Hunters

Eric Winters

Chapter 14 : Eric Winters.

The black on black Maserati Ghibli zoomed to a scorching stop in the courtyard of a narrow

Queen Anne house in Le Plateaus mont-royal and out stepped a well built, vampire dressed in trendy, ripped jeans and a black leather motorcycle jacket.

He had chiseled features, curly black hair and ruby eyes behind reflective aviator sunglasses.

He paused momentarily to finish his end of a conversation on the silver iphone XS Max .

"I'm well aware of that.
Just handle the problem." Eric Winters said tersely then ended the call.

If you want something done then it's better to do it yourself was Eric's favorite motto, but the only hitch was that he'd been out of the country when Dani Andersen had murdered one Amanda Sorbo.

"Papa's home now." Eric muttered grimly.

Two guards instantly jumped to attention at his purposeful approach and Eric passed them without acknowledging their greeting.

He was in a bad mood and raring to take it out on someone more
important than these peasant  guards.

Once inside of the beautiful house,  Eric snapped his fingers and four vampires materialized in front of him. 

Each was regarding their leader anxiously, and with good reason to appear so nervous.

"How is it possible that you four idiots allowed Amanda to be destroyed ?" Eric demanded.

Vito Ortega, the senior member of the four top recruiters nervously cleared and bowed before his "master".

"Welcome home, Sir." His voice was shaking, badly. "We weren't aware that she was attending the gala event. You know how secretive Amanda could be."

"That's no excuse!" Eric screamed directly into Vito's broad, bone white face. "She should not have been allowed to go there alone!"

The other three jumped at the volume of his voice, and shared uneasy glances.

Eric was so angry that his fangs  descended and in the blink of an eye, he'd ripped Vito's thick head from his broad shoulders and flung it into a corner.

The others scattered from his presence with howls of fear and chest heaving, Eric permitted them to flee.

The bloody cowards.

He'd deal with them later.

Right now he was in need of sustenance and so he marched into the gleaming, little used kitchen and tapped out a code on

the keypad which was hidden behind a joke portrait of the president of the United States as Count Dracula.

A door in the wall slid opened and Eric descended the stairs which would take him to a very warren of  chambers which stretched for miles beneath the property.

The motion sensor lights in the ceiling flicked on with minute buzzing sounds to flood a large , square room with high intensity lighting.

Chained to the wall were six, nude and terrified humans and when they saw what had come downstairs they began to scream.

A cruel smile lifted the corner of Eric's lips as he began to feed.

Several minutes later he was back upstairs, seated behind his massive desk in the oak paneled

study and now he summoned the surviving members of his team which consisted of Paula Denver,

a thin, androgynous blond female who'd been with him the longest.

Kimble St. Jean was a short, muscular Frenchmen with an off kilter nose, a shovel like chin and whitish blonde hair worn in a romantic ponytail.

And finally the beautiful and exotic, Akumè Massad, whose striking, midnight skin had retained much of it's natural hue.

Akumè was almost as tall as Eric, with a dignified presence and her rope like, rust colored locs had been twisted into a bun on the top of her elegant head.

Tribal tattoos marred both sides of her gaunt cheeks and silver rings decorated her ears.

It was to Akumè in particular that Eric directed his next words.

"I'm not going to kill you because it will take far too long to assemble another team of recruiters. What happened to Amanda was her fault.

However, we must avenge her or risk being looked at as cowards."

Rising from behind the desk, he began to pace the room like a caged animal desiring to be set free.

The excessive amount of human blood that he'd consumed earlier lent a dark flush to his cheeks which almost made him look human and a fleck of blood stained the collar of his white shirt.

"I want that brood of vipers wiped out once and for all." Eric snarled.

"That might not be as easy as you think." Akume said in her slow, heavily accented voice. "Because they are under the protection of Carlo Mancini."

Eric paused at mention of Principe Mancini's name and an
ugly flush suffused his cheeks.

"The blood traitor!" He said. "When did he become their protector?"

"After Amanda's death." Akume said. "But he has always been a friend to that family."

"We don't desire a quarrel with Mancini." Paula said and the others nodded their agreement.

"I'm not afraid of Carlo effing Mancini!" Eric roared and flipped the mahogany desk over so that it  thudded to the floor with an earsplitting crash sending dust and wood chips flying everywhere.

"Are you three idiots afraid of him?" Eric demanded, fixing his baleful, red glare on each of them in turn.

"No, master." They said.

For two hundred years he had patiently gathered a coven of loyal followers behind him and

had risen from obscurity to take over a powerful and lucrative coven after destroying it's original "Master".

The Winter's coven included one hundred loyal vampires, scattered all over the world, making it one of the largest of it's kinds.

The recruiters held the most important job of finding and eventually " turning" humans into
vampires then training them to

fight or run certain branches of the criminal business and each
splinter group was firmly under the command of that recruiter and they all answered to Eric Winters.

His many enemies said that having so much power had gone to Eric's head changing him into an evil tyrant.

Yet none of the smaller covens dared to oppose his.

Except for the Hunters.

Eric despised them with every fiber of his unnatural being.

He'd hoped that the peace treaty would end their interference.

Unfortunately things weren't going the way he'd hoped.

He considered the murder of Amanda Sorbo as a personal warning to the Winters Coven and

Eric was both humiliated and furious that they'd dared to take down one of his best recruiters, in plain sight!

"Gather a team of fighters and send them to Carlo's nightclub.

I want those Andersens rooted out and killed on sight and if bloody Carlo Mancini gets in our way then take him down too."

"Yes, Sir."

5/19/2019.
Edited 4/29/21.