Hunter's Heart

Chapter 1

Out of habit, she cast her gaze left and right as she stepped out of the coffee shop and locked the door after herself. It was a habit she'd learned long ago, hammered into her for so long that she caught herself doing it every time she stepped outside. As usual, the night was quiet, the streets almost empty of people. But forewarned is forearmed, as her grandfather used to say when she was little. She knew for a fact that there were things out there in the dark that most people only dreamed of in their worst nightmares.

Stop it, she berated herself angrily as she started walking in the direction of her apartment building. You left that life two years ago. It's time to move on.

But she was Alexandra Quinn Antanov, once a member of one of the oldest and noblest Hunter clans, and old habits died hard. She still got up before dawn. She still took long runs through town to keep in shape. She still kept an eye on the local papers for any sign that something was amiss. And she still stowed a small knife in her boot, tucked safely away so that she didn't alarm any of the customers in the coffee shop.

Growing up, she'd learned quickly that a Hunter's life was all about their duty. They went after the monsters hidden in the dark places of the world, keeping them from terrorizing the human world. Love was a rarity amongst her people. If Hunters married, it was only to ensure that the bloodlines continued. A Hunter had no use for emotional attachments beyond that of direct blood relatives. It made them weaker.

Her mother had been the kind of woman who put duty before anything else. Most Hunter parents at least took some kind of interest in their children's lives. Quinn's mother had raised her daughter until she was old enough to be placed in the training program and then she'd gone off into the field, leaving Quinn to be raised by her trainers. Quinn had no idea who her father was. All she knew was that her mother had spent a year away from the clan and had come back with a newborn baby. No one knew anything about the baby's father and she'd refused to answer any questions about him.

And any opportunity to learn about him had been crushed when word came of her mother's death. It had been on a standard raid conducted by the clan. Seek out, destroy, wipe clean ... only the monsters had been ready for the Hunters' arrival and they'd been killed. Quinn was pretty much left to fend for herself after that, and she threw herself into her training. It had nothing to do with vengeance – you had to have felt some kind of connection to the person you were avenging for that to mean anything.

She became an efficient tracker and a deadly fighter in the practice arena. She had lived up to her family's reputation of being the most skilled Hunters of their people, enough so that she had quite easily earned a reputation in the training yard of being someone you didn't want to cross. Her skills and dedication to her studies had garnered the respect of some of the higher ranked officers in the clans, but it also put her under a harsh microscope when she put a toe out of line.

And then the events of the Gathering two years ago had happened and everything had changed.

Every year, clans from all over came together at a predetermined location where they would catch up with old friends and form new alliances. Then, they would all go on a hunt. There had been word that a large werewolf pack had settled in the area and the clans were going to exterminate it before it became a problem. The information had been highly inaccurate. The reports had made it seem like there was an army being amassed, but when the gathered clans had arrived, Quinn saw only a small community.

None of her training had prepared her for what she'd seen that night. She'd been taught that the things in the dark were monsters and were a danger to the human world, that they had to be eradicated. What she'd seen, however, were people. Some scared, some angry, some desperate. When they changed, they could certainly be described as monstrous, but Quinn had seen that it was only done out of necessity to defend themselves.