She gazed up the stairs again before turning to look down the hall behind her. No one was coming to retrieve her, and aside from the dull hum of the vacuum cleaner, she heard nothing else. She adjusted her hold on the knife, lifted the end of her robe, and placed her foot on the first step. As she climbed, she kept her back against the wall and her eyes focused on the stairs above her.
The Commission here. She didn’t know what to make of that. Her aunt and uncle had faked their deaths in order to keep her hidden from The Commission. Clint’s family had fled from them years ago in order to keep themselves alive. They had done things to Julian that still haunted him. They had no care or value for any life; human, Hunter, and vampire alike were something to be experimented on.
She’d hoped to never come across the sick organization that had created the Hunter line, but now she realized it had been inevitable. Her world had been as sheltered as possible for as long as she could remember, but it was a small world after all.
Now that one of the members of The Commission had walked into their lives, Julian wouldn’t be stopped until he destroyed every one of them. Her stomach twisted at the possibility of him in danger as she reached the landing of the second floor. A humming sound coming from a room set off to the right of the landing drew her toward it. Poking her head around the corner, she discovered a small room housing an ice machine, two soda machines, and a couple of vending machines.
On her right, another room branched off from it. She moved cautiously toward that room until she found herself standing at the edge of the arcade she’d seen advertised at the front desk when they’d checked in. She nearly jumped out of her skin when the pinball machine made a strange sound before it lit up across the back and the flippers flicked loudly back and forth. Perhaps the noise and lights were supposed to lure her into playing the machine, but all she wanted was to drive her knife through the glass to make it stop.
The colored squares of the dancing machine next to her lit up in a wash of reds and blues before going still once more. All the other machines remained silent as they waited for someone to insert tokens into them. The stale aroma of sweat and the metallic ting of computer chips permeated the air. There was nothing sinister about the room, but something about the waiting machines gave her the creeps.
She took a step back to leave when the hair on her nape rose. She detected no new scent, but her instincts screamed that she wasn’t alone. Over her time with Julian and the others, she’d become attuned to their presences. It wasn’t one of them coming up behind her now.
Ever since Earl had first walked into her life and torn it apart when she was eighteen, she’d always been ready for a fight. Always been loaded down with weapons so well concealed many wouldn’t know they were there. Now, she was standing in a freaking robe and bikini with none of the weapons she’d become so adept with over the years.
For the first time in six years, she’d let her guard down, allowed herself to pretend to live a “normal” life for a vampire, and she was about to pay for that.
The faintest hint of a step behind had her spinning and swinging the butter knife out. She’d twisted it within her grip so the blade was pointed to the side in her fist. Despite its dull blade, she swung the knife with enough force that it whizzed past the nose of the man standing there and drove deep into the wall next to him. Plaster filtered over her hand as blood trickled from the thin slice the blade had left across the tip of the man’s nose.
His blue eyes widened on her before narrowing. Quinn yanked the knife from the wall at the same time he pulled out two stakes. Her fangs tingled as realization sank in.
Hunter! Not Commission, she faced a Hunter, and he was far better prepared to kill her than she was him.
She danced back a few steps, cursing the cumbersome robe swaying about her feet as she moved, but she didn’t dare shed it and reveal to him how woefully unprepared for this battle she was.
The man’s agile body moved around her with the flowing grace all Hunters and vampires possessed. With the faint lines around his eyes and mouth and a hint of gray in his brunet hair, he appeared to be in his mid to late thirties. His eyes were assessing as he tried to gauge how deadly of an opponent she may be—something she wasn’t sure of herself right now.
She’d never fought a Hunter, one of her own kind. She’d killed Zach, but that had been to save Julian. Could she kill another Hunter again now?
Yes. If push came to shove, she would kill him in order to stay alive. She would do everything she could to keep it from coming to that point first though.
“I don’t want to fight you,” she said.
The man wiped the back of his hand across his nose, removing the trickle of blood from it. “You don’t have a choice.”
“I’m not a killer.”
He snorted as he shifted the stakes in his hands. Quinn recognized the move as him readying to throw one at her. “I suppose those fangs are only for show.”