Crimson Warrior (Onyx Assassins 3)

“Not going to happen.” She sat up next to me as I pulled the bound dossier from the envelope. “What’s that?”

“It’s everything we had on the Hunters. Julian prepared it for me.” The historian was one of the smartest vampires I knew, and as an elder, was one of the few of us who actually remembered the famed six.

“Share,” Olivia demanded, pulling the table up out of the armrest and snapping it into place between us.

“Bossy,” I teased with a grin. Olivia was the only female who never hesitated to bark orders at me.

I opened the dossier and flipped to the first page. It was a copy of a hand-drawn portrait from our archives.

“Guess when you go into stasis in the sixteen hundreds, there aren’t exactly a lot of photographs,” Olivia noted, her brow furrowing in concentration.

“That’s Zachariah. If the Hunters had a leader, he would be it.” The portrait showed heavy brows over intelligent eyes, a Roman nose, and a square jaw.

“He’s hot for a drained vamp,” Olivia noted. “Funny, my family has the task of guarding them, but we don’t have anything like this.” She motioned to the binder. “It was deemed a security risk.”

“Understandable.” I flipped the page. “He’s the strongest of the six, and he was known for his courage and loyalty.” My brows rose. “Holy shit.”

Olivia leaned in, and I held my breath to keep from sniffing her hair like a creep. “Whoa. He can absorb the powers of others? Like The Highlander?”

“The what?”

“You know, The Highlander. That show from the nineties? There can be only one!” She finished that last part in the worst Scottish accent I’d ever heard.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I managed to say with a straight face.

“You try spending a couple hundred years at an all-girls school that specializes in boredom and see just how much television you binge.” She elbowed me. “Anyway, in the show, when the immortals kill each other, they absorb the other’s power.”

“Okay then, he’s pretty much exactly like the show, except he absorbs the other’s abilities. So, if he killed Benedict, for example, he’d become the new lie-detector.” My jaw clenched at the thought.

“Not that he’d try to kill an Assassin, right?” She shrugged with a forced smile.

“Right.”

We both knew that was exactly why I was here—to slay any of the Hunters who came out of stasis with blood madness or ill intent for our king. There was no telling how they’d emerge from their four hundred years of sleep.

Once we’d both read through what Julian remembered about Zachariah, we turned to the next hunter, Dagon.

“Elemental powers,” Olivia read as I studied the titled chin and cocky smirk in the portrait. “I don’t know a vampire alive that can wield the elements.”

“He’s the only one, according to Julian.” I rubbed my hand over my chin. How the hell was I supposed to battle a snowstorm? A tidal wave? “Let’s hope his powers are more gentle breeze than tornado.”

Olivia hummed in agreement.

Next came Talon, whose lanky frame and predatory gaze seemed perfectly matched with his power of shapeshifting into animals.

“I’m starting to feel like I got the short end of the stick in the power department,” Olivia muttered.

“Your speed is nothing to balk at,” I countered.

“This guy can pause time,” she groaned after we flipped the page.

“Ajax.” I blew my breath out slowly and studied the smug face with his slashing brows. His eyes looked like he was a breath away from laughing…or killing you. Either one was possible.

I flipped through to the last pages, where a set of twins with dark hair and serious eyes seemed to peer at us from across the centuries.

“Saint and Samuel,” Olivia whispered.

“The reason they went into stasis.” My gaze flicked between the two brothers, the difference between them only discernible by the slight variations of the mark that tattooed the sides of their necks. “Saint went mad according to legend, and rather than slay his own brother, Samuel and the others forced him into stasis, and then followed.”

Her fingertips traced the copied portraits over the clear page protector. “I get that. I could never kill one of my sisters. But all five of them followed?”

I nodded. “They fought as a unit. As brothers. And since the twins’ powers could either heal other vampires or bring plague, they knew they’d all be needed to capture Saint if he was still mad when regenerated.”

You must watch for the twin, Julian had told me before leaving Edgemont City. Where one goes, the other follows, and if Saint stirs to blood madness, we’re doomed.

“If it was Hawke?” Olivia asked quietly.

Out of all my brothers in the Order, Hawke was the one we all knew teetered on the edge of sanity. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for my brothers,” I answered. “Which means if the Hunters are anything like us modern-day Onyx Assassins, we could be waking an even bigger problem than the one we’re trying to combat.”