Frostbound (4) by Ashwood Sharon

Author:Ashwood, Sharon [Ashwood, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Romance, Paranormal, Fiction
ISBN: 9781101515488
Publisher: Signet
Published: 2011-06-07T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Talia expected she’d keep on running. That was the problem with leaping into the unknown. It was, really and truly, unknown.

Instead, she fell. It was probably only a dozen feet—nothing for a vampire—but she’d only just grasped what was happening when the ground leaped up to smack her.

Wham. She lay for a moment, stunned and hurting. Her skin tingled like she’d stuck her whole body into an electrical current. Was that the aftermath of some sort of magic spell?

Cold, damp ground. Outdoors? No. Wherever she was lying was mercifully bare of snow.

She got to her hands and knees and looked around. Her first instinct was to call out for Max, but common sense stopped her. He was hostile, and she was horribly vulnerable. It was completely dark. Not nighttime dark, which had enough ambient light for a vampire, but pit of Hades dark. Only a glimmer showed in patches of what seemed to be a ceiling. Where am I?

Skin crawling with nerves, she sniffed the air, trying to get some information about her surroundings. She could feel a slight movement of air, but city smells mixed with something musty and older. Almost sweet. Definitely stale. Somewhere in that cocktail was the stench of rat. The furry bastards were one of her few real phobias. A vampire sunstruck into her daytime sleep wasn’t safe in rat territory. They weren’t picky about whether or not flesh was dead.

Talia shuddered, getting quickly to her feet before she began to dwell on the thought. Her boots crunched on sand and dirt, but that was over something uneven but harder. Brick maybe. The sound was oddly muffled, as if it wanted to echo but the surfaces nearby were too close. Stretching out her arms, Talia felt nothing. Not that close, then.

Carefully, she moved toward the lighter patch of darkness ahead, pulling on her gloves as she went. Where was Max? There was no sign of him, not a whiff. Part of her was grateful, part pissed, part afraid. When had he learned to walk through walls? It wasn’t impossible—a simple teleportation spell was something a sorcerer could make for someone else—but it was entirely out of character. Hunters didn’t use magic. They were utterly against it.

Something is very wrong. Unease burned in her stomach. It was one thing that she was caught in a moral dilemma between ratting out her brother and turning in an attempted murderer, but magic made everything more complex.

Perhaps Hunters had started out protecting human villages and maybe they’d had the moral high ground once upon a time, but this was a different reality. To hate and kill someone just because they weren’t human—to hurt someone like Perry—was completely wrong.

Monsters were monsters until they were your friends. Talia’s beliefs had been changing for a long time, but this sealed it. Shooting Perry had made it personal.

And if the Hunters were using nonhuman powers? That was going from wrong to perverse. That was becoming the thing you despised in order to destroy it more effectively.

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