The Hunters Series

by Shiloh Walker

  Eli approached her warily, his eyes narrowed and hungry. “Again, hmm?” he murmured, dropping down to his knees and lowering his head until they were nose to nose. Slowly, he covered her mouth with his and slid his tongue inside hers, between her fangs, so that he could taste her. When he pulled away moments later, she was breathing heavily and staring at him with dazed eyes.

  “A promise I hope you intend to keep,” Eli purred before sitting back on his heels. Staring at Declan, all emotion fled from his face. “Night approaches. He will be here soon. Unless you want to face him in your lovely white hide, Tori, I would suggest you clothe yourself.” He drew the air in through his nose, tasting the faint sweat that dewed her body, the scent of Declan’s body on hers, in hers. “It will infuriate him, knowing that the wolf has been touching you, marking you, fucking you.”

  Declan lowered his head to hers and kissed her swollen mouth hungrily, gently. Then soothingly before he pulled away and murmured, “Loving you.”

  Tori accepted the hand Eli offered and sat up, glancing out the window to where the sun hovered just on the horizon, blazing orange, the clouds around streaked with pink and silver. “Can he take daylight?”

  “Not last I saw him,” Eli answered.

  “You know him?”

  “I’ve fought him before.”

  “Can I…can I win?”

  Declan rose and lifted her to her feet, cuddling her back against him, pressing a gentle reassuring kiss to her neck. Eli rose to his feet in a boneless, lazy movement, the subtle power inside him easily cloaked for now. “I’ve no doubt of it. You already have. You broke his hold. Tonight, he will learn that.”

  “Is Declan his match?” she asked, looking from the vampire to the wolf.

  Eli lifted a brow and said, “I would dare say, yes, he is. I don’t know for certain. But you must fight him. Not your wolf. This is your battle.”

  “I know that.” She met Declan’s eyes. “Can you beat a Master?”

  He smiled smugly. “I can, and have.” Then his muscled, naked shoulders lifted in a shrug. “But five hundred years…that is a powerful mark to reach. And this cannot be my battle alone. I can face him with you, but not for you.”

  Tori looked back to Eli and took a deep breath. Declan hadn’t really answered her. “Are you stronger than he is?”

  “A hundred-fifty years ago, I was, yes. I imagine that is still true. Manuel Rodriguez has reached his plateau and I’ve yet to reach mine.” He stroked one hand down her face and lifted her chin, staring into her haunted, frightened, blue eyes. “You’ve not even begun to rise to what you will be. He cannot defeat you, Tori. Of that, I am certain.”

  With a shuddering sigh, Tori said, “The old woman, she is his mother. She’s trapped here, until he dies. I need to know that she will be able to move on, no matter what. If he ki…” Her voice trailed away and she hesitated for a long moment, her throat tight with fear. “If I can’t beat him, will you kill him? She deserves to be at peace.”

  Declan growled, clutching her tightly against him. “You will not face him alone, Tori. And we will defeat him.”

  Stubbornly, she said, “I need to know, that if I fail, he will still die. He can’t do this to anybody else.”

  Eli met Declan’s eyes over her pale naked shoulder and said gruffly, “He does not leave here alive. That, I promise you.”

  Chapter Ten

  Manuel pressed through the invisible cloak that marked the edge of Crawford’s territory. The other Master had taken his bitch—that was all he could focus on.

  Had taken her, saved her and fucked her.

  And the wolf…Fuck, how he hated the shifters. Hated them with a passion. But this wasn’t just a wolf, not just a shifter. He was an Inherent, Manuel suspected, and most definitely one of the hated Hunters.

  It was the worst sort of betrayal, letting not just another Master fuck her blind, but to let a wolf fuck her. And both of them, the Master and the Inherent, were Hunters.

  She had let the wolf between her legs and into her pussy. That had been his. All of her belonged to him.

  And he was going to get her back.

  He hovered at the edge of the tree line, staring in fury at the brightly lit house, with all its windows and laughter. The bastard lived as though he were still human, in a house, with people he provided for. The English bastard drove a car, for pity’s sake. Served the Council of Hunters, had the authority to decide when the Hunters would strike.

