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I place my hand on his chest and shake my head. “Let me go first,” I whisper, then push him back and get to work on the lock.
Turned vampires have a more challenging time resisting blood, where Purebloods have it down to an art. Someone could be waving their severed arm in front of me, and I would just shrug them off, but not a vampire like Valentine.
Yes, he’s over 200 years old, but there’s a reason it’s called bloodlust. He can control it to an extent before it takes over, and by the smell of the blood inside, someone has already met their demise.
I slowly open the door and gesture for Valentine to follow behind me. Something heavy falls to the floor, and the scent of fresh blood hits me again, but this time it has a different smell to it.
With wide eyes, I turn to Valentine and notice the equally grim expression on his face when we realize what the smell is.
A child’s blood.
“You cover me; I’ll go and have a look in the bedrooms,” I say, then quietly make my way to the bedrooms, but as I open the door, a wooden arrow flies straight at my head.
I quickly move out of the way, and it gets embedded in the wall behind me. However, the person didn’t let me get my bearings before I felt two baobab bullets hit my left shoulder. Instinctively my hand goes up to the wounded shoulder just as it starts to numb, and another one gets shot into my hand.
“FUCK!” I call out, making my way into another bedroom and pulling the bullets out by extending my nails. The splitting pain is pounding away at my shoulders even after the bullets are removed, but I allow my anger to take over now that I know this fucking person was expecting me to come here.
A fucking hunter.
A movement to my right gets my attention and against the white drapes, I see the outline of the hunter with a gun in his hand. I launch myself at him, but he instinctively lunges forward to meet me, jabbing his fist at my wounded shoulder.
I growl as the pain shoots through my arm, but I ignore it and grab his head, cracking it on the concrete windowsill. Grinning at the sickening crunch, I watch the life leave his eyes the second he sprawls to the floor.
But that glee leaves me when I realize that I should probably have kept him alive for questioning. How the fuck did he know we would be here? Did Andreas set this up, or does he have rats in his own home?
“Gabe,” Valentine’s voice cuts through my thoughts, and when I turn around, he throws another body at my feet. “They knew we would be here.”
I nod. “I thought the same fucking thing,” I say, then make my way back to the other bedrooms.
The moment I stepped over the threshold of the main bedroom, I shook my head at the sight before me. Hunters say supernatural creatures are monsters and murderers, but it has nothing on human nature.
The woman we came to find is lying half naked with her ripped clothing drenched in her own blood; someone had slit her throat so deeply that her head was hanging on by a strip of flesh.
The dripping we heard was from her, and the way her eyes were staring up at me in horror and the coldness of her skin told me that she’d been dead for a few hours.
I sighed, dreading what I would find when I opened the door marked ‘Kayla,’ and as soon as I opened it, I wished that I didn’t. A murdered woman has nothing on a murdered child, especially when you know what has been done to the poor thing.
I take out my cell phone and call Andreas, not feeling guilty for killing these assholes at all.
“Got anything?”
“We found your VP; unfortunately, she won’t make it back to work,” I say, looking at the tiny body in front of me while despair sets deep in my bones.
Andreas sighs, and I hear a glass being smashed against a wall. “Do you know who did it?”
I growl. “Hunters, and by the looks of the tattoos on their backs, it’s Death’s Temple, but that’s not the only thing I found out,” I say sadly, tearing my eyes away from the tiny, bloodied body. “It seems those hunters are affiliated with the trafficking ring; they killed the VP hours ago, and her daughter—"
“No fucking way,” he says incredulously. “Are you implying what I think you are fucking implying?”
“I wish I were joking, Andreas,” I sigh, pinching the bridge of my nose in disgust. “It seems Décès has his fingers in a lot of sickening pies, and if they knew we were being sent here tonight, that means you have rats in your house.”
“I’ll sort it out,” he says with anger lacing his scent. “I’ll be over there in the next few minutes to clean up; thanks, Priest.”
“Yeah, don’t mention it,” I say, then kill the call and pocket my cell.
I lean my head back against the wall and exhale loudly; out of everything I have ever seen in my life, a child’s bloody, violated body is not something I ever want to get used to.
Hunters pride themselves on killing us, but they’re the biggest fucking monsters out there.
