Helena was not pleased.
In fact, Helena was quite thoroughly annoyed.
People who knew her well, knew that it was decidedly dangerous to annoy her. People who knew her less well generally still knew enough to be afraid.
Josef was a hulking man who used his height and size to intimidate those he underestimated. Aggression leaked off him like bad cologne, and he moved like he was anticipating a fight.
He was, in fact, almost certainly doing exactly that. Helena knew that this meeting was a poor attempt at a trap. It was why her Coven was not with her, and was, in fact, ignoring this distraction to deal with the actual attack Josef was sending against Parkside Coven.
Not that that would go well for his forces. Loraven was very old, and took his duties very seriously. An attack on his people, and on his city, was a sure way to get the elf-turned-vampire Elder properly angry. His Coven was the largest and most powerful in the city. With Helena’s Coven secretly backing his own, they were well-equipped to handle whatever first salvo Josef sent against them.
Helena’s job, and Owen’s, was to distract Josef from his own forces, and how better to do it than to have an Elder and his missing traitor walk into his trap? The Elders had all agreed that the best response to an obvious trap and a hidden attack was to break one, and destroy the other.
Helena did not care for this plan and thought they were risking a lot to take down one man, but there wasn’t much that could be done about that. Owen was under her guard, and he was probably the only person who would hold Josef’s attention long enough for Loraven to devastate the Hunter’s forces.
“So, you’re the leech elder,” Josef said, and chose to pace rather than sit. Helena was unsurprised, and settled herself comfortably. Very different from Ivan’s club, this one was all modern elegance, and had provided a rather lovely glass of wine the moment she sat. “I didn’t expect you to have the balls to face me.”
“I have no ‘balls’ at all,” Helena pointed out, and smiled as the wine colored her lips. It was precisely the color of blood, which was delightful, and also a pointed message, if he was smart enough to see it. “I might say the same of you, however.”
She held his gaze as she took another sip, just to make the point
The rage in his eyes really was deeply satisfying. Beside her, Owen snickered into his beer.
She was starting to like her hunter, despite herself. Hopefully it wouldn’t be a problem later. She wasn’t the type to take a lover for a single night, and vampire-hunter relationships could be very tricky if they weren’t handled well.
Josef fumed, and tried to loom over her, and growled when she smiled and peeked up at him through her lashes. Owen had told her all about this man and his expectations of female intelligence. She could hardly wait to show him the error of his ways.
It had been two weeks since Owen appeared in her office, and in that time, there had been deaths. Josef’s hunters were very well educated on the most vulnerable members of the Other community, and they hit those weak points with ruthless precision.
The most recent attack shook even those who knew nothing of the inhuman residents of their city. A daycare that specialized in Other children was burned to the ground with nearly thirty children inside.
Ten of them had been Wolf pups from Ivan’s pack. If he was smart, Josef would pray it was a vampire who killed him. If Ivan found him first, he would die of old age long before Ivan grew tired of torturing him.
“You,” Josef’s eyes landed on Owen, who now had a proper suit, courtesy of Helena’s tailors. He cut a very fine figure, compared to the hulking Hunter across from them. “I thought you were dead.”
Cleverly worded, considering that nearly a dozen other Hunters lingered in earshot.
“Well, that happens when a body gets pushed into a vamp pit,” Owen said causally, just a little to loud. “Thought you were rid of me, huh?”
Helena heard murmurs from the other Hunters and tucked a smile away for later. Owen was a good tactician, and hid razor-sharp intelligence under flirtation and bad jokes.
“You’re discipline problem,” Josef growled. He was angry, but near as Helena could tell, he always was. Owen was a serious threat to his authority, and he knew it. “Can’t trust you to follow orders. Looks like I judged you right. You look like a Pet.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“I’m not one,” Owen said casually, to all appearances completely unruffled. Helena caught the faintest scent of nervousness off him, but unless there was another vampire in the room with senses like hers, no one else would know. “And it’s hard to betray a cause you never agreed to support. And, you know. You did try to murder me. That was dumb.”
“I was eliminating a security risk,” Josef said, and got a very mean smile that made Helena tense, ever so slightly. She was probably faster than anything the human could unleash, but a smile like that never boded well. “Nice of you to walk back in under your own power. I was hoping to get the full set.”
“Full set of what?” Owen asked warily, hand close enough to get his gun if Josef moved at him. “We already covered your lack of balls, and brains. You’re gonna have to be satisfied with just brawn, buddy. If the others haven’t showed up by now, they’re not gonna.”
Josef ignored him, which made Helena’s bad feeling grow much, much worse.