  Manuel couldn’t possibly admit it, but this was part of why he hated Eli. Being a Hunter, he was safer from the rest of the world than the ferals were. Nobody hunted the Hunters; nobody was a threat to them. A feral feared fighting a Hunter, not just because of the death that most always came, but because, if by chance, the feral won, the rest of the Hunters would descend upon him and tear him apart.

  A slim figure passed in front of the window and Manuel’s hands curled into tight fists.

  The woman.

  She was the reason he was here.

  He’d get her back, even if he had to kill them all to do it.

  Hell, he’d prefer to kill them all anyway.

  He watched, enraged, as she strolled back in front of the window and lifted it. Unaware of the light touch on his mind, he glared as she leaned out, drawing the cool, clean night air into her lungs.

  With a puzzled frown replacing the fury on his face, he listened, ears pricked and eyes searching.

  She hadn’t changed.

  Her heart still beat.

  He could hear the faint sound of air moving in and out of her lungs.

  And as he watched, she lifted a fat, juicy orange to her lips, and bit down on the peeled wedge, juice trickling into her mouth, down her chin. She chewed, swallowed, took another bite.

  Manuel watched, entranced as she polished the fruit off and daintily wiped her mouth. She hadn’t changed. How was this possible?

  He had bitten her, watched as the blood drained from her body. He had fed her and made sure the change had started before leaving her alone to suffer and die of starvation. But she hadn’t changed.

  He moved a little closer, certain she couldn’t see him with her still human eyes.

  But then she propped her hands on the windowsill and grinned, right at him, moonlight gleaming off her pearly fangs. “There’s my sire, all ready to play,” she purred.

  And she leaped out of the window, dropping the twenty feet to the ground and rising to the balls of her feet, staring at him with her head cocked, her eyes wide. The faint bulge of her fangs behind her upper lip betrayed the innocent expression on her face, giving voice to the hunger that was churning in her gut.

  Hunger for his blood.

  “Why, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she murmured.

  A shadow separated itself from the house and Manuel watched as the wolf placed himself protectively at her back, one hand resting on her shoulder.

  Another shadow slid away and shifted, a moving drift of gray fog that hovered between Manuel and the woman, hovering for brief moments, taunting Manuel. The Spaniard seethed silently at this show of power. Not all Masters attained the ability to shift to other forms—Eli had mastered them all by his first century.

  The fog solidified and reformed, until Eli Crawford stood between Manuel and the bitch he had come to take.

  “Do you like the monster you made, Manuel?” Eli asked, his hands in the pockets of his trousers, his pale naked chest gleaming in the bright silvery moonlight. “She walks in the sun, and she threw off my compulsion as easily as she did yours. I watched while she sat and ate a bloody steak, right in front of me. It was the damnedest thing. She washed it down with wine and chocolate. You remember chocolate, don’t you?”

  “She’s still human. And weak,” Manuel spat, his body quivering with rage. “She was too weak for the change, too weak to become like one of the gods.”

  Eli laughed. “Weak? Aren’t you in for a surprise,” he stated, pacing a large circle around the three of the
m. He stopped just beyond Declan, who had dropped to his heels, one palm resting on the earth, while he stared at Manuel with unconcealed rage. His back was arched, the muscles and bones underneath shifting restlessly as he fought to control the urge to shift and pounce—to take the vampire down and rip his throat out.

  Eli paused only long enough to squat down and whisper, “Her fight,” before rising to study Manuel.

  “You know about the bonds between a wolf and his mate, don’t you?” Eli asked Manuel. “You tried to break it.”

  “She had no bond,” Manuel hissed. “None.”

  “She’s my mate,” Declan said, his voice a low rough growl. The glinting green eyes glittered with rage and hate and fury and Manuel felt a spark of fear in his gut. “From the day we first met, I knew she was mine. You tried to break that.”

  “She had no bond,” Manuel repeated. “And this involves neither of you men. I sired her, and by laws of old, she is mine. That is a bond, wolf. And you tried to interfere, tried to keep me from my property.”

