Page 1 of Huntress Unleashed
PROLOGUE
On edge after having another disagreement with Wendy, his fiancée, over finances, Dane Edmonton arrived at the popular Wilding Club, a vampire club, late that night in a Dallas, Texas suburb where Lucilla, a rogue vampire, often visited. He watched the establishment, waiting for her to leave. He was sitting in his black pickup, the rain coming down hard on the windshield as he conducted surveillance of the red brick building, disco lights flashing through the windows. Vampires and blood bonds were mostly going inside. Occasionally, a couple of people would leave the club.
The police had verified that Lucilla was killing homeless men, and as a hunter assigned to the case, it was Dane’s job to eliminate her. She was known to often have a couple of male vampires with her, but his informant, only known as Green—a blood bond that Lucilla sometimes fed off—had said she was leaving the Wilding Club—going downtown alone again tonight, just before midnight. When she went alone, it meant she was hunting prey.
The blood bond also was an informant to four other hunters—Van Olson, Moose Warner, and cousins, Flynn and Felix Freeburg—but Green swore he always shared information with Dane first, when he knew a rogue vampire needed to be taken down.
Yet, Green had seemed more nervous than usual. Maybe the vampiress had learned he was an informant, and he was afraid she would kill him. Dane could certainly understand Green’s concern.
Then Dane saw Lucilla leave the vampire club and head downtown alone in her black Nissan coupe. He knew he had his chance to eliminate her without any interference from her friends. She was evil to the core and until a hunter terminated her, she would continue to prey on the innocent.
Most vampires paid for a blood bond’s blood, a mutually acceptable arrangement between humans and vampires, but she liked to hunt for potential victims too.
Dane assumed she was going to target someone downtown where her other victims had been, and he had to stop her before she murdered anyone else. He parked his black pickup down the street from where she cut her car’s engine. She was wearing a long flowing black gown as if she was going to a formal ball, but it made him think of a large black raven, fluttering its wings when it went to kill a small mammal. In her case, a male who lived on the streets.
The police department had hired him to eliminate her, paying the usual bounty that hunters received for taking down menacing rogue vampires. Humans within the police department couldn’t successfully deal with the bad vampires, normally. Though there were some Van Helsing human hunter types who took on the missions and risked their necks in this life-or-death business. They didn’t have the superior strength that hunters and vampires had, so they were truly at a disadvantage. But they wanted the money and loved to live dangerously. More power to them, Dane figured.
Some hunters did serve as homicide detectives in some police departments. But most police departments hired hunters to do their dirty work because most hunters didn’t want to do anything but work for bounties. As homicide detectives, they would have to work other kinds of cases, not just rogue vampire-related ones.
Lucilla spoke with a woman sitting next to a grocery cart stacked full of her treasured possessions. If she attempted to kill the woman, she would be changing her MO. She had only killed men in the past. Any age, race, it didn’t matter. She didn’t discriminate, except that she didn’t target women.
Dane was following her, his sword out, keeping to the shadows, making sure she didn’t hear or see him approaching. The vampire’s hearing was as good as a hunter’s, and hunters were just as stealthy as a vampire. And they had the same kind of strength, healing up quickly from injuries suffered.
She had to know she would be on a list for termination. Unless she was so arrogant that she thought no one knew who was killing the homeless men.
Then she slipped into a dilapidated building, and he hurried after her, afraid he was going to lose her. As soon as he did, two male vampires hiding in the darkness attacked Dane. Damn, he hadn’t expected that.
Worried that he would alert Lucilla that he was after her, he swung his sword at one of the vampires, and the other cut him in the shoulder. Hell. He ignored that vampire because the one in front of him was defending himself and wasn’t as good a fighter. Dane suspected he might have been more newly turned. Dane quickly penetrated the vampire’s heart and swung around to fight the other vampire who was just trying to strike him again. Dane slammed his sword into the vampire’s sword, sweeping it away, nearly making the dark-haired vampire lose it. The vampire quickly lost his composure, his jaw dropped, his blue eyes wide. What did he think? Just because he cut the hunter once, he would win the battle?
