The Hunted

by L. A. Banks

  “She’s one of your lair whores, now . . . is that it?”

  “She’s something more deadly than that,” he stated evenly and turned to face her. If he couldn’t give Damali anything else, at least she deserved the truth. She needed to know, by what was said and un-said, the depth of the thing that he’d been in denial about for the ten nights he’d spent with her. It was only a matter of time before his will gave out. It had frayed so badly out in the wilderness that there was no sense in playing with himself or her about it. He could still taste this mystery woman in the back of his throat, she was in his nose, on his skin, and he knew as sure as sunset that he’d set her up in his main villa in Brazil . . . and would visit her often. Might even bring her fresh kill.

  “I’m a master vampire. From this, baby, you run.” What else was there to say when she just stared at him battling tears and swallowing hard?

  The look on her face couldn’t have been worse if he’d driven a knife through her heart. Shock fused with hurt, becoming rage, turning into pain in a slow dawning. He’d never ever seen the fight knocked out of her, and it pained him to no end that he’d been the one to deliver the blow. It was all in her eyes, those beautiful, brown, pain-stricken eyes. But he also had to be real. If they had no future, not one he could live with for her sake, then now was the time to end things. Ending on the truth was the most honorable solution. He owed her at least that much.

  Damali slowly lowered her weapons. There was no fear, no anger, just total defeat in her expression. She understood what he was saying. He let his breath out hard and looked away. All resistance had gone out of her body, and she was sipping air slowly. She shook her head in a painful rhythm of disbelief. He glanced back at her, unable to break the spell she always had on him. He absorbed her hurt as he watched the brass poker fall, then the arrow tip, and then the wooden stake made from it. The clatter against the hard surface pierced his ears. He saw her hand slowly sweep down her chest as though trying to restart her own heart, and he turned and continued to stand before the open deck doors, staring up at the moon.

  In that moment, that inner part of him that still remembered what it was like to have a soul wept, though not a single tear fell. His insides were bleeding, but there was nothing he could do. She was so stubborn, yet deserved the truth. How could he promise her what he couldn’t even promise himself? He had felt the primal pull of the beast within him, and the reaction he’d had toward the new female had been visceral. Lust and ambition drowned him, and was encoded within the deep lake of his loins, the need to procreate—turn humans to replace his territorial losses, create solid lieutenants, to build an empire, to mate with his own kind—the undead—but it wasn’t love. She had to understand that. He wanted Damali safe, out of harm’s way, but he also needed to do what he had to do. He heard her swallow again, hard, and knew no tears were flowing. She was sucking it up, and the river of pain in her was the tributary.

  “I should get you back to the hotel,” he said softly, not taking a step toward her.

  She only nodded. He waited.

  “You want her that much?” Damali was barely breathing when she finally spoke.

  He didn’t answer. She took the silence as his answer. Damali turned and looked him in the eye. She didn’t use her gift, or any special powers. And that look, more than a wooden stake, more than a silver blade, stripped the air from his lungs and sent a hurt so deep into his core that he almost couldn’t stand. But he also couldn’t look away from that source of profound agony. The priests had told him to block the shot. He’d ripped out her heart, instead.

  “I just have one question,” she said in a quiet, defeated voice. Her gaze never wavered. Her chin lifted with dignity. Her bottom lip quivered as she breathed. Yet her stance was firm. “All that time, when you were with me . . . how much of it was me . . . and how much of it was your desire to conquer the Neteru?”

  It must have stripped her bare to bring that question to her lips. The brutal honesty in it filleted him. Shame washed through him that she would even have to ask. He’d been wrong; there was no ego in this struggle. He couldn’t breathe; much less answer her question. Didn’t she know? He had loved her when he was a living man. Had loved her when they were kids. Had wanted her so badly some nights that he thought he’d lose his mind. She was the only woman in his life that had ever turned down all that he had, wasn’t the least bit interested in material gain or what he could do for her, and had worried about him—the man, the vampire—had tried to protect something so ephemeral as his soul.

