Hex on the Beach by Kelley Armstrong

Chapter Four

Silver flashed in their hands as her three vampire minions lunged at me. I flew straight up, causing them to smack into each other instead of me. Then, I flung my silver knife.

It landed in the blonde vampire’s heart. With another concentrated thought, I gave it a hard twist while using my body’s downward momentum to slam the other two vampires against the cave walls. One vampire’s head hit the wall so hard that she instantly went down, but the black-haired one screamed as she raised her knife and aimed for my unprotected back.

With a focused thought, I yanked the knife from her hand and sent it into her chest with another hard twist. Now two of the vampires were dead.

This was too easy. If they hadn’t been about to murder a teenager, I might’ve felt bad about slaughtering them this way.

“Stop!”

I whirled to see that the redheaded witch now had the boy up against her chest while her back was to the cave’s wall. Smart. Now her heart was protected from both sides. She also had an ancient-looking knife pressed against his throat, and her eyes glowed with a vampire’s trademark bright emerald light.

“One more move and he dies,” she swore.

“Hurt him and I’ll rip your head off right now,” I countered.

Her smile showed her newly extended fangs. “No, you won’t. If your powers were that great, I’d already be dead.”

Ooh, a thinker.She was right, too. I hadn’t mastered the ability to use my borrowed telekinesis on people yet, especially people with supernatural energy like vampires. But I didn’t need to be able to control her to stop her.

I focused on her knife, and then yanked with all the mental strength I had. To my shock, the blade didn’t even budge.

If snakes could grin, their smiles would look just like the one the redhead flashed me. “Your impressive abilities are useless against enchanted objects, intruder.”

Inwardly, I cursed, but all I said was, “Really? Guess life’s a bitch until one kills you.”

“You will die,” she said flatly. “Pity. With your abilities, you would have been an asset to our coven.”

Her human acolytes started to chant in the strange language again. From their thoughts, this spell would end with my death. So much for thinking this was too easy. I’d seen how nasty magic could get in the hands of a skilled practitioner, and if the redhead had an enchanted weapon, she wasn’t a poser or an amateur.

That’s why I couldn’t let her minions finish their incantation. The humans might be easy to incapacitate, but if I went for the last two vampires, I risked the boy’s life. How to stop the chants without endangering him?

I glanced above the redhead. Yes. That could work.

I put my hands up in an “I surrender” pose. “Maybe we can come to an agreement—”

The redhead’s scoff cut me off. “After you killed two members of my coven? Our only agreement is your death.”

I readied my power, careful to look only at her. “You don’t want to do that.”

She scoffed again. “Oh, but I do.”

Just a few moments more… “Not if you don’t want a shitload of trouble. I’m Cat Crawfield Russell, and if you don’t know that name, does the term ‘Red Reaper’ ring a bell?”

From her widened gaze, it did. “Wife of Bones, and friend of Vlad Dracul,” she whispered.

I’d earned my nickname after cutting a bloody swath through the undead world when I was still half human, and she was defining me only by my relationships with the men in my life?

“You don’t deserve a vagina,” I muttered, and finished wrapping my power around the thin slice of protruding rock above her. With a mental yank, I tore the rock free.

The narrow slice of ledge slammed into her hard enough to take off her head. I lunged at the same moment, pulling the boy down so he was out of the rock’s deadly, slicing path. Then, I took advantage of the other witches’ shock to rip my knife through the nearest one’s heart.

My head exploded with pain. I turned, seeing the formerly unconscious vampire through a haze of red as blood dripped into my eyes. At some point during my exchange with her leader, she’d woken up. Now, she held a piece of debris in her hands, its tip stained with scarlet. I was so dazed that it took a second to figure out what it was.

Bitch had brained me with the rock ledge I’d just used to kill her coven leader. Admirable, really.

I ducked under her next swing and managed a sideways kick that knocked her briefly unconscious again. I tried to use my abilities to send a silver knife flying into her heart, but though I concentrated, nothing happened. Guess the decent-sized piece of my skull on the ground meant my telekinesis was temporarily out of order.

The boy stared at me in horror.

“Run!” I said, fumbling around to grab one of the silver knives from the dead vampires.

He did, and after my second try, I had a knife. My head felt a little better, too. God bless vampire healing abilities.

Problem was, I wasn’t the only one healing. The final vampire jumped up, giving me an evil glare. She didn’t lunge at me, though. She stayed back, making me come to her.

I did until my legs suddenly had trouble working. What the hell? She’d whacked my head before, not my legs…

The spell, I realized. Shit. Not amateurs at all.

I changed course and flew at the chanting witches. This area of the cave was so small, it didn’t matter that my power failed halfway through my flight. I still barreled into them, slashing as I went. Blood coated me in a hot spray, and two of the human witches fell. What I’d lacked in coordination, I’d made up for in strength. The other two witches screamed as their friend’s head bobbed up and down in the water next to them.

Then they ran. Or tried to. The seawater hampered their strides since it was now up to our waists.

But one of the running witches was still chanting, and pain blasted through me as the remaining vampire slammed my head against the cave wall. I tried to block her next blow but ended up only swatting at her hands. Damn that spell! I felt like I’d been dropped into a cylinder of quick-dry cement.

The witch’s chant grew until she was screaming. My vampire attacker smirked as my legs suddenly couldn’t hold me up. Water went over my head as I collapsed beneath the waves and the weight of the spell. Through the haze of the sea, I saw the vampire walk away, presumably to fetch a silver knife. If vampire bodies floated, she’d have her pick of knives from the ones sticking out of her dead friends, but vampires lacked air in our lungs, so her dead friends had sunk straight to the cave’s bottom. Just like I had.

I tried to force my body free of the invisible hold over it. Nothing happened, not even a twitch. Fucking hell! Why hadn’t I learned any defensive magic? I’d learned every which way to fight, but only physically. Not mystically.

The vampire hauled me up from the water so I could see her smile as she raised a silver knife. For some reason, I found myself taking in every detail of her appearance. Cornsilk blonde hair, sky-blue eyes, skin as pale as a porcelain doll, and a near flawless complexion, except for a little scar near her eyebrow that she must have gotten when she was human.

Was this what people who were about to die did? Memorize the last face they saw, even if that face belonged to their killer?

Anger surged, so hot and fierce, I half expected the water around me to start boiling. Fuck her, I was not going to die this way! I might not be able to move, and my borrowed telekinetic powers might not work on vampires, but I wasn’t totally helpless. She still needed that knife to kill me.

I focused on it with everything I had. Just as she slammed the blade home, it shattered into a thousand pieces, leaving only her hand to hit my chest. She stared at it in disbelief, and then stared at the roiling water that swallowed up the now-tiny silver shards that used to be the knife.

I kept my mind wrapped around a few of those shards as the vampire screamed and began bashing my head against the cave wall. Guess she’d decided on decapitation by battery since she could no longer stab me to death.

My vision went red, and not in a rage sort of way. In the oh shit, I have massive cranial hemorrhaging way. Acid being poured into my brain likely would’ve hurt less, and I could do nothing to defend myself. I only had one shot to survive, so I used the last of my quickly fading mental power to form those silver shards into a long point.

Then, right as an ominous ringing overshadowed the sickening crash-crunch-repeat sounds of my head being pulverized, I sent the combined shards toward her heart and twisted.

The next instant, everything went dark.