Blood Ties (Fallon Hunter #2)

Prologue

Mary lived with her husband and her grown son in the community that would one day be called Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was happy as anyone could expect to be in those harsher times. Until the vampires came.

Humans in her town began to disappear, plucked in the night, never to be seen again.

Farmers, bakers, clergy, mothers and children, the faces she’d grown up with and had seen every day, gone with no answers.

Resistance to these abductions was met with harsh punishment — bloodless bodies hung around the public as warnings.

This continued for months, until the urge to fight back became the instinct to hide in the dark and pray that it was someone else taken that night.

Mary hid with her family, just like all the rest, and she burned with the shame of powerlessness.

If her husband could do nothing, or her son, what could she expect to do?

Every night with the possibility of death coming to her doorstep, she closed her eyes and saw herself fighting.

Then the visits began, always after dark, always with three knocks on the door.

They started at the north of town and moved south through the half-empty homes.

The offer was the same across each household.

Pay these pale creatures of the night in coin, food, or goods, or be the next to disappear.

Even in the safety of daylight, neighbors stopped speaking as suspicion and distrust mounted.

The whole town had gone quiet and cold, already dead.

It was weeks before the vampires reached the Luceros’ home, and Mary had long since decided what she would do.

She conferred with her husband and son and demanded they fight to protect their family and community.

She would do the same, with whatever power she had.

But when the three knocks rapped on their door, her husband and son listened to the guileful whispers from the other side.

They ignored Mary’s pleas and left the safety of their home for the dark of night.

They didn’t return for three horrific, grief-filled days while Mary searched for them by the light of day and waited for them through the terrible dark.

There was a single knock on her door on the third night when they returned.

The two men were cold, their familiar eyes now red reflections of their evil souls, and they spoke only praise for their new masters.

Her husband was dead, and so was her son, and Mary didn’t know what wicked magic guided their bodies now, but she did not allow them back into her home when they begged entrance.

When the choice had come between fighting for good, for those they loved, for their neighbors, Mary’s husband and son had chosen instead to accept power to serve themselves.

Mary, however, chose to fight. She invited her husband in, and she used what little she had against him.

The knife she stabbed in his chest over and over only made him laugh, then made him angry.

He took it from her and turned it around, plunging it into her abdomen.

All she had left was a broken broom handle, and in the upending fight, the sharp end of it broke through her husband’s own soft belly, and all he could do was scream and curse while all his limbs locked up, unable to move.

Her son spat vile, vicious words from beyond the threshold, and when it made no difference, he fled back to his masters.

By the laws of nature, Mary’s husband should have been dead, but vampires broke such laws.

She likely should have been dead, too, especially when she pulled the knife from her womb and hacked off her husband’s head with it.

When she’d made it through his neck with what little strength remained in her dying body, he turned to ash.

Mary collapsed on the floor of her home and waited for death to take her next, once all her life poured from her wound.

Something else came to her, though. The light of dawn rose early and floated through her open door in the form of a woman.

“You’re a fighter, Mary,” this being told her, then put a hand to her cheek. Mary saw a vision of her future life, and so many lives after her own. She understood that the light of the universe had always been watching, and her fight was not yet over. All she needed to do was accept her gift.

That day, burdened with this new power, with the front of her dress still adorned with the crimson bloom of her own blood, she gathered a dozen women and girls, and this group fled south to safer lands.

Mary the Mother would never have children of her own, but these women were her sisters and her daughters, and from that day, they were Hunters.

Where men were offered power and took it for themselves, Mary and the Hunters would use their power for the light.

They would train, get strong, and they would fight back against the very evil that drove them away from their home.

As long as vampires existed, so would the Hunters.