Page 2 of Huntress Unleashed
She entered the house and saw that the short hallway was clear. She carefully closed the door to the garage. A laundry room was off to the left, the door open to it, and then the hall opened to another hallway. The voices were off to the right. Before she could make a move to eliminate Moulson, a knock at the front door made her heart skip a bit.
Now what? Please be a pizza delivery, not another vampire. She never knew how blood bonds would react either. They usually left the fight to the vampires and the hunters, but sometimes they were so loyal—or brainwashed, they would fight on the vampire’s behalf.
She ducked into the laundry room off the short hall as she heard footfalls—one person—heading for the door. She so wanted to peek to see who it was—Moulson or one of the blood bonds—but she was afraid she would be caught at it.
Still, if the person at the door was another vampire, she could be in trouble. One could be hard enough to take down on her own.
She made the decision, good or bad, and checked to see who it was. It was Moulson. But she couldn’t trust that the person at the door was someone like an innocuous delivery guy and not a vampire. She quickly moved to take Moulson out, praying that the blood bonds wouldn’t come to his aid. She couldn’t look and see how they were reacting, but at least they were quiet and didn’t alert the vampire. Maybe they didn’t really want to be his blood bonds after all.
Moulson whipped around when he spied her move in behind him. It was too much to ask for that she could just swing her sword and take his head. She tried, but he leapt at her with a vampire’s flying leap and hit her with such an impact that he knocked her flat on her back on the marble tile floor. Not a good position to be in for a hunter who was fighting a powerful vampire. She couldn’t use her sword in such close quarters and instead, she yanked a dagger out of its sheath and cut into his chest. But she didn’t reach the vampire’s heart. Damn it.
He screamed in pain and anger. “Open the front door,” Moulson said to the humans, but neither moved from wherever they stood, maybe afraid if she killed the vampire, she would take them out next.
When Moulson turned his head to growl at the humans again to make them do his bidding, he made a fatal mistake. She stabbed the vampire in the heart, and he looked shocked right before he disintegrated on top of her. An ancient vampire, arrogantly believing the huntress he’d taken down was done for the count.
Then the front door burst open and a man—who looked like Moulson—saw Jacqueline getting off the floor, throwing aside Moulson’s clothed, wizened body. He appeared aghast. Oh, no. This man looked like Moulson’s twin brother. Even though she didn’t know he had one. And she hadn’t been hired to kill him, though if he attacked her, she had every right to defend herself because she had been in the right where Moulson was concerned.
Like Moulson, this guy swooped in, and it appeared that he was planning on using the same maneuver, plowing her down and forcing her onto her back. But she quickly sidestepped him and being ambidextrous, she swung her sword with her right hand, cutting him in the arm, her dagger still ready in her left hand and she cut into his chest, but nothing fatal. It only made him angrier.
The two humans—appearing to think this was the time to make their escape before whoever was the victor decided their fate—dashed for the front door, still standing wide open. They stumbled over each other, trying to get around Jacqueline and the vampire, hoping to avoid the fight. But as she moved back to get her stance to thrust her sword at the vampire and strike his heart this time, they bumped into her and threw her off balance completely. It was time enough to give the vampire the advantage. He grabbed her shoulders and rammed her against the wall, then bit into her shoulder before she could stab him with her dagger.
“No…no…no…no…no.” She tried to pull free from the vampire’s vicious bite. She attempted to stab him in the heart with her dagger while he was drinking her blood, but she was losing too much blood, and she was afraid she would pass out soon.
The next thing she knew, she was on the floor, coming to, tasting blood in her mouth—his blood—and she knew that the exchange had been made. She was no longer just a huntress, but one of them. A vampire. Worse, she couldn’t kill the one who made her no matter how much she wanted to. And then he smirked at her and vanished.
1
A week later
In the pouring rain, Jacqueline Anderson stalked across the cracked asphalt parking lot to a red brick building where Hunters turned by Vampires Group Therapy was meeting in Dallas, Texas—not that she wanted to go to it at all. No other vehicles were there yet, and she was hoping no one was coming. She had a list of five rogue vampires to eliminate, and she felt this was a total waste of time.
