Page 82 of Huntress Unleashed

“Okay, two of us are staying here with Jacqueline and one of us is going with you, Dane,” Matt said.

“All right by me,” Dane said.

Jacqueline sighed. “I wish I could be there with you all.”

“Yeah, me too, alive and kicking. I want to get these hunters taken down so you can be yourself again.” Then Dane hugged and kissed her and said to his brothers, “Keep Jacqueline safe.” But he wondered what was going on that Anne thought that all the hunters turned were now on a hit list. He figured just the ones who had been at the hunters’ club that night were. Then he and Ryan left in Matt’s car.

* * *

Jacqueline hoped all the hunters would be all right. The thing of it was, that meeting place wasn’t that safe, she didn’t think. Then again, she assumed the hunters who would be there were good fighters.

Not long after Dane and Ryan left the house to go to the meeting, they heard a noise at a window in back of Dane’s place. “Someone’s breaking in,” Jacqueline said, her voice low. Then she grabbed her sword and vanished.

“Hell,” Matt said.

Then she was in Dane’s office, saw the window broken, but nobody inside yet. Matt and Trey came running up behind her, and she put her finger to her lips, and they all backed out, waiting for whoever it was to enter the office.

But no one tried to come in. Then another window broke, this one in the laundry room. “Laundry room,” she whispered. “One of you watch this window. I’m afraid they’re coming in from different directions.”

“They must have been watching Dane leave the house and probably think no one is here right now. Then they would ambush him when he returned,” Trey said, his voice hushed.

“Brother, you stay here and watch this window. Let us know if someone comes in. We’re going to check out the laundry room,” Matt said to Trey.

But Jacqueline wanted to get an eye on who was outside breaking the windows in the first place. She vanished and reappeared outside and was near a shed that would give her some shelter from whomever was breaking the windows. Then she saw them. All five hunters that had hassled them at the hunters’ club. They weren’t bothering to hire someone to do the job this time. She wondered how their neighborhood watch had missed seeing them. But then she saw four more hunters in addition to the five original men! All of them were dressed in black, but they weren’t wearing anything to cover their faces.

Then one of the hunters saw her and made a mad dash to fight her. “What the hell. You were supposed to be dead. Well, you will be now.”

Not this time either, if she could help it. She told Dane, “The hunters are here! I’m in the backyard by your shed fighting one of them.”

“Where the hell are my brothers?”

“In the house where the bastards broke the windows into your house. Laundry room and your office.”

Then she took on the hunter, a hefty blond-haired guy. She knew Dane would be there momentarily. But then two of the other hunters saw her fighting the one guy, and they raced toward her to kill her.

She was going to vanish because she couldn’t fight that many hunters when Matt and Trey rushed out through the back door once they realized she was outside in a fight.

But then the other hunters turned who had been at the meeting—Anne, Stacey, Dane were there, right in the middle of it. Right after that Adonis, Danai, Pasha, Michael, and Zachary joined them, swords swinging, striking metal.

No one had any time to say anything, but Zachary and Danai terminated one of the hunters while Dane and Jacqueline fought another. Adonis killed another hunter, who was not giving up for anything. Anne and Stacey worked to finish off another. Some were just not going to allow themselves to be taken prisoner. The goal really was to turn the hunters over to the League so they could deal with them but terminate them if the hunters were determined to kill the hunters turned.

Matt took out another hunter. Trey pulled out some zip ties for the hunters they’d been able to take down without killing them.

Another hunter fell, wounded, but still alive and Dane zip tied his wrists. “You’re a disgrace to our kind, Felix.”

“You are, as a vampire. You should have died rather than have been turned,” Felix said.

As if they’d had any choice, Jacqueline thought.

Four of the nine rogue hunters were dead. Two were injured, but their wounds would heal faster than a human’s would. The other three hunters finally dropped their swords and gave up, raising their hands above their heads.

Ryan showed up in his car and hurried to join them. “Hell, I missed helping out.”

Dane slapped his back. “Sorry we had to leave you behind.”

That was the great thing about moving in the vampiric way. The vampires had all arrived instantly, while poor Ryan had to drive from the meeting place to get there.

Adonis was on his phone to call Tobias, who would notify the League that they had caught all the rogue hunters. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that these men were rogues, but now the League would take care of them in their own way.