The Hunters Series

by Shiloh Walker

  Her fingers pressed against his head and she whimpered, straining against him, squirming against him. Only when she was panting and losing all ability to think, did Declan shove the urge to mate aside. Her safety first, that was what mattered.

  He pulled back and met her eyes levelly. “I know it’s not the best of times for you right now. We need answers, and we need you to be someplace safe. But we’re needing to talk about this. I don’t think I can let you go.”

  Her eyes dropped, a slow burn starting inside her heart. Curling her fingers around his healing wrist, she pressed a kiss to the scars that were already fading. “I can’t think about that right now,” she said honestly. “But I really can’t see me leaving either.”

  She kissed him softly and wrapped her arms around his neck, twisting awkwardly in the seat to press her body to his. She felt a soft caress of her hair as he sighed into the tumbled brown ringlets, squeezing her tightly before releasing her. “Come. Let’s go find some answers,” he murmured, setting the car in motion.

  “How are you feeling?” It was past midnight, nearly three hours had passed and they were well into the mountains of West Virginia, traveling down the interstate under the light of the quarter moon that hung in the sky.

  Declan had driven like a bat out of hell, covering hundreds of miles in only a few hours.

  The wonders of being a cop, she mused. If he had been pulled over, just flashing his badge would get him out of it. It wouldn’t have been the first time she had seen it.

  Then she frowned, and concentrated on his question. He wasn’t asking in general, she knew. “Hungry,” she finally answered, her pale cheeks going scarlet.

  She wondered if he could tell in the darkness of the car, touching one hot cheek with the tips of her fingers. Most likely. She could tell a change in her own scent and after the explicit explanation of how well he could smell…Well,

  She wasn’t going to be able to hide things from her wolf.

  My wolf, she mused. I kinda like the sound of that.

  “Most vamps, when they are newly turned, go slightly mad with hunger at first,” Declan said quietly, his voice grim. “Something kept you from that, probably you filling your body with regular food which interfered with the purging process. I am thinking that you somehow changed your metabolism and kept the change from completing.”

  “Slightly mad from hunger?”

  “Hmm. They can’t control the thirst for blood, you see,” he told her, flicking a brief glance her way. “It’s aggravated because the purging process and the change going on inside drains the body of resources it really doesn’t have to spare. So when a newly turned vamp wakes, it’s not too far from starvation anyway. All it wants to do is feed.

  “You changed your body’s metabolism, is what I’m thinking. But, you still have those needs.” Tori watched as he sighed in frustration. “We’re going to have to get you a heavy feeding, Tori. I can lose more blood than a human without suffering, but I’ve heard of newly turned vamps that can drain a person a night for close to a month before the urges can be controlled. Older vampires can’t even ingest that much blood, but new vamps almost need it. We have to get you fed.”

  “And how am I supposed to do this?” she asked miserably. She couldn’t feed off a person. She couldn’t.

  “I imagine Eli will have a solution,” he said, laying his hand on her thigh. “One of his people will be more than happy to donate some blood. That will help until we find a more permanent solution.

  “Such as?”

  He shrugged.

  “You’ve got an idea about what can do that,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “I can tell.”

  He sighed in the darkness, flexing his hands around the steering wheel while he stared hard at the road. “Some people deserve death, Tori,” he said.

  “What are you saying?” she asked softly, drawing her knees to her chest and staring miserably out the window.

  “We’ll get to that later,” he said obscurely, taking an exit and following a road that led high into the mountains.

  “I’d rather get to it now,” she said flatly.

  “Later. We’re getting close.”

  Whatever Tori had been expecting, it hadn’t been this, the towering wooden construction that perched on the face of a cliff, overlooking one of the deep valleys. Right now, the many windows sparkled under the silvery moon, reflecting the white light back at them as Tori climbed from the car. In the day, it would nearly flame from all the sunlight that would pour through it.

  “Ah, isn’t that a little…open?” she asked, wondering how the vampire inside managed to keep away from the sunlight in such a house.

  “Eli likes keeping his people happy,” was all Declan said as he led her to the door. He had been waved through the gate nearly a hundred yards back and Tori was fairly certain she heard other people out there.

  “His people,” she repeated. There were other buildings. Several smaller average sized houses, like guesthouses, scattered here and there. She could smell chlorine and suspected a pool was somewhere close as well.

  And life.

  She could smell the hot rich scent of life beyond those doors and a fine sweat broke out on her skin.

  After the way Declan had spoken, she had expected somebody other than the mysterious Eli to answer the door. But she knew the minute it opened, this was the vampire.

  She sensed great age, a bone deep weariness, and her head was spinning from all the emotions she was picking up on. Hunger, thirst, loneliness, chaotic flashes of painful, intense sex and years that stretched out in front of her forever, empty long years.

  Staring into Eli’s eyes, eyes that were the color of old gold, she didn’t realize she was gasping for breath until Declan’s hands landed on her shoulders and he shook her.

  His mouth was moving and she could hear his voice over a great distance but she couldn’t understand his words.

  This confusion.

  The brutal flood of emotions and thoughts and needs that weren’t her own.

  And an urging.

  An urging to break open a vein and feed it to this man in front of her while he fed her.

  “Stop it, Eli! I brought her here for you to help her, not enslave her,” Declan growled as Tori fell away from his hands, her face white and her eyes going glassy while she stared at Eli.

  Softly, Eli replied, “If she is strong enough, she won’t be enslaved.”

  “She’s only just turned, damn it, it’s not a fair fight,” Declan snapped, struggling to leash the rage inside of him. Why hadn’t he known Eli would try this? After all, he was one of the few Masters, and he guarded his people and his territory ferociously.

  “You can’t interfere, wolf. If you do, it won’t hold well for her. She has to find her own strength.” He continued to stare at the woman who was still fighting him. He intensified the strength of the mental command, waiting for her to fall to her knees and offer up her blood.

  “She is mine,” Declan rasped, his hands flexing, his skin starting to burn and itch.

  Turning his head, Eli smiled, his fangs glinting in the moonlight. “Really? Then she shouldn’t have any trouble resisting the call of another Master,” he said.

  “I’m not her Master,” Declan said, his voice dropping and roughening. His jaws were starting to ache and he fought to pummel his rage into submission.

  “I’m her lover and if you think I’ll let you take her, you’re wrong. I’ll behead you with my bare hands.”

  “All she has to do is throw it off. Any full-fledged vamp of strength can do it.”

  “She can’t. Damn it, she’s never fully fed and she’s different—”

  A low cry tore from Tori, followed by a shriek of rage as she threw Eli’s compulsion off, her soft, mellow blue eyes glowing electric in the night, while she stared at the man in front of her. “Get out of my head,” she ordered softly, her voice trembling with strain.

  “Hmm. What a fighter you’ve found, Declan. Young, strong, a
nd—”

  Fast.

  Declan never saw her move. And apparently neither did Eli, for he flew back into the solid oak door, blood oozing from his mouth, his eyes wide and glowing with power. And shock.

  Tori was standing only a few feet in front of him, massaging her knuckles. Her knuckles were torn and bleeding, and her breath was sawing in and out of her lungs.

  Eli stared at her, his eyes glittering with shock and rage.

  Declan tensed and prepared to spring, but Eli straightened slowly, staring at Tori with confused eyes. “Never fully fed?” Eli repeated, running his tongue along the inside of his cheek and lip, tasting the blood. It wasn’t the pain really, though it hurt like bloody hell. It was the surprise.

  A newly turned vamp, even one of considerable strength, would never have been able to strike him. Even when he clamped it down, the compulsion a Master radiated kept the other, weaker vamps around him in a state of submission. It was that compulsion that gave a Master power over his people, what allowed him to rule, to keep the others under his control.

  How could a newly turned vamp, who—according to Declan—had never fully fed, strike him?

  He caught the scent of something in the air and his eyes narrowed. Before Declan realized it, Eli had moved and was seizing Tori’s hand, staring at the blood and smelling it.

  “Do you mind?” Tori snapped, trying to jerk her hand away. She couldn’t. Eli might as well have been made of steel. He held her bleeding hand in an unbreakable, strong grip.

  “I smell vampire,” he whispered roughly, his fangs, protruding slightly from his anticipation of battle, slid even further out as lust and hunger started to pump through him. “But I also smell woman, human woman, sex, and wolf. If you are vampire, why do I still smell woman?”

  “I am a woman?” Tori offered, relief coursing through her when Declan aligned himself at her back, wrapping one arm protectively, possessively around her waist and staring at Eli with eyes that shifted and swirled and glowed.

  “Not human woman, at least you shouldn’t be,” Eli whispered. He lifted her stiff hand to his lips and licked at the trickling blood, rolling it on his tongue and swallowing, a shudder of ecstasy coursing through him. “God, what a taste.”

  Reluctantly, he released her hand and stared at Declan, his eyes impassive again. “It is our way, Declan. A Master will always exert his will over any vampire who enters his ground. If I hadn’t, my own people would have wondered why. But I am sorry that I caused her distress. It was most unfair, and too much to ask of one not yet at full strength.”

  Tori watched in confusion as the other man’s face went cold and impassive. “The next time you try to control her, I will kill you,” Declan promised. “Friend you may be, and we have spilled blood together time after time. But this woman holds my heart.”

  Eli was handsome, almost poetically so, with wavy golden hair he kept secured in a queue at his neck, and those eyes that looked like golden coins. Tori could still feel the subtle call that he silently, and probably unconsciously, exuded.

  But she didn’t feel him inside her head any more.

  Not him, nor the other vampires he called his. It had been their emotions she had sensed. The link Eli had tried to force on her had gone both ways without him even realizing it, and it had given her a brief insight into the troubled, lonely mind of the Master who stood before her.

  Enough of an insight for her to figure out a few things…things Declan probably didn’t know.

  She shouldn’t have been able to resist Eli. It was near impossible for any newly turned vamp without a master to resist the call of a true Master.

  Flicking her eyes to the window, she listened with half an ear as Declan tersely explained what had happened. Tori wasn’t certain she wanted to speak to Eli again. Wasn’t certain she wanted to risk another glimpse into his rather tortured mind.

  “You fed?”

  Turning her head, she blinked slowly, forcing the cobwebs from her mind. She was so fucking tired, and weak.

  Incredulously, the golden vamp repeated, “You fed? You ate food?”

  She nodded.

  “Bloody hell, that isn’t really possible,” he told her, staring from Declan to her and back again. Something akin to jealousy appeared briefly in his eyes.

  Good.

  “Tell that to my stomach. I ate pancakes for breakfast,” she told him with a smirk. Her eyes narrowed as something else slid through her mind and she stared into his eyes… “And I ate some strawberries.”

  Eli’s eyes went to slits and his lower lip poked out just the slightest bit…my my my…the Master Vampire pouting over strawberries. Tori snickered.

  “Tori,” Declan whispered warningly.

  Eli had been the dominant creature in his world for too long, and his tolerance for sarcasm was thin. But Eli only asked, “Blood? When was the first time you took blood?”

  “Night before last,” they both responded, meeting each other’s eyes. Heat rolled through Tori again, chasing a little more of the fatigue away.

  “Yours, Declan?” Eli asked sardonically, rubbing his jaw with the tips of his fingers. When the wolf nodded, Eli laughed. “No wonder she is so bloody fast, her first meal being a shape-shifter.”

  “What does that matter?” she asked, flicking Declan a glance. But he only raised his hands and shrugged.

  “A vamp, particularly a strong one, can take something of his first meal into himself. Memories, abilities. When we first change, we are like a clean slate, or a sponge. And whatever we take first is one of the things that will determine how strong we are as vamps. That is why many vamps provide the first feeding for those they sire, either their own blood, or the blood of one the vamp sought out. That way, they can start the newly turned out the way they want. And you were her first meal,” Eli finished.

  Rising from where he had been sprawling on a large leather chair, he circled around Tori, an odd little smile playing at his lips. “The strength of a vampire, the thoughts and morals of a human, the speed and sexual appetite of the shifters and the vamps—my, my, my, what an odd little package you make,” he mused, his low voice still carrying a faint trace of his native England. “I wonder what your strengths will be, your weaknesses.”

  “She can take the morning sun.”

  Eli’s disconcerting study broke as he turned to stare at Declan. The Irishman stood just a few feet away, watching over Tori. “Impossible,” Eli said, shaking his head.

  “She can take it. And she stood in the light of a new dawn with a smile on her lovely face. Impossible? You can stay awake longer, my friend. Just watch and see,” Declan offered.

  “A few seconds is one thing, and maybe not so surprising, considering she somehow stopped the transformation before it could complete,” Eli said, still shaking his head. “But there is no way she could possibly tolerate—”

  His voice broke off and he moved until he stood toe to toe with the wolf, glaring up at the taller man. “You swear?”

  “I am no liar,” Declan said softly. “Why should I lie? I stood there, ready to pull her away if it started to burn her. She held her face up to the sun, and I watched.”

  “And rejoiced, I imagine,” Eli said almost soundlessly. He turned and studied Tori with a new light in his eyes. “A vampire who can withstand the sun and take sustenance from something other than a blood vessel. I had thought such things were legend.”

  “So you have heard of such things,” Declan said. “Tell us.”

  Tori froze under the weight of the golden eyes that landed on her. “‘Tell us,’” he repeated, mocking Declan lightly, even throwing a bit of Ireland into his English voice. “Is it ‘us’ to you as well, Tori?”

  “What can you tell me?”

  “Only that the ferals will fear you even more than our wolf friend. Even more than they fear me, if what I have heard is fact, and not just myth.”

  “What have you heard?” she asked, her voice shaking.

  But before he could answer
, something seized her—black, evil, spiraling darkness that swarmed through her and blanketed her entire mind. She fell to the floor screaming, her hands to her head.

  She bit down on her tongue and tasted blood and then everything went dark.

  “He’s calling her,” Declan snarled, when she shot up off the floor as quickly as she fell, leaping for the glass window. He pounced and took her to the floor, pinning her struggling body.

  Eli’s eyes were wide and his head thrown back. He could sense something. “I know him,” he whispered gutturally.

  “Help me,” Declan said when she started to convulse underneath him.

  He held her wildly struggling body, pinning her hips with his, holding her legs with his, but she was strong. Entirely too strong.

  Eli’s strength joined his and they rolled to their sides, keeping her body pinioned between them. “If she cannot fight this, he will kill her for not coming to him,” Eli grunted, locking his arms with Declan’s, grinding her more tightly between them. “He will see this as disobedience. He will not see this as her not being able to come because we are stopping her. He will see it as disobedience, and he will kill her.”

  Blood was starting to pour from her eyes and nose and mouth. “Fuck,” Declan rasped, lifting murderous eyes to Eli’s. Over her twitching shoulder, he shouted, “What is he doing?”

  “Something only her sire could do. He gave her this life. If she is weak enough, he can end it,” Eli said through clenched teeth. “Bloody hell, she is strong.”

  “Can you stop him?”

  Eli closed his eyes and said, “I can try. But if it goes badly, you may wish I hadn’t.”

  “Stop him,” Declan snarled.