The Hunters Series

by Shiloh Walker

  “Silver can hurt them. Wood cannot, unless it totally destroys the heart, not just pierces it. Destroying the heart will kill. Taking their heads will kill them. Fire will kill.”

  “You may not be able to kill him now. You may want to die later. But you will live. And then you can become strong enough.”

  “I’ve lost it,” Tori whispered, settling into the chair, gun in hand, making herself as small as possible while trying to block the voice in her mind.

  “Use the gun. It hurt him before. Shoot his head, his heart, his throat, where the big arteries are. Bleed him. Fight him.”

  “Damn right I’ll fight,” she hissed, unaware she had started to rock. “I’m not ready to die.”

  A soft, sad sigh seemed to shimmer in the air. “You’re going to.”

  And then the door flew open.

  Tori started firing the second she saw those eerie blue eyes. Even when he took her body down, she continued to fire. Shooting with one hand until the gun was empty, while she clawed and struggled and kicked.

  She hadn’t tried to run. She needed to be here.

  Here.

  Here…

  He tore into her throat and it hurt. Agony ripped through her as he started to feast.

  He tore away from her almost the second he swallowed, bellowing.

  He shot to his feet and kicked her in the side.

  “What did you do?” he shrieked, his voice gone hoarse.

  She lay there, bleeding from the wound in her throat, her blood seeping out on the floor. Picking her up, he hurled her across the room. Already near death, it didn’t even hurt, though her blood sprayed everywhere.

  All around, furniture flew and crashed, while the man, no, while the vampire bled slowly from half a dozen different wounds. Dark fog started to cloud her mind but she dragged her eyes open, unable to stop watching him.

  And eventually, he stopped. Came to kneel beside her. “I cannot have you die too quickly, stupid bitch,” he whispered, stroking her hair almost tenderly. “You hurt me, you know. How did you know to do that? Turning your blood into poison in such a way? All the acid in it burned my throat. You need to suffer more than just a quick bloody death.” He mewled softly. “All that lovely blood wasted.”

  He used his teeth to open a vein in his wrist, held it to her mouth with an iron grasp when she tried to turn her head. “You’ll suffer now. A newly turned vamp doesn’t do too well alone. Some die even with a Master to guide and protect them. You will be alone. You’ll suffer, and starve, and thirst, and die painfully,” he crooned after she had swallowed the thick, bitter tasting blood.

  Tori remembered nothing beyond that—nothing beyond trying to make herself vomit it back up.

  She came to and stared around her. Lying on the floor in the middle of her destroyed office, she tried to remember what had happened. Why she lay in a pool of dried blood, why she was holding her gun. Why she hurt, oh, she hurt.

  There was a deep, throbbing, burning pain low in her belly. With every slow beat of her heart, the pain worked its way up until it was in her head as well. By the time she was able to force herself onto her hands and knees the burning, tearing agony was eating into her brain, trying to force its way outside through her skull.

  Pain stiffened her neck, making it difficult to move it, and inside her body hurt. It seemed as though her very veins and arteries burned.

  She couldn’t think clearly. Couldn’t remember.

  But that voice. She remembered it.

  Eat.

  Hide.

  Eat.

  Hide.

  Eat.

  Hide.

  She ate a steak. Raw. She ate half a bag of potatoes. Chocolate cake. A bag of stale Cheetos. Anything she could get her hands on, she ate, even though every bite made her want to vomit. Even though she had to force herself to swallow instead of gag.

  The food rebelled in her belly.

  Her blood seemed to boil and burn in her veins as she crept away from the office late that night, slinking in the shadows, keeping away from the roads. She walked and walked and walked until she came to a tiny little shack nearly fifteen miles from her office.

  Her father’s little fishing shack, perched on the banks of the Ohio. She hid there, in the tiny little cellar underneath the house. She hid there and cried and ached and burned.

  Chapter Two

  Declan Reilly was trying desperately to get drunk.

