Masquerade (Vampires Realm Series Book 7) (Reading Sample) by Felicity Heaton (thriller book recommendations TXT) 📖

Izabella would die too.

He would sever both her head and her brother’s as vengeance for that night.

She wouldn’t be coming back as one of his kind and death by any means other than decapitation would allow that because of her mutated DNA. The vampire hunters were fated to become the very creature they loathed on death. It triggered the immortality part of their new genes. Vivek called that justice for daring to steal the precious abilities of his kind.

How many of them would be brave enough to kill themselves and end their life as a vampire?

The one that Marise, the Law Keeper of the Venia bloodline, had tracked in Saint Petersburg after he had attacked Lord Timur and come close to killing him had taken poison to protect the hunters’ secrets but that hadn’t stopped them discovering the genetic manipulation the hunters were undergoing. Marise had taken the body to the Law Keepers’ stronghold outside the city of Vilnius and the Vehemens vampire Eduard had examined it, revealing that the DNA sequence had changed from human to something closer to a vampire. Several days later, the dead hunter had awoken. When faced with the revelation of what he had become on death, he had tried to kill himself with a surgical knife. When that had failed and he had succumbed to the Law Keepers’ questioning, surrendering information about the locations of several Section Seven bases, he had sought death through a desperate and grim method.

He had escaped and fled into the sunlight.

Holy wood touching vampire skin was painful enough. Vivek couldn’t imagine how terrifying and agonising death by sunlight would be.

Perhaps he wouldn’t decapitate Izabella and Aleksis Romanov. Perhaps he would snap their necks and then stake them out in the sunlight and wait for them to turn and burn.

He smiled grimly, amused by his thoughts, and Sophis frowned at him, her gaze questioning.

He wasn’t about to tell her the dark imaginings crossing his mind. She thought he was cruel as it was.

Instead, he motioned towards the buildings, intimating the one on the left. It was close enough for them to be able to sense the hunters, count them, and even judge their strength. Aleksis and Izabella were strong, and the enhancements they had undergone were so successful that they had even slowed their aging, so they still looked as young as they had all those years ago, barely thirty in appearance. Not many of the documented hunters displayed such a trait.

Sophis led the way, stealthily crossing the open expanse of road, running up the grassy incline, and then heading straight into the building on the left without disturbing the broken door. Vivek followed close behind her, his senses sweeping the area while hers remained fixed ahead, monitoring all three buildings.

As they entered the darkness, Vivek allowed his eyes to change. His senses sharpened with them and his fangs extended. The blackness faded to reveal the room and silver highlights touched the broken furniture and rubble that littered the floor, outlining it for him. He moved swiftly through the building, taking the lead because his vision was better than Sophis’s. She brought up the rear, her senses now sweeping outwards, scouring their surroundings and outside the building too, searching for signs of more hunters.

When they worked together as harmoniously as they were now, Vivek could almost believe that Tynan was right about them and that they were a good pairing. Tynan had spoken to him in the past about what would happen should he prove himself worthy of promotion to the position of elite guard, a role in which he would work only with other elite guards. It was Vivek’s dream but it came with a catch. Tynan had mentioned that he would want to elevate Sophis at the same time and match him with her. Vivek had been against the idea solely because Sophis wasn’t ready for such a leap in rank. She was still too young and too rash, and had proven that the other week.

His chest tightened and he rubbed the spot over his heart to ease it. Coming around that city street corner to see Sophis fighting a vampire hunter alone, her squad watching on from a distance as though she had told them to stay out of the way, had been one of the most heart-stopping moments of his life. He had sensed the shooter on the rooftop, had spotted him bare seconds before he had fired on her, and her scream had chilled Vivek’s blood, freezing it in his veins. Instinct had seized control, a fierce need to protect her beating deep in his bones as he had sprinted across the distance between them. Everything had been a blur after that. There had been blood, the feel of flesh rending under his claws, the bitter taste of fury, and the sweet pleasure of pain. He had come to his senses to find himself almost a mile away from where he had started and with the shooter’s butchered corpse at his feet. He had left it there and run back to her, back to where she lay on bloodstained concrete sick from poison.

That was the most heart-stopping moment he had ever experienced.

It had robbed him of his strength, filling his mind with twisted flashbacks to that night ten years ago, causing her to flicker between looking as she had then, soaked in blood with a dagger protruding from her side, and as she had in the present moment.

He had snarled his commands, needing to be alone with her, to be the one to tend to her and ensure she would live. He had needed to save her.

Sophis touched his back again, shattering the memories clouding his heart and mind, and he looked over his shoulder at her. The sight of her in one piece, watching him in the darkness with curious eyes that he felt could see straight through him, soothed the raging beast within him and his focus slowly returned to the present. Her hand dropped to the spot on his back where Izabella had staked him and her look softened. Let her think that his mind was on that night ten years ago and his own close encounter with death. It was easier than trying to explain what was really going on in his mind and his heart.

He eased up the rickety staircase to the first level of the dark building and then made his way across the patchy broken wooden floor to the crumbling brick wall that separated the building from the one where the hunters were.

Vivek turned and pressed his back against the dusty wall. Sophis carefully crossed the room, stepping around the holes in the floor and the detritus left by whoever had previously occupied the building. She eyed the wall with distaste and placed her hand against it rather than leaning into it. Such a small area of contact would hinder her senses but he wasn’t about to get into an argument about the correct manner in which to use a structure as an amplifier.

She mouthed the word ‘count’ at him.

At least he thought it was ‘count’. In the darkness, it had looked like something distinctly ruder and with one less vowel.

Vivek switched his focus from her to the neighbouring building. The brickwork muted the voices on the other side but he could pick out fragments of their conversations. There was no talk of the ball but several mentions of lords. He looked at Sophis.

She leaned against the wall facing him, her ear close to it and her pale blue eyes on his. Silver threads danced over her form, his heightened vision revealing her in the darkness, tracing down her hair and over her shoulders, curving around her waist and hips, tempting him to track them with his gaze to places it shouldn’t go.

He closed his eyes instead and focused on counting the number of hunters.

His senses touched on everything in the adjoining building floor by floor and he either tallied it as living or discounted it as an object.

Nine.

That was a lot of vampire hunters.

A dangerous amount if they were all enhanced.

While a single enhanced hunter working on their own wasn’t a threat to most of his kind, a group of them working together could prove a problem for even a strong vampire.

Sophis touched his shoulder. A shiver danced over his flesh, spreading outwards from the point her fingers had brushed and carrying warmth in its wake. Vivek frowned at the intensity of his reaction, how that simple brush of her hand had sent sparks like fireworks exploding from every nerve ending in his body and heated him down to his core in a split second, and then put it down to being in his true guise. It was his heightened senses that made him feel her touch as an electric shiver, not anything else.

He opened his eyes and met hers.

Another tremor raced through him, pounding in his blood like a drum, a beat that ignited a deep hunger in him that wasn’t thirst for blood.

He stifled it and held his fingers up, revealing nine. She raised an eyebrow, stared intently at the wall and then nodded. Had she counted less or more the first time? A wrong count could prove disastrous. This wasn’t the last time someone would track hunters and tally their numbers before the Creator Day masquerade but it was imperative that they knew exactly how many they were dealing with at all times during the lead up to it.

Vivek counted again, double-checking his figures.

Four on the ground floor. Two of those were Aleksis and Izabella. He would recognise their signatures anywhere because they were so similar to each other—a trait he presumed was because they were twins. The other two were probably the men who had arrived after Aleksis. Three on the same level as him and Sophis. Two on the top floor, although one was in transit now, heading downwards. The other was very still and the signature was faint. Sleeping most likely. Perhaps Sophis had missed that one. Her senses weren’t as acute as his were.

Nine.

More than he and Sophis could deal with alone.

Someone on the same level as him mentioned lords again. Two more voices joined it, both male and both speaking Czech. Vivek could speak the language fluently. He listened, picking out words in the muffled conversation.

No one mentioned the ball but instinct said that these hunters were here because of it. They needed to report to Tynan and get him to send the elite guards out to scout for more hunters.

The vampire hunter that was moving continued downwards and then reached the periphery of Vivek’s senses. Were they heading out?

He signalled Sophis and she nodded, silently following him back through the building. Vivek paused at the door and quickly glanced out, his gaze scanning everything in under a second. No sign of the hunter. He led Sophis down the hillock and into the shadows of the tall industrial buildings. They moved swiftly on a direct path to the mansion but Vivek didn’t drop his guard. He monitored and mapped his surroundings with his senses, constantly on the lookout for more vampire hunters.

Once they had filed their report, they would gather their men, return to the hunter base and eradicate them all, Aleksis and Izabella included.

Vivek scrubbed a hand through his unruly black hair and glared at the road ahead. He couldn’t remember the last time there had been nine hunters in Saint Petersburg at the same time, and he had never seen more than three together before. There were no Section Seven bases in the area, unless the hunters had created one since his kind had last accessed their network or information about it had been hidden in the protected files.

Enhanced or not, this handful of hunters wouldn’t stop the masquerade from happening. It was tradition, held every year to celebrate the recorded point in time when the first vampire had awoken on Earth and started to spread his