Page 6 of Slayer

“Down!” he barked again.

I hit the floor, rolling onto my back. My palms slapped the sticky club floor, smeared with spilled drinks and glitter. He leapt over me just as I lifted my head and peered up to see him collide with the man with the bloody teeth who’d been chasing me. One second, the bloodstained teeth guy was doing his cat hissing thing, and the next, his head was on the floor, severed from his body.

What. The. Hell?

Bile rose in my throat as I pinched my eyes shut. The music crashed in my ears, muffled by adrenaline.

I’m hallucinating.

I had to have been drugged, and now I was stuck in a bad trip or something. Maybe it was the Top Ramen…

The sounds of chaos around me forced me to open my eyes as I sucked in a breath at the sight of absolute carnage. The people in the black SWAT team suits were beheading people left and right or stabbing them right in the chest. Bodies hit the floor with soft thuds as the music mercifully skidded to a stop.

This wasn’t a bad trip; it was a nightmare.

Oh hell no. I had to get out of here.

I stood on shaky legs, and the hot dude with the samurai sword called out to me.

“Wait!” he screamed.

Nope. Nope. Nope. I’d seen plenty of horror movies, and I was not that girl. I was smart. When multiple people started getting killed, I didn’t wait to learn my fate. I ran. I was getting the hell out of here.

I scurried across the space and leapt through the open window that he’d broken to get in here. I hit the ground hard, the impact rattling my bones. A jolt of pressure shot up my calves, and then I ran, my legs pumping faster than ever before.

“Stop!” the hot guy called after me as I turned to see that he was chasing me, bloody sword in his grasp. The sight of it made something primal in me spike with terror.

I ran like a wild animal, with no thought or purpose, weaving through the alleyways in a blind panic. There were a few people out and about, and I screamed for help, which caused them to stop and turn my way.

But then he was on me.

Hottie head decapitator.

He gripped my upper arm, gently pulling me to a stop. His fingers were warm, almost too warm, searing through the thin fabric of my shirt as my boots scraped on the gritty pavement. Laughing nervously, he waved at the people who had turned my way. “She smoked a bit too much.” He pinched his thumb and pointer finger together and put them to his lips, and the people laughed, heading back inside the bar next door, the door thudding shut and muting the distant thump of music.

I scoffed. I didn’t smoke weed. I was way too worried about being out of control of my thoughts and emotions, worried I’d have a bad high like I obviously was right now. My heart was still racing from the run, breaths coming in sharp pulls that made it clear I did not regularly work out.

He dragged me to the end of an alley and then let me go. I panted, noticing that I was conveniently trapped. A brick wall at my back and sides and this tall, sword-wielding Adonis in front of me. The alley smelled like old garbage and damp concrete, and there was a sticky chill clinging to my bare legs as a light breeze moved through. All my self-defense training suddenly rushed to the forefront of my mind, and I thanked God that Rae forced me to enroll in classes when I was fifteen. She’d been attacked in a parking lot and the next day made all the girls at the group home fourteen and up start classes. This guy was about to go down. Eyeballs, ears, mushy bits between the legs. Nothing was off-limits.

His gaze flicked to my forearms, and he frowned.

“Where are your hunter runes?” he said in a silky, deep voice.

I cocked my head to the side, mirroring his confusion. Was I dreaming? Maybe I fell asleep at Rae’s and never woke up. Except I didn’t remember falling asleep, and this felt very real. I stepped to the side to bypass him, but he blocked me by moving as well.

“Let me go,” I growled, fisting my hands and readying to fight him if he didn’t let me pass. Even if I couldn’t overpower him with three years of self-defense classes, I would at least get some of his DNA under my fingernails before he beheaded me. Let there be justice and honor in my death when the local detectives figured out he was the unhinged club murderer from one scratch of my nails.

He frowned again. “My name is Asher. Are you on some lone assignment with another academy? Where is your partner?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about, but you better get out of my way before I make you regret the day you were born,” I told him. It sounded cool, and I felt very badass delivering that line, even if my voice shook a little at the end.

Until he laughed.

He full on cackled in my face. Then he sobered. “Oh, you’re serious?”

I attacked then, lunging for him, knowing he would come for me, and when he did, I drew my nails down his face until his skin bled. The satisfying drag of skin under my nails was met with a warm, tacky wetness that told me I’d definitely broken through.

DNA acquired.