The Hunted

by L. A. Banks

  He looked away from Marlene, studying the sun. “I’ve accepted my fate . . . did when Tara turned. I don’t even take myself there anymore—which is why I watch the ladies dance the poles, indulge myself stupid, and numb any useless thought when I start going down memory lane.”

  “Rider, you’ve gotta stop drinking . . . and if the guys are looking for real life-mates, they won’t find them in the clubs or hoochie bars, brother.” She wasn’t scolding him. Her voice was filled with so much hurt for him and the others that it was hard to speak.

  He chuckled and kept his gaze on the horizon. “Solves a short-term male problem. But the fact that that’s getting old . . . hey. The long-term solution is very complicated. My boys and I are caught between a rock and a hard place,” he said, his chuckle hollow and waning. “Literally. And this shit is gonna go on for the next twenty-five years. Might as well tell these boys to join up with Father Pat’s Covenant. They’ve accepted their fate, too, for different reasons. But, hey, a monk is a monk.”

  She was going to walk toward him, but thought better of it. He needed space. So, instead, she spoke softly, trying to dispense hope and healing with her words. “Somebody will come along for each guardian . . . I mean . . .” Her own lack of confidence in what she was saying just made the sentence trail off. What could she say?

  “You got a vision, a bead on this, Mar? A gut hunch? Or are you just trying to make this old warrior feel better?”

  It took her too long to answer him. They both knew she wouldn’t lie straight to his face. All she could do was shake her head. “My visions have been off . . . I haven’t specifically seen . . . but that doesn’t mean—in the future, it may not have materialized yet, but—”

  “Ain’t your fault. Even you can’t conjure up what’s not out there.” He took another swig and winced. “I already found my somebody once and lost her to a vampire turn. That was it for me. Had a name I used to call, don’t want the heartbreak of losing another one. I know what the girl is going through, Mar. But Damali never even got to . . .”

  Rider took another fast sip, but his hand was shaking as he brought the flask away from his mouth.

  “I’m done. But a lotta guys in here aren’t. They still want that. And, Mar, you’ve got a whole team of young bucks about to be all screwed up like Damali is now. Me and Mike, we’re older, and can hang. We’ve crossed the line and ain’t sitting up at night thinking about a future wife and kids and shit.”

  “Oh . . . Rider . . . but, you said in Hell . . . in the battle . . . why would being there—”

  He chuckled sadly. “In all the places in the universe, where you’d least expect to see it—I’da lost that bet, if you’da told me. It’s a man thing, and Marlene, you definitely wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me,” she whispered, her voice tense with worry. “Because, Rider, I really need to know how to heal this team, if possible.”

  “You can’t fix this, Marlene. That’s what we all know, and what’s fucking up every man in here.” He began slowly pacing, raking his fingers through his hair, looking at the floor, his voice so thick with emotion that she almost couldn’t hear him.

  “All right. Here we are, Mar, strapped to the nines, standing in the middle of a battle. Shells flying, fucking demons everywhere, green gook exploding, all-out mortal combat . . . a damned master vampire in our midst, serious battle hazard close by, adrenaline kickin’ like a mo’fo, everybody in there ready to go down, knowing any of us could at any time . . . the priest’s squad is getting slaughtered, we had to do some of our own to keep them from turning, got a Neteru going through changes . . . dragging bloody wounded that’s drawing Hell sharks, almost out of ammo. Rivera had a firestorm coming his way, was hungry, exhausted, and should have used all twelve of us that were left standing to feed.” Rider looked up at her. “We were in Hell, Marlene. Right? We weren’t in Kansas, Dorothy.”

  She could only nod and stare back at him.

  “If he’d snapped our necks, tranced her out, and fed well, he would have had enough energy to transport her out of there and start a damned empire.” Rider paused, letting the silence in the kitchen envelop them. “But he didn’t, did he?”

  Rider pulled a hair out of his head fast with two fingers and thrust it toward Marlene. “The line of choice made within seconds was as thin as this,” he said, gesturing with his hand, “and could have gotten snatched in the wrong direction as fast as I just pulled this hair out of my head, Mar. And the one who had the fragile balance of choice was a damned guardian that had turned. A male vampire. Not just our Neteru. If the dude had decided differently . . .”

