Pasha sighed heavily.
“And my sister and her husband are arriving in an hour at the airport. If someone could pick them up, that would be great.”
“Pasha and I can do it,” Zachary quickly said. Pasha would need to go because she knew them. He would be her and her relatives’ additional protection.
“I’ll stay here with Carissa and the baby,” Michael said, waiting for Rachael to declare what she would do.
“I’ll remain at the hotel with you both also.”
Then Pasha got a call as Carissa sat on a chair and proceeded to nurse her baby. Pasha put the call on speakerphone. “Yeah, Danai?”
Danai asked, “Are you at the hotel?”
“Yeah, we’re just settling in. I just need to know if you can handle trying to sleep with a baby at night. We might need to get another room for us anyway.”
“I’m fine with staying with Carissa.”
“Okay, we’ll reserve a couple of more rooms. The others are coming to help us.”
“Grandma and Grandpa too?”
“Yes. Carissa wants to fight. Maybe Grandma can take care of the baby.”
“I will,” Danai said.
Pasha looked surprised to hear it.
“Listen, the baby and the twins will need a good fighter to protect them if we have any trouble. We’re at the hotel. Adonis and I are brainwashing the hotel staff that they follow only our orders. We’ll be up to the rooms in a bit.”
“All right, Danai.” Pasha sounded relieved, to an extent, that Danai would stay with the kids.
Zachary knew that it would cost them a good fighter too. Still, the children were their future, if they lived through this. He glanced at the mom nursing her baby and was certain she must be grieving for her mate. All of them would be grieving for family they had lost.
He hadn’t considered that Adonis would take over the clan here and Rachael would stay with him. That Danai and Michael, if he could live with what she’d become, might stay here too. That Pasha would also. He realized this wasn’t just about taking revenge and killing those who had murdered their family members but starting over for this group of hunters. Their numbers had been decimated, but with the new blood from the Dallas pack, they could become the new order—a mix of vampire hunter and hunters. It might even work better for them than returning to their own clan in Dallas where some of the other hunters most likely wouldn’t like what they’d become.
Here, they would prove to their own people that to get rid of the threat with so few of them to fight, they needed the edge and maybe the others would accept them. If they didn’t, they might just have to start up somewhere new where another hunter clan didn’t already exist.
Chapter 9
As soon as Danai and Adonis joined them in the ladies’ hotel room, Pasha asked her sister, “You said you were following Crichton. What happened?”
“He turned down a street and disappeared.”
“Did he realize you were following him?”
“I don’t think so. He was just being super cautious.”
“Okay. The police officer in charge of getting rid of vampire bodies said that Crichton had been moving from place to place. Maybe because Carissa has made him jumpy,” Pasha said.
“Or because you all weren’t here when the fight began,” Carissa said, “and he knew once you learned of it, you’d be back to terminate his ass.”
“You said you’ve been hunting his men down. How do you know where to find them?” Adonis asked as Danai picked up the baby, cradling her in her arms, and walked her.
Pasha was surprised to see the change in Danai. Usually, she let any other women who wanted to hold the baby do so. Was it all because of what had happened to Danai? Pasha thought so. Or maybe Michael had something to do with the change in her. Pasha hadn’t thought she’d want it to happen, that she didn’t believe Michael should be saddled with her sister, but she was beginning to believe he was good for Danai and he seemed to truly care for her, no matter that she was a vampire.
Carissa picked up some of the hotel note paper and began drawing on it. “The vampires are scattered all over the city. They’re making it harder to hit a bunch at once. It’s worked well for me because I can go after a lone vampire one at a time.”
“An ancient even.” Pasha was surprised and glad Carissa had killed the vampire without getting herself killed.
“Yes, well, that one was a surprise. I had taken down a newly turned vampire and then suddenly, the ancient one showed up. She looked young, of course, but she had blood staining her lips and I could smell the blood on her. She wasn’t from here, so she didn’t recognize me as a hunter with the family they’d murdered. I think I so stunned her that I was here and fighting them alone, I was able to stab her in the heart with my sword before she could react.”
Which was a good thing since ancients were usually much harder to kill.
“She didn’t let anyone else know she was squaring off with a female hunter?” Adonis asked.
“I can’t know for certain, but I suspected she didn’t have time because I killed her so fast, and then I was out of there. Nobody was around, and no one followed me.”
“Good,” Adonis said. “Who called in the killings?”
“A woman and her teenaged son. I would have done so myself, but I didn’t know who Crichton was controlling—the police or others? I just didn’t know. But these are all the locations I’ve found them at.”
“How did you know where to look for them?” Adonis asked.
He and Zachary studied the drawing.
If nothing else, Adonis was thorough, like their father was, about learning the details of a case. One slip up on the hunters’ part could spell their doom, if they were as outnumbered as they thought they were.
“At first, I was studying the family’s homes and I’d follow a lone vampire out of one of them and learn where they were staying. I did that so no one would realize I was watching the homes. I took out all five that way. Though I hadn’t expected the one to have an ancient come meet up with her.”
“Do you think they suspected someone was going after the vampires that left any of the families’ houses?” Adonis asked.
“No. When the first one left a family’s home, I waited until he slept in another house after that. As soon as he left that second house, I eliminated him. I did that with three of them, waiting one or two days after they’d left the families’ homes. That way if anyone was trying to determine how they were being watched, it hopefully wouldn’t lead back to our places. As for the last two, I had waited for three days before eliminating them.”
“Okay, good,” Adonis said.
Pasha was proud of her cousin. She wasn’t sure she would have done as well at keeping her identity secret. She probably would have tackled all the vampires in her parents’ home first. But Carissa had a baby to raise too, so that probably made her a little more cautious.
“So what are we going to do now?” Pasha didn’t want to sit and wait. She wanted to strike and strike and strike until they had eliminated all the threat.
“We wait for everyone to get here,” Adonis said, the voice of reason.