The Vampire's Surprise - Stormy Glenn Page 0,5

beat three rogue vampires and bring in one human, he didn't deserve to be second-in-command of the tribe.

"Tell me about this human."

"He was a waiter at the restaurant. I sent Nico and Saul after the rogues, but followed the waiter home. He stopped at a place on the way home. I'm not real sure what the place was, but there seemed to be a lot of people coming and going from there."

"Apartment building?"

"No, it looked like an apartment building on the outside, but there were too many people coming and going from there for it to be someplace people were living. It was definitely a business of some sort."

"What else?"

"He knew I was watching him."

Marcus was silent for a moment before he asked, "He knew you were watching him?"

Dmitri had been shocked as well. He was one of the best enforcers in Marcus's tribe. It was one of the reasons he'd had his position for so long. If he wanted to stay in the shadows, he stayed in the shadows.

"I have no idea how he did it, but he knew I was watching him."

"You specifically? Or he just knew someone was watching him? Some humans have very good intuition, Dmitri."

"When he got home, he looked out into the darkness, not at where I was standing specifically, but he told me to go away, that I wasn't wanted here."

At least, it seemed like the guy was talking to him.

"Interesting."

Dmitri certainly thought so.

"So, he definitely knows who we are."

"I'd say so, sir."

Suspicion and unease knotted in Dmitri's gut when he spotted three men making their way down the street toward the waiter's residence.

It wasn't so much that three men were walking down the street in the middle of the night that brought them to Dmitri's attention, but more that they seemed to be slinking, almost as if they were trying not to be spotted. They stayed close to the hedges and fence lines, darting from shadow to shadow.

When they stopped and spoke to each other in a hushed whisper and then one of them broke away and walked up onto the waiter's porch while the other two went toward the back of the house, Dmitri knew they were trouble.

"Shit! Sir, I need you to send back up to my location immediately." Dmitri hung up before his prince could say anything more—and yes, he'd probably pay for that—and then started toward the waiter's house.

The front door opened before he got there.

Dmitri dropped down and darted behind a vehicle when he heard the very unmistakable sound of a shotgun going off. When he peeked over the hood, the man who'd gone up on the porch lay in the middle of the yard.

He wasn't moving.

Dmitri glanced toward the house. The waiter stood on the porch, a shotgun in his hands.

"I don't know who you are," the man called out, "but you need to leave."

Dmitri slowly stood, his hands raised up. He didn't want the guy to mistake him as the bad guy and shoot him. He knew he'd made the right decision when the waiter raised the shotgun up and pointed it at him.

"I mean you no harm." He nodded to the guy in the yard. "I'm not with them."

"Do you think I'm a fucking idiot?" the man snapped. "You're a vampire. He's a rogue. I do know the difference."

Dmitri refused to show his surprise at the man's declaration. How he knew the difference was a question, but the bigger one was how he knew about vampires in the first place.

"You do know he had friends, right?" Dmitri pointed to the side of the house. "They went back that way."

"Damn it!" The waiter cocked the shotgun as he started back through the house.

Dmitri hadn't technically been invited inside, but he had left the front door open, so… Dmitri used some zip ties—which he always carried—from his back pocket to secure the rogue’s hands and feet and then chucked him into the bushes in case anyone came by before making his way inside the house.

He heard the shotgun go off just as he stepped inside. He started running toward the back of the house. He heard a kid crying somewhere in the house as he slammed into the screen on the back door and pushed through it.

The waiter stood at the bottom of the back steps, pointing his shotgun at two rogue vampires laid out in the yard. They were moving so Dmitri knew they were alive, but they didn't look as if they were going