Dark Slayer

Ivory leapt on him, punching down with her fist, reaching for the heart, ignoring the acid as it poured over her coated gloves and began burning through them quickly. The vampire thrashed and ripped at her, but the wolves pinned him down as she extracted the pulsing black heart, flinging it from her and raising her hand toward the sky.

Lightning zigzagged, streaked down and slammed into the heart, jolting the ground. The wolves leapt out of the way and the bolt of cleansing energy jumped to the body, incinerating the vampire and cleaning her arrows. Wearily, Ivory bathed her gloves in the light and then sank down into the snow, sitting for a moment, hanging her head, struggling to draw in air when her lungs were burning with need.

One of the wolves licked at her wounds in an effort to heal her. She managed a small smile and laid her fingers in the fur of the alpha female, rubbing her face in the soft pelt for comfort. These wolves, saved from death so many years earlier, more even than she remembered, were her only companions-her family. They were her true pack and she owed no loyalty to any other but them.

«Come here, Raja,» she crooned to the big male. «Let me take a look at the damage.»

Still trapped behind the shield she'd created to protect the natural wolf pack from the vampire, the alpha roared a challenge. Raja ignored him as he'd done so many others over the years. The natural pack lived and died, the cycle of nature intervening, and he'd learned such petty rivalries didn't touch him. He sent the natural alpha a look of pure disdain and crawled to Ivory, lying on his side so she could inspect his wounds. She'd healed him countless times over the years, just as his sisters and brothers healed the slayer's wounds, their saliva containing the healing agents.

She scraped snow from the frozen ground and dug deep until she had good soil. Mixing her saliva with the soil, she packed the wounds and then hugged him. «Thank you, my brother. As so many times before, you've saved my life.»

He nuzzled her and waited patiently while she inspected each of the pack. The strongest female, Ayame, named after the demon princess wolf, cuddled close to him, inspecting his wounds and passing her tongue over the other scratches he'd received. Their littermates formed the rest of the pack: Blaez, his second in command; Farkas, the last male; and Rikki and Gynger, the two smaller females. They crowded around Ivory, pressing close to her battered and bruised body in an effort to aid her.

The littermates, born of different parents, were very distinctive with their thick, silver-tipped coats, a shimmering fall of luxurious fur, all larger than normal, even the two smaller females. All had the blue eyes from their puppy days when Ivory had tracked blood and death back to the den, finding the mangled bodies of her natural wolf pack all those years ago. Even then, she'd become a scourge to the vampires, a whisper, the beginnings of legend and they'd sought to destroy her. Instead, they'd killed and mutilated the bodies of the wolf pack she'd befriended.

She had found the puppies dying, their torn bodies wriggling across the blood-soaked ground, trying to find their mothers. She couldn't bear to lose them, her only family, her only contact with warmth and affection, and she'd fed them her blood out of sheer desperation to keep them alive. Carpathian blood. Hot and healing. She'd stayed in the den with them, back away from the light of day, nearly starving herself. Forced, again out of desperation, to take small amounts of blood from them to stay alive. She hadn't realized she was giving blood exchanges, until the largest and most dominant of the pups underwent the change.

The pups had retained their blue eyes as they'd grown, the Carpathian blood giving them the ability to shift. Their ability to communicate with Ivory had saved them, giving them the necessary psychic brain function to live through the conversion. Like Ivory, they had been wounded a thousand times in battle, but over the past century they'd learned how to successfully bring down a vampire, the seven of them working as a team.

She lay back in the snow, catching her breath, letting her body absorb the pain of her wounds. The one in her neck throbbed and burned and she knew she had to cleanse it immediately. She was impervious to the cold, as were all Carpathians. Her race was as old as time, nearly immortal, as she had discovered, to her horror, when the prince's son had betrayed her to the vampires for his own gain. She'd never known such agony, an endless battle deep in the earth as years went by and her body refused to die.