Vampire Redemption (Heart of the Huntress Book 5) Read online

  Vampire Redemption

  Heart of the Huntress Series, Book 5

  Terry Spear

  Contents

  Synopsis

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Terry Spear

  Copyright © 2020 by Terry Spear

  Cover Art by For the Muse Design

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  E-book: ISBN: 978-1-63311-056-4

  Print Book ISBN: 978-1-63311-057-1

  Synopsis

  Huntress Pasha wants revenge against the vampire who had decimated her family of hunters and she’s sure she’s found her mate—a hunter who saved her and helped free her family. But he is a hunter turned vampire now and as much as she hates the vampires for what they’ve done to her and her family, she scorns any notion of settling down with one.

  Zachary is in love with one hot-blooded huntress and he’ll do anything to save her and her family from the vampires who had taken them hostage. But now, he’s one of them, and he can’t come to grips with what he’s become. He’s on a mission to help Pasha eliminate the vampires who destroyed her family and hopes he will fall in battle, an honorable way to die—as a hunter eliminating rogue vampires who threaten mankind.

  But just maybe being a hunter turned vampire isn’t the worst thing that can happen to him, if he can have an edge against the vampires, if only he wasn’t shunned by the huntress he has lost his heart to.

  To Sherille Elliott and Nancy Hoch, hope you all love the new vampire book. They don’t have the same kind of teeth as my shifters, but they’ve got them! Thanks for loving my books!

  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 daught
ers 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.

  The sound of rushed footsteps outside the house followed. She was certain more hosts had arrived. Pasha and her family were doomed. In the next instant, men shoved in through the windows that Danai had broken when she couldn’t open them by conventional means. The men unsheathed their swords and targeted the vampires, not Pasha and her parents.

  Were they local hunters? They had to be!

  Pasha’s heart leapt with joy.

  Utter chaos ensued as the new men fought the vampires, the bigger threat.

  Ear shattering screams from the vampires, whose hearts were pierced by the ancient hunter swords or knives, filled the air.

  Then a blue-eyed, blond hunter caught her eye. He hesitated for a second as his gaze shifted to her, his eyes darkening in an instant. He rushed forward, killing the host who attempted to attack her. Rashly, and without regard to his own safety, he slaughtered another host, then swung around to meet a vampire’s threat, thrusting his sword into the bloodsucker’s heart.

  The hunter’s long hair had fallen free of its leather binding and fell across his broad shoulders in a golden mass of corn silk kissed by the sun. His hunter skill with the sword and graceful hunter movements entranced her. Or was it the lack of food she’d had, the constant threat of being killed or worse...of being turned, that made her mind drift so?

  “Zachary, behind you!” a man shouted to him.

  Zachary, the hunter who fought so valiantly for her, whipped around, but too late. A vampire swooped down on him, seized his throat with his hand, and flew him out of the room.

  Pasha attempted to move through the bodies fighting in her path to reach the door. But she was blocked in and couldn’t get to it or to the hunter she felt compelled to save.

  The hunter who’d yelled to Zachary, grabbed her by the waist and ran her across the room. Quickly, he shoved her through the window to the safety of the sun-drenched yard. The sunlight warmed her all at once. But she couldn’t leave the fight. She had to rescue Zachary. He had saved her, and she needed to aid him in his fight with the ancient vampire.

  Another hunter deposited her mother outside. Instantly, a shudder of relief wracked her body. Instead of returning to the madcap fighting, Pasha grabbed her mother to keep her from going back into the fracas. Her heart was torn between preserving her mother’s safety and helping Zachary. Her own body was so drained, she suspected she’d never save anyone but become a vampire’s next meal.

  “We’re too weak, Momma,” she pleaded. “Come away. We’re safe out here in the sunlight. Safe from the vampires.”

  “Papa, Danai, Adonis...,” her mother wailed.

  “They’ll be with us shortly.” In Pasha’s heart, she knew Danai and Adonis would be better off dead than living life as a turned hunter and huntress.