  And for the same reasons then, that were repeating themselves now, he’d pushed her away to protect her. Conquer her? Never. He’d been the one who had surrendered. She was the embodiment of everything that had ever been good, and right, and real in his world. Nothing could replace that, but everything could take it away.

  This attack sadly proved his theory. He had hoped he’d been wrong. But he also knew better than to hope for something so tenuous. He knew his kind, and how they operated. As above in the drug life, so below in the underworld. It was a warning for him to make a decision, and make it fast. By the time he’d reentered the lair, he had made his decision. He would take the offer he couldn’t refuse and block the shot—and it had less to do about him than it did Damali’s personal safety. He’d use his forces to protect her as long as he could, then those at higher levels in the upper realms would have to do their thing. He couldn’t guard her forever, nor could he block the shot in-definitely. One day her heart would get broken, one way or another. He’d had time to ponder that truth. So, now, or seven years from now—which was such a short time anyway when one considered eternity—what difference did it make?

  There would come a time when he was away, distracted, or couldn’t get to her. Then what? He’d rather let her go than see her torn apart by the myriad of predators Hell could unleash. He’d rather give the Devil her due, and appease the beast, cut a deal, a compromise, than to ever draw Damali into the complex cesspool that surrounded him.

  She nodded, but didn’t understand his silence. “If I’m lucky, I’ll get old one day.” She chuckled quietly. It was the hard, hollow sound that came from bitter resignation. “You won’t. My body will get flabby. My hair will gray. My eyes will dim. My blade hand will tremble with arthritis. My womb will remain empty. But I will look back and remember ten nights when I loved a man with my entire soul till I saw lights. If I have nothing else, even if it wasn’t real to you, I will have known what it was like to be ready to die for someone.”

  Her admission in the wake of all she thought about him, all that she assumed, tore him apart. He sucked in a huge breath, trying to think of how to explain. “I loved you, too, baby,” was all he could whisper.

  She stared at him. “Loved. Past tense,” she said. “I still love you, and I don’t even know why.” She collected the arrow tip, and stood facing him. “Please, take me back to my family.” When he moved toward her, she held up her hand. “If you choose to walk this path, and you have, I will hunt you. Not out of revenge. Not out of spite. But if you go completely dark, take bodies, turn victims, or aid another vampire—male or female—in doing said same, I will hunt you down and kill you. We can end this tonight.”

  He saw the resignation not the defeat in her, and knew the next time they encountered each other it would be a fight to the death. How was he supposed to stand against that?

  “If you win, all I ask is that you don’t turn me. Let me go out with honor.” She lifted her chin higher, her back straight. “Don’t feed on me, or allow my body to be desecrated like that—you owe me that much.” Her voice was calm, even, and controlled, but her eyes said it all. “And keep the same seal on my people, my family, the clerics. You owe us all that much. And, just for the record, don’t you ever again not trust me to do my job, which is hunting vampires.”

  He backed away from her, appalled, shaking his head. “I could never do that,” he whispered, sickened by what she proposed. “And they’ll always h
ave my seal.” He shook his head. “How could I desecrate you?”

  She nodded and rubbed a sudden chill from her arms. “In many ways, I suppose you already have.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE DEBATE raged on about what could possibly be lurking near Brazil, but Rider sat silently, just looking out of the limousine window. He hated not knowing the lay of the land, and felt handicapped by not having fluent knowledge of the language. He felt trapped, could feel the sensation rising within him fast, threatening to suffocate him. He studied the dark, mountain road. Mist surrounded the vehicle, and there was no other traffic. The limousine bounced along the uneven asphalt, and the moon shimmered overhead. They were going down another dark path that felt like one more blind alley. He had been down too many in his life, and this was the last one he was willing to explore.

  “Let me out,” he said, his voice low. The walls of the vehicle seemed like they were closing in on him.

  The group stopped talking and looked at him.