“Fortunately,” Josef said as if he didn’t know they were watching him. “I’m not the only one with a traitor problem.”
The door opened, and Helena sighed in disappointment to hide the way her heart began to pound.
“Wilhelm,” she said, and nodded a tight greeting. Her fellow Elder smiled darkly. “What a surprise to run into you, here.”
Not such a surprise, sadly. Wilhelm was Turned during the European witch-hunts, and had never quite gotten past his hatred of magic. All the same, she had hoped the threat to the Covens would keep him loyal.
“You’ve never been a good liar, Helena,” Wilhelm said, still smiling. She was going to rip out his throat. It would be very delightful. His blood would make her powerful enough to duel even Loraven. “To be expected, I suppose. You’re very young.”
He still thought he was older than she was. That was sweet, and a bit foolish. Perhaps she wasn’t as bad a liar as he thought.
Not that she planned to tell him that. He could go to his grave being wrong.
“Perhaps,” she said mildly, and began planning how to kill him. If he was here, now, Josef already knew about the joined Covens, and Wilhelm’s could not be trusted to stand with the rest of their kind. “But I would rather be a poor liar than a blood-traitor. Ekaterina Turned you. How dare you throw her Gift away on this human?”
In her pocket, her phone vibrated with a text, and then a second. Wilhelm’s eyes fixed on her as she casually set her wine aside. Josef watched her closely as she pulled out her phone, made a show of checking it, replying, and then tucked it away.
The attack had began and Loraven now knew to expect traitors among their own. Now it was time to do her real job in this place.
“Such a shame,” she murmured, and stood, comfortable in white silk. Owen stood at her elbow. This was a carefully-choreographed dance, and Wilhelm complicated it. “I hope she will forgive me.”
Before vampire or Hunter could stop her, she was on Wilhelm, fangs deep in his throat as she applied all of the strength she usually pretended she did not have.
Most vampires got a set of abilities upon turning. The list was wide and varied immensely between vampires. Knowing what your opponent’s abilities were could change the course of a battle in moments.
Helena curated those who knew of hers with a precision usually seen in surgeons. Even her most trusted had no idea, and she preferred it that way.
Very few looked at her and assumed that she had the full set of physical enhancements. Strength, speed, and all five senses taken as high as they could go.
Wilhelm, of course, also thought that she was Turned under Victoria’s rule.
Shy by a good four hundred years, more the fool he.
He struggled, and fought, but by the time any of the humans managed to react, he was already turning to ashes under her fangs.
Gunfire rattled around her. Owen was quick on the draw and managed to drop two of Josef’s lackeys before the big Hunter crashed into him, armed with a knife and brass knuckles.
Helena spent a precious second studying the room, and darted into action, claws out and ready. Out of six living humans in the room, five were hostile, and three were fast enough to be a problem.
Josef was occupied, but it took all her speed and precision to keep the other two from shooting her human.
They died messily, spreading crimson blood across the white silk of her suit.
The fourth human, armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a hard smirk, caught her clean in the chest.
Owen yelled her name, and took a hard blow to the ribs as sharp punishment for his distraction. Josef was taking no prisoners this time.
The blast threw her backwards. Any other vampire might have died. Massive chest trauma was usually enough to kill her kind. But Helena was an Elder, and had just drained another Elder dry. It would take more than that to slow her down.
The man with the shotgun put a rather spectacular, blood-soaked hole in the wall when she hit him so hard his ribs caved in around her hand. He was dead before he went through the wall, which was just as well.
More bullets ripped through her before she managed to drop the rest of the minions, but better her than Owen, who probably wouldn’t survive being shot more than once, of at all. The Hunters were trained well, and died well. She would give them that, some day when she was feeling more charitable towards the people who shot her.
“Time to go!” she called to Owen. Josef wasn’t down, but heavy boots on the stairs announced more backup than the two of them could handle alone. The Hunter leader would have to wait for another day “Owen!”
“Yeah!” he called back, and pulled a grenade out of his coat pocket. “Josef, fetch!”
He yanked the pin, dropped the grenade on the floor and ran for her, and the hole in the wall. Their new, and convenient exit.
The explosion ripped through the building behind them as they made it through the hole just in time.
“The car,” Helena said, and pointed as the pain of her injuries caught up to her all at once. Pain nearly made her knees give. Bullet shards tinked against the pavement as she healed and they pushed out of her skin. “We have to get out of here before they figure out what happened.”
“On it,” Owen said, and went to help her. She held him off with a raised hand. She needed blood to heal, and he smelled far too good for her to risk touching him. “Right. Car.”