The vampire tried to recover, but he couldn’t swing his sword around fast enough before Dane attacked and killed him with a sword to the heart. Both vampires had dropped to the ground when they were mortally wounded and remained in the same physical state as when they were alive—so they were more newly turned. Ancient vampires would turn to dust when they died.
But where was Lucilla? That’s when two more male vampires came after Dane and Lucilla made her appearance. She had blood on her mouth and Dane was certain she’d found her victim. She didn’t look surprised to see him and he figured she’d lured him here to his death. The male vampires attacked, and he was fighting from one to the other when she suddenly was behind Dane and bit him on the right side of the neck. For a moment in time, he wondered if his informant had known that this was a setup.
He expected Lucilla to drain him dry like she did with her victims, though he was trying to shake her loose, while swinging his sword at the male attackers. Yet they weren’t going in for a kill. No, they were working with Lucilla to keep him under control. He sliced at one of the vampires, cutting his arm, and he howled. His dark brown eyes turned nearly black, and he tried to cut Dane this time, even if it wasn’t what Lucilla wanted. Then to Dane’s horror, he was afraid she meant to just turn him. He was trying to fight back, his vision blurring, his strength waning when she released him and he sank to his knees, trying to rally his strength, knowing if he didn’t, he was going to die. He smelled her blood then as she bit into her arm and the males held Dane’s arms while she pressed her bloody wound against Dane’s mouth. He shook his head, trying to get away from her, knowing that if he tasted her blood, the mutual exchange would have been made.
One of the vampires reached over and pulled his chin down and Dane tasted Lucilla’s blood. “You’re here because a hunter you know made it happen and so did someone close to you.”
“Who?” He had to know which hunter would set him up. And who was close to him who would do this horrible deed. Green? His informant?
Dane was doomed. He couldn’t kill her. She had turned him. And now he was going to be a hunter turned, owing allegiance to the vampiress. He would rather have died in the battle between good and evil this night.
Worse, she wouldn’t tell him who the hunter or the other person was who had sabotaged his career, his life, and turned his world inside out.
* * *
Jacqueline Anderson had thought the mission she was going on would be easy. The vampire was known to eliminate blood bonds he had recruited after they riled him. She often didn’t know why the vampire who she was hired to eliminate went rogue or targeted some type of person. But in his case, the trigger seemed to be when the blood bond refused to do anything for Moulson, and then in his eyes, they became disposable. Once they had become one of his blood bonds, he owned them.
He often recruited blood bonds at a human club, so she’d been staking it out for nights until she finally saw him. He left the building at two in the morning, wearing black boots, a black satin shirt, and blue jeans, leading two new potential blood bonds outside on the rainy Dallas night that spring. The two men looked like they were in their mid-twenties, wearing jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts. She didn’t know when Moulson would snap and kill the blood bonds, so she didn’t want to leave him with them for any length of time and discover he’d left more victims in his wake.
He got into his van and the potential blood bonds hesitated. Not a good idea when faced with a short-fused vampire. Then they reluctantly got in.
She started her car but didn’t follow Moulson. She knew where his house was located, and he always went there after he visited a club. Before he arrived at his Spanish style estate, she was waiting curbside at a house down the street. She saw his van drive past her vehicle, a black sedan, and then he parked inside the garage. The two humans and the vampire left the van. He told them to enter the house. He was hostile, probably still annoyed because they hadn’t gotten into the van right away near the club. Anything would set him off.
These guys were already in trouble.
Jacqueline got out of her car while the three of them went into the house, the garage door still open. She rushed toward the open garage and slipped inside and hid behind the van when the door leading into the garage opened, and someone pushed the button to close the garage door.
She studied the shoes of the wearer. White sneakers. It was one of the humans. As soon as he shut the door to the house—glad it didn’t squeak—she moved quickly to that door and listened. She heard voices deeper in the house, and with her sword out, she quietly opened the door. Thankfully, it wasn’t locked though she had a lockpick she could have used too but it might have alerted the vampire that she was trying to gain entry into the house.