Prologue
Pasha Cameron, a huntress of rogue vampires, one of any number of hunters having been born with the instinct to kill rogue vampires, needed to find redemption for what she’d done.
The hunters were descendants of some of the ones who had survived the Black Death during Medieval times, their genetics having been altered, allowing them heightened senses of smell and sight, and they were stronger than humans. Weapons they had constructed that would kill the vampires had been passed down from generation to generation.
Others, who had lived through the plague, had become vampires, turning humans who had survived, into their own kind. Some had learned to live as law-abiding citizens, buying their blood as needed from blood banks. Some humans who had lived and had been unaffected by the pandemic remained unchanged.
Hunters were family-oriented. So were vampires. Vampires could vanish and reappear in another location close by. They had the same strength as the hunters, but they had the ability to transport unlike the hunters. The vampires could also conduct telepathic communication with each other, and control their victims with vampiric persuasion. They couldn’t turn hunters into vampires—so they thought.
Until one day…one did.
Which was why Pasha had to find redemption for what she’d done by doing anything she could to fight the vampire rogues who were turning their world upside down.
Chapter 1
Weakened from her month-long captivity at the hands of Piaras, Dallas’s most ruthless vampire, Pasha barely had the strength to wield a sword against the human host who struck at her with his. And the thing of it was—this was all her fault. The vampires capturing her parents, the one turning her sister and her brother. If Pasha hadn’t gone to her best friend’s aid in Dallas without the support of a hunter’s clan, none of this would have happened. And for what? Her hunter friend had already been dead before Pasha had even arrived in the city to save her.
Now, Pasha was in Piaras’s house, trying to save her parents and herself, while her sister and her brother were now vampires, attempting to save them too. Pasha hated herself for what they had become. If anyone deserved to die for it, it was her. Yet the innate need for self-preservation, and her parents’ welfare, kept her fighting.
She tripped over a chair, then turned and shoved it into the vampire’s path. She and her parents and sister, Danai, had just made it to the vampire’s sitting room before Piaras had sent his human hosts to stop them. The glass window Danai broke for their escape, lay shattered into millions of shimmering crystals on the Aztec carpet-covered floor. Pasha’s designer boots crunched on the fragments as she tried to stay out of the host’s blade’s reach, her heart beating wildly, her skin prickling with worry.
If they could only crawl through the window and into the noonday sunlight, they’d be safe from the vampires Piaras would most undoubtedly unleash on them next. But the hosts outnumbered them three to one. To her horror, her parents were stuck in a corner of the room where she couldn’t reach them and usher them to safety. Both her parents were thin, her father’s graying, dark brown hair hanging loosely about his shoulders, her mother’s dark hair tied back in a tail. Their dark brown eyes were wide with terror as they shoved furniture in the path of the hosts, trying to keep them at a distance.
The host’s sluggish movements against Pasha were most likely due to the vampires draining him of blood the night before, then not having enough sleep to make up for it. Though her huntress genetics gave her stronger abilities, she still struggled against his meager efforts, using the sword her older sister had quickly armed her with.
Her family maneuvered around the leather-bound furniture, attempting to use the pieces as shields against the onslaught. She bumped against a turquoise pot displayed on a table, then grabbed it and threw it at the host. He ducked.
Another host lunged at Pasha. She swung her sword to connect with his, and the resounding clang reverberated off the walls. Danai whipped around and thrust her sword into his chest. She yelled over her shoulder, “Momma, climb through the window, before Piaras wakes the bloodsuckers!”
The panic in her voice indicated they were fighting a losing battle. They’d only managed to kill three human hosts but combating the remainder and a slew of vampires would be a fatal mistake on the hunter family’s part.
“I will not leave my family! Give me a sword, a dagger...anything!” their mother screamed back.
Their mother could barely lift a sword at this point, let alone use it. Pasha knew her mother didn’t want to live if the rest of her family died here today. And all of this was Pasha’s fault. Their being here. Danai and her brother, Adonis’s, conditions. All of it. She’d hated every waking day, knowing the havoc she had brought down on her whole family.
Pasha maneuvered back toward her mother and grabbed her arm. “Please, Momma, go into the sunlight where the vampires can’t get to you should they attack next!”
It was only a matter of time.
Their father forced a sword into a host’s heart and yelled, “Do as your daughters bid, Melana!”
Instead, Melana grabbed up the knife from a fallen host. Stubborn, like the rest of the huntresses in the family, she stabbed at a host’s arm as he swung his sword at Pasha.
Pasha’s own strength dwindled as Danai held the hosts off. She couldn’t get used to the fact Danai and Adonis were now vampires, no longer just a hunter and huntress in their family. The notion both repulsed her and saddened her at the same time. It made her hate herself for her rash impulsiveness.
Rogue vampires killed hunters outright. She still couldn’t believe Piaras had turned them instead.
Yet, if it weren’t for Danai and Adonis, and their concerted efforts to free her and their mother and father from Piaras, she and her parents wouldn’t even have this slim chance to get out alive. She hadn’t seen Adonis but could hear screams and fighting going on down the hall in the main part of the house and she was certain he was at the root of it.
Pasha sliced a host’s arm with her sword. They didn’t seem interested in killing Danai. Their efforts were concentrated on Pasha and their parents instead. Piaras had undoubtedly wanted to keep his huntress turned vampire in his stable of bloodsuckers a while longer.
Was he keeping Adonis too? She thought if her brother and sister survived this, it would be a fatal mistake on Piaras’s part.
And what of the huntress Adonis had to turn over to Piaras in payment for their release? Rachael Bremerton? What was to become of her?
The sounds of fighting continued down the hall where Pasha imagined Adonis fought Piaras. She shuddered to think what would become of them all.
Suddenly, the vampires swooped into the room. Seven of them in various states of undress in the early afternoon hour. Wearing everything from black silk pajamas to satin boxers, the seven looked like they’d had an all-male slumber party, and every one of them had woken up on the wrong side of the bed. Their hair hung freely about their shoulders, the length of it indicating they’d been turned some years earlier. The more ancient the vampire, the stronger he was...and the whole lot of them extended their fangs and leaped into the fray as if well-practiced in a choreographed dance. They were sure to make short work of Pasha and her parents.