Retribution Read Free Page A

smallest bit of his fangs showing as he spoke. Something else flashed. A memory of him that was gone so fast, she couldn’t grasp it.
    Was it important?
    “I need water,” she rasped.
    “Do you crave anything else?”
    “Yes,” she breathed.
    “What?”
    Abigail licked her lips as the memory of her birth parents’ deaths seared her. Even all these years later, that memory was perfectly intact, as if it’d happened only yesterday.
    Barely four years old and dressed in her red Sesame Street pajamas, she’d hidden under the bed while the man her parents had called friend mercilessly slaughtered them with a shotgun. Those horrendously violent sounds were forever carved in her heart. From where she’d been, she saw the man’s black cowboy boots, which caused the floorboards to squeak while he searched her room. Terrified, she’d watched him track blood all over her pink princess rug. She’d held her favorite teddy bear to her mouth and bit him hard to keep from crying out and betraying her location. He’d paused before her dresser, and there in the mirror she’d seen his face so clearly. So perfectly.
    And as she heard those heavy footsteps leave her home, she’d sworn one thing.
    To find that man and kill him as brutally as he’d killed her parents. To make him beg for a mercy she had no intention of giving him.
    Retribution would be hers. …
    “Abigail?” The doctor forced her to look at him. “What else do you crave?”
    “The throat of Sundown Brady.”

 
     
    2
     
    “Someone’s killing Dark-Hunters.”
    Jess Brady scowled as his Squire, Andy, burst into the obscenely huge kitchen, huffing and puffing, with his dark hair sticking out all over his head as if the boy had been wringing at it—a habit Andy had whenever he was duly stressed.
    Much less excited, especially since he’d been up only a few, Jess blew his breath across his steaming coffee. “Settle down, pup. I ain’t had my caffeine yet.” And he wasn’t a morning person, even though his mornings were what most people called early evening.
    Still the boy jumped about like a filly around a rattlesnake. Had he ever been that nervous about anything?
    The answer hit him hard in the chest and did nothing to improve his irritability.
    Jess quickly turned his thoughts away from that memory and focused on the boy he’d known since the day Andy was whelped.
    Even though Andy was nearing thirty now, he was about as high-strung as anyone Jess had ever met. Times like this, he missed the old calmness of Andy’s pa. Nothing had ever rattled that man.
    Not even the time he’d landed in a nest of scorpions.
    “Sundown  … you don’t understand. It’s—”
    He held his hand up to stop the boy midsentence. “I get it, kid. Case you haven’t noticed, Dark-Hunters are on almost as many menus as humans are. Having something trying to kill us is about normal. Now, why you more flustered than a preacher in a whorehouse?”
    “I’m trying to tell you.” Andy gestured toward the door as if expecting the bogeyman to charge through it. “There’s a human out there who is killing off Dark-Hunters, and someone needs to stop them.”
    Jess took a slow drink before he spoke. Ah yeah, that hit the spot. Little more, and he’d be as close to human as a deadman could come. “Well, that’s just plain rude.”
    All that did was frustrate Andy more. “I really don’t think you understand what I’m trying to tell you.”
    Jess scratched at the whiskers along his jaw. “And my mama drowned the dumb ones. I hear everything you’re saying. There’s a group of Buffys thinking we’re the bad guys. Ain’t my first rodeo, pup. It’s been happening so long, they were called Helsings long before your daddy was a gleam in your granddaddy’s eyes. Thank you, Hollywood and Stoker for that. Not like being undead didn’t suck before. They just made it worse for us by cluing the rest of the world in that we exist. Now every goth with a thirst for immortality