Fighting the compulsion was not an easy thing, and not something he would be able to do for very much longer. Not while that ring was still on his finger. Something he couldn’t seem to rectify on his own. He had tried. Any and every time that evil bitch didn’t have her eyes on him, he had tried in vain to pull it off. And up until now he hadn’t been able to get his hands on any form of blade whatsoever.
In her desperate need to have the three males dead and out of her way as quickly as possible, his master, captor, and huge pain in his ass, Seraphina hadn’t quite thought her plan all the way through. Wanting to sustain her sick and extremely twisted sense of humor and love of irony by having Jayden be the one to kill three pieces of his own mate’s soul, she had inadvertently given him the means he needed to free himself.
The sweat that poured off him as if he were a leaky faucet had absolutely nothing to do with the leather trench coat he was wearing; it was the compulsion trying to rush him along to do his commanded task and force him to forget his own plans.
Upon crossing the threshold where the three males were being held, Jayden had no time to acknowledge the gaping hole and fallen debris where the door used to stand. He was greeted with an extremely weak snarl from the werewolf.
“Down boy, we haven’t got much time.” Going as fast as he was able, each step harder than the last as the compulsion grew worse the closer he came to their vicinity, Jayden finally found himself before the counterparts he had yet to officially meet. “One of you fucks needs to muster up enough strength to cut off my hand before the bitch in my head forces me to kill the three of you. Then we can get the fuck out of here and find our mate.”
Clearly sensing the urgency in his tone, none of them bothered wasting time pondering over his last words. No, they did their damnedest to find at least one ounce of strength within them. It was Adorjan who spoke first, his voice nothing more than a thin, whispered lisp. “Need. To. Feed.”
Rivulets of sweat continued to roll down Jayden’s face as he began to lose the battle against himself. “Do whatever the fuck you need to.” He had barely finished that statement before the vampire was behind him and latched on to his neck like a baby on his mother’s tit.
Adorjan’s fangs burrowed deep into Jayden’s neck. The look he gave Jayden right before doing so conveyed without words that he had no idea who or what Jayden was, or where he had even come from. But the urgency in Jayden’s words must have let the vampire know he had the same ultimate goal as they did.
Adorjan’s minor choke evidenced that the sheer potency of the blood took him by surprise and let him know this being most definitely was not human, no matter how much he might resemble one. By the third pull, Adorjan’s body was already regaining strength, while Jayden was losing what little bit of control he had left. As Adorjan continued to drink his feel, Jayden had started walking towards the incubus and the wolf, unable to stop himself.
Adorjan’s eyes popped open just as Jayden raised his arm to start stabbing either Jason or Raziel. Faster than either could blink, Adorjan was in front of the demon and knocking him down to the ground, straddling him and making a grab for the knife. The problem? Every time Adorjan let up pressure on Jayden to do so, he began to fight back. “Listen here—”
“Jayden.”
The dark, baritone voice caught Adorjan completely off guard. He looked at the demon as if he’d lost his damn mind. “What?”
“My name is Jayden. If you’re going to cut off an extremity I’ve been rather attached to all my life, we should probably be on a first-name basis, don’t ya think?” The next he said through gritted teeth, his eyes now becoming a swirling vortex of crimson red and black. “Now hurry this up, will ya? ’Cause the drive to rip you limb from limb is growing stronger with each passing second.”
“Well, doing that would be a tad bit easier if you’d quit fighting me every time I try to go for the knife. Adorjan.”
“Gesundheit.”
“That’s my name, asshole, not a damn sneeze,” Adorjan replied right before headbutting Jayden so hard the sound bounced off the walls. It wasn’t enough to knock him out completely, but it put him in enough of a daze to complete his task. “And we descended from Hungary, not Germany.”
Adorjan visibly shook off his own dizziness and hurriedly grabbed the blade from Jaydon’s hand. Without the slightest bit of hesitation, he lifted the blade and brought it back down hard and fast, whacking off Jayden’s hand a few inches above the wrist in one fell swoop.
As Jayden began to buck against the floor uncontrollably, Adorjan leapt up from him and scrambled back more than a few steps, apparently not wanting to be too close for whatever was about to happen next. Since Jayden felt like he was about to explode, he imagined he probably looked like it too.
And that was exactly what Jayden did, just not in the way Adorjan had anticipated. One thing demons did not do when they were summoned was show their true self. There was no need to show their temporary master just how powerful they truly were. Jayden was finally free to be himself. More importantly, he was free of the Wicked Bitch of the East. He bucked against the floor as the power from his own rage at being forced to work against the female placed on this
