Stalked By The Game

Chapter 10 - The First To Fall

::ARI::

It hadn't taken long to get Rebecca on our side and agree to participate in our fact gathering adventure. She was the only female hunter I knew with a bigger death wish than my own and as a child, I'd looked up to her in awe. She wasn't really that much older than me, turned twenty six just last June but that was still old enough that I saw her as a role model of sorts.

Antonio and I now sat in his truck, watching her stroll towards a bar that was notoriously known as a vamp hang out. She'd dressed to kill in a low cut black dress and heels higher than her hair. She looked cheap and trashy - just the way the newbie vamps liked it. There was a bounce in her step, a swing to her hips that I knew they wouldn't be able to resist. I glanced sideways at Antonio and grinned.

'You can stop watching her ass now.'

'Just checking she's got the goods for the mission.'

Men. They were all the same when it came down to it and that was what I was hoping for when it came to Rebecca. As soon as she hit the threshhold of the bar, he started the engine and we took off. We were in contact with her via her cell phone and pager if need be. It would be too risky for her to return to us. Had to love modern technology. With a few clicks of a button, she could immediatly let us know of anything important.

To pass the time, we stopped at some cheap dive of a cafe and offered coffee. I needed the caffine like a hole in the head at the moment but the warm heat from my mug soothed my nerves. I watch Antonio devour a huge burger and enough fries to sink the Titanic. Where the hell he put it all, I had no idea seeing there was not even a hint of flab on his body. If I ate like that, I'd never work it off.

'I hate the waiting,' I told him, starting on my second coffee.

He shrugged his shoulders. 'What can we do though, hey? Wasn't like you could walk in there and just demand answers. Even you're not that good that you could storm into a vamp safe bar, beat the crap out of a few newbies and escape alive.'

I knew that was the truth. Just because we'd gone in search of newbies, it was stupid to believe they would be the only ones in that particular bar. There would be older, more powerful vamps as well. I couldn't take them on at the same time, even in my wildest dreams. We were interrupted by a beep and I quickly checked my phone. First bit of news was that Vincent was not our head honcho. He was the middle man in this whole mess. That didn't really surprise either of us. If he was usually off the radar, that meant he was good at letting other people do the dirty work. Chances were that was one less vamp I had to worry about for the moment but it didn't solve the problem of who was calling the shots.

'If it's not Vincent,' I said to Antonio after I'd filled him in, 'we may never know where the orders came from. We don't know much about him so whoever is playing puppetmaster, he must have a lot of pull.'

He agreed. 'My first guess if we didn't know any better would have been to go with your gut instinct of McConnell but clearly, he's not going to put a hit out on himself.'

I laughed. From all accounts that I'd heard and what I'd seen in the few brief moments I'd encounted him, he was an egomaniacal bastard. By all reasoning, that would rule him out. Obviously, we were dealing with someone who he had rubbed the wrong way as well. I watched the sugar I swirled into my mug disolve and had a thought.

'You know, if the other vamp involved wasn't McConnell I might have been tempted to.........'

'No bloody way would I have let you do that,' Antonio broke in. I gave him my 'what, I know what I'm doing' look as he continued on. 'You were going to suggest a united front against a common enemy, weren't you?'