Page 40 of Blood Submission

Shea was approaching the apartments from the opposite direction as he got to the door. It was too late to hide from her; she’d already seen him. Besides, Dante hadn’t hidden from anyone or anything since he’d decided to turn the tables on the ones that would hunthim.

Her smile of greeting turned to a look of confusion as she saw the stuff he was carrying. “Don’t tell me they have you running for snacks for the witches,” she teased.

He snorted with disgust. “No.”

Following her inside, he wondered how he was going to lose his favorite Hunter without giving away the location of his little mouse. He’d have to take it up to his place and then take it down to her once he got rid of Shea. “It’s for the dog,” he toldher.

She frowned. “I just got him some dog food last night. And more cat food, too. I left it in your kitchen. Didn’t you seeit?”

“No,” he told her. Truth. “Where have youbeen?”

“I just went out to feed,” she answered.

She was lying, but Dante wasn’t going to press the subject. What Shea did was her business; however, his questioning look achieved what he desired.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night,” she said as she got off on her floor to go back to her place.

“What’s tomorrow night?” he asked, sticking his foot in the door so it wouldn’t close.

“We’re hiding the box, remember?” Shea’s forehead scrunched up in concern. “Are you sure you’reokay?”

That’s right, he remembered now. They were taking the box that Aiden’s female had found and putting it somewhere safe, and out of the apartment building. “Right. Tomorrow. I’ll see you then.” He let the doors close.

After Luukas had debriefed him the night before last, the other Hunters had filled him in on what they’d found out since Luukas’s rescue.

Leeha, the bitch that had been made a vampire illegally and banned from their territory, had found a way to capture and hold Luukas in retaliation for his not wanting to make her his queen. She’d done it with a little help from a witch—Luukas’s current mate—by threatening to kill her sister, Nik’s mate, Emma. And that’s where Luukas had been the last seven years, until Nik and Aiden found him and freedhim.

While there, Leeha had also been busy attempting to create her own army of demon soldiers. She’d found them chained to an altar buried in the mountains of Western Canada. Not literally, as they were dead, but their spectral bodies. To release them from the altar, she’d had to provide bodies for them to possess. The bodies of vampires created by Luukas, a Master vampire, seemed to workbest.

She’d even managed to get one into Aiden, and it was still there, though it tended to stay dormant unless it sensed the other demons and roused. Something was going to need to be done aboutthat.

Any vampires of Leeha’s own creation that she’d sacrificed for possession didn’t last very long, quickly turning into gray-skinned, rotting creatures that were more demon than vampire. Creatures first seen by Emma and Keira when Leeha had sent her minions to collect the powerful witch. Emma had been left fordead.

These creatures were now all after the box that Grace, Aiden’s mate, had brought here with her from China. They thought it held a clue. A clue to what, no one knew. But Luukas wanted it far away from his witch.

There was a lot more to the history of the Moss witches that he had yet to be told, mostly something about how they’d all scattered all over the world when the new High Priest had taken over. Only now, after years of hiding, they were reuniting thanks to a small tweak Keira had put in the curse Leeha had forced her to cast over Luukas and his Hunters. Just a little something extra she had done for shits and giggles.

And Dante had just brought home another of them, out of all the humans he could’ve found in Vegas.

With Shea gone, he hit the down button in the elevator and took the human herfood.

Not just a human. Laney.

He would harden himself against his little mouse’s wiles to get him to let her out of her hole. If he let her out, she would run away. She would leave him. She would tell others about him. And then his home would no longer be safe. He would be hunted again. They all would. And he couldn’t let that happen.

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