Hunter's Salvation

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

SALT LAKE CITY
AUGUST
2006

“S
O,
how is wedded bliss treating you?” Vax looked from Kendall to her husband, Kane, and grinned. “Have you gotten used to the ball-and-chain routine yet?”

Kendall flicked a peanut shell at him. She held a pilsner glass in her other hand and took a long drink before saying, “We keep the chains in the bedroom, darling. You ought to know that.”

“Kendall, please. I don't want Rambo coming after me.”

Kane looked at Vax and flashed a toothy grin. The eye-teeth looked a little longer than they had when Vax had first met him, but other than that, Kane looked pretty much the same. He had taken to the abrupt change in his life pretty damn well, but Vax wasn't surprised. Kane's being Changed into a vamp was the only way he and Kendall could have had a happy ending. Vax figured that if anybody deserved a happy ending, it was Kendall.

“Now, Kane isn't going to do that, are you, Kane?” Kendall snuggled up against Kane, resting her head on his chest. When he looked down at her, Kendall gave her husband an innocent smile and batted her lashes.

Kane leaned his shaggy blond head against the wooden slats that made up the back of the booth. His eyelids closed and he gave a faint smile. “Not right now. I'm enjoying the peace and quiet too much.”

Quiet
being a relative term, Vax hoped. The bar they were in was anything but quiet. The band was actually pretty decent, the singer crooning out his rendition of “Desperado.” But even though they didn't sound like a bunch of cats fighting it out, they were not quiet. Kendall, Kane, and Vax were able to carry on a fairly normal conversation only because all three of them had superacute hearing. Everybody else in the bar had to raise their voices to be heard.

Vax knew that Kendall and Kane had just surfaced from a pretty messy job. A long one, too, if the look in her eyes was any indication. She seemed tired. Vax could sympathize.

Vax might be out of the game, but that didn't mean he'd forgotten it. He'd spent enough years doing the “defender of the innocent and helpless” bit to know just how exhausting and heartbreaking it could be.

He didn't know how she kept going. Kendall had been a Hunter for far longer than he'd been alive, and that could be measured in centuries now, not just decades. She'd been at this for several hundred years and Vax had left it behind him after fifty. He'd asked her once how long she'd keep fighting.

“Until I die or until there's no need left,” she'd told him. Which meant until she died, because as long as the world kept spinning there was going to be in evil in it. Hunters faced down that evil and did what they could to level the playing field—a hard, thankless job.

But of the two of them, Kendall was the happy one. She was surrounded by evil, death, and despair, but she hadn't let it beat her. Vax had. He didn't fight the good fight anymore. He lived alone on his ranch, worked his land, cared for his horses—and he was lonely as hell.

Of course, the man at Kendall's side was definitely the main reason she was happy. Kane and Kendall, they'd saved each other.

Kendall glanced towards the dance floor and then back at Kane. “Enjoying the peace and quiet too much to get up and dance with me?”

Kane's lashes lifted. “Sort of.” He reached over and trailed his fingers down the outside of her arm. “I'd rather dance once we get to the hotel.”

She snorted. “That's not dancing, pal.” Shifting her gaze to Vax, she lifted a brow. “How about you?” There was a wicked gleam in her eyes as she asked it.

Vax grinned as Kane stiffened in the booth, sitting up as straight as if somebody had swapped his spine for a metal pipe. “You aren't dancing with him, sugar.”

Vax hid his smile by taking a drink. “I don't mind taking a turn around the dance floor, Kendall. For old times' sake.”

As Kendall started to slide from the booth, an evil smile on her lips, Kane reached out and wrapped his fingers around her arm, locking her in place. Then he looked at Vax and narrowed his eyes. “Not a chance.” Kendall stood up and Kane scooted out after her, sliding an arm around her waist.

Having gotten what she wanted, Kendall let her husband lead her out to the dance floor, leaving Vax alone. He reached over and grabbed a handful of peanuts from the tin bucket placed nearby.

