Page 78 of Huntress Unleashed
“I wouldn’t let him go without me,” Jacqueline said. “If they see us together, they’ll realize we’re a couple just out on the town for the night.”
“A hunter couple who is a team who hunt down rogue vampires and if any of them are in the club you go to?”
“We’ll leave in a flash.” Jacqueline smiled at Dane.
“You’re both playing with fire,” Trey said. “Besides, Jacqueline is supposed to be dead.”
“We wouldn’t do it until the rogue hunters are taken down. It’s just an idea, not that we have to do it,” Dane said.
“I would tell you to take Adonis and more of their family, if you go to a vampire club, but that might be too much of a show of force. I’ll let you go. And tell us for certain if you decide to go and we’ll try and talk you out of it,” Trey said.
“All right. Talk to you later.” Dane said.
“Are you done swimming?” she asked, watching the police chief talking about her death.
“Yeah. That was fun.”
“Did you ever consider the idea that you might be turned when you had to fight a rogue?” she asked.
“No. I always figured that if I lost a fight with a vampire, he would just kill me. It used to be that we all thought that vampires drinking a hunter’s blood would kill them. When they realized it wouldn’t, and they could actually turn a powerful hunter, some of them decided to do that, rather than just eliminate the hunter. Not only did they eliminate the hunter threat to them, but they had a minion to control.”
“But hunters can’t be controlled as well as a human, and their hunter friends will seek out the master vampire and terminate him,” she said.
“Exactly.”
The talking heads on some talk show were trying to second guess what the police were doing with regard to Jacqueline’s murder.
“The police are keeping really hush-hush about this,” the one commentator said on the TV news show. “Do you think that it’s a vampire hit? Or maybe the murderer is someone closer to home?”
“A hunter friend or family member, you mean? That happens with humans for sure, but not with hunters so much. Not that it can’t happen. Or maybe Ms. Anderson terminated a vampire and one of his or her family members wanted revenge. That has been known to happen.”
“Why don’t they wait to see what really happens with the investigation?” Jacqueline asked Dane.
He smiled at her.
“I mean, if there really was a murder. They talk these situations to death, and they don’t know anything. Just to have more TV views. And often they make conjectures that are totally off base. Sometimes that puts some innocent person under the gun and their lives are ruined.”
Dane agreed.
They showed a picture of her home with yellow security tape across the front of the house and reporters converged on the sidewalk in front of her home. “I bet my next-door neighbors are thrilled about this.”
“Are they hunters?”
“No. Just humans. The one on the right is owned by a doctor family, both family physicians. The one on the left—he’s a home developer and she’s a nurse. But look—as soon as one of them drives their vehicle out of their garage, the media is swarming them to question them about me—probably if they heard anything or saw anything.”
“Yeah, I’m glad I don’t live next door to you.”
She laughed. “Who would ever have thought! But if we have trouble, we might have to stage another murder and then your neighbors will have all the issues from that.”
“You know if that happens, it’s possible that the hunters living here might really ban together to catch the rogue hunters,” Dane said.
“That could be.”
Then someone was knocking on Dane’s door, and he grabbed his sword. “You probably should stay out of sight because your photo has been all over the news.”
“I will, but I’ll be listening in.” Then Jacqueline stayed in the kitchen where no one at the front door could see her.
He looked out the peephole and said to her telepathically, “One of my hunter neighbors.” He opened the door and said, “Hey, how are you doing, George?”