The hunter stayed stubbornly silent, the edges of the rune on his chest flaring angrily with magic, keeping his tongue unmoving. Takoma tipped his head and nodded at Masha, who danced lightly on her feet in glee and got to work. She butchered the first hunter bit by bit, making sure not to hit any of the major veins and arteries at first.
By the time that hunter passed out from blood loss, the hunter in Takoma’s grip was shivering. From cold or shock or fear, it didn’t matter because the stress would hopefully help him fight against the compulsion for silence. His fingers scrabbled uselessly over the metal processing table, unable to look away or cover his ears from the sound of his fellow hunter dying beneath Masha’s blade and fangs.
She used the deboning knife to gut the next hunter on the table before tearing out his intestines. A desperate, screaming rattle of breath escaped him, then another, until he went still. Masha carried the ropey length of his intestines with her over to Takoma, her clothes stained heavily with blood, her hands covered in it. She dropped the intestines on the oldest hunter’s chest and flashed her fangs at the man.
“That’s two down,” Masha said.
Takoma studied the hunter in his grasp, taking in the bleeding eyes and the pallor of his face, the way the bravado had disappeared. The rune on his chest was bleeding at the edges. “Make the next one last.”
Masha flicked her deboning knife at him in a mockery of a salute before choosing her next victim. She took her time, skimming her blade over each hunter until she stopped beside the youngest. That hunter looked to be midtwenties, and the animal-wounded sound that came out of his mouth when Masha sank the tip of the deboning knife into his cheek made the hunter in Takoma’s grip jerk hard.
“Don’t,” the hunter ground out.
“Then answer my questions. I know you can. I know you want to,” Takoma said.
The hunter clenched and unclenched his hands, bloody eyelids twitching. Takoma turned his head and watched as Masha sliced the youngest hunter’s mouth open wider from the corner of his lips to his ear, listening as he screamed.
The hunter in Takoma’s grip let out a protesting sound he couldn’t quite swallow. “Don’t.”
Takoma studied him for a moment. “Your blood family?”
He knew hunters made their livelihoods a family business. They hunted with or without contracts, passing on generations of learned hatred and working to spread their harmful views to others. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for family members to be part of a hunter group. It seemed almost an expected thing in the course of their history.
The hunter said nothing, but the way his expression twisted—that wasn’t just fear; it was also grief.
“Tell me what Adler wants, and the rest won’t suffer,” Takoma coaxed.
“Liar,” the hunter rasped, the rune fracturing on his chest.
“Suffering has different connotations. I never said it wouldn’t hurt, but it doesn’t have to be drawn out. That’s on you.” Takoma tightened his grip in the hunter’s hair and pulled his head back, staring into that blood-streaked face and those eyes that couldn’t close. “Tell me what I want, and they will pass quickly. You owe Adler no loyalty for putting you in this position.”
The hunter swallowed thickly, breathing harshly, neither confirming nor denying his association with Adler, the rune a brand on his chest. Takoma watched as Masha cut a line between the groove of two ribs in the other hunter’s chest as if she were sawing them apart. When that hunter screamed, a full-body flinch ran through the older hunter’s body.
“She wants her land back,” the hunter spat out, fighting against restraints that wouldn’t budge and the vicious curl of blood magic fracturing on his chest.
“That isn’t new information,” Takoma said.
The hunter tried to jerk his head free of Takoma’s grip but to no avail. “She doesn’t tell us everything. That’s all I know.”
Which was perhaps the truth. The Cascade Coven looked down on anyone who wasn’t a magic user. Hunters, for all their brutality, weren’t in the same social class the Adler family moved in. If they were going to sacrifice anyone to a cause, it would most likely not be from their coven. But the fight for territory was an old one. That explained their antagonism toward his presence and perhaps their outreach to the Spokane Night Court if the vampire in the forest truly came from the east.
It didn’t explain the poltergeist.
But whatever Adler wanted, Takoma didn’t want her to succeed in getting it—especiallyif she was after Spencer.
Takoma caught Masha’s eye and nodded. She smiled widely at him, fangs gleaming beneath the harsh fluorescent light, before she dropped the deboning knife on the processing table in favor of wrenching the man’s head back to bare his throat. She sank her fangs into his flesh, tearing into the vein below and ripping it open.
“No!” the hunter in Takoma’s grip yelled.
“I said quickly, not painlessly,” Takoma said, holding the man’s head at the perfect angle to force him to watch as Masha fed. At a nod from Takoma, the rest of his vampires set upon the remaining hunters, feasting on the enemy.
The human body held around ten units of blood in their veins. Death by exsanguination didn’t take long, not when his vampires were hungry for a meal. In the end, death was a messy business, but at least the fish-processing plant would make cleanup easy.
Takoma looked down at the last surviving hunter, seeing that tears had washed quite a bit of the blood away on his face. Takoma rested the fingertips of his free hand against the hunter’s chest, sharp nails pricking cold skin. The man’s eyes rolled in their sockets, lips quivering. He didn’t beg for his life though, which Takoma thought was refreshing.
It didn’t take much effort for Takoma to rip out the hunter’s heart. The man was dead before Takoma’s fangs sank into the still-beating muscle, sucking blood out of the chambers. After a moment, he stepped away from the processing tables, tossing the drained heart onto the body behind him. “Dispose of the pieces like usual.”
Masha nodded as the rest of the vampires who’d come with him tonight set upon the bodies for the purpose of further feeding and dismembering. The mess they’d made would be cleaned up with the industrial tools in the processing area. When the morning shift arrived, no one would be the wiser.