  Rider sucked in a shaky breath. “I done seen a lot of battle, Mar, but even for me, that was deep. In seconds he could have done us and saved himself, and took a bride.”

  “Oh . . . Shit . . .”

  “Right.” Rider flicked away the hair and crossed his arms over his chest, biceps bulging as his body tensed. He looked down at the flask he was clasping with disdain.

  “Rivera begged her to leave him, made us pull her out while she was ovulating, turned around and watched our backs—not just hers, but the whole family, just because we mattered to her. Fought on low fuel, and got fucked by whatever was coming through the tunnels. Just for her. Even if he wanted her away from the battle zone, he could have snatched one of us to feed on just to even his odds and perhaps save his own ass—but he didn’t.”

  Rider held Marlene’s gaze captive, his expression grave. “We all saw love transcend Hell, Marlene. Saw the most advanced predator in the demon food chain give up a prize that he’d battled another master for, and won . . . just so the girl could live a normal life topside. That shit right there would give any man pause . . . will make you reevaluate your entire existence. And, if you’re a believer, it’ll make you have a loooong conversation with the man upstairs about all the shit you’ve done wrong.”

  He nodded and took another swig from his flask when Marlene closed her eyes.

  “Will make you argue with Him about justice, too,” Rider said, renewed rage at the unfairness of it all keeping his voice a low rumble. “Rivera was one of ours, wasn’t supposed to turn—definitely wasn’t supposed to go out like that. And we had to leave him, just because of what he was. But judging by the way the man fought . . . yeah, he was one of ours. By rights, who knows, maybe we shoulda stayed? That’s part of what’s tumbling around in that girl’s brain, just like it’s tumbling around in all of ours, causing survivor’s guilt, too.” Rider saluted Marlene with his flask. “Respect. He went out with honor. Just like a guardian. This is man-type shit, Marlene. Don’t try to figure it out or heal it. This conversation stays A and B.”

  He glanced at her again as he moved to the kitchen door. “Shabazz got a second chance to get out of prison and find somebody, I got a second chance not to die . . . Mike got a second chance not to die—we all did, so did you. That’s why we’re here.”

  “I know, but Rider, the kids have time.”

  “The young bucks on the team never even got a shot off,” he said, pure frustration in his voice that turned into bitter defeat. “Where’s Rivera’s get-out-of-jail-free redemption pass, huh? Where’s Damali’s? Where the fuck is Jose’s? Dan and JL ain’t even smelled love, let alone felt it—and in here, under these circumstances, they probably won’t. Our entire younger level will not replace itself, won’t heal. This shit is not right, Mar, and that’s why the team’s not right. The trinity of energy is the masthead that broke, Mar, when this crap broke our girl’s back and we had to watch it. We won the battle down there, but the dark side is winning the war—our spirits ain’t right. Everybody is losing faith. Hope . . . shit, that’s history. Love,” he said, shaking his head, “is really fucked up for almost everybody around here. Not even a possibility. If we saw those two connect, woulda gave the rest of us hope, renewed faith, and maybe a little encouragement to keep looking for the one.”

  “Rider,” she said, her voice as gentle as she could make
it, “in time . . . with patience . . .”

  “Whatever. All I know is, I’ma kill Rivera for dying on my watch in front of my team. Every man, not just guardians, I mean regular average Joes, are searching for his own Neteru, Mar, even though we’re human.” He looked at her, his eyes hard. “Every man is looking for the one that will make him walk through fire.”

  Marlene closed her eyes and continued to lean against the sink. What was there to tell the man? Shabazz wouldn’t even talk about it. Now she understood why. Double survivor’s guilt . . . he’d made it out alive, and still had a life mate. As a blessed man, he was grieving his heart out for his brothers, knowing they didn’t have what he did, but he couldn’t fix it. Shabazz always had profound philosophy, wisdom to impart. But, this time, there were no words he could offer. They’d isolated him from their grief, he couldn’t share their pain over a beer—it would be like a wealthy man telling a homeless person he understood his pain, not credible . . . salt in the wound.