The brick building looked like it had seen better days, the asphalt shingle roof sagging, moss and ivy growing all over the red brick walls, the door needing to be sanded and revarnished. Inside, one of the rooms was serving as the meeting place for the therapy group. She wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her parents and brother forcing her to do this. They were hunters still and they believed after she was bitten and turned, she was living on the edge—taking risks she could ill afford, going after rogues without a hunter partner to back her up, working all hours of the day and night and not taking time to rest. She was a ticking timebomb some hunters said. Rogue vampires had given her the tag that she was the huntress unleashed. Which truthfully, she didn’t mind at all. Though it could make her more of a rogue vampire target.
She considered the look of the building again. She’d learned Anne Struthers had purchased it after she was turned a month ago—the building standing idle after the ring of rogue vampires who had owned it had been terminated thirty years ago and no one had wanted to own the building since, some saying it was cursed.
Jacqueline didn’t believe in curses or ghosts, like she suspected Anne didn’t, and opened the door and headed inside, brushing wet strands of hair off her cheek. She headed down the hall past empty rooms. She stepped into room five and observed the mostly bare walls, a clock hanging on one, but only shadows remained where framed pictures had been removed. Plastic chairs had been hastily thrown together in a circle, so it appeared. It looked like a place for members of an Alcoholic Anonymous group to meet, except that this was a meeting place—first meeting ever for a group of hunters who hunted rogue vampires down for the murderous killing of innocents or turning innocents into vampires so they would be at their beck and call. But these hunters had been turned by such rogue vampires and were now considered hunters turned.
Jacqueline smelled stale coffee, nothing freshly brewing in the coffee pot on a table against one wall. It looked like it had seen better days—grimy, a can of coffee, and a half-crushed box of filters sitting next to it. At least the coffee can wasn’t rusty.
She pulled off her rain jacket on the bleak March day where the sunlight hadn’t shown in four days and wind and rain had sent the temperatures dropping. She wondered what the vampires had used this building for before they were terminated, and the place fell into disrepair.
And where everyone was! She had to be early—always. She glanced at the clock, and it said she was two hours late. She glanced at her watch and sighed. The clock on the wall was wrong. Naturally. She hung her rain jacket on the back of one of the chairs and then did stretches in the form of sword practice.
She heard the main door shut that she’d walked through a little earlier and stiffened. She really didn’t want to be here, exposing her feelings to a bunch of strangers. But they would be like her, wouldn’t they? Their worlds turned upside down because they had viciously been attacked by a rogue vampire and turned.
She listened to the footfalls of the person walking down the hall, like a good hunter always did—on edge, watching for someone to initiate an attack. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. If they ended up with hunter turned vampire sponsors, they better be of the same sex. Unless the hunter was gay and then they had to have a sponsor of the opposite sex. That was to keep the therapy on a professional level and for it not to turn into a sexual relationship. At least she hoped it was like AA meetings in that regard.
Not that she’d attended them for herself, but she’d had a human friend who’d needed them for her own sobriety and had told her what the protocol had been.
A woman walked into the room looking wetter and more haggard than Jacqueline even. She was about thirty, her curly blond hair hanging over her shoulders, wet, spots of water on her raincoat. She was wearing nice slacks, boots, and when she pulled off her coat, a sweater featuring a butterfly. “Sorry. I’m Anne Struthers. I set this group up and didn’t mean to be late. Six others are coming, but one is having trouble finding a sitter for her baby girl. One is on a job on Sixteenth Street”—which meant she or he was probably tracking a rogue vampire—“and said he would be here if he finished the job before the meeting was over. The others, I’m not sure about. I wasn’t able to get a hold of them to confirm they were coming.”
“You organized this?”
“Yeah. You know how it is for things like this. It’s all so new. We’re the first group like it in all of Texas. It might be a while before we get real active participation. I’m excited about it. Though I can see how most might feel reluctant to share their stories. At least at first. So what do you want to do? Have a one-on-one meeting between us and if others show up late, they can join in? Or should we skip it and try for next week when more can come?”
In truth, Jacqueline was ready to keep her story to herself. Most likely no one could think her story was all that traumatic. She did like Anne though. She was outgoing and organized. Jacqueline admired her for it. And she felt she owed it to Anne for setting up the meeting in the first place. Maybe Jacqueline would feel better if she spoke with someone who was like her now.
“We can have the meeting, just you and I.” Then it wouldn’t be a wasted trip out here. The five vampires that she needed to track down were on the other side of town so she wasn’t even close to where she needed to be. And she needed to do it before they learned she was the one hired to take them down. At least they were individuals, not working together in their criminal enterprises.