  He’d been brooding in front of the fire, drinking steadily from the bottle of good Irish whiskey, while he stared into the dancing flames. He wasn’t getting drunk quickly enough. It was hard for him to get drunk anyway, as evidenced by the two bottles he’d already put away, but he was putting up the good fight and trying his hardest.

  Tori was gone.

  Dead.

  Tori McAdams, the sexy P.I. he had been trying to get close to for months. Everything about her drove him insane, from her tightly curled, long chestnut- brown hair to her big blue eyes. From her high rounded breasts and slim waist to her full hips and curvy ass, to the way she smelled like peaches and sex. But most of all, that stubborn, feisty spirit, and that soft heart she tried so hard to hide.

  She was gone.

  His eyes seemed to burn as his head fell back and he tried to block the images from his mind. Her neat, spartan little office had been destroyed, splattered with blood, human and not. He knew the scent. It had been faint and decaying, but he knew the scent. The blood of a vampire was hard to mistake, once you knew it.

  There had been a good deal of it.

  But even more of Tori’s. Oh, God. Tori.

  His hands clenched and the glass tumbler in his hand shattered. He closed his fist over the shards of glass buried in his hand, welcoming the pain.

  He had failed her.

  She had called, finally. She had called him, had needed him.

  And he hadn’t been here.

  A weak, scrambling sound tickled his ears.

  He almost ignored it, too caught up in his own grief.

  But he got up, blood trickling down his fingers to fall on the floor as he walked to the front door and opened it.

  She almost fell at his feet.

  Declan stumbled and caught the lean brunette who tumbled into his arms, out of the pouring rain, dead-white and half unconscious.

  It was Tori, who had been missing for a good week, and presumed dead after police discovered her office in a bloody mess, literally, blood and gore staining the walls, furniture smashed, filing cabinets overturned.

  He hadn’t been in town last weekend. And he had cursed himself. If he had been around, he would have found her, maybe before it was too late. He would have been with her when it happened, and he could have stopped it. And he had suffered through night after sleepless night, suffered through a rage more terrible than any he had ever known.

  Tori, who had a left a terse, “Call me,” on his work voicemail the night she was last seen by anybody. Followed by another, more urgent message on his personal cell phone: This is Tori. As soon as you get this, call me. Declan, I need you.

  He had started lusting for flesh and blood, to find that bastard who had done this, and rip his guts out.

  But by the time he had gotten back to town and been informed of what had happened, it was too late. The trail nearly cold, and all the clues he could have used were demolished under the heels of his fellow officers.

  But she was here now.

  It was Tori, who had rebuffed him in every way imaginable. And now she was on his doorstep, lying listless in his arms. Listless, pale and still. Humans had more movement than that, made more sounds.

  Sharp hearing detected something.

  Or rather, a lack of something.

  Declan hissed, his eyes narrowing as he carried her to the couch and jerked her shirt open. Laying his head on her chest between her breasts, he listened.

  Lub-dub.

  Thirty seconds passed before he heard it again.

  Lub-dub.

 
; He leaned over, pushed her wet ringlets away from her neck.

  Lub-dub.

  He took a deep breath, forced himself to open his eyes and saw it.

  The ragged wound, gaping and huge when fresh, now mostly healed, remnants of bruising. She had fought.

  Had she been drained?

  Or changed?

  Draining was generally slow business. One vamp alone wasn’t likely to have drained her to the point of killing her in one feeding. A new vamp could drain a person, fairly easily, because they were so starved, so hungry when the change first came.

  Had she been attacked by a newly turned vamp? If so, that would make finding him a little easier.

  It was possible, though, that two or three different vamps had done this. Or perhaps one vampire, feeding from her over a period of time. Yeah, that would do it. The messy bite at her neck could have very well been made at separate times, separate feedings. Maybe two bites, not one.

  But if she had been bled so much as to put her in this condition, she wouldn’t have been able to stumble to his door.

  Changing usually took place over a period of time as well, the blood exchange taking place when the victim was near death, running so low on blood it gave a whole new twist on the term anemia.

