“I was out for a walk when I heard the commotion. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t understand most of what they said. He’s not moving, but he was breathing.”
“Let’s go find out what happened,” Elena said and ran up the steps of the building as they carried the hunter inside. The door was starting to swing shut when Elena caught it.
When she stepped inside, a couple of hunters glanced up at her, but no one spoke as they carried the motionless man over to the nearest cot. When they laid him down and stepped away, Elena saw it was Manuel. She’d known him for her whole life; he had a wife and young son. It had taken him and his wife years to conceive their child.
With a burst of motion, he came alive. Thrashing and kicking, he snarled so viciously she took an abrupt step away. Logan rested his hand on the small of her back while he casually moved to stand before her.
The hunters worked to pin Manuel down, but he possessed inhuman strength as he jerked, swung, and spat like a cougar in a cage. He yanked his hand free and punched one of the hunters in the cheek.
The man’shands flew to his face as his cheekbone gave way, and he stumbled back. Elena looked away from the grotesqueness of his eye bulging out as Logan seized her arms and nudged her toward the door.
“Get out of here,” he commanded.
“No, I can help,” she said.
“If they can’t control him, there isn’t anything you can do.”
“You don’t know what they’re saying.”
Logan couldn’t argue with that, but he didn’t want her anywhere near this. Whatever this was.
He’d never seen anything like what was going on with this hunter. The strength this man exhibited was phenomenal. A hunter shouldn’t be able to resist being pinned down by four others. They could put up a good fight but not break free like this.
And then, Logan spotted the black seeping through the man’s face and spreading into his fingers. It highlighted each of his veins as it spread further through his body.
Before the hunters could react, Logan leapt forward and pinned the man’s shoulders down. It was then he caught the faint aroma of rot wafting from the man.What the fuck?
How was that possible? Savages smelled like that, not hunters who weren’t even vampires before they went out hunting for the night. This man hadn’t had enough time to become a vampire, never mind a Savage, so why did he smell like that?
It was impossible, but clearly, it wasn’t as Logan was staring at the impossibility now, but he wasn’t a vampire either. He was something else, but Logan hadnoidea what that something else was.
The hunter’s fingers hooked into claws as they dug into Logan’s arms. He half expected the man to peel his flesh away like the top of a tin can, but the fingers only bit deep. Jerking his hands to the side, Logan released the man’s shoulders to knock his death grip free.
“Get me something to restrain him!” he ordered, and one of the hunters ran out the door.
The monstrous hunter struggled to sit up. Before he was halfway there, Logan punched him in the face, knocking him back. The man’s head lulled to the side, and his tongue protruded, but he wasn’t done. Rolling toward him, the man lashed out. Logan dodged his punch by sucking in his gut and jumping back a little.
Then he hit the hunter again, and this time he went out.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“What is going on?”Logan muttered as he bent to inspect the hunter.
Every vein on Manuel’s face was black, and when Logan rolled his sleeves up, he saw the veins in his arms had also turned black. Some kind of sludge seemed to fill them, or maybe his blood had turned black, but how or why?
One of the other hunters spoke, but Logan didn’t understand what he said. He turned to Elena, who was staring at the man on the cot in disbelief. When the hunter stopped speaking, she turned to Logan.
“He said they injected Manuel with something,” Elena said.
“Whoinjected him with something?” Logan asked.
“The Savages,” the hunter replied. “We got into a fight with them outside of a bar, and one of them had a syringe. They injected him with it.”
“Where?” Logan asked.
The hunter walked over and turned Manuel’s neck to reveal the red welt on his jugular. Logan prodded at the perfect hole in the center of the injection site. Black was clustered all around the hole and welt.
