Chapters (52)
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Epilogue
- An excerpt from Halfway to the Grave
- An excerpt from One Foot in the Grave
- An excerpt from At Grave’s End
- An excerpt from Destined for an Early Grave
- An excerpt from This Side of the Grave
- An excerpt from One Grave at a Time
- About the Author
- By Jeaniene Frost
- Copyright
- About the Publisher
The scent of fresh smoke teased my nose the closer I got to the end of the room. Fabian paused, hovering near the ceiling, and pointed down.
Candlelight cast a faint amber glow amidst a pile of books stacked up like a partial igloo. At my angle, I couldn’t see over it, so I went higher, brushing the decaying ceiling in my eagerness.
I caught a glimpse of a little girl crouched over a half-rotted book when plaster crumbling from my nearness jerked her head up. Our eyes locked, and as I watched, hers began to turn bright, glowing green. My dormant heart began to beat in an erratic, staccato rhythm from the excitement that gripped me.
She was alive, well, and—once we got her out of here—safe.
“Katie,” I breathed, flying faster toward her.
Her hand snapped up as if she were waving at me. Then something burned in my chest. Bones dropped Tate and grabbed me, spinning me around. That made the burning sensation worse, but I still strained to see Katie before the intensity of the pain finally made me look down.
A knife jutted out from between my breasts. The handle was some strange combination of paper and old leather, but from the fire that spread through my body, the blade was silver.
Thirty-three
Thirty-three
I’d forgotten how much it hurt to be stabbed in the heart with silver. Most vampires only felt that once; lucky me, this was my third time. As awful as the pain was, it didn’t frighten me as much as the weakness that made every muscle limp with instant paralysis. Then came the blurred vision and blunted hearing that caused everything to seem very far away. Only the pain was near, burying the rest of my senses under a merciless cascade of agony.
That grew with unbearable ferocity as the knife in my chest moved. Someone screamed, a shrill, anguished sound. I would have fled in any direction to escape the terrible pain, except my limbs didn’t work. Worse, a great, oppressive weight bore down on me, crushing me.
Maybe the building had collapsed, a still-functioning part of my mind reasoned. That would explain the crushing sensation and feeling like the knife jerked with brutal, scissoring motions. If so, I should be dead already, so why did it still hurt so much—
Another scream tore out of me, and I convulsed as nerve endings surged with sudden, spastic motion. Then I saw the glint of moonlight on a red-smeared blade before it crumpled as though being smashed by an invisible fist.
“Kitten?”
Pain faded with his voice, leaving me dizzy with relief. Weakness was slower to release its grip, though, so it took me two tries to sit up.
“Where’s Katie?” were my first words.
A muscle flexed in Bones’s jaw.
“Don’t know. She ran after she threw the knives.”