Ambushed by Dean Murray

been expecting that.
    The smart thing
would have been to avoid overcommitting. You had to commit your
bodyweight to any given attack when you were fighting another hybrid
or a werewolf because they were too big for anything less, but that
wasn't how you fought a wolf.
    For those kinds
of fights you kept your weight balanced so that you could change
directions on a dime and used your claws in lightning-quick attacks
to keep your enemy off balance. Fighting a vampire was a lot more
like fighting a wolf than anything else and that went doubly so when
it came to fighting a vampire who might or might not be inside of
your head at any given time.
    I ignored all
of the rules of smart fighting and threw myself at the monster
currently inside of my friend's mind. The katana darted in from my
left side, but the sheer stupidity of my attack succeeded in catching
the vampire off guard. He started to hold his ground just like he
would have done against a human, but even if he'd cut me in half that
still wouldn't have been enough to stop me from colliding with him.
    At the last
second he tried to move to the side, which robbed his blow of most of
its power. My claws deflected the blade up into the meaty part of my
side, and then my right hand grabbed him.
    We were going
to hit the glass hard.
    Maybe the glass
would have held if it hadn't been compromised already by the chairs
that had cracked it, but more than likely we still would have
shattered it. I pushed the vampire ahead of me and felt him trying to
break into my mind in the split second before he hit the window.
    It was the last
effort of a desperate man, but even as dark threads of thought
breached my defenses I knew he was too late. Even if I'd been trying
to stop us from hurtling out into space I wouldn't have been able to.
    I heard
footsteps, James' heavy hybrid thumps and the lighter ones from the
two girls and wondered whether or not one of them was still being
controlled by the vampire, but that didn't matter either. Even
another hybrid couldn't stop me now, there was simply too much mass
moving at too great of a speed.
    The glass bowed
as the back of the vampire's head hit it, and then it shattered. I
had so much adrenaline in my system that it all happened in slow
motion. One moment I was looking at a single pane of glass,
spiderwebbed with cracks, and then tens of thousands of pieces
shivered in the air as the vampire cut through them in a spray of
red.
    The vampire was
all of the way out of the building now, but he let go of his sword
and was trying to grab hold of my arm. It didn't matter, nothing
mattered anymore, but I didn't want to fall to my death connected to
a parasite who had killed thousands of people to preserve his
unnatural existence.
    I shifted
forms, and the vampire's hands closed on empty air, my human
fingertips now ending nearly a foot sooner than they had as a hybrid.
The vampire finally realized that there wasn't anything he could do
to save himself and I saw a level of terror on his face that I hope
to never see again.
    Popular culture
glorifies vampires and portrays them as powerful beings who survive
for centuries based off of willpower, but at that moment I saw the
truth. He'd survived for centuries, but it hadn't been because of a
drive to achieve some kind of master plan. He'd survived because he'd
been terrified of dying.
    I closed my
eyes as gravity started to take hold of me. Things had happened so
quickly that I couldn't have traveled more than a few inches, a foot
at most, out of the building, but I had nothing to push against, no
way of reversing my course.
    I had a moment
to hope that my death wouldn't hit Rachel too hard, hidden away back
in the States against her will because I hadn't wanted to expose her
to danger, and then my leg was practically ripped from my body.
    The pain nearly
made me black out. It wasn't just the sudden deceleration. James
tried not to tear me up too badly, but he'd been most concerned with
stopping me, so he'd