  Tori laughed. “Property? I am no man’s property.”

  “I sired you. I own you,” Manuel said with a leer. “Body, soul, mind. Your pussy and the ass you shared between them. You will pay for that, I promise you. You think I didn’t know, didn’t see you fucking the two of them? I saw every damn time they pounded their dicks into you, and for each and every single stroke, you will pay, little puta. Now, come.”

  Tori only smiled.

  “Come!” Manuel ordered, inflicting his will into the word. And she did nothing.

  “You protect her?” the Spaniard asked, glaring at Eli with hatred and incredulity.

  “I’ve no need to, Manuel. She is not yours. She broke your hold.”

  “She belongs to ME!” Manuel bellowed. The windows trembled and shook, and the birds in the forest took flight and the night around them grew silent. “Come to me, you little cunt, now.”

  Declan’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a ghastly smile, his teeth lengthening just slightly, just enough to remind Manuel what he was. “Watch how you speak of my mate, vampire. Watch, and remember what we are.”

  “She isn’t one of you,” Manuel hissed, unwittingly falling back a step. “I broke no Council law when I took her and she is not one of yours. I took her and I control her.”

  “Then why doesn’t she come? Why don’t you try to take her mind, if you are so certain you own her?” Eli suggested. The wind picked up and threw long golden locks of his hair into his face. Absently, he brushed them aside and lifted a brow at Manuel. “Well?”

  Manuel called.

  She only smiled.

  He threw every bit of his strength into compelling her, and she laughed.

  “You protect her!”

  Eli rolled his eyes. “Check for the bond, you fool. I protect no one. She stands on her own, and you’d be wise to fear the creature you made.”

  Manuel did search. And the bond wasn’t there. Instead, when he reached for her through the mental paths, he was thrown into a maelstrom of blinding golden lights shot through with glittering threads of silver and blue, caught in a cage he couldn’t understand. He was trapped, caught, paralyzed.

  Until he felt a warm, living hand on his cheek. The bonds that now bound him loosened enough to allow his eyes to open and he stared up at her. At some point, he had collapsed to the ground and he caught the bitter metallic taste of his own blood in his mouth.

  “What are you?” he rasped. How could this fledgling vamp hold him like this? He was more than five hundred years old, and a Master.

  “She is less than a week old, and already a more powerful Master than you could ever have hoped to become,” Eli said, dropping to his heels and staring at Manuel.

  “How?”

  “I stopped the change, and followed another path,” Tori said, her voice low and throbbing, full of some power Manuel couldn’t recognize. “An old woman showed me the way.

  “Her name was Rosa. Do you have a ghost haunting you, Manuel? Someone you were bound to, someone you hurt?”

  The vampire’s eyes widened and he struggled uselessly against the bonds holding him. “You lie,” he rasped, a forgotten memory rushing to the fore as she said that name. Kind eyes and a loving smile, followed by disappointment and shock and pain. The guilt he had left behind when he lost his humanity was returning, and he hated it. “She is long dead.”

  “Long dead, but not forgotten,” a soft voice whispered. “You’ve kept me chained to you, with every foul, evil deed, with every young life you ended, you kept me chained. I have watched you always. And waited.”

  The whisper had sounded through the night and all heard it. But only Tori kept her eyes focused on Manuel, kept her mind focused on the bonds she had wrapped around him under Rosa’s tutelage.

  A rapid spate of Spanish fell from Manuel’s lips and he shook his head, staring in the air just beyond Tori. Declan watched with wonder as a white, silvery cloud shifted and formed just in front of them. Formed into the face and then body of a young noblewoman, her long hair bound up in the back, covered by a net that was strung with jewels. Her gown was long and heavily embroidered, with a low, square neck that revealed a smooth bosom, and two neat little pinprick holes in her neck.

  “How could you help her, Madre? She was meant to die, she hurt me and she was meant to die,” Manuel wailed, sounding like a child.

  The woman, so sweet and innocent looking, shook her head. “I gave birth to a monster. You became more of a monster as you grew. And when you were changed, it only worsened. I bore you, allowed you to become what you are now. Then you took her. And I saw my chance to make amends for the evils you have done.”