  Her soul was so heavy that she couldn’t even cry. It took another male to explain what even a mother-seer couldn’t see. And damn it, it all made so much sense now why her lover wouldn’t come to bed with her at night, or touch her in the compound with the other guardians still home. It was beyond worry for Damali. It was beyond post-battle trauma or introspection. The family was disintegrating around them.

  Her voice was just a slow whisper as she formed words to respond to Rider’s truth. Didn’t matter that it was. Rider was already gone. So she spoke to the empty kitchen.

  “Oh, God, it isn’t fair. I know.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Tijuana, 45 miles into the Mexican desert, right after the battle in Hell

  CARLOS LAY motionless against the cool earth. Only a whisper of existence flickered within him as his disoriented mind replayed the outcome of the vampire civil war. A travesty. A variable. Destiny was laughing. He could only hope that Fate’s cruel sense of humor had spared his woman. At twenty-one years old, Damali Richards didn’t deserve to go out like that. Yet, who would have thought he’d be made into a vampire at twenty-three? Way before Damali learned that she was a vampire huntress she’d been right; there were worse things than death.

  He had heard his own bones snapping and flesh ripping, his cries echoing in the caverns of Hell as he fought off the attack. His body had suffered carnage, but it had also temporarily kept the Minion forces at bay. With all that he had to give her, he’d put himself between his kind and her humanity. That he had been turned into a creature of the night was moot; she was made of living, mortal flesh, and still had a soul. It was the last gift he could give her: protection, and a chance to escape.

  It was a foolish concept that he nursed as he lay dying. Protection. For minutes, hours, days until they tracked her down again? His kind was relentless and had all the time in the world to go after her once they regrouped. That he killed many of them in the combat was of little consequence. His efforts would barely make a dent in the numbers that hunted her. He’d come to understand that as the tunnels of Hell had filled and they’d rushed him.

  Even for a master vampire like him, there had been too many of them. Rogue vampires had descended upon him with their allied demon forces, however his objective had been singular: keep them away from the Neteru, away from Damali and her guardian team. Were it not for his alliance with the Vampire Council of old, he would have immediately perished. But, then, that might have been a more merciful fate.

  Agony from his wounds stripped the breath from his lungs as his mind struggled to hold onto consciousness. Bone cut through his skin like jagged, bloody, white knives, leaving his leg a distorted wreck. His jaw had been shattered, neutering him, leaving him no vampire defense. His left arm was almost amputated, hanging by a bloody mass of muscle at what had been his shoulder. Sections of his rib cage protruded from beneath ripped flesh and had dug into the ground when they’d dropped him, almost trapping him against the sand until he could bring himself to roll over onto his right side. He couldn’t even groan when he did. Pain had seized his vocal cords and impaled him.

  His chest rose and fell with intermittent shudders for air. He trained his mind on the distorted faces that had attacked him. In the chaos of battle, he’d avoided being beheaded, and something he couldn’t fathom had made it impossible for one of Fallon Nuit’s master vampires to drive a stake through his heart. Odd. A strange arc of energy had spared his chest and had given his attackers pause. The split-second advantage allowed him to take out his immediate opponent, but it had not kept him from being badly mangled in the blood struggle with the others. Were he not in so much pain, he would have questioned what spared him, and then laughed at the irony of it all.

  “Pride goeth before a fall,” his mother had always said when he was still human. She, too, was right. What good were expensive suits on a dead man? He thought about how he’d once put so much emphasis on being well-groomed, the perfection of his haircut, his material possessions, all that he owned. No wonder he was damned. He’d never put a value on his soul, and now his once-athletic body was ripped to shreds and of no use.

  His right eye was almost sealed shut. Multiple blows to his face had left a gaping hole that remained from where a claw took out his left eye and a part of his cheek. An attacker from behind had gotten to his one arm in mid-swing—that was now precariously dangling from filleted cartilage and ligaments, no longer in the shoulder socket that once housed it. When he’d fallen from the impact, like vultures they’d gone for his legs, his mobility, leaving one leg stripped of muscle and flesh down to the bone over a multiple compound fracture, and his ribs on one side had been crushed. There had been just too many of them that descended upon him like rabid wolves. Now his immortality was a curse, keeping him locked within a pain-riddled carcass.

