Guild Hunter 02 - Angels' Flight

crappy places. They were paid very well for sticking theirnecks out chasing vampires who might just tear those necks off. “To each his own.”
     
    “He has a hellhound.”
     
    She thought she’d heard wrong. “Did you say hellhound?” Visions of red eyes pulsing in a miasma of sulfur danced through her head. Then the pitchforks started circling.
     
    “Big, black thing, probably bite your hand off if you look at it wrong. Timothy calls it Lucifer’s Girl.” He took something from his pocket. “Tranquilizer dart.” Then he was gone, and if she hadn’t seen it, she’d never have guessed he could move that fast.
     
    She stayed with him, both of them scrambling over the chain link to land with hunter silence on the other side. There was no bark, nothing to alert them they’d become prey—Lucifer’s Girl came out of the darkness like a raging whirlwind. Sara ducked instinctively, and the dog’s body jumped over hers . . . to meet the clearly rapid-acting tranquilizer in Deacon’s hand. Instead of allowing the dog to fall, Deacon caught its muscled weight and lowered it gently to the ground.
     
    “You like her,” Sara said, incredulous.
     
    Deacon stroked the dog’s heaving sides. “What’s not to like? She’s loyal, and she’s strong. If I have to execute Timothy, she’ll miss her master.”
     
    “You’d adopt her, wouldn’t you?” She shook her head. “There go your chances of ever again getting a girl.”
     
    He raised his head, looking at her in that intent way of his. “Not a fan?”
     
    “She’s got nine-inch fangs.” Only a slight exaggeration. “A woman would have to love you an incredible amount to put up with that kind of competition.” She jerked her head toward the building on the other side of the mountain of scrap metal and God knew what else. “Yes?”
     
    “Let’s go. Tranq will keep Lucy out for a while.”
     
    Lucy?
     
    They took their time finding a path through the junk, checking for booby traps in the process. When they finally reached the tumbledown shack that Timothy called home, it was to discover the place empty. A little breaking and enteringlater, they were inside, but saw nothing even close to a smoking gun. The fact that Tim wasn’t home meant nothing—hunters kept irregular hours as a rule.
     
    She watched as Deacon took something from his pocket and placed it on the bottoms of all the shoes he could locate. “Transmitters,” he told her. “Battery life of about two days. So if there’s a kill in that period, and he wears a pair I’ve tagged, I’ll be able to trace his movements.”
     
    “Who’s next on the list?”
     
    He told her after they scaled the chain link—petting Lucy along the way, and waiting long enough to ensure that she was coming out of the tranq okay. “Next is Shah Mayur. Loner, does the job but doesn’t seem to have any contact with other hunters.”
     
    “Like someone else I know.”
     
    Deacon ignored the comment as they straddled his bike and took off.
     
    Grinning, she pressed herself to the heat of his back. “What put Shah on your radar?”
     
    “He’s had five complaints filed against him by the VPA.”
     
    The Vampire Protection Authority had been set up to stop cruty and prejudice against vamps. They never won court cases—it was extremely hard to make a vampire look the victim when you had pictures of their blood-soaked kills—but they could kick up a serious stink. “What for?”
     
    “Excessive violence against a vampire during retrieval.”
     
    “Hmm.” She thought about that. “Why don’t you sound more excited?”
     
    “Because all five complaints came from the same vamp.”
     
    Her own burgeoning excitement deflated. “Probably someone with an ax to grind.”
     
    “Yeah, but we have to check him out.”
     
    Shah Mayur lived in a much more ordinary home—in terms of its attractiveness to hunters. His apartment occupied the entire third floor of a freestanding town house.
     
    Sara frowned. “Getting in’s going to be a problem.” Deacon had already told her there was no internal access, so they couldn’t break in downstairs—and the ladder that Shah used to get up anddown was currently pulled up. That didn’t mean he was home. According to Deacon’s intel, it could be raised or lowered by remote. Shah wasn’t a trusting sort. But he was also supposed to be on a flight to Washington as of an hour ago. “Any ideas?”
     
    Deacon was staring up at the back