  Tori said quietly, “Rosa, you are not to blame for what he did with his life.”

  Sad, large eyes met Tori’s briefly. “A mother always feels guilt when her child goes astray,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders. “I must make amends, and I must know that he will cause no more evil. And then I can rest.”

  Tori shifted and stood. “You do not need to see this,” she said as she started to loosen the mental bonds that held Manuel captive.

  “Yes, I do,” she said with grief filling her eyes.

  Tori leaped aside the moment she let the last mental rope fall, nimbly avoiding Manuel’s lunging reach for her. “Kill you,” he grunted. “When you’re dead, she will die with you.”

  “She’s already dead,” Tori said. “You killed her five centuries ago.”

  “Because she refused to see, I could have made her invincible and we would have lived forever, together.” Manuel fell back, circling her, wary of the strength he could now sense in her. “I could have given her the world, but she wanted to remain human and mourn the death of the cowardly bastard she whelped first, the one who took everything that should have been mine—the title, the lands, the woman I wanted. I killed him slowly, and painfully, like I will kill you.”

  He dove for her, but she was gone like the wind, moving faster, with more agility than a vampire. When he turned, searching for her, he saw her standing more than a dozen yards away, smiling at him serenely.

  “What else did my beloved Madre show you?” Manuel demanded. “You are a fledgling. You cannot hope to defeat me.”

  Eli offered offhandedly, “Do you know what her first meal was? Aside from the steaks she loves to eat, of course…the wolf. He was the first to feed her, and he did so willingly.”

  “Agile and fast, like a wolf. Sly, cunning, and strong like a vampire. Able to walk in sunlight and live as a human.”

  “Don’t you know yet what she is, my son?” Rosa asked, her white form hovering above the ground, between Manuel and Tori.

  “That is legend,” Manuel spat, moving to go around the ghostly form of his dead mother.

  “She is legend. Legend made flesh. Only a handful of others like her have ever existed in the world. And you helped make her. Didn’t you suspect—when you couldn’t trap her mind before you sired her—didn’t you s
uspect she would be different?” Rosa asked, drifting away and allowing Manuel to see Tori again.

  “My lady,” Eli said quietly, dropping to one knee in a courtly gesture, waiting until her eyes came to rest on his bent head. “Let them finish it. Say your good-byes to your son, and let them finish it. “

  Sadly, Rosa said, “I said my good-byes long ago. He is not my son.”

  And she faded into nothingness, leaving Manuel to search desperately for her. “Madre, come back!” he cried, spinning to search for the insubstantial form.

  “She doesn’t want to see you now,” Tori said quietly. “She only came because she wanted you to know how you brought this upon yourself. And that she is the one who finally found a way to stop you. You swore she never would, and she swore she would.

  “She was right.”

  “No, Huntress, she was not,” Manuel said, turning to face Tori.

  Huntress.

  Not just a Hunter, but Huntress, the one all others would turn to if they failed. Tori felt the flood of knowledge hit her mind, and absorbed it, as Eli and Rosa finally let her know what she was meant to be.

  Huntress.

  “Come and get me, you bastard,” she taunted, her jaws aching and empty. Her fangs slid out, longer and sharper, glinting and deadly, as Manuel rushed her.

  With a strength and skill she hadn’t known she possessed, Tori caught him, spun him and flung him. She leaped and landed on his back, lashing out along the mental path and binding him. “I want you to know the fear I felt,” she crooned in his ear as she grabbed hold of his hair and jerked his head aside. “I want you to know the fear Rosa felt. The fear all your victims felt when you stole their lives.”

  Rearing back, she struck, sinking her fangs into his neck and feasting. His blood, once tasting so bitter, slid down her throat like liquid gold and flooded her with a blinding light, washing through her body in caressing waves.

  His fear filled the night and she gloried in it.

  His heart kicked up, ten beats, forty beats, ninety. Each panicked heartbeat pulsed more blood, more strength from his body into hers, until his heart faltered and stopped altogether.