Blessed unconsciousness shielded the tender songbird from the vulture’s siege, utterly blacking out her apocalyptic thoughts so that she floated within a protective, empty void . . . free of the sharp shredding sensation of her wounds and the horrifying pleasure-pain bombarding her innards. Perhaps he feasted upon her for a few more cruel minutes. An hour. More. Losa could not possibly know. It wasn’t until the monstrous weight imprisoning her was aggressively shoved away that she stirred in her bed of mud and sin, eyelids fluttering warily open and assaulted senses slowly creeping back online.

The first thing she heard was a roar that could have woken the dead from their graves.

As if under a hellish hex, Losa turned her cranium in the direction of the noise, her blood-smeared body instinctively curling in on itself. She watched the vicious battle unfold in a thrall of frozen terror. A ghost—Emissary of Death, Angel of the Beyond—had charged at the obsidian mammoth and confronted him with swords flashing and pristine ivory robes gleaming like sheets of freshly fallen snow. Snarls shattered the air like machine gun fire from the gladiators’ savagely yawning maws; they writhed ferociously, a pair of serpents, masculine chassis twisting and wrenching and thick with tough clenched muscle; the crunch of bone and snap of tendons crackled sickeningly beneath the explosive shrapnel of their enraged combat, the impact of jaws on flesh jarringly audible to Losa’s sensitive ears. If it hadn’t been for the bruises and lacerations and deep, deep aches mapped across her skin the brunette bird would have thought she was dead. But the dead felt no pain. And the ghost . . .

“Aindreas?!” The exclamation lurched from her velvets at barely more than a hoarse whisper, her vocals having been torn to shreds by her unending screams for help. For too soon her wide amethyst irises saw the lurid slashes of carmine that betrayed the poltergeist as mortal—and not just any mortal, but a wolf her shattered mind recognized at last. In a rush the princess recalled that faraway night she’d spent huddled in his den against the rain, the grudging kindness he’d shown her despite her foolishness. And now he had lunged into war on her behalf, rescuing her from certain carnal destruction. Trembling desperately, lungs fighting for breath past her fear, Losa shouted as loudly as her tattered cords would allow her. “Kill him! Kill him, Aindreas!”

At one point the stygian devil flipped the alabaster warrior onto his spine, stabbing at Losa’s unexpected hero with merciless fangs. The girl screeched in desperation—hackles lifting in spite of the sticky scarlet painted down her spine—and Aindreas leapt to his paws again with teeth glinting. Seconds stretched on, intense slow motion, as the fearless ghost gripped the demon’s jaw bone and slammed his evil skull into a monolith rock protruding out over the ground. The vulture crumpled to the earth. Defeated.

Losa blinked her mismatched luminaries, stunned beyond words. She hardly dared believe the Aindreas had emerged victorious. As the porcelain prince trotted closer, the dark dove shrank down a little farther, all at once unbearably shy. Little by little her awareness rekindled, until the battered lass felt each and every thread of lightning pain that stitched her together. The beast’s heady cologne saturated every surface of her canvas. The sensation of his breath hot on her nape and the phantom of his manhood forced inside her seemed unbearably real, as if this moment were no more than a wishful dream and the vampire still held her hopelessly in his grasp. A bone-chilled shiver rippled down her spine . . . and she felt the honeyed wetness of her forced coupling still seeping between her aching thighs. Filthy. As grateful as the ballerina had been for Aindreas’s heroic intervention, she would give anything to be alone—somewhere the blue-eyed knight couldn’t watch her with those gentle, pitying lanterns that had witnessed her fall into worthlessness.

Her ears drooped and her gaze slipped away from Aindreas’s bloody visage. She couldn’t look him in the eye. She didn’t know if she’d be able to look anyone in the eye. Losa sniffed pitifully, enormous tears rolling from her heavenly pools and slender frame shuddering as if with bitter cold. Shame and torment hung heavily from her rasping voice. “I . . . I c-can’t s-stand up . . .” And then, still not facing him: “. . . is he dead?”