  “I have to get out,” he said again softly. “Please let me out.” He looked at the team’s stunned expressions. “This is where I get off,” he said, his voice beginning to become strained, rising as he spoke, each word becoming louder and louder. “I don’t want to go see some fellow guardian team in the hills. I don’t want to make another god-damned choice about shit. I’m exhausted—mentally wrung out. I do not care if it’s demons or vampires or a fucking drug dealer, just as long as the bastards kill me quick!”

  He drew a ragged breath and placed his hand on the door, and nodded toward the driver. “Tell that motherfucker to open the door before I shoot the window out!”

  “Rider, man, be cool,” Shabazz said, his voice low and comforting, but steady. “I know you’re tired. We all are,” he said, trying to reach some rational part of Rider’s mind. “Marlene’s been getting wild visions just from the land we’re on. My reflexes have been hair-trigger, like I’m about to go off any minute, which ain’t good in a foreign joint where there’s no such thing as parole. Feel me? There’s so much stimuli here that Mike is picking up everything and nothing at the same time. The young bucks are wigging, and are overextended after the concert. Your nose is off, ’cause you’re exhausted.”

  “Right now, you could light a Cuban cigar next to me, and I wouldn’t know it.”

  Shabazz kept his gaze on Rider’s, waiting for him to remove his hand from the door. No one else spoke. All that could be heard was the drone of the motor. “Man, it’s gonna be all right.”

  “It’s not going to be all right!” Rider drew his Glock and pointed it toward his window. “She looked like Tara.”

  Big Mike exchanged a glance with Shabazz and Jose, then sent a warning glance around the team. No one said a word and Marlene swallowed hard.

  “It’s all right, man,” Big Mike said slowly, his voice low and steady. “That was a gift.”

  “It was not a gift,” Rider said, now looking at Big Mike, but his hand was no longer on the door handle. Angry tears shone in his eyes and his gun trembled as he lowered the weapon and pointed it toward the floor. He shook his head. “That chick in the club . . . she looked just like her.” He breathed in a shaky inhale. “It was a curse that just brought it all back, Mike. I shouldn’t have taken her back to the room.”

  Quiet enveloped the group as Rider’s breathing steadied.

  “There comes a point in a man’s life where he reaches his limit,” Rider said, his voice just above a murmur. “When you gotta let something go, no matter how much that shit hurts. Then you start over, and try not to look back.” His gaze sought the window again, and he stared out past the blackened windows. “That’s all Rivera is trying to say. I can dig it. Been there. This bullshit going down over here is part of his territory—let him handle it. Damali isn’t in any danger from him, she’s in danger from not letting go when she should.”

  Shabazz slowly reached out and put his hand on Rider’s shoulder. “Gimme your gun, man. Let me hold it for you tonight . . . I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

  “Yeah, man,” Jose said, his voice dropping to a soothing octave. “Give ’Bazz the gun, me and you can talk this out . . . just like old times, just like we always do around this time of year. It’s gonna be all right.”

  Rider chuckled. But the sound of it was distant as he lifted his Glock, ignored Shabazz’s open hand and Jose’s pleas, and put the weapon to his temple. “I wouldn’t want anything else to happen to me, either,” he said, his gaze never leaving the window. “There was only one person I’d take a bite from, and she’s history.”

  “Rider,” Marlene said, her voice quiet and strained. “Baby, listen. If we’re dealing with demons, one just got to your head . . . remember I told you that you and Dan were more susceptible on this mission . . . Dan has German in his line, you’ve got European, and whatever’s out there has an ax to grind. Put the gun down, honey. We love you. We’ve all got a past that haunts, and you’re right. The past is hard to live with. Why don’t we go home, figure this all out, huh? Let’s just live through one more night, and when this child comes back to the hotel, she’ll be baptized by the experience of a broken heart, too. And every one of us in here can testify, one by one . . . Carlos will be able to, as well.”

  “We’ll let the man clean out his own territory,” Big Mike said, reaching across Shabazz and putting a gentle but firm hand on Rider’s biceps to lower the gun away from his skull. “There’s a hundred and forty-four thousand guardians on the planet, brother. We’re just one team of seven that happened to get the hard task of guarding a Neteru. We can let a couple of vamps get smoked by the other teams. And in those other teams, who knows . . . there might be somebody worth taking a bullet for. You understand, man?”