As he cracked open a shell, a shadow fell across the table, and Vax lifted his eyes to the brunette standing there. Standing—hell, the way she was posed, she might as well be on the cover of a magazine. One glittery green strap of her tank top had slid off her shoulder. The emerald green matched the stones dangling from her ears, and as she shifted her stance, the hem of her top lifted enough for him to see a matching stone flashing in her navel. Her skirt was so low, he could see her hip bones jutting out over the band, and it was so damned short that if she bent over, Vax imagined she could get arrested for indecent exposure.

She smiled at him as she sat down across from him in the booth. “Hi.” As she spoke, she leaned forward. Whether it was to keep from having to yell too loudly or to treat him to a better view of her breasts, he didn't know.

Since she was going out of her way to treat him to the view, he went ahead and admired it as he popped a peanut into his mouth. “Hello.”

“You look kind of lonely.” She reached out and touched the back of his hand with a perfectly manicured nail and gave him a smile that showed perfectly white, straight teeth. “I hate seeing a man as sexy as you looking so lonely.”

Vax decided she looked like a Barbie doll, with her perfect manicure, her perfect smile, her perfect breasts, and her perfect hair that fell halfway down her back. Plastic. A pretty piece of perfect plastic. Vax smiled a little to himself and leaned back against the booth. “And if I was an ugly-ass bastard, would it bother you to see me lonely?” he asked.

A blank look crossed her face, and he popped another peanut into his mouth while she tried to figure that out. She didn't for more than a second or two. “I love this song. Would you like to dance with me?”

Without even glancing at the crowded dance floor, he said, “Nope.” He nodded towards the back of the club, where there was a long row of crowded pool tables. There were easily two dozen wannabe cowboys back there who'd love to impress Barbie. “I bet some of them guys would love to dance with you.”

She flipped her hair back over her shoulder. “Boys. I came here looking for a man.”

He wondered whether the chemicals used on her hair had started to affect her brain. She wasn't taking the hint very well.

Finally he decided to just spell it out for her. “Not interested, sweetheart. I just came to have a couple of beers and talk with my friends.”

Her eyes narrowed and she stood up from the table, straightening her top and smoothing down the pathetic excuse for a skirt. “Your loss.” She walked away with an exaggerated sway of her hips.

As the crowd swallowed her up, Vax reached for more peanuts.

His stomach rumbled demandingly, and he studied the scant menu that was glued to the table under the Plexiglas. He was debating between the burger or some buffalo wings when he heard it. None of the mortals could have heard, over the boom of music, the faint, almost strangled scream that ended abruptly.

By the time he hit the crowd at the door, he could see Kendall and Kane coming up behind them. Something rolled through the air, and the crowd parted around Kendall without even realizing why. He fell in behind the vampires. The second they got outside, Kendall threw a damper on the aura of fear emanating from her. “Such a handy little trick you have.”

Kendall looked at Vax over her shoulder with a smile, but it looked strained.

The three of them trotted around the outside of the club, trying to find the source of the scream. Vax scented blood and magick. He swung to the east, along the farthest edge of the parking lot. They approached as one, Kendall pausing by the fallen body of a man. “He's alive,” she murmured, pressing her hand to the gouges in his neck.

“Will he stay that way?” Kane was staring off into the darkness. Vax followed his line of sight but couldn't see as well as the vampires could in the dark. All he could make out were a couple of darker shadows.

“Yes. Just unconscious. Looks like he got his head bashed in.” Kane didn't wait around to hear any more. He moved quickly to investigate whatever he'd seen in the shadows. Vax paused and crouched down by her side, studying the man's injured neck in the faint light. “The wounds are deep, but as long as he doesn't lose more blood…” Kendall's nose wrinkled and she looked up, her eyes seeking out Vax's. “What's that smell?”

