"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 anywhere anytime soon. Both rogues had nice-sized holes in their chests. It didn't look fatal, but it had to be painful.
"I only saw three of them."
The waiter jerked around and pointed his shotgun at Dmitri. "You need to leave." He used the barrel of the shotgun to gesture to the two vampires on the ground. "And take them with you."
"Oh, I'll be taking them with me. My prince wants to know why they were in his territory, but he also wants to talk to you."
"No." The waiter brushed past Dmitri as he went back inside the house.
Dmitri shook his head as he pulled more zip ties out of his pocket and started for the rogues. "Prince Marcus is very interested to know why you are in his territory."
Both vampires whimpered. Dmitri didn't know if it came from the pain due to their injuries or the fear from facing the prince. He didn't much care. They shouldn't be in the prince's territory without his permission, and they shouldn't be rogues.
Rogue vampires were essentially vampires who refused to follow the rules. The council had very strict rules about how humans were treated. Many of these rogues didn't care if humans were hurt or killed, which was why they became rogues.
And there were many rogue vampires in the world, those who refused to submit to the rules set down by the vampire council to keep their species hidden from human eyes, to keep their kind safe, and keep the humans safe from them.
Dmitri had just finished restraining the two rogue vampires when Nico and Saul came into the backyard. "Get these two, and the one in the front yard, and take them back to the prince. He wants to question them." He rolled his eyes when one of the rogues grunted. "And get them some medical care."
It wouldn't do for the rogues to die before the prince took their heads.
"Check in with the prince when you get back to the car. Let him know I'll be bringing in the waiter." Dmitri was not looking forward to the fight ahead of him to convince the guy to go with him, but refusing an order from Prince Marcus would not happen.
Dmitri waited until Nico and Saul had hauled away the two rogues, heading toward the front of the house, before he walked up the steps and into the house. Considering the waiter's animosity toward vampires and rogues, Dmitri was a little surprised he'd left the back door open for him.
He couldn't hear any crying anymore, so that was good. Although, he was curious as to where it came from. He walked through the house until he found the waiter. He was standing in the dining room, drinking something in a cup while watching out the front window. Dmitri had no idea where the shotgun had gone.
"Are you going to kill them?"
"If my prince orders me to, yes."
The waiter snorted. "You guys are all the same. You follow orders blindly, even when they are wrong."
"You believe it is wrong to kill rogue vampires?"
Dmitri was taken aback by the rage on the man's face when he spun around.
"Come with me."
Dmitri smelled something sweet and tangy when the man stormed past him and back down the hallway. He wanted another sniff, but instead, he grew a bit concerned when the waiter stopped in the kitchen and grabbed one of the knives in the knife rack. He didn't make any threatening moves with it, but Dmitri still decided he was going to take the knife at the first opportunity.
"Here." The knife was held out, handle first. "You're going to need this."
For what?
The waiter stormed down the hallway and threw open one of the doors. By the time Dmitri got there, he was standing across the room in front of a crib. Dmitri's jaw dropped when he picked a baby up and turned around to face him. The kid couldn't be any older than six months.
He thrust the infant into Dmitri's arms. "He's a rogue. If you believe what you say, you have to kill him."
Dmitri's eyebrows snapped together. Something between outright rage and total horror knotted in his stomach. "I'm not going to kill a baby."