  His nostrils flared and he scented it along her skin now. The subtle musk of vampire. Nausea and rage roiled in his gut. Throwing his head back, he drew air into his lungs and forced it out through his nose until the blinding rage cleared a bit.

  Then he lowered his head, and crouched back over her.

  The clothes she wore were filthy. They were covered in blood and dirt and grime, but, with the exception of missing buttons on her shirt, relatively intact. Under her nails were tiny bits of flesh and blood—none of it her own. He blew a breath out between his teeth and tentatively reached for the zipper of her jeans. The heavy black cloth parted, revealing her ivory smooth skin, and lower, a small thatch of dark curls.

  No blood there. No signs of bruising.

  Then she probably hadn’t been raped prior to being bitten, which happened, unfortunately, all too often. Most of the feral vamps he had known would have fed during the rape, or before.

  Not after. It takes the fun out of it when your food lay there listless and broken. Ferals liked their sex painful and rough and bloody. Of course, he had killed a good many of the ferals he had known, so he had an extensive knowledge of them.

  Not that all of the vamps were evil. A good number of them were decent people, like Tori had been. But the changing warped them, all too often, robbing them of what they needed to live happily. Some of them continued to live, unhappily. A few went on to live with some semblance of happiness.

  Others ended their lives.

  Others, while unhappy, were filled with a sense of purpose.

  Suddenly her eyes flew open and her hands latched onto his shirt while she stared up at him wildly. She started to scream and he touched her cheek.

  “Tori,” he said quietly. “It’s me…it’s Declan. You’re safe.”

  Would she remember him? Would she remember herself?

  For a long moment, blue eyes stared into his and then she shuddered. Lashes swept down, shielding her eyes. “Declan.” Her fingers curled, clutched at his shirt for a brief second before she fell limply back on the couch. “Declan…I found you. I found you, didn’t I?”

  “Yes…yes, you did.”

  She was weak, very weak.

  “I found you.” Her lids fluttered closed, only to fly back open as she stared up at him, her mouth all but bloodless, terror turning her eyes nearly black. “He…bit me. He bit—”

  Her eyes rolled back and her head started to jerk, her body convulsing.

  “Bugger,” he muttered, rolling her onto her side, uncertain what else to do. Well, what he wanted to do was panic, but that didn’t seem to be the answer. What was this?

  The convulsions lasted for long, tense moments and then blood started to trickle from her mouth. A moment later, he recognized a telltale bulge from behind her lips. Her mouth was open and he could see it as it happened, as her fangs began to emerge.

  Her heart rate started to kick up, erratic and broken sounding. Her skin seemed to burn.

  She was dying, starving to death.

  “This isn’t right,” he muttered, fear turning his heart into a stone.

  She had been turned a good week, if Declan had figured right, and her fangs were just now coming? That’s what he was seeing—he’d seen it enough times to know, too.

  If her fangs were just now emerging, she hadn’t fed. No wonder she was starving.

  He wondered if she knew how to feed.

  Her eyes closed and her head went limp, rolling toward him. He hissed and fell back. Her fangs had cut through. Pearly sharp canines on top and bottom, canines that she would learn to retract somewhat and hide.

  If she lived long enough. She was sliding into an exhausted sleep, and at the rate she was going, if she didn’t feed soon, it would get worse. Of course, she was probably going to snap at some point along the way and try to feed, but she was so weak now, she might not have the strength to feed from an angry poodle.

  Declan sighed, his head falling forward. Long, shaggy, blond hair fell into his eyes as he tried to convince himself he was debating what the proper course of action was to be. But he was just trying to delay the inevitable.

  He had been dying for a taste of her for months.

  And now she was going to get a taste of him.

  He grimaced wryly as he realized he was about to become a vamp’s first meal. Lifting his wrist to his mouth, he used his own fairly sharp canines to rip his flesh before he held the bleeding wound to her mouth.

