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Thinking came second to doing. Amira dashed across the room to extinguish the flames under her elixir while her father grabbed her things, resetting the room to make it seem abandoned.

“What are you doing with this vampire?” Papa’s voice came harsh in the low light.

She glanced at the side of her father’s face, but when he turned to face her, she looked down to his salt and pepper beard unable to meet his scrutiny.

“How did you even get him?” then a realization flashed on his face. “You set off the bombs at the portals?”

Amira said nothing. Her father’s incredulous anger bubbled.

“The shifters are blaming the humans for that. The vampires are blaming the shifters. And if Monger catches that you were behind it, what do you think he’ll do to you? No one knows what you really are, Amira. How many times must I tell you? This remains secret. We let him free, right now.”

“You can’t do that,” she forced herself between the vampire and her father.

In kind, her father gripped her shoulder and yanked her away.

“Never turn your back on your enemy.”

Amira merely went where her father led, not bothering to fight him on this one. The vampire remained docile at their feet, entrapped by her inescapable binds and the drug, he wasn’t going anywhere—least of all, was he going to harm her.

“That’s the first of many mistakes for you, I see,” her father, ever the hunter, never truly ceased in his training instruction. But it seemed he couldn’t help but look at the vampire on the floor. “Did you stop to think of what would happen if Monger finds him here?”

Amira didn’t utter a word but a voice from below them did, low and musical.

“Who’s Monger?”

Neither she nor her father breathed a word. They didn’t dare to. Monger was the human who stole her birthright and made them as they were. He was an enemy to them, but one they needed to keep as an ally or risk execution.

“Ah, I see. He is an adversary,” the vampire, Gustav said. “Then, you must fight him.”

The vampire knew nothing of her affairs. Monger’s campaign against her and her father was too strong to fight against. They’d be dead before sunrise if they’d done something so foolish.

“Hush, you.”

She barely looked in the vampire’s direction as she opened the satchel in her father’s hand to place her ingredients into before buckling it up, then she placed the bag near the door. Gustav’s eyes followed her as she moved.

When she returned to the table to grab her fire stones, Papa’s sharp gaze blazed a trail down her face. He disapproved of this. Unsurprising, as Papa disapproved of all things hunter ever since he’d been overthrown by Monger and his men.

“I can help,” the vampire continued on as if she hadn’t told him to keep quiet. “I’m very fast.”

She glared at her traitorous companion. Could he not sense the danger that was in the room, let alone what would await them if Monger discovered them?

“One more word and I will bind your mouth.”

“You will do no such thing,” Papa chided her as he ripped open another of her bags for her to place the hot stones inside. “You will have courtesy toward this creature. We’ve raised you better.”

“This is your daughter?” Gustav interjected just as her father’s dark eyes bore into her temple. “She’s very pretty, Mr. Amira.”

The vampire practically crooned at her feet. Her father paused, then looked at the vampire on the floor who’d been acting too amiable for his predicament.

“What have you done to him?”

Subtly, she tried to cover up her elixir, but her father’s keen eyes caught her in the act. She pulled the pot away, but her father’s rough hands grazed hers to rip the cloth from covering her crime. Outrage widened his eyes.

“You drugged him?” There was no need for an answer as he continued. “I’ve told your elden mother not to teach you this. You two are set to get us killed, yet.”

Now, she saw why Grams forbid her from telling her father she knew the recipe. Because of this reaction. Papa never liked for a hunter to know the ways of the alchemists. Especially not her.

“I only used it to help keep him still so he doesn’t hurt himself.”

Papa made a hissing sound with his teeth as his jaw flexed in angry disapproval, but the voice near the floor spoke up again.

“This way, they come.” Gustav’s head lulled toward the door. His big brown eyes seemed doe-like as he watched her being scolded by her father.

In an instant, she and Papa were back to their task. She sheathed her curved long knife on her back as Papa knelt beside Gustav.

“I will unbind you and you’ll come with me. Bite me and I’ll leave you here to die. The men that come are no friend to us. They definitely won’t be a friend to you.”

The vampire took the threat in stride.

“Is she coming too?” Gustav’s amber gaze found hers, a goofy, yet friendly smile plastered his face. She really did drug him. Perhaps, she’d put too much Angel’s Trumpet in it.

Papa didn’t answer Gustav as he loosened the rope that anchored him to the support column that drove several meters into the earth. Once he was free, the vampire rose. At full height, he and her father stood face to face, but Gustav was much larger in form.

“I see you are both the silent type.” He frowned as he held out his wrists. “You were cutting my binds.”

“Don’t,” she shouted without meaning too.

“Quiet girl,” her father chided, watching the window behind her back with desperate eyes.

“Papa, we can’t let him go. He’s the key to getting Lilah back.”

