Page 24 of A Hunter Turned
Jamie brushed at her cheeks and swallowed hard, not sure if she wanted to hear the rest since she knew there wasn’t a happy ending to Kelsey Langley’s story. She wanted to rush over to him and hug him and stop the words that she somehow knew he was about to say, but it was too late.
“I heard the gunshot ten minutes later.” The look in his eyes was bleak, rife with suffering as he met Jamie’s gaze. On a choked sob, he told her, “I had given her the gun to protect herself.”
Unable to sit still a moment longer, Jamie lurched out of her seat and collapsed to her knees beside him, her arms holding him as tightly as she could as if she could squeeze his broken pieces back together again and make him whole.
He cleared his throat once, twice, before he fell back on his butt taking Jamie with him. Lifting his shoulder against his face, he wiped away a tear that had escaped and seemed to pull himself back together. “The bastard that did that to her is still out there. He’s one of the ones that Kane’s hunting. Big, gorilla looking waste of oxygen with a scar down his face.”
Jamie’s breath hitched in her lungs and she gasped, “He’s one of the ones that tortured me.”
A low growl rumbled in Archer’s chest, his bright silver gaze mere inches from her own. “He should be dead. Rodolfo assured me when I issued a complaint against the vampire that he would be dealt with. If it’s the last thing I do, Iwillsee that bastard’s head removed from his body,” he swore. “For you, for Kelsey, shit, he probably had a hand in what happened to the dragon.”
Flexing her fingers that were still sore but rapidly regaining mobility, she itched to get her hands on a computer and get down to business. Jamie’s voice was determined as she announced, “We’ll hunt him together.”
Chapter Fifteen
Pulling the glasses off that had now become too strong for her recovering vision, Jamie rubbed her eyes. She’d stayed with Archer until dawn had begun to streak the sky and she’d been forced to leave thanks to the imminent appearance of the sun. That was one thing she missed about being human. Seeing that bright orb in the sky. Which, honestly, was weird considering how often she’d slept the day away as a human or locked herself behind closed doors with her computer, curtains drawn against the glare. But now that she could no longer see it or spend time under its rays, she missed it.
She and Archer hadn’t spoken much more after Jamie had made her declaration, both of them too consumed by their memories. Jamie might not remember much in the way of details about her torture after the pain had begun, just flashes really, but she remembered the duo that had been tasked with hurting her. Both of them were large, beefy vampires, with fists like anvils. One of them had had a face that reminded her of a bulldog. He’d been grim from what she’d remembered of him, determined, but the other one, the one with the scarred face, he’d taken pleasure in her pain, had laughed at her screams. He’d enjoyed hurting her.
She had a name to put to that face now, thanks to a quick call to Kane who had files on all of Rodolfo’s Turned. A quick description from her and he’d been able to send over the file. Marlin Hughes. Born in 1902, he had been a smuggler during prohibition, had been an enforcer for the mafia, and a prize-fighter in the ring before he’d been recruited by the Born and Turned in his late thirties. His education was minimal, his worth measured only in his ability to dole out pain.
Thanks to an image Kane had also been able to send her, Jamie was now running facial recognition. She had back-door access to every street cam, ATM, even hotels in the area that had cameras in their lobbies, but it would still take time, and unless she got very lucky, still left a lot of areas, a lot of hidden shadows where the vampire could hide. Nonetheless, she would find him. She was a Hunter, and this was what she was good at.
As if knowing that Jamie needed a distraction, Morgan appeared in the doorway with a grin on her face and what looked like a rolled-up poster in her hand. “Guess what I got.”
“An autographed poster of a naked Chris Hemsworth?”
Morgan barked out a laugh. “You’d drool all over it.”
Jamie smiled, already feeling better. “I would.”
“Maybe I’ll get you a poster of him in the fat suit.”
“I’d still drool,” she said with a laugh, moving her laptop aside. It would run its programs with or without her supervision, so best to just let it do its thing while she let herself be pleasantly distracted. “What have you got?”
“Initial sketches of the new base. Check it out and let me know what you think.”
Stretching to get a look as Morgan unrolled the plans and weighted the corners, Jamie attempted to bring the three-dimensional drawing and small writing into focus. Giving up, she put the glasses back on. If she had to guess, another night or so of Morgan’s pure blood and she’d be able to ditch the eyewear altogether.
“You know, square-footage and basic structure design are all well and good but my opinion is going to count for shit until we get down to installing the tech. We’ve been making do with dive hotels and working out of the SUV for so long that this,” she said, waving a hand over the diagrams, “this is luxury.”
And on that note, Jamie actually looked at the square-footage notations and her eyes bulged. Blinking, she checked again to make sure she hadn’t missed the decimal point. Nope. Still the same. “Holy shit. This place would be huge. Were you able to even find a plot of land this big to accommodate it?” And then with a frown, “Why are you even thinking this big? I mean I know Travis’s dragon needs a lot of space but this is crazy.”
“Ah, yeah. That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”
Morgan was biting her lip like she was nervous, and that was enough to get Jamie’s full attention. Morgan was never nervous. “What’s up?”
“You know I had to get permission from the higher-ups at the Hunter’s Society to set down a permanent base, right?”
“You said they were cool with it as long as we kept it under the radar.”
“They’re the ones that sent through these plans to me, along with an offer.” Standing, Morgan pulled the folded letter from her back pocket, little bits of red wax from the old-fashion seal falling on the plans. “Read it and tell me what you think.”
Taking the letter that was written in fancy calligraphy on heavy cream paper, Jamie’s eyes widened. They wanted Morgan to build a training facility for new Hunters. The escalating situation thanks to the recent mandate from the Born that had expelled Hunters from New York and its bordering territories had thrown the vampire community into a tumult and they didn’t have the necessary manpower to maintain the fallout. Morgan and her team would run the facility, house, and train the recruits that the Hunters’ Society would send their way and in exchange, the Society would foot the bill including a salary package for each of them that made Jamie nearly choke on her tongue.
“Holy shit. Is this for real?”
Before she even saw Morgan’s affirmative nod, she noted what she had missed before, the Hunters’ Society official emblem in the corner of the blueprints.