  Tori was mostly unconscious and for a moment, she did nothing but lay there as his blood flowed into her mouth, down her throat. Then she gagged, choked. Swallowed. It happened again, and again. Long seconds passed before she did little else than gag and sputter and then Declan felt the sharp pain of her incisors cutting into his skin, felt her hands come up to hold his wrist greedily against her mouth. Her tongue lashed out, caressing his flesh. Her mouth felt like silk, hot wet silk, as she fed.

  He knew the minute the monster inside her started to emerge. It called to the one inside of him, the animal that was part of him. His skin grew tight and itchy, his jaws started to ache.

  If he’d have allowed it, in moments, the skin along his spine would have started to ripple, then pulse. Then his hair would have begun to thicken, and after that, the bones would have started to lengthen and shift before his change.

  Declan forced himself to breathe slowly, steadily, forcing his body and mind into a light state of meditation as the ache spread to his shoulders, down his back.

  Breathing slowly and evenly, he focused on Tori’s pale, still face.

  Can’t change…

  You have the control.

  Wouldn’t change.

  You have the power.

  And he did. Declan was power, a primal, powerful force that walked around in human skin.

  Well, human skin most of the time.

  Slowly, the urge and the animal inside him faded and he opened eyes that gleamed only slightly in the dim room, to stare into Tori’s lovely alabaster face, once more alive and mobile.

  Well, maybe alive wasn’t such a good word. And her lovely, sapphire blue eyes were empty still, full of nothing but monster and hunger and greed.

  “Let go now, Tori,” he said softly, tapping her cheek with his free hand.

  A low, sexy growl emerged from her throat. And her fangs slid a little deeper into his flesh. He blinked once, slowly, at that tiny, exquisite little pain.

  “Let. Go.” She’d drain him dry, if he let her. The bastard who did this had known damn good and well what he had done.

  A new vampire was like a loaded gun—the potential for harm was huge. If she learned control, there was little chance for harm. But if she wasn’t trained…she could be deadly.

  Of course,
a shifter had a better chance than the average human. With a wrench, he tore his wrist from her and got to his feet quickly, moving a pace or two away, out of reach of her seeking hands, and grabbed a discarded shirt. Tearing a strip of fabric from it, he tied a makeshift bandage around his wrist and watched her. She still reached for him, and started to slither in his direction.

  “Tori.”

  Her eyes were glowing brightly; swirling pools of lust and hunger and need. He felt his own hunger rising, felt his cock hardening, felt the urge to mate, wildly, mindlessly, with her. Mate while she fed from him, and he fed off of her, until they simply couldn’t do it anymore. Kinda made the idea of fucking to death sound rather appealing.

  “Tori McAdams.”

  Those slumberous, heavy lidded eyes blinked and her head cocked.

  “Tori!”

  Her lids fluttered shut, then she shot to her feet, pressed her hands to her temples and started to scream.

  Oh, God. Baby, what did he do? Declan thought helplessly, his feet moving in her direction, even though he knew it wasn’t really safe. Not yet. Then the screaming stopped.

  “What did he do to me?” she rasped out, touching her fingers to her mouth and gathering the drying blood. Staring at the red stain on her fingers, she keened, a low helpless sound.

  “I’m sorry, Tori,” Declan whispered.

  “Sorry?”

  “Sorry?”

  “What the hell has happened to me?” she shouted, her hands clenched into tight fists.

  “You’ve been bitten,” he said softly.

  Did she remember?

  By the growing horror and disbelief in her eyes, most likely yes, she did remember.

  “That man…” her voice trailed off and she swallowed, a loud audible sound in the silence of the room. “He was strong. Too strong. And his…he had…his eyes—” Her voice trailed off and she fell silent for long seconds. “His eyes glowed. Almost red. He was going to hurt me. And, at first, I wanted it. I wanted it.” Her voice fell to a low, awful rasp as she repeated, “I wanted it.”

  So he had lulled her. A master, then.

  This one had beguiled her.

  “Tori, you did nothing wrong. He made you want it, hypnotism, if you will.”