To find that man and kill him as brutally as he'd killed her parents. To make him beg for a mercy she had no intention of giving him.
Retribution would be hers....
"Abigail?" The doctor forced her to look at him. "What else do you crave?"
"The throat of Sundown Brady."
"Someone's killing Dark-Hunters."
Jess Brady scowled as his Squire, Andy, burst into the obscenely huge kitchen, huffing and puffing, with his dark hair sticking out all over his head as if the boy had been wringing at it-a habit Andy had whenever he was duly stressed.
Much less excited, especially since he'd been up only a few, Jess blew his breath across his steaming coffee. "Settle down, pup. I ain't had my caffeine yet." And he wasn't a morning person, even though his mornings were what most people called early evening.
Still the boy jumped about like a filly around a rattlesnake. Had he ever been that nervous about anything?
The answer hit him hard in the chest and did nothing to improve his irritability.
Jess quickly turned his thoughts away from that memory and focused on the boy he'd known since the day Andy was whelped.
Even though Andy was nearing thirty now, he was about as high-strung as anyone Jess had ever met. Times like this, he missed the old calmness of Andy's pa. Nothing had ever rattled that man.
Not even the time he'd landed in a nest of scorpions.
"Sundown ... you don't understand. It's-"
He held his hand up to stop the boy midsentence. "I get it, kid. Case you haven't noticed, Dark-Hunters are on almost as many menus as humans are. Having something trying to kill us is about normal. Now, why you more flustered than a preacher in a whorehouse?"
"I'm trying to tell you." Andy gestured toward the door as if expecting the bogeyman to charge through it. "There's a human out there who is killing off Dark-Hunters, and someone needs to stop them."
Jess took a slow drink before he spoke. Ah yeah, that hit the spot. Little more, and he'd be as close to human as a deadman could come. "Well, that's just plain rude."
All that did was frustrate Andy more. "I really don't think you understand what I'm trying to tell you."
Jess scratched at the whiskers along his jaw. "And my mama drowned the dumb ones. I hear everything you're saying. There's a group of Buffys thinking we're the bad guys. Ain't my first rodeo, pup. It's been happening so long, they were called Helsings long before your daddy was a gleam in your granddaddy's eyes. Thank you, Hollywood and Stoker for that. Not like being undead didn't suck before. They just made it worse for us by cluing the rest of the world in that we exist. Now every goth with a thirst for immortality is cruising for us, begging us to bite them and turn them. Did I ever tell you about that time when-?"
"Sundown," Andy snapped. "I-"
"You need to check that tone, boy. Remember, I used to kill people for a living, and I ain't been up long enough to have much tolerance right about now. Knock it down a notch before I forget I'm supposed to actually like you."
Andy let out a long sigh. "Fine, but answer me this."
Dang, when had the kid turned into the Riddler? He should have curtailed all those Batman reruns when Andy was a boy.
"Did any of those others ever come after you guys in the past leading a Daimon entourage?"
Now, that got his attention. While it wasn't unusual for Daimons to use humans as servants or tools from time to time, it wasn't normal for them to follow one.
Jess set the coffee down on the stainless steel counter. "Come again?"
"Yeah ... this one travels in a pack of Daimons, and has been slaying every Hunter they can find. She's taken out three here and four others in Arizona and Oklahoma."
Jess took a full minute to digest that. "How do you know about this?"
"I was contacted by Tawny, who got it from her mother." Now, to most, that'd sound bizarre. But like Andy, Tawny was a multigenerational Squire. A few thousand years back, the Squire network had been set up to provide a "normal" cover for the nocturnal Dark-Hunters during the daylight hours when they were sleeping. The Squires helped them to pass for humans, and most of all, the Squires shielded their existence from the rest of the world and took care of their day-to-day necessities so that they could focus on their job. Killing Daimons and freeing the human souls they'd stolen before those souls died and were forever lost.
But the best part about the Squires was that some of them were Oracles who could speak directly to the gods and get information from them that the Dark-Hunters could use to track and kill Daimons.
Tawny's mother happened to be one of those Oracles.