“Don’t come any closer,” he warned.
She tilted her head slightly like an inquisitive bird of prey, her eyes returning to their tawny color and her face returning to its regal profile. Only the fangs still remained. “You have nothing to fear from me. Look around you, Hunter. Have I harmed the innocents in the coach? Have I harmed you? No. I took only the lives of those who were contributing nothing to your society in the first place. Hardly a crime.” She peeled the soiled black gloves from her fingers one at a time, then tossed them into the air where they disappeared in a swirl of dark smoke.
Winn’s finger rested heavy on the trigger, just needing a finite amount of pressure to fire the rifle at the vampiress. Only one thing held him back.
Everything she’d said was true.
He glanced at the steam stage. The occupants huddled inside the wooden stagecoach, whispering and peering with wide frightened eyes from behind the dusty leather window coverings, afraid to come out, but they were unharmed. Hoss’s men lay in crumpled bloody heaps and Hoss himself was still huddling behind him, but she hadn’t attacked him.
“What d’you want, vampire?”
“I am Lady Alexandra Porter, Contessa Drossenburg, embassary of his vampiric majesty, Emperor Vladamir the Fifth. I’ve come to seek out the eldest of the Chosen, Winchester Jackson. I was told he resides in Bodie.” Her gaze flicked to the cluster of sun-bleached wooden buildings down in the valley below, then drifted to the star on his chest. “Do you know him?”
“Lady, I am him.”
Her eyes widened slightly. “Then we have business to discuss.”
Winn slowly lowered his gun, but not his guard. Apparently Hoss was stupider than he looked; he tried to wrestle the repeating rifle away from him. But Winn had lost his patience. He clocked Hoss on the side of the head with the butt of his rifle, and the other man slid unconscious facedown into the powder-fine dirt.
Winn glanced up at the vampire. “I don’t work with supernaturals.”
She gave a shrug of her petite shoulder, her fangs retreating completely, leaving behind an even, white smile. “I expected as much, but the Emperor does not share my view. He thinks it is time for vampires to join with the Chosen if we are to defeat a mutual enemy.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend?”
“Da. But perhaps it is best if we discuss this elsewhere.” She threw a meaningful glance over her shoulder at the stunned occupants of the steam stage. “May I have your leave to glamour them? It is not safe for them to know so much. Don’t you agree, Mr. Jackson?”
Much as he didn’t like it, she did have a point. The last thing he needed was a stage full of frightened travelers to come rolling into Bodie spouting off about a vampire killing the Dalton gang. People, as a general rule, were panicky, stupid, and rash. And chances were ten out of ten, if the travelers talked, the town would come beating down his door demanding him to fix it. No, it was far better if she glamoured the lot of them and made them forget this un-pleasantry had ever happened. He nodded his approval.
The vampire Contessa dipped her head as she bent in a curtsey, then gingerly picked up her skirts and turned back to the stage. The low, husky quality of her voice rustled like the taffeta she wore, sultry and smooth, completely absorbing the total attention of the travelers.
“You have had a most pleasant trip, with only the slightest delay for a mechanical horse that needed an application of oil,” she said slowly. Winn tried to block out her voice, but glanced over her shoulder to see the wide, glassy stares of the occupants of the stage. She certainly did know how to throw a glamour. Good thing he was practically immune.
That was the second thing Pa had taught him about hunting. The first had been never to trust a supernatural being. The Darkin were the scourge of the universe—children of the night—dedicated to eliminating humans so they could claim the earth for themselves.
No matter how elegant, sophisticated, or well-mannered the Contessa seemed, she was still just a damn vampire, and sooner or later he was going to have to slay her.
The knowledge bit down deep and hard into his bones, refusing to let go. Winn silently cursed in four different languages. As the oldest Jackson brother, he’d been exposed to the life of a Hunter the longest. Pa had started drilling it into him from the time he could toddle.
Which made all of this so much worse. Because ten years ago he’d given it up, walked away, and vowed to stay good and gone from Hunters and anything to do with the Darkin. He’d tried to lead a normal life—be an upstanding citizen with a clean reputation—something neither of his brothers would know about. For while the Jackson brothers looked similar on the outside with their pa’s jet hair and broad shoulders and their ma’s blue eyes and winning smile, they were as different as could be on the inside.
Winn turned away from her bidding the travelers a kind good-bye, shaking their hands and waving to them as the horses gained steam and began to huff and chuff, ready to resume their journey into Bodie.
It didn’t help that his little brother Colt, the hothead of the three and a self-styled outlaw, had come waltzing in that afternoon, determined to locate their pa’s long-lost piece of the Book of Legend.
He’d told him the truth. Only a Darkin could access the Book. Well, Colt was welcome to it. Nothin’, but nothin’, was going to change his mind about taking up arms as a Hunter again.
White puffs of steam and darker smoke from the steam carriage’s boilers mixed with the dirt, creating a dark smudge in the otherwise cloudless clear blue sky as the stage clanked and rolled on toward Bodie.
The vampire eyed him with a mixture of curiosity and respect mingling in the whiskey depths of her eyes. “You are not exactly what I expected, Mr. Jackson.” She clasped her bare hands together, the dark ruby ring winking on the ring finger of her right hand.
“What’d you expect?”
The corner of her mouth tipped up in a way that made his skin tighten, and he had to keep himself from leaning forward to sample those tempting lips.
“From the legends we’ve been told,” her gaze raked him over, assessing him, “someone bigger.”
ZEBRA BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2011 by Theresa Meyers
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ISBN: 978-1-4201-2556-6
The Hunter Page 32
