“And then he started courting your best friend. We all felt that was going too far. I’m sorry, really, Jacqueline. When I think about all the stuff you went through, I realize that we should have been there for you. I want you to know that I want what’s best for you. I’ll do whatever I can to make it up to you and be the brother I’ve always been.”

  “Or better.”

  He raised his brows.

  “An even better brother.”

  Robert smiled. “Okay, that’s the sister I knew.”

  She frowned at him. “Were you worried I would be a rogue? That I might attack you?”

  He shook his head. “No. Even if Heskel had tried to convince you of it, we knew you wouldn’t. Truly, we know when you need your space. We really felt you needed some time after all that had happened, but we should have at least made sure, and I sincerely apologize for that.”

  “At least I had Dane there for me.”

  “Okay, so what’s the deal with him?” Robert asked.

  “I met him at the therapy session for hunters turned, and you know what? Not only did he step in to be my hero and take down Heskel, his brothers stood by the both of us too.”

  Robert lowered his eyes to the floor, and she knew he was feeling guilty about it. Then his blue eyes caught her gaze and he said, “I told you Van wasn’t the right one for you. As soon as he went hunting with you and then said he preferred fighting with his brothers but then here he is off hunting with Lettie now.”

  “I know. I think that irritated me more than his dating her.”

  “Knowing you, I’m not surprised.”

  Then there was a knock at the door and Jacqueline wondered who that would be now. She set Princess on the couch and walked to the door, though if her brother hadn’t been here, she would have just used the vampire way to get there. Not that she was afraid to show what she was in front of her brother, but—she felt maybe it would be like showing off? She wasn’t sure why she was feeling that way.

  “Are you expecting someone?” Robert sounded concerned.

  “No, but I hadn’t been expecting you either.”

  18

  Jacqueline looked through the peephole in her front door and saw four men she didn’t know, standing on the porch, looking a little wet from the rain, all wearing rain jackets.

  “Trouble?” Robert asked, coming up beside her.

  “I don’t know. I don’t recognize any of them. What do you think?”

  Robert looked through the peephole. “They’re armed. You can see the tip of their swords tucked under their rain jackets.”

  “I’ll be right back.” This time she vanished and grabbed two swords from a sword stand near the living room since her brother hadn’t come armed when he came to see her, which she had appreciated. It meant he really hadn’t felt that she was a threat to him.

  “Okay, now that’s a cool ability to have,” Robert admitted, watching her.

  She was glad she hadn’t freaked him out and rejoined him in the vampire’s way. “Yeah, one of the coolest. Telepathic communication is too.” She was relieved he didn’t seem to be bothered by her new ability because she didn’t want to have to guard against using it around her family. She opened the front door, her sword in hand, resting by her side.

  “Hey, uhm, I’m Zeek Weatherby and my friends and I were hired to, uhm, take down a rogue vampire.” Zeek was a strawberry blond, longish hair, a madcap of freckles sprinkled across his cheeks and over the bridge of his nose and was staring at her red hair, before he noticed the sword in her hand. But he didn’t look too worried about it. Maybe because he had three friends with him when there was only one of her, but of course her brother was with her, so she wasn’t totally alone.

  “I’m not a rogue, if you are talking about me.” This was the weirdest situation she swore she’d ever been in. If these guys were here to terminate her, why were they standing on her front porch and weren’t doing anything but being honest with her? It was as though they were waiting for her to give them permission to kill her.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Shut up! They were the politest would-be hunters she had ever met.

  “Well, what are you? You can’t be real hunters. None of them would ever talk to the rogue vampire they were supposed to take down. They would just get on with business.”

  “Uh, yeah, we’re humans who work as hunters,” Zeke explained.

  “Okay, Van Helsing hunters.” A lot of hunters didn’t care for humans who worked in that field because they felt that was a hunter’s job and though humans could be well trained, they still were weaker than hunters. Too many human hunters were killed each year compared to the number of hunters who were born that way who fought rogue vampires.

  “Uh, well, sure, if that’s what you want to call us,” Zeke said. “You’re not the last one who will.”

  “Are you new at this?” She just couldn’t figure them out. Why hadn’t they forced their way into the house and tried to kill her. They hadn’t moved to pull out their swords at all.

  “Well, no.”

  “Then you should know better than to knock on a vampire’s door, who you believe is a rogue, and then tell him or her that you’re there to eliminate him, right?” She felt like she needed to teach them a thing or two so they wouldn’t get themselves killed so quickly in a future fight with a vampire. If she’d been a rogue, they would have been dead already.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  The other guys with him were nodding their heads in agreement.

  “So then, why are you here? It can’t be to eliminate me.” She figured they must be having second thoughts. Maybe they realized she wasn’t a rogue. If they killed a vampire who wasn’t, they would be up on charges of murder.

  “We were hired to eliminate you,” Zeke repeated.

  “I’m not a rogue. The police haven’t sanctioned it, have they?” That was a scary thought.

  “No. Hunters hired us.”

  Her jaw dropped. “Hunters?”

  “Shit,” Robert said. “What are their names?”