  Danai was barely eating, as upset as she was about having been turned. Adonis, well, she couldn’t tell what he was feeling. Anxious, short tempered. That’s how he’d appeared to her when she’d seem him briefly during their captivity.

  She hugged her mother to her breast. “They’ll be fine, Momma.” But she couldn’t help thinking about the hunter who had attempted to save her. The way his muscled arms wielded his sword, the form of his broad shoulders as the silk shirt rippled over them while he moved...her savior. She wiped away tears that dared to dribble down her cheeks while her mother leaned against her, exhausted.

  Her father was helped out through the window, fighting the whole time against being removed from the brawl. But he too, was much weaker than he should be to fight vampires. Despite his protests, the hunters knew his safety mattered more than his pride.

  To her surprise, the one who had set her outside grabbed her sister, Danai, and rushed her to the window. Had she been injured? Despite feeling that Danai would be better off dead, the thought she’d been injured sliced through Pasha’s heart.

  “No, Michael. Let me fight!” Danai objected.

  Michael’s blond hair was tied in a tail, his blue eyes narrowed. “You protect your family, should hosts attack you outside. I have to find my brother.”

  She nodded.

  His next action confounded Pasha. The hunter kissed Danai’s lips.

  Didn’t he know what she was? Damned forever as a vampire? Pasha stared at the hunter as he hurried back in through the window. He didn’t know. He couldn’t have known.

  She turned to Danai. “You can’t keep the secret from him, Danai. You can’t live a lie like that! Aren’t you going to tell him?”

  But then hosts fled the house through the windows and Danai was busy killing them as Pasha and her father took up the fight.

  Zachary, unable to use his sword on the vampire as close as they were to one another, dropped his weapon.

  The bloodsucker held Zachary’s throat in a death grip against a bedroom wall and smiled, his wicked canines ready for the bite. “Like Adonis couldn’t kill Piaras once he turned him, you won’t be able to kill me once I turn you. You’ll be mine forever to do as I say. A hunter-turned slave. Piaras had the right idea in turning the others.”

  Zachary struggled to pull the vampire’s hands from his throat. He knew he shouldn’t have allowed the huntress to steal his attention away from the threat, no matter how much she had intrigued him.

  The vampire yanked out a dagger, still pinning Zachary by the throat against the wall and stabbed him in the shoulder. Zachary’s mind blackened with the pain, but he fought passing out, and opened his eyes to see the vampire’s teeth extended. Zachary struggled further against the inevitable. The vampire tightened his grip on his throat. The dark-haired woman, Pasha, her almond-shaped brown eyes studying him back, filled his thoughts.

  She would be his. He had to return to her side and protect her. At all costs he had to defend her. She’d fought so valiantly, but she was so weak. S
o very weak. He had to save her.

  He struggled to extend his wrist knife. Once it snapped into place, he thrust the ten-inch ancient blade into the vampire’s chest. It missed penetrating the vampire’s heart. In anger, the bloodsucker dug his canines into Zachary’s bloodied shoulder.

  Zachary’s eyes watered from the pain streaking through his shoulder, all the way down his arm, and through his chest. The vampire forced Zachary’s mouth open and smeared his own blood inside, attempting to bond Zachary to him, to force the exchange.

  Zachary fought swallowing, but the transfer had been made, though it hadn’t turned him completely. In one last effort, he struck the vampire again with the rest of his strength dwindling rapidly, before the blood exchange stopped him from doing the job right.

  The vampire screamed out as the blade sank deep, the vampire’s heart having been pierced. Instantly, the vampire shriveled up, collapsing to the floor in a dehydrated mass of skin, bones, and loose clothing.

  “Zachary!” Michael shouted.

  With belated satisfaction at killing the bloodsucker, Zachary slid to the floor. The room spun around him in darkness as if he were riding a spinning teacup at an amusement park at night. He tried to concentrate on the vision of...Pasha, her petite form fighting against the hosts, and then the vampires. Long dark hair had whipped about her shoulders as she swung around to fight the menace as if in slow motion, her movements sluggish. If he didn’t get to her soon, she’d perish. She couldn’t fight them all off, not as weak as she was.