Free A Wicked Hunger (Creatures of Darkness 1) by Kiersten Fay Page B

suffer horribly before I killed him.”
    She canted her head. “Why would you bother?”
    “Because you deserve that much and more.”
    His reply didn’t seem to alleviate her confusion. She looked at him now as if to figure out what manner of treachery he engaged in. He reached out for her shoulder, intending to reassure her.
    Something slammed into his chest, knocking the air from hi s lungs and tossing him back.
    Pain stole his sight. He lost his footing over the cliff.
     
     
    For a moment, Cora couldn’t understand what had just happened. Mason’s chest had…exploded!
    He stumbled back, falling over the bluff.
    Adrenaline spiked. She screamed. He had to have been shot, but by who?
    She darted her gaze around, searching.
    A mud-covered jeep sped over the dirt road toward her, screeching to a halt just behind the motorbike.
    Three scruffy men in grungy clothes jumped out, all of them eyeing her with cruel grins.
    She rushed to the cliff face and leaned over. Mace lay face down at the bottom, about twenty feet below, unmoving. “Mason!”
    Boots crunched against rock, closing in on her from behind. She couldn’t take her eyes from Mace.
    Callous fingers threaded through her hair, dragging her back toward the jeep. One of the men stepped to the edge where she had been, aimed a gun down, and fired twice, presumably at Mason’s corpse.
    “No!” she screeched.
    “Shut that banshee up!” one of the men yelled.
    In the next instant, pain laced her cheek from the backhanded slap. As she tried to clear her jarred brain, her coat was ripped from her body. A disgusting string of appreciative noises came from her assailants, and she was slammed up against the burning hot side of the still running jeep.
    “Is she the one?” the man near the cliff asked. His voice was odd, harsh and scratchy, like he’d been smoking since birth.
    “Looks like it,” the man next to her replied. He was the youngest of the three. “We should bring her in, just in case.”
    “We only need to bring in her head,” the third man laughed.
    Cora gagged on a sob. Her eyes blurred from both horror and the pain that still stung her cheek.
    “Shame to kill such a sweet ass,” Scratchy Voice said apathetically.
    “Well, we don’t have to kill her right away. Is the vamp dead?”
    “I shot him three times. What do you think?”
    A pair of rough hands pulled her forward and pushed her toward Scratchy Voice. “You hold her. I call first crack.”
    “No way. I’m the one who brought you in on this. I go first.” He shoved her aside.
    “Screw that. I don’t do sloppy seconds,” the young man said.
    “Fuck you.”
    Fists swung between the two, while the third held a gun to her head and waited indifferently for the outcome.
    Cora stood, shaking, heart thundering, as she contemplated what was sure to be the end of her life. What a sad, pathetic, useless end. How utterly unimportant her life turned out to be. Nothing but an ode to endurance with less than a few short months dedicated to happiness. Or as close to happiness as she would ever experience.
    What was the point of life, anyway, if there was nothing but sorrow, heartache, and pain? If everyone was nothing more than cruelty wrapped up in the facade of civility. Morality was a joke created by cynics and con artists. Evil reigned at every turn. Anything good decayed like fruit and turned sour, hateful, greedy, and selfish.
    She wasn’t fit for this world.
    A snarling roar made the men freeze mid-fight.
    Cora looked up.
    A mountain lion stood atop a pile of rocks, some fifty feet away, its fangs bared at them.
    The men swore and scrambled back.
    The young one yelled, “Shoot it!” and the man with the gun to her head turned it on the animal.
    Three loud shots echoed off the mountain ridges, but the sound hadn’t come from the directions she’d expected.
    The three men fell lifeless, blood oozing from each of their skulls, staining the gravel.
    Heart slamming, Cora crumbled to the