  She knew from the intensity of her brother’s voice he was ready to take out some hunters. Hunters who tried to eliminate hunters who had been turned if they weren’t rogues would be considered rogue hunters and then hunters could terminate them.

  “The only one who actually talked to us was a dude called X. At least that’s the name he gave to us. But the others were there as well. My friends and I said we would do it, because we wanted to warn you and if we didn’t take the job, we were sure they would have hired someone else. They might have also figured we were a liability at that point and killed us.”

  “Come inside,” Jacqueline said. “Would you like anything to drink? Sodas? Tea? Water?” Since they said they weren’t here to try to terminate her, she figured they needed to move this indoors and she needed to learn as much as she could about the hunters who had hired them.

  “Water would be good,” Zeke said.

  She got everyone some water to drink, and they eyed hers, as if they were surprised to see her drinking it too instead of blood. Blood was important, of course, but staying hydrated by drinking water was too. They all sat down in the living room. Princess greeted them, breaking the ice. “I’m going to call on a hunter-vampire friend of mine who was turned also to come join us.”

  They all looked at Robert.

  “That’s Robert, my brother, a hunter who hasn’t been turned.”

  The guys were all petting Princess, the cat setting them more at ease.

  Then she said, “Dane, I’m visiting with some Van Helsing hunters who were hired by hunters to eliminate me. If you’re not busy doing anything, I would like you to join me to see what they have to say.”

  Immediately, Dane was standing in her living room with a sword in hand.

  The men all jumped up from their seats on the sofa. Even Robert did, but he was concentrating on the humans, not on Dane, in the event the humans tried to fight Dane and Jacqueline, which she so appreciated.

  “They warned me that some hunters had contracted them to terminate me,” Jacqueline said. “They’re not about to do it.”

  “It’s too bad we couldn’t have them return to the hunters and kill them, but they can’t do that without going to jail for it,” Dane said privately to Jacqueline.

  “Right. We need to learn who the hunters are and then out them to the head of the League of Hunter’s Council.”

  “Tobias.”

  “Yes.”

  “Take a seat, gentlemen,” Dane said, sitting down next to Jacqueline while Robert sat on a chair nearby and the humans sat back down on the sofa. As soon as Dane was sitting down, Princess jumped on his lap, and Dane smiled, then began petting her.

  That seemed to set the humans even more at ease as if they felt the cat wouldn’t go to Dane if he was dangerous and they relaxed a little.

  “All right, tell us everything you can about the hunters,” Dane said.

  “One was called X, but we were sure that wasn’t his name,” Zeke said.

  “That’s Zeke,” Jacqueline said to Dane, “and this is Dane. Like me, he went to take down a rogue vampire and lost the battle.”

  “He might be one of the ones they wanted to have eliminated,” Zeke said, motioning to Dane.

  “I thought you had only come for me,” she said, worried this was more a case of taking out all hunter-turned vampires.

  “Yes, but they said there would be more jobs for us, if we did this one without getting caught. That there was a rogue hunter-vampire male who was a friend of yours,” Zeke said. “Since he came to your defense, I would say that’s a good bet. And by the way, we always check the records to see if a vampire has committed certain crimes and it can all be verified. We have our own private investigator.”

  A skinny, mousy-brown-haired guy raised his hand. “That’s me. I’m Timothy. I did a lot of research on you and found you were an excellent fighter, always took down rogue vampires, never targeted anyone who was innocent, and saved some humans from being turned by rogues. Even after you were turned by Heskel, you were fighting the rogues. There’s not one thing that showed up that would indicate you had turned rogue. So we figure, for whatever reason, the hunters have a beef against you. Or that it’s just a general hatred for hunters who have been turned. What if one of them was turned? That’s what we wanted to know.”

  The blond guy of the group said, “I’m the IT guy, Callaway, and I did a lot of digging, trying to learn who these guys were before we came here. We wanted you to have as much intel as we could gather so that you could ensure your own safety. No way were we going to take money for the job and try to eliminate you. Then those guys would have their way, and if anyone discovered we had done the job, we would end up with sentences of life without a chance for parole. Even if we didn’t talk, the hunters would have gotten away with your murder. I found where they had been last night, via the GPS on their phones—the Starlight Club. And Timothy learned the bouncers and some hunters threw them out of the bar over an incident with some hunter-turned vampires who were dancing.”

  “The five rabble-rousers we had to deal with at the club,” Dane said, glancing at Jacqueline.

  She couldn’t believe it! It was one thing to hassle them in a club and not want them to be there but to hire a hit on them?

  “Who are they, do you know?” Robert asked.

  “Sorry, Dane, I should have introduced you to Robert, my brother,” Jacqueline said, so wrapped up in what was going on, she realized her mistake in not introducing the two of them to each other.

  “Good to meet you,” Dane said, but he didn’t really sound like he was too pleased with her brother.

  She didn’t blame him. She hadn’t been either.

  “Yeah, I know them. They’re friends of Gregory Devine,” Dane said.

  “Hell, the hunter who stabbed Adonis? If the Bremerton family had wanted to charge Gregory, he could have been in prison for life for attempted murder,” Robert said. “I thought he was banished from here, and his friends followed him to wherever they ended up.”

