Free fall.

Without warning, his body went flying forward and a searing pain streaked down the front of his calf and sliced across his ankle. Twisting in midair, he landed face up in the tangled grass—and a breath later, the partially wounded slayer who’d gotten him with a knife lurched up onto his chest, that blade arc’d over its shoulder, its lips curled into a snarl as black blood streamed out all over Assail.

Right, fuck this, mate.

Assail grabbed a fistful of still-brown hair, shoved his muzzle into that wide-open maw, and hit the trigger, blowing open the back of the skull, incapacitating the body such that it fell on him as a writhing deadweight. Kicking the animated corpse off, he sprang to his feet.

And found himself directly in the cross hairs of the beast.

His movement up to the vertical was what did it, the dragon’s eyes snapping to him and narrowing into slits. Then, with another roar, the killer came at him, pounding over the ground, crushing slayers under its massive hind feet, its front claws curled up and ready to strike.

“Fuck!”

Assail surged forward, no longer worried about where his gun was pointed and absolutely unconcerned about the fact that he was now headed directly into an advancing line of lessers. The good news? The beast took care of that little problem. The slayers, likewise, garnered one look at all the hell-hath-no-fury coming at them and scattered like leaves unto the autumn wind.

Naturally, there was naught directly up ahead that provided any cover. By bad luck, his escape route offered nothing but scrub and brush, without any meaningful protection. The nearest building? Two hundred yards away. At least.

With a curse, he ran e’er faster, reaching down into the muscles of his legs, calling for more and more speed.

It was a race the beast was due to win—a victory that was inevitable when a five-foot stride tried to outrun a set of legs that could cover twenty-five in a single bound. With every second, that pounding grew louder and closer until hot blasts of breath hit Assail’s back, flushing him in spite of the cold.

Fear struck to his core.

But there was no time to try to harness the panic that flooded his mind. A great roar blasted at him, the force of the sound so great that it spurred him forth, providing a gust of foul-smelling air that ushered him along. Shit, his only chance was—

The bite came after the great roar, those jaws snapping so close to the nape of Assail’s neck that he cringed down even though it slowed his gait. Too late to save himself, though. Airborne. He went airborne, plucked from the ground in mid-stride—except why wasn’t there more pain?

Surely if the beast had gotten him by the shoulders or the torso, he would have been racked with—no, wait, it had him by the jacket. The thing had him by the leather jacket, not the flesh, a band of constriction cutting across his pecs and lifting him by the armpits, his legs flopping, his gun firing as he made fists of his hands. Below him, the landscape tilted like it was on a seesaw, the bolting lessers, the fighting Brothers, the overgrown bushes and trees flipping around him as he was shaken all about.

The fucking thing was going to toss him up and gullet him. This back-and-forth nonsense was just tenderizing a meal.

Goddamn him, he was the vampire equivalent of a chicken wing.

No time. He let his gun go and went for the zipper at his throat. The shaking motion made his tiny target fast as a mouse, slick as a marble, all needle-in-a-haystack for his trembling hands and slippery, sweaty fingertips.

The beast’s very hold did more for him.

With those teeth locked in the back of the jacket, the leather couldn’t hold his weight, and he broke free, falling from the jaws, the hard ground rushing to greet him. Tucking into a roll so that he didn’t break anything, he landed in a heap nonetheless.

Directly on his shoulder.

The crack was something that registered throughout his body and rendered him as useless as a babe unattended, all breath lost, his sight blurring. But there was no time if he wanted to live. Wrenching around, he—

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop—BOOM!

His cousins came out of the night, running as if they were being chased when in fact they were not. Ehric had two autoloaders up and discharging . . . and Evale had an elephant gun on his shoulder.

That was the BOOM!

Indeed, the weapon was, in fact, an actual elephant gun, an enormous firearm that had been left over from the time of the Raj in India. Evale, the aggressive bastard, had long ago seemed to have bonded with the thing in an unnatural, “my precious” kind of way.

Thank the Fates for unhealthy preoccupations.

Those forty-millimeter bullets did nothing to slow the beast down, pinging off the purple scales as if they were peas cast upon a motor vehicle. But the elephant gun’s payload of lead caused a howl of pain and a recoil.

It was Assail’s only opportunity for escape.

Closing his eyes, he focused, focused, focused—

No dematerializing. Too much adrenaline on top of too much cocaine with too much pain from his shoulder as a chaser.

And the beast went right back on the attack, refocusing on Assail and giving him the dragon equivalent of a fuck-you in the form of an enormous roar—

The massive shotgun went off a second time, catching the thing in the chest.

“Run!” Ehric bellowed as he reloaded his forties, clips kicking out of the butts of his little guns. “Get up!”

Assail used his good arm to shove himself off the ground, and his legs reengaged with admirable aplomb. Holding his injured limb to his chest, he hauled as hard as he could, the remnants of his jacket flapping, his stomach rolling, his heart pounding.