When they finished, they ran a piece of rope down to secure his ankles and wrists together behind his back. The hunter wasn’t completely hogtied as he had room, and they hadn’t bent his extremities back, but he wasn’t going to move around well either.
“Where are we going?” Zina called from the front.
CHAPTERFOUR
Brie crawled forwardand poked her head through the doorway separating the front from the back of the van. Zina, a tall, slender woman who became a vampire in her mid-thirties, sat behind the wheel.
She was often their getaway driver as she’d spent a good portion of her late teens and early twenties stealing vehicles and evading the police… when they weren’t arresting her. Zina once revealed that her fifteen arrests were a small fraction of the number of cars she stole and the things she did wrong.
“They caught me fifteen times; I got away with it a thousand times,” Zina once bragged to Brie over a bottle of tequila.
After seeing how the woman could drive, Brie didn’t doubt it.
Zina slowed the van as they approached a red light and brushed a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. Her brown eyes were curious when she glanced at Brie.
“Let’s head home,” Brie told her. “We got what we came here for.”
Zina grinned at her. “That’s what I like to hear.”
Brie examined the hunter’s phone, but there weren’t any numbers in it. There were a few missed calls from one number; she wouldn’t call it back. That would only be asking for more trouble.
“Throw this out soon,” Brie told her. “And where it won’t attract too much attention.”
Zina took the hunter’s phone from her. “Will do, boss.”
“Don’t you start too,” Brie said as she eyed the passenger seat.
It was the only other seat in the van, and it looked really appealing right now. She couldn’t curl up in it as she yearned to do when she had a hunter in the back of her van. With a sigh, Brie retreated to the back and slid down the wall to sit across from the hunter.
Draping her arms over her drawn-up knees, she studied the handsome features that had haunted her dreams and waking moments for the past six months. She didn’t know his name and barely knew who he was, but she’d spent a lot of time with him already… even if he didn’t know it.
She had no idea why he suddenly entered her visions six months ago, but he’d been an almost nightly visitor to her sleep and appeared before her a few times a week. In the beginning, she would stop short when she saw him, like she did with most of her visions, but he materialized so often now, she walked right through him.
He wasn’t the first man or woman she’d seen without knowing them, far from, but he had haunted her far more than any of the others. And he was the first who left her feeling empty and a little lost when she woke after having a dream of him.
She’d eventually run across all the others from her visions; it was how she met Cabo and Zina. She’d been both excited and dreaded meeting him. She was curious why he was different to her, but different didn’t always mean good.
His hunter status easily could have made him an enemy—they had been the enemy to the vampires for years, but she was aware that had changed. She’d seen enough glimpses of this change not to fear him.
But she did fear why he’d been so prominent in her visions and what she’d seen about his future. She’d received premonitions for as long as she could remember; she probably had them as a baby but hadn’t been aware of what they were or how to communicate them with others until she was older.
And not once had she received visions about someone as often as him. Why? What did it all mean?
Brie rubbed her temples as she pondered this. Despite her better judgment, she had to warn him when she saw him at the airport last month. She’d known he would survive the battle he would soon face and he wouldn’t heed her advice, but that hadn’t stopped her.
She couldn’t walk away from him, and not only because she felt compelled to tell him to stay away, but also because she wanted to see if she could glimpse some answers about him by touching him. Both of those things hadn’t given her any insight into her nonstop visions of him. Instead of easing them, they became more intense after she approached him.
She shouldn’t have gone to him; it had only unleashed trouble on them. And considering they now had a hunter bound in the back of their van, she didn’t see it getting any better. His friends would hunt for him.
She cursed that day in the airport and her stupidity for going to him. A vision led her to the terminal; he hadn’t been in it, so she’d suspected the premonition had something to do with locating a stone.
She’d been wrong.
When Brie spotted him across the way, she was too shocked to move at first. She hadn’t seen him in her vision, but it had led her to him. Standing there, staring at him, she’d been tempted to flee, but she was drawn there for a reason. Since she’d been experiencing premonitions of the upcoming siege on his home, she suspectedthatwas why.
She saw the future after all, or at least glimpsed it—a blessing or a curse given to her by God or the gods or whatever was out there. But maybe there were no entities out there. She sometimes saw the future but probably had fewer answers to the world and the way it worked than those who didn’t.
But then, she supposed if vampires and demons existed, then God or gods or something else must too. That was a whole theological thing she wasn’t going to get into.