  “In Florida, but it appears some of his friends remained behind,” Dane said. “Two are cousins, Flynn and Felix. Ralph, Manning, and Samuel are the others. Felix would most likely be X. He’s really a leader. But we’ll need proof that they hired you to eliminate Jacqueline.”

  The IT guy, Calloway, rose from his seat and pulled a recorder out of his pocket and handed it to Dane. “We always record the conversations when we take on a job. That way we have proof that someone actually hired us to do it. Of course the hunters didn’t know it.”

  Dane smiled and said to Jacqueline. “I like these guys. They’re on the ball.”

  The guys gave him tentative smiles and she thought he had kind of won them over. Otherwise, he looked like a hunter/vampire that could do some serious harm to them. The same with her brother. She could too, but some thought she didn’t look that capable to win in a fight—which gave her an advantage sometimes.

  Then Dane looked at the other two guys in the Van Helsing group of human hunters. Both men were dark haired, and they held their hands up to say they didn’t know anything. Both were well-muscled and probably worked out to fight vampires. The other three might too, though they didn’t look like they were that strong, but sometimes looks could be deceiving.

  “So if you don’t do the job, then what? Would the hunters want to terminate you because you know too much?” Dane asked.

  “Yeah, we figure that would be the case. That’s why we’re hoping that you can take them down before that happens. No matter what, we want no part in eliminating good vampires,” Zeke said, all his friends agreeing.

  “How was this supposed to go down? You kill Jacqueline, then report back to X?” Dane asked.

  “Yeah, they said she would look like, uh, a regular dead body when we killed her. Not turn to a wizened-up form since she was so newly turned. So we were supposed to take a photo of her after we killed her and send it to X. Then he would tell us what our next job is and would wire us the money. He only wanted the one meeting face-to-face. After that, he wants to do this without physically seeing us to limit his connection to the crime. He let on that this was just a job. If it was just a legal job, there was no reason to keep his connection to the hit a secret. Though of course he told us she was a rogue. But we knew better,” Zeke said. “And the other thing is—if she was a rogue—the hunters would be paid a bounty. They wouldn’t be paying anyone to take down a rogue vampire.”

  “Exactly. What was the timeline on the hit?” Jacqueline asked.

  “We told him we would get it done by midnight tonight. X said that worked for him, but that if it wasn’t done by then, he would contract someone else to do the job,” Zeke said.

  “Yet they don’t have the balls to do it themselves,” the IT guy said.

  Everyone agreed with him.

  “I’ll contact Adonis and tell him what’s going on. Adonis, Rachael, Zachary, Pasha, Michael, and Danai, all are hunters turned and they could be next on these hunters’ list,” Dane said. “Adonis will relay this information to the rest of the family, especially to Tobias and his brothers. These hunters won’t stand a chance.”

  The human hunters visibly sighed in unison, looking vastly relieved.

  Dane got quiet after that and she realized he was talking to Adonis telepathically since he wasn’t getting on his phone.

  “In the meantime, I’m sure we can make some kind of arrangement to keep you safe. Kind of like a Witness Protection Program only it will be handled by the League of Hunters. Probably Tobias and his kin will be in charge of it, so that no one else in the league will hear of it in case some of the members are friends of these hunters,” Jacqueline said.

  “Thanks. We appreciate it,” Zeke said. “We figured we would be in trouble no matter which way we went. I mean, with the hunters or your people.”

  “Well, thanks for coming to our aid. We had no idea this was going on,” Jacqueline said.

  “You’re welcome. We count ourselves as good guys and don’t want to change that,” Zeke said.

  “The same with us.” Jacqueline relayed the information to Stacey because she’d been at the hunter club dancing with them too last night and she wanted to make her aware of the danger to them.

  “Thanks. I’ll tell Anne also,” Stacey said.

  Dane joined the conversation with Zeke and his team. “Danai and Michael are coming to escort you to a safe place. Tobias and his kin own the land and homes, and they’ll take you to one of them they use for guest quarters. No one will dare come there who isn’t good friends of the Bremertons.”

  “Great,” Zeke said. “We want to get back to work as soon as we can.”

  “We’ll have to take care of the hunters first, but you’ll have free food and lodging, and you won’t want for anything. If you have family or friends who might be looking for you, let them know you’re going out of state on a job, and you’ll communicate with them when you’re done. We don’t want the hunters to learn where you are,” Dane said.

  “Yeah, thanks. We’ll do that,” Zeke said.

  “So, uh, I guess I need to thank you,” Robert said to Dane, “for getting rid of the vampire who turned Jacqueline.”

  “You don’t need to thank me for anything,” Dane said. “I did it for her. I would have done it for anyone who was in that situation.”

  “Well, I should have been there for her,” Robert said.

  “Yeah, you should have been. You and your family and her ex-fiancé.” Dane went to the kitchen and got some water to drink.

  “So I guess you all had something to prove by going to the hunters’ club last night,” Robert said.

  “That we’re still hunters? Yeah,” Dane said. “We could go to a vampire club, but I believe we would be less welcome there.” He retook his seat next to Jacqueline.

  “Uh, probably,” Robert said. “They might think you were there to hunt a rogue.”