"How do you feel?" Daniel sounded really concerned, more than he'd ever sounded. "Hell, and I threw you out of the club."
"I had a sword on me." Giving him sort of an out.
"You had been bitten by a bloody vampire."
"Yes."
"How do you feel, Selena? Honestly?" Daniel asked.
"Tired. Atreides told me I heard vampire communication."
"Damn it."
“Yeah. I have to tell you if it's true, I might be one of them."
"Hell."
She needed to let him process the information, good or bad. “Good night, Daniel. I’ll talk to you later.”
She felt the same way as her brother did, but she couldn't do anything about it. It really truly was becoming a hazard of being a hunter of vampires now. In the past, they killed hunters, period. Now they were turning some of the hunters, to try and get them to work for them. A hunter couldn't kill the vampire who turned him. And they had to do their bidding. The rogue vampire wanted to control a hunter, the ultimate treasure.
No hunter wanted to be controlled in that way. It was worse than death. And they had no way to kill themselves. They could only fight the vampires to the death and hope to die in a good fight. But she didn't feel that way. Some of her hunter friends: Tezra Campbell, Rachael Bremerton, Crystal Anderson, and Alena MacLeod had all been turned and they had been great huntresses. Now they were a combination of hunters and vampires. Selena would never have wished it on herself, or on them, but she wouldn't regret it. Not when she knew she would have friends all over the States who were just like her. Not that many, but enough to know she wasn’t the only one.
She would somehow learn to live with it. She wondered, facetiously, if she could dance any better with Atreides with new moves as a vampire, if she were one.
"Let's go back to the house," Atreides said.
"She can stay with me," Iconia said. “I can take care of her."
Yeah, like get rid of her! She would much rather stay with Atreides. He was a much safer bet.
"She's my ward, she stays with me."
"You know what Daemon's going to say about all this?" Iconia asked.
Selena assumed Atreides was hoping no one told Daemon about what was going on here while he and Tezra were away.
"Well, don't you have anything to say about it?" Iconia asked Selena.
"I might as well stay with Atreides. He set me up in the guest room already." Selena hoped he would be fine with her staying there until she could figure out what she was going to do. She could return to her apartment, she figured.
What if the rogue hunters come after her there though? She guessed she could stay with Colt at his ranch too. He seemed to have a bunch of vampires living there to guard her sister. Well, in truth she should stay with her sister, so why did she want to stay with Atreides?
Thankfully, she wasn't feeling thirsty for blood and she couldn't do anything else the vampires did, so she still wasn't sure about what was going on.
Then she said to Atreides, “If the women are all going to their places safely, then I'm ready to stay at your home. I'm going to need my clothes though, unless you think I can return to my place and will be safe enough. I'm sure my sister or brother wouldn't mind staying with me or watching out for me now."
"No, you stay with me. I don't want to worry about you being there alone if they should leave." He wrapped his arms around her. "I'll talk to you later, Iconia." Then he transported Selena back to the house. Basil, Colt, and Renault were there and Atreides said, "Go get Selena's clothes and bring them here."
"I should go with them," Selena said, "so that I can get everything I need."
"Okay, then we all will go," Atreides said.
"How long is Rosa going to stay with you?" she asked.
"Until we catch the rogue hunters. She's all in on this. She admires you greatly and wants to do what you did for the vampiress—to prove that the hunters are rogues and not all hunters are like that. I just hope that we can get them quickly."
"All right. I feel the same way."
Atreides contacted the other guys and they all arrived to ride in the van to her place so she could pack. Thankfully, when they arrived there, they could see no one had been in her apartment. She was halfway expecting someone to have trashed her place—hunters, mainly, angry she got away with killing the rogue hunter. But no one had touched. She packed her bags in the bedroom and her toiletries in the bathroom. Then she got her perishable food out of the fridge. She was glad the vampires still ate food. She wouldn't want to give up that hunter or human aspect.
"Are you hungry for anything other than food?" Atreides asked. "I'll feed you when you need something to eat."
"Blood, you mean? I don't feel any urge to have blood." She wrinkled her nose at the thought.
"You don't mean the rogue vampire turned her," Colt said, looking shocked, but then he smiled. "That could be good news."
"No one's dating her," Atreides said.
"As if I wanted to be with a vampire." Selena didn’t want them taking it for granted that she just wanted to throw out her hunter sensibilities and start dating vampires.
"If you're one of us, would you be interested in dating a hunter? I'm not sure a hunter would be interested in dating a vampiress even if she's a hunter too," Renault said.
"I doubt a hunter would be interested in a vampiress. I would probably be stuck with having to date a vampire," Selena conceded.
"I love the way she says that. She would be stuck with one of us. I believe she would be happy to have one of us after she got used to this," Colt said.
Then they carried all her stuff to the van and drove back toward Atreides's place. Near her apartment, they saw a wolf on the side of the road, and she stared at it. "That's it."
The guys all looked out the van windows and Atreides jerked the van to the side of the road, but when they got out of the van, the wolf was gone.
"Are you sure that was the same wolf?" Atreides asked.
"Yes, the same one. Exactly. And he's following us—me."
They all piled back into the van.
"I would kill him if I could," Renault said.
"I would beat you to it,” Colt said.
Atreides shook his head. “We have to know what this is all about. His showing himself to us like that has to have a purpose. He knew she would recognize him, and then we would know him if we saw him again. But I don't recognize him in wolf form."
Selena knew they could turn into bats or wolves or ravens. "Maybe he’s the one who said to me that they killed her. I heard him whisper it in my ear."
"He could talk to you because he knew you had been turned, maybe because he had turned you," Atreides said. "You were with me when you heard him speak. He was talking to you telepathically, privately, so I didn't hear his conversation with you."
"Privately? You can talk with someone privately?" She was surprised, though she thought it was cool.
"Yes."
"Wait! When you were with Iconia, you were talking to her telepathically, weren't you? I thought you two were having a staring contest, but that wasn't what was going on, was it? You were talking secretly to each other." Now Selena was getting it.