women. They were standing beside a door and waiting for Atreides and Daniel’s sisters to be in place before they broke in the doors.
Atreides and his party were standing at the door down the hall where they smelled Cliff and the others had been. "Ready?" he whispered, though he would have telepathically spoken just to Selena, he had to let Rosa know what he intended to do. He did telepathically say the same to the others in the hall because the two huntresses turned could tell Daniel what Atreides had said.
Daniel inclined his head and then both he and Atreides slammed into their respective doors and broke them in. That was the problem with cheap doors when hunters, and vampires, used their power to break them in.
Cliff was off the couch in an instant, but instead of coming at them with a sword, he began shooting at them.
Atreides whipped Rosa out of the room’s entryway using vampiric transportation. Selena vanished. Weapons were discharged in the other apartment and Atreides saw that Eliza had moved Daniel out of the apartment he'd entered.
Neither hunters nor vampires used guns. It wasn't done. These men were rogues of the worst sort.
"Hell, we've got to get out of here," one of the other men yelled to Cliff.
"Don't you think I know that, damn it?" Cliff yelled back at him.
They were in a bind, but Atreides thought Selena would reappear next to him. She didn't. What the hell had happened to her? He was worried that she had been hit. That she was dead even. He couldn't go into the room without her invitation and he didn't want Rosa to subject herself to more gunfire. Daniel was texting on his phone, supposedly for backup.
Atreides called to Colt and Renault to join them at the apartment complex. He had thought there were other hunter rogues out there, so he hadn't called to them to come before this. But he needed to get in the room.
"Where's my sister?" Rosa asked, expecting the same thing as Atreides, for her to suddenly appear next to them.
"I'm in here," Selena said telepathically to Atreides. "I've been hit."
Chapter 19
Selena would kill the men. Cliff and Perry Rochester had shot her because she'd moved in front of her sister and Atreides, to invite him in and to protect her sister. She'd never expected the men to be armed with guns. It was unheard of in the history of their kind.
She was in pain, bleeding, but the bullet wounds hadn’t hit fatal spots. Thankfully, she managed to transport into one of the bedrooms where the men weren't at and they must not have realized it. She was afraid to invite Atreides in. The hunters needed to do this, but she also didn't want anyone else to get shot. Then she thought of her brother. What if Daniel had been hit also? And Eliza and Brittany? She invited Atreides in. "Don't let my sister enter the apartment."
"Are you badly hurt?" Atreides asked Selena.
"Yes. I'm in a back bedroom, first one on the left down the hall. Cliff and Perry sound like they're in the kitchen."
"I'm on my way."
"Don't get yourself killed. I would never forgive you."
Then he was in the bedroom, appearing next to her, and she was lying on the floor, holding her wounds. "Hell, Selena," he whispered. "I've got to get you out of here."
"No way. We've got to end this now. Not only for the vampiresses they’ve murdered but for the future ones if we don't stop them. No telling where they'll end up."
"We've got hunter reinforcements coming. Let me take you out of here." Atreides sounded desperate to move her and get help for her.
"No."
"You can't fight like this."
"Watch me. I'm healing." Not instantaneously, but she could do this. "Just give me a few minutes."
"We've got to make a break for it. We killed Selena. There are two others out there, her sister, and some other guy I didn't recognize," Cliff said.
"Yeah, the other guys want to leave too. We're hemmed in here. If they call for reinforcements, we're dead," Perry said.
"Okay, they didn't expect us to be using guns so they can't win against us. Let's do this," Cliff said.
"I still can't raise Lonnie."
"He may be dead."
Selena told the other huntresses turned to go after the men in the other room.
"Will do," Eliza said.
Selena heard Cliff and his friend running out of the kitchen and she suddenly appeared before them and thrust her sword into Cliff's heart, if he'd had