had no idea how anyone could have survived the beating Logan unleashed on him, but his fingers twitched on the pavement, and his head started to lift.
Though she’d been horrified by everything she witnessed, it took everything she had not to kick him in the head. He’d killed, or least helped to murder, her father, and haddaredto put his hands on her. She’d love to unleash some violence on him too, but she was afraid a blow to the head might kill him.
Instead, she retrieved her gun and kept it aimed at his back. If he came after her, she wouldn’t make the mistake of not shooting him again. She’d try not to kill him, but she wasn’t going to let him touch her.
When Logan finished making sure the hunters were all still alive, he opened one of the car doors and poked his head inside. No one else was in the vehicle. He hit the switch for the trunk and closed the door as the lid popped open. He ignored the lingering discomfort from his fresh wounds as the bullets worked their way out.
Asher kept the gun trained on the hunters while Logan examined the contents of the trunk. Inside, he found guns, stakes, and half a dozen zip-tie handcuffs.
He pulled the zip ties out of the trunk and secured the hunters before they could wake. He ran out of restraints before he could bind them all, but only Mateo and the one whose head he’d smashed off the pavement remained free.
He went to the second car and peered inside. Elena’s mother wasn’t in it either, but then, he hadn’t expected her to be. This whole thing had been nothing but a trap, one that backfired badly on them.
Logan opened the car's trunk and removed a couple more restraints before returning to the hunter with a dent in his skull. The man was still alive, but whether he would recover or not was an entirely different matter.
Logan felt no remorse over that. These men had come here to take Elena and destroy him and Asher. He couldn’t pity someone who would have shown no mercy for them.
Elena stared at all of the bound hunters lying face down on the ground as Logan approached her. “They’re all alive?” she whispered.
“For now,” Logan said as he knelt beside Mateo. “I’m not sure if one of them is going to make it.”
Elena watched as he grasped Mateo’s wrists and yanked them behind his back. A muscle in Logan’s clenched jaw ticked as his eyes burned that white-blue color again.
“I told you we’d try to keep them alive,” he said.
“I know, but there’s so much blood, and they weren’t moving, and—” She looked to Mateo. “—it was so brutal.”
“Life is.”
