Free Redemption (Jane #4) by Samantha Warren Page A

head as far as it
would go. His dark eyes landed on mine, terrified. My heart seized.
For the year that I'd known Felipe, I'd never seen him afraid of
anything, much less death. But this was different, so
different.
    I opened my mouth to cry out,
to plead with Donna for mercy, to tell Felipe that I loved him. The
words never came. An unexpected pain blossomed across the back of
my head, spidering out across my skull. The horrible agony was
followed by an uncontrollable urge to yack. As my breakfast finally
freed itself, my vision blurred, shrinking until all I could see
were Felipe's eyes, dark and pleading. Then they were gone.
     

 
ONE
     
    After the death of Ado, the
mood in our group of vampire hunters changed. Drastically. It was
no longer just about doing our job and hunting down rogue vampires.
It was about revenge. We didn't want to just find and kill Felipe's
murderer; we wanted to inflict as much pain on him as possible. In
the months since that horrible, fateful day, we had taken down
eight covens of freshly-turned vampires and their snacks. But it
wasn't enough. More kept popping up. When we started, there had
been sixteen in our district. After taking out the eight, we still
had twelve confirmed locations to deal with.
    "This isn't effing working!"
Felipe paced the debriefing room after our most recent slaughter.
"We have to do more. We need help."
    Father Bellini sat in a chair,
staring at Felipe silently while the vampire raged. The rest of the
team had left, seeking to avoid the verbal slaughter that was about
to occur, but I stayed, hoping to keep the two frustrated men from
killing each other on sanctuary grounds.
    "And what do you suggest,
Felipe? We are pulling all our resources, doing the best we can.
We've found and handled three of Conrad's accomplices. We are
making progress."
    Felipe scoffed. "Handled? They
sit locked in rooms in the sanctuary, fed, clothed, entertained.
They need to be punished. Harshly, so others are afraid to cave to
Conrad's false promises."
    "You know we can't do that. We
need them for information, and it is not our way to inflict cruelty
on those who have done wrong. We are not like them."
    "No, we're not like them. So
we sit here every day talking , hoping that will
prevent others from being turned and dying." Felipe stormed out,
the door slamming so hard I felt the chair beneath me shake.
    Father Bellini sighed and
placed his elbows on the table, resting his forehead in his hands.
I sat silently, not having any idea what to say or how to help.
This was so far beyond anything I'd ever experienced before. Since
the crackdown on the unapproved vampires began, the hunter teams
had taken down more than three dozen covens. But we'd suffered our
fair share of casualties, too. An entire team in Russia had been
wiped out. They'd received false information and went into a job
expecting ten vampires. They met three times that many, including
two of the older rogues we'd been hunting. One human made it back
to his sanctuary, but he died of his wounds a day later.
    The Americans had four teams
dealing with more than two dozen covens. Like ours, their teams
were made up of four vampires and two humans each. They had lost
half their humans and a third of their vampires trying to take out
the rogues and their offspring. Several reports stated that the new
vampires had been trained and given weapons powerful enough to take
down even a seasoned vampire. I thanked the stars that I had ended
up in an Italian sanctuary and not in America when I was
turned.
    "I just don't know what else
to do, Jane." Father Bellini's voice made me jump. I'd gotten lost
in my own thoughts and forgotten he was there. I turned to look at
him, opened my mouth, and snapped it shut again, shrugging.
    He scratched his chin,
thinking. "We need help. I think..." Bellini sighed, shaking his
head, his forehead creased. "I think I need to talk to the
Pope."
    That made me sit up straight.
The Pope? Bellini had access to the