It was faint. Vax just barely caught the scent, and it was oddly familiar. “Wait here.”

She grimaced. “I'm not going anywhere until I get the bleeding to stop, darling.”

Leaving her alone in the shadows, Vax approached the muffled sounds of fighting a block away. There was another body, but this one was moving. It was a woman clutching the shredded remains of her shirt together in front of her, whimpering and rocking herself. The panicked fear rolling off her hit Vax's shields like an avalanche. Bracing himself against it, he tried to sift through all the stimuli coming from her. He caught one random image, and it seemed as if all the fear was related to it.

It looked like a shifter.

Sort of. In a Hollywood-version-gone-wrong sort of way. A humanoid face covered in fur, the brow ridge more pronounced and the jaw elongated. The way a shifter looked for a split second as it shifted from human to animal. Limbs stretched out, as though somebody had replaced the bones with putty and jerked them all out of proportion. Vax had seen some scary-ass-looking creatures, but the wrongness of this image disturbed him.

Had she seen a shifter Changing? Could this stem from that random moment?

There was a scrabbling sound behind him and he whirled, flicking his wrist and dislodging his knife from the sheath he kept strapped to his forearm. It was eight inches long, slender, and made of pure silver. It was balanced for throwing, but he could also use it in a knife fight if it came down to it. He swung out with the knife, and it was the only thing that kept him from getting his throat ripped out.

He backpedaled away from the thing in front of him. As his back collided with a rusted-out work van, he stared.

It was the thing he had picked up from the woman.

It moved towards Vax, and he realized vaguely that it wasn't an
it,
but a
she
. He could make out the curve of breasts on her chest, and the fur on her torso started to thin out just under the rib cage. Her belly was practically hairless, save for a ribbon of hair that ran down to the pubic area before thickening and covering her thighs with a thick, coarse-looking pelt.

The eyes looked human. Vax found himself staring at her, almost dumb as his mind tried to process what he was looking at. The hair on her head could have passed for the hair he'd see on any woman, thick and shiny. And she was wearing an earring. Just one, a silver spiral that looked out of place against the darkness of her pelt.

She swung out towards him, and the sight of those deadly black talons flying towards his face snapped him out of his daze. He dove to the side, tucking his body into a ball and rolling away. He came to his feet and pivoted around. The wolf-woman turned towards him, studying him with her head cocked to the side. She opened a thin, lipless mouth and spoke. Her voice was too garbled for him to understand, but the tightening in the air told him everything he needed to know.

Fire came hurtling towards him, and he swore. Drawing back his hand, he threw the knife. More magick shimmered around him, but it ended abruptly as the knife planted itself in her malformed chest.

The fire had struck the Dumpster just behind him, and he dealt with that, using his own power to kill the flames. Smoke continued to rise from the Dumpster while he turned and approached the woman still huddled and whispering on the ground.

There was a faint sound behind him, and he turned to see Kane limping towards him. There were four furrows in the left leg of his jeans, and Vax could see blood welling from some nasty-looking gouges under the cloth.

“Was that a werewolf?” Kane asked, lines bracketing his mouth.

Vax looked back at the thing. The fur was slowly receding into the woman's body, the limbs returning to a more normal length. In under a minute, all that remained was a human woman, her body covered with bruises and Vax's silver knife sticking out of her chest.

He drew it out and pulled a bandana from his back pocket. After he'd wiped away the blood, he folded up the bandana and stuck it inside his jacket pocket. “I'm not really sure.”

“You're not sure.”

Looking up at Kane, Vax repeated in a slow voice, “No. I'm not really sure.”

 

H
OURS
later, the three of them were holed up in a hotel room.

Some mortal at the bar had seen a commotion and called the cops, so Kane and Vax had been forced to dodge the police, leaving Kendall there until the ambulance arrived. She fabricated a very believable-sounding line about how she had been trying to find the man she had come with when she stumbled across the bleeding man.