Page 74 of Silver Claw

Either way, a vampire was always going to vampire.

Sick bastards.

“Kait,” Joe roared when he saw me hang in midair for a moment before being slammed to the bed. “What can I do?”

Joe couldn’t see it, but the vampire had grabbed me around the throat, shocking the hell out of me, and flung me to the bed. It didn’t matter that he was a ghost. He was vampire strong.

I put everything I had into keeping his teeth away from my throat. I had a feeling that if he bit me, I would begin to weakenimmediately. In the chaos, Joe’s cell phone began to ring. I’d turned my cell off, so probably it was someone who’d called him when they couldn’t get me.

I heard him murmuring, then I heard him say Jared’s name, and I knew my alpha was worried that Voss had gotten to me. I’d rather have fought Gavin Voss any day of the week than a fucked-up vampire ghost who I could not only see but feel.

And then I heard him.

He didn’t speak in words, but grunts and moans and wheezes, and it was like I’d found my way into a horror movie.

He didn’t feel like a ghost.

There wasn’t time to wonder why, but later, later I would wonder.

Not surprisingly, I’d dropped the wand when the vampire had grabbed me, but I still held the trap. The magic inside it, tiny, swirling particles, would pull him like metal to a magnet. I just needed to get the mouth of the trap against the mouth of the ghost.

It would drag him inside out into the jar.

And that was easier said than done, especially when I was trying to hold him away from me as he clacked his teeth together, trying to get at me with his long, pointed fangs.

“The wand, Joe,” I said, my voice so hoarse and raw that I wasn’t sure he would hear me. He did hear me, though, and he shoved the wand into my hand, rubbing my skin away because the wand had to go between my palm and the ghost’s face—and that was a tight fit.

The vampire was just a few inches away from my face. I knew he wanted my throat, but he’d settle for any part of me he could bite. I had to release my hold in order to get the wand into his back, so I had maybe two seconds to stake him before he bit me.

With a yell of rage, I folded my hand around the wand and immediately shoved it into the hole in his back. Seconds. That was all it took.

But he was a vampire, and he was fast.

He bit me.

He didn’t bite my face or my throat, but my shoulder. On the back of that same shoulder was a daywalker bite that had never totally healed. It still caused me problems. And his bite was on the front of that same shoulder, directly across from the daywalker bite on the back.

And though he was weakening, dying, really, that bite went straight through my shoulder and merged with the daywalker bite, and that agony was like nothing I’d ever felt before.

I’d had more painful injuries. Like when Adam Thorne’s goons had filled me with liquid silver and then beaten the hell out of me.

But the agony from the vampire bite joining the daywalker bite was not just painful. It was…it wasweird. There was nothing to compare it to. I knew without a single doubt that somehow, his bite was going to screw me up.

The witchwolf’s wand did exactly what I wanted it to do. It staked the ghost. His back arched and his teeth left my shoulder, and I slammed the ghost trap jar against his mouth as hard as I could.

He fought it, but the stake through his heart was doing what a stake through the heart of any vampire would do. It was killing him. But I couldn’t keep the wand in place for long. I had to get him into the trap to contain him forever. The wand staking hadn’t made him disappear or explode into a thousand glitter pieces or caused him to cease to be. And if I removed the wand, he would return.

He was a ghost.

Finally, with a scream of fury, I sucked him into the trap and slammed the lid shut.

It was over.

Joe sat beside me on the bed, gingerly, and took the wand and the trap and dumped them into my bag. “Are you okay, boss?”

I felt my shoulder where the ghost had bitten me. My shirt was not torn, and there was no blood. But the pain was still there. My shoulder throbbed with it, and I could barely lift my arm. It was lessening, and the strength in that arm was returning, but slowly. “He bit me,” I said. “So weird. It’s painful, and my arm is weak. If I hadn’t been able to get him off me…” I shook my head. “I don’t know that I would have survived it. I felt that bite trying to force its way through my body.”

“But it’s contained now to just your shoulder?” he asked, then continued when I nodded. “How did that little girl survive it, Kait?”