John Paul sat on her stomach, his giant hands around her throat, his face a grim mask as he began to squeeze. His fingers dug into her windpipe, cutting off her air, crushing her throat.
Destiny hit him hard, her palms flat, carefully positioned high on his shoulders to keep from injuring him even as her enormous strength sent him flying backward. “Get off, you oaf! Sheesh! You weigh a ton.” She leapt to her feet, landing lightly, hands up, her eyes glittering with warning. “Back off, John Paul. Do you even know what you’re doing?”
John Paul had landed on his backside. He sat on the sidewalk, stunned, shaking his head to clear it. Destiny watched him carefully, aware he was not in his right mind. She could only read the need for violence in him, violence aimed at her. She wasn’t certain she had been the original target, but he seemed a puppet doing someone else’s bidding. There were no blank spots in his mind to indicate a vampire, but she didn’t believe John Paul was aware of what he was doing.
A wisp of fog swirled around her neck, tugged at her ankles, bit deep like tiny teeth. She felt a fiery pain lancing unexpectedly through her leg. She looked down and saw tiny drops of ruby-red blood. The air left her lungs in a rush of shock as she attempted to dissolve into mist, but the vapor held her fast. She was locked in the mysterious circles as surely as if they were shackles.
Her heart broke into a thudding rhythm, but she blocked out the pain and fear, concentrating on her imprisoned ankle where the white tails of vapor were solidifying into tiny wires with serrated edges, digging deeper and deeper into her flesh. Her ankle and foot contorted, thinned so that the coils slipped off.
She looked up just as John Paul attacked again, slamming her to the ground with the force of a human freight train. Destiny didn’t give him much thought other than as a nuisance. She could handle John Paul, but her unseen enemy was another matter. The fog was alive with tendrils, little wormlike creatures rushing toward her, alive with teeth and seething with hatred. Again she tried dissolving, but the holding spell she was caught in could not be broken.
The worms ignored John Paul, rushing at her with ravenous appetites for her blood. As if her blood drew them to her. The answer hit her hard. Her tainted blood was once again betraying her. Worse, they reminded her of the microscopic creatures she occasionally caught glimpses of in her own blood. They sickened her. She hissed her defiance at her enemies, hastily throwing up a barrier between her body and the wriggling worms. Some had already gotten through, biting at her arms and legs viciously.
John Paul swung his hammer like fist at her face. Before he could connect, he was jerked backward, his huge body tossed through the air as if he weighed no more than a child. Nicolae’s grim features stared down at her.
“You look as if you could use some help.” He pulled her to her feet, ignoring the worms slithering around her.
“Don’t flatter yourself, hotshot,” she snapped, yanking one of the creatures and hurling it off of her. She kicked another as it tried to crawl up her leg. “I am perfectly capable of handling these things.”
“Hmm, I can see that,” he said, one eyebrow arcing as he lifted his hand toward the sky. At once the dark clouds swirling overhead lit up with veins of white-hot lightning. “A little out of sorts this evening?”
“You’d be cranky too with these things sinking their teeth into you.” The truth was, the ugly creatures turned her stomach. Shuddering, she pulled viciously at two more, hurling them away. The fog was flowing around the barrier she had erected, the worms erupting into a frenzy as they tried to get to her. “They’re disgusting.” The white worms boiled up out of the fog, writhing ferociously, smashing into the invisible wall, their teeth tearing at it.
“Women.” Casually Nicolae lifted his arm to direct the whips of lightning to the fog. Black ashes burst from the spinning vapor, and a foul odor permeated the air. Destiny plugged her nose against the stench.