  Rider nodded, swallowed hard, and put the safety back on his gun before putting it in his shoulder holster hard. “That’s all I was saying,” he whispered, and looked at the stricken expressions of the younger guardians. He could feel the muscles in his jaw pulse as he blinked back tears and they burned away. “Rivera is a good man,” he said, his voice steadier as his gaze went back to the window. “Had a tough choice—one of his own, or one not like him . . . didn’t matter where his heart was. He could do this quick and draw that knife out of the wound in one hard pull, or drag this shit out for seven years in fucked-up increments.” He nodded again, just staring. “Quick is always better.” Then he sat back and slung his arm over his eyes and took a deep breath.

  No sooner than he’d sat back, the window shattered, the limousine swerved, and then hit a tree. The team tumbled out of their seats and scrambled to right themselves, their nervous gazes shooting around to see if anyone had been hurt. Rider yanked an arrow out of the upholstery by Marlene’s head, his hand shaking. Two seconds earlier, if he hadn’t sat back, it would have gone through his temple.

  The fractured radiator hissed, and the entire front of the limo was an accordion of crumbled metal. The tree didn’t even lean. The driver was slumped over the wheel.

  “Incoming!” Rider hollered, as another arrow whizzed through the missing windshield and hit the empty front passenger seat.

  Big Mike quickly looked at the driver through the partially broken separation window. He kicked out the remaining glass, reached over the seat, and forced the man back. He looked down and pulled a bloody arrow from the center of the driver’s chest with a rip. “We got a major problem, people.”

  The limo rocked as something landed on the top of it. Mike adjusted his shoulder cannon, aimed at the ceiling, and fired, opening a large hole in the roof. “We’ve gotta get out, or we’re sitting ducks in here.”

  Rider put his head up through the gaping hole, cocked his gun at the blackness, and ducked down again fast. “I didn’t see anything,” he said, breathless.

  “You won’t,” Marlene told him in a flat tone. “Look at this arrow-head. Amazon. Shaped just like an Isis blade point. Just like you’d find on a guardian team’s weapons.”

  “Oh
, shit . . .” Rider was about to go up through the hole again when the vehicle rocked from sudden weight. A jaguar peered down through the blown-out steel, snarled, and vanished.

  The group stared at the drip of saliva that was now sizzling a hole in the limousine floor carpet.

  “I smell it now, if I didn’t before—sulfur.” Rider looked at his junior tracker partner for confirmation.

  Jose concurred. “Demon with a heavy animal tracer. Gotta be a were.”

  “We’ve got one choice,” Shabazz said. “We can sit here while they pick us off one by one, or get out and go down swinging.”

  “We swing, dude,” Rider agreed. “On three?”

  The team looked out the missing windshield through to where the divider used to be.

  “We’d better swing hard, because I count several pairs of green glowing eyes dead ahead.” JL glanced over his shoulder as six jaguars materialized out of the dense mist.

  “There’re too many of them to go out there,” Dan whispered.

  “Shit,” Marlene whispered, clutching Damali’s sword. “The only way we can—”

  But her words failed her as a hand punched through the driver’s-side window and yanked the dead driver out. Shabazz opened fire and missed the black hooded entity. It snarled, brandished a battle-ax, and leaped with five other hooded figures in front of the advancing row of jaguars.

  “What the fuck?” Rider’s voice trailed off and he knelt on the vehicle floor, facing the windshield with his gun pointing toward the missing pane. “Vamps, too? All in the same night?”

  “I’m going over the seat!” Dan hollered. “C’mon, JL. I’ll cover you. Try to see if we can start the engine!”

  “Dan, sit your ass down! You’re a target, like Rider. The engine and radiator are done. You see that front end?” Big Mike pointed with his shoulder cannon. “Everybody, conserve artillery, and only shoot at what comes near us. If they fight over us as dinner, maybe they’ll thin their own numbers out. We pick off what’s left.”