Insurmountable pain flashed across her father’s face. It had been a long time since she’d said her sister’s name to her father. It’d always caused him too great a pain. Like now, her father choked back three years of unshed tears.

“Lilah is…” The words were overshadowed by grief. Papa visually shook himself from it and leveled her with a stare of pity. “This is my fault. I should have never let your elden mother encourage this. But it is time we all moved on.”

“She was taken by his kind. He will help bring her back.”

“This vampire can help you no more than any hunter can. Your sister is no more.” His pain rushed over her, but her brain refused to process it. Instead, anger took hold. How dare he give up so easily? How dare he ask for her to accept what she knew in her heart not to be true? Her sister was alive. She knew it.

“How can you say that? I saw the ones who took her. He wears their mark! He can take us to her.”

Her father stalled for a moment, hope flashed on his face, but he extinguished it as quickly as it formed.

“It doesn’t matter what he wears, Amira. Too much time has passed for us to continue to believe the fairy tale of her survival. Realize this and heal.”

Papa’s dark eyes, pensive within the shadows of the night, looked more hurt than anything she could describe. It was the same pain she’d buried three years ago when she hatched her plan and kept it secret until now.

“What if she’s still out there and can’t get to us? What if she’s waiting for us to find her?”

If Lilah was like her and her parents, she’d come to the age of being a full hunter soon and her natural gifts would start to take over. Her scent would change, her hunter’s instincts would surface, and her blood would start to taste too delectable to the vampires.

By nature, hunters were very appealing to their natural enemies. Even the average hunter would look like a beauty queen to them. To shifters, hunter’s developed reesa, a pheromone that mimicked estrus, and made shifters go wild. Around vampires they’d develop sweet blood, making their scent and taste irresistible. All to lure them to their knives.

It was the reason Amira had kept her masking potions. She was a full hunter, a rarity among hunters now, so that made her more potent to her enemies. Her sister would likely be the same and she wouldn’t have an elixir to suppress her taste and scent. She’d be vulnerable.

“We will discuss this at home.” Papa’s jaws tightened before he turned back to Gustav, and lifted his sharpened blade. “Say nothing of this and you can go free.”

“No!”

Before her father could cut Gustav’s binds, she bumped his wrists out of the way, but the elixir in her hands splashed onto her face, clothes, and some of the bitter brew got into her mouth.

She coughed as the spicy liquid splattered in the back of her throat, forcing her to swallow some of it.

Yuck.

She couldn’t imagine anyone ingesting this, like her elden mother suggested. Another cough bubbled in her throat. Her eyes watered. She needed water to wash the spicy bitterness down.

“Shh, they’ll hear you,” Gustav said. His words were equal parts helpful and not. She couldn’t stop the involuntary function of her throat, but his warning reminder her to be quick on her feet.

Her father peeked over her shoulder and out of the smallest of the windows in their shed. “He is right, they are not far. Quickly.”

“Water,” she barely managed through another cough. Her father thrust a full waterskin in her direction. Uncorking it, she took several sips until her throat was mostly calm. Although a patch of her mouth partially burned as though someone lit it ablaze in that one spot.

“Are you well?” Gustav asked at the same time as her father.

She nodded and crossed the room, holding in the tightness of her throat, and shoved her strong rope, her sharpening stone, and a hand full of bandages in a single duffle. She still needed to reset Gustav’s wound, which bled too much.

“Come,” her father said.

“One more thing,” the words were tight coming out of her throat. Amira rushed to the cutting board, wiped it clean and turned it over to reveal an unblemished surface. In the distance the flickering light from Monger’s torches lit their pathway.

“Why are they looking here anyway?” She asked to no one, but it was her father who answered.

“After hearing of the disaster at the portals, Monger called for a tally. You were not there to be counted.”

Oh, but her father’s scolding only started again.

“You know he’s been keeping a keen watch on you, wondering where you’ve been disappearing to. You had to know of the danger you put yourself in,” Papa’s hands smoothed the gray hair trimmed to his scalp in worry as he eyed the empty space where Gustav had been tied to, then amended. “Put all of us in.”

Monger would kill them all. He’d been looking for a reason to dismantle their line since he’d won his mutiny campaign against her father three years ago.

“And what of your elden mother? She’d suffer the punishment too.”

“We need him.”

Their debate ceased when the trees moved and horses splashed through the water troughs her elden father dug on the property line before she was born. They only had minutes to escape.

She grabbed her satchel and hoisted onto her back before taking one last look around at the last of what remained of the shack of her elden father’s birth. Amira opened the door to let her father out before twisting to the vampire who monopolized a fair bit of the room.

“This way,” she urged him.

Except the vampire did something he shouldn’t have done.

He stood his ground and refused to move.