Working a day job barely paid anything.
Not to mention, they were pulling in serious side cash while on the clock.
A sweet deal like this didn’t come around every day.
Brown and his team were in incredibly high spirits.
Their sleeves were already rolled up, and they were fully prepared to keep building on their momentum, scale up their operation, and reach new heights of glory.
A single vampire guaranteed at least five thousand dollars.
Even with the team split, a conservative estimate meant each of them could pocket five hundred dollars per catch.
At five hundred a pop, catching a conservative four a day meant two thousand dollars a day.
Over a month, that would rack up to sixty thousand dollars.
*Tsk, tsk!*
If you wanted to make money, you had to start early.
Besides, the absolute best time to hunt vampires was during the broad daylight.
Therefore…
time was money.
Let’s do this!
As long as they didn’t die from exhaustion, they would work themselves to the bone.
While they talked, Locke and Brown hopped back into the car, flipped open their directory, and sped toward the nearest destination on the list.
Unfortunately…
Until noon rolled around, Locke and his team failed to bag a second vampire.
The reason was simple.
The vampires weren’t home.
To be precise, other than the first vampire they had caught early in the morning, they had visited three different locations before noon.
By the time they arrived, the targets seemed to have caught wind of the danger beforehand and had already cleared out.
They had made those trips for nothing.
“Gone again?”
Brown stared with a dark expression at the empty coffin in front of him, then looked around the living room, which looked as though a hurricane had ripped through it, just like the previous three apartments.
“Have they caught on to us?”
Locke didn’t say anything.
As if spotting something, he walked over to the apartment’s bar counter and picked up a business card that seemed to have been left