  His entire existence flashed through his mind in snapshots. Everything in his short lifespan was measured before the vampire turning point, and after it. B.V., before vampirism, and A.V., after vampirism. Before he had been turned, he’d squandered his talents for business by investing in the drug world and had been king of his hill. He was a real predator—and had been preyed upon by his own kind. Vampiri. A mournful howl entered his chest and escaped from the confines of his broken jaw. What had he done?

  When the Vampire Council’s forces had rushed the tunnel in search of him and his Neteru cargo, it had created a distraction for Nuit’s army—but not before the rogues had angrily jettisoned him to the topside, earth. Their demons had made haste to lay him in the open desert two hundred yards away from a cave entrance before returning to the underworld civil war . . . two hundred yards away from the safety of a sunshield with dawn approaching. No mercy. That was the way of his world.

  Badly wounded, and unable to hunt to feed himself in order to regenerate, he knew his fate was sealed. He didn’t even have enough telepathic energy to mentally project himself to a safe place beyond the sun’s reach; he could barely lift his head. He just laid there in the dark awaiting dawn.

  Yet an eerie calm befell him, like that of a man who has finally accepted his demise. Soon daylight would incinerate him. It would burn away what remained of his flesh and turn it to a pile of ash, but it would also release his embattled soul. The pain of sunlight would pass in minutes, and would be nothing in comparison to the suffering that tortured him now.

  Carlos stopped struggling against the hard, rock-strewn ground. The desert night air was cool. Coyotes howled, and he could sense them coming nearer to him; he was carrion. What did it matter? He had already been ripped to shreds, and his heart had no beat, no blood flowed through his veins. The Covenant of Light had been wrong. There was no second chance. In life, he had been a predator, feeding on the weak and dying as a drug lord, luring them and seducing them with his product. Now the carrion feeders were about to fill their bellies with his dying remains. Yes, only fitting. Karma.

  Besides, there was no going back to a human existence, not with two significant mob factions looki
ng for him, as well as the FBI. There was no joining the Minion, Fallon Nuit’s rogues, even after conquering Nuit, their attack made that clear. The old vampires posed no option, either. They wanted him to hunt down the only source of light in his life and bring her to them—and he’d never give them Damali.

  So, Carlos waited. He could feel his body being nudged and sniffed by the jackal-like creatures of the desert. Out of pure reflex, he snarled, having no real energy to do more to defend himself. But the animals yelped and backed up in confusion. He could feel their terror and see them retreat with his inner mind’s eye, at least. But eventually Damali’s image eclipsed even that. God, please let her have made it out alive. He fully closed his half-shut eye. Profound. Near death, and with her name in his skull, he could call the name that used to scorch his brain.

  Seeing her inside his head, the last still frame of her as she turned to him once, her eyes filled with tears, her voice strong but trembling, begging him to come with them. She’d seen him in full vampire mode, knew what he was, had watched him transform, but foolishly insisted that he come away with her and her guardians. Carlos allowed the sweet balm of her belief in him to enter his bones. It dulled the excruciating pain. As long as he could see Damali’s face, her eyes, her Isis sword raised above her head . . . her eyes closing as tears for him ran down her face . . .

  They had taken his soul, but they could never take his memory of her. The warmth within her being blanketed him. He remembered her touch, her kiss, her smile, her passionate spoken words, her music. His undamaged hand clawed the sandy earth as he remembered the softness of her bronze skin, the smell of shoulder-length locks, the way her black pupils eclipsed the color of dark brown irises when she looked deeply into his mind. All five-foot-seven inches of her lithe, athletic frame had fused to his in a desperate hug. She had not given up on him, refused to let him go, even when she saw the beast within him. And both vampire nations had wanted him to turn over such a precious vessel to them to pollute her with their demonic seed . . . to turn her untouched womb into a sanctuary for daywalker fetuses? Never! Not even as a dead man.