The Devil Next Door

41

The Huntress waited behind the dusty glass of a second hand store.

She watched the man and the girl get into the car.

There was something about the man she remembered, as if perhaps they’d been joined at one time. The more she watched him, the more she was certain of it. Just the sight of him made her blood run hot, made her heart beat in a delicious new rhythm. She licked her lips. She clutched the hunting knife in her hand very tightly.

The Huntress could no longer remember who she was.

She could no longer remember why she was.

It seemed that the way she’d been living these many hours was the way things had always been. Flooded with the primal memory and instinctive recall that had swallowed all that she was or ever had been with a simple plunge into the ancient black waters of prehistory, she was content. Content with the hunt, content with the kill. What more was there?

The car moved slowly up the street.

Hiding in the store, the others of her clan waited breathlessly. They wanted to hunt. They wanted to bring down prey with claws, teeth, and gleaming blades. She could smell the raw animal stink of them and it excited her. She led them because she was cunning. They were brutal, bloodthirsty, but almost idiotic in their simplicity. They understood only savagery, the law of the beast, kill or be killed, and they raided in such a fashion: with berserk, screaming mania. She, however, understood tactics, ambush, stealth. They were in awe of her.

One of them made a grunting, slobbering sound.

“Wait,” she told them. “Not just yet.”

She was tall and raven-haired, lean with rippling muscle, her eyes just as dark as the animal inheritance that misted her brain. Intrigued by the man, she trembled. Everything inside her—from heart to liver to lights—was pulsing, thrumming, anxious.

The Huntress had a vague recollection of the girl.

But that was unimportant.

She would have the man to satisfy her curiosity about him. And the girl? She would be killed or enslaved to amuse the sexual appetites of the clan…