So crazed did Thackery feel over the smell of blood, so savagely desperate to kill was he, that when his chosen prey retaliated the vampire hardly felt the wounds. The taste of red-hot life slaking his tongue, the sensation of his fully extended fangs sinking into tough meat of a shoulder, had the blond monster’s eyes rolling back in ecstasy. “More.” He moaned the word against his prey’s flesh, a throaty purr, and he had just enough time to whip his tongue over the open laceration before Kalgalath pulled away—skin and fur catching on Thackery’s daggers and tearing on their deadly sharpness. Thacks gave a vicious snarl. Narrowed eyes blazed the flickering dark red of glowing garnets, and the grimace warping his muzzle pulled at his features so hard it seemed as if the veneer would tear and reveal the visage of a true demon underneath. “MORE!” he spat out, spittle tinged lurid ruby where it flew from his gaping maw. The blood poured down his throat and lit the coals simmering in his breast. Life. He was deliciously, furiously alive, and he would not be satisfied until he’d pried the still-beating heart from his victims chest and crushed it in his jaws.

When the other brute’s forepaw slammed across his face, Thackery paused only for a moment—stunned. The blow struck across the top of his head, right across his brow: blunt claws raking gouges and contusions into that flaxen crown from ear to ear. Immediately, Thackery’s own blood began crawling sluggishly from the ragged, parallel scrapes . . . pulse barely matching the speed of a non-vampire. But that was changing fast. The taste of fresh meat in his mouth had his heart throbbing almost painfully inside his ribs, and when sticky trails of carmine traced their way over his eyes and down the bridge of his snout, the leech started to laugh. A low, erratic sound. Off kilter and insane. His cranium had been pushed to the side from the force of the grey soldier’s assault, so he rapidly turned back and threw himself forward, the continuous motion as graceful as the undulation of a snake. And that’s when the bastard’s trap closed on his leg.

A sickening sound: not unlike a twig snapping, only wetter, muffled by the tendons and integumental tissue gloving the bone. His opponent had latched on to the space just above Thackery’s carpus—and used the full strength of his mastoid muscles to crush that section of skeleton. A high-pitched eerie howl of pain shrieked from stretched lips. The vampire was in no state of mind to think of his own injuries, but later—should he survive this battle—he’d realize that his ulna had been fractured, his radius cracked. Electric adrenalin alone would allow him to continue fighting . . . although there was absolutely no way Thackery would be able to put weight upon the broken limb. Only the ruthless miracle of instinct drove Thackery to act through the nauseating shock of agony, and while the thundercloud male still had his teeth buried in his column he aimed to hook his cruel fangs into the shell of the closest ear, biting down toward the base of the aud before shredding backward to remove the ear and hopefully a strip of scalp. If successful, the shock might kill his enemy . . . but at the very least, Thackery had always been a petty son of a bitch—and he’d die happy knowing he’d irreparably mangled the brute.

In the next second, it did not matter if Thacks had managed to rip off an ear, slice into the nape of the cur’s neck, or tasted nothing but air. A horrendous tug ruptured his concentration, and without meaning to Thackery was suddenly peering over his shoulder at another set of smoldering wine-colored lanterns. Draven. His hated Sweoster, the fucked-up devil who’d stolen his dignity and his mortal life. A seismic growl throttled the sunshine beast’s larynx, the vibrations rippling through the chaotic air. Violent, unforgiving loathing, the desire to murder mixed with the dread of disobeying his master, too many dark emotions bubbling up like an infection—

Thackery didn’t even see the little bitch his maker had brought along. One moment he was glaring with seething hatred at Draven, and the next his body had launched itself back into the fray of its own accord—this time in the path of a white-pelted Tempest. If the midnight predator had thought himself driven mad with the urge to feed before . . . it was nothing compared to what possessed him when he came within striking range of Aindreas. The instinctual antipathy toward Tempests—their very kind and everything they stood for—careened into his brain like a steel train, knocking Thackery breathless with its cold vehemence. He needed to kill this Tempest. All Tempests. And there was something else too, a scent threaded somewhere in the pallid hessian’s pelt, and the heartbreaking promise of its joys and passions finally wrenched the last of Thackery’s mind from his skull. Pupils contracted into pinpoints within their shimmering bloodred pools. His frame moved on its own accord, seconds too late to stop the blue-eyed knight from snatching Draven and throwing the vampire king like a rag doll. An involuntary cry shattered from Thackery’s tongue—stunned that he had felt even a ghost of the torment his Sweoster had just experienced—and although he could only limp as fast as his lame foreleg would let him, he still charged toward Aindreas to aid Draven in finishing the Tempest.

The thump of someone else’s paws played a syncopated rhythm with his steps; a female Tempest, her eyes just as gloriously blue as the male’s, targeted Draven. Leaving his maker to deal with the femme, Thackery bunched the muscles of his hind legs and jumped, hoping to land on the snowy gladiator’s spine. From that vantage point, he wouldn’t need to worry about putting weight on his broken stilt; his jaws tried to grip the Tempest at the base of his neck, right at the withers, where he’d be anchored. From there, Thackery would snap his head back and forth—shoving his body weight into each rip—so that he either shredded the superficial muscles of the Tempest’s shoulders, or severely injured his neck. While he had the advantage of proximity, Thacks would lunge—pirhana-like—toward Aindreas’s right ear, trying to shred it off the way he’d wanted to tear Kal’s. At this point, whether or not the young vampire had been successful, he’d need to drop and roll away from his enemy, his momentum spent on the bloodthirsty energy of his attacks. Thackery would crumple to the sodden, mud-drenched earth, twisting away from Aindreas to gain some distance . . . feigning too much agony and weariness to continue . . . and should Aindreas, or anyone look away from him for but a second, he'd be crawling on his belly back to safety, to lick his wounds and revel in the smell of spilled blood..


Attacks: tries to rip off Kalgalath’s ear and partially scalp him; attempts to assist Draven by leaping on Aindreas’s back and latching onto the base of his neck, hoping to shred the muscles of his shoulders/neck; he then rolls away from Aindreas.

Mentions: Draven, Aindreas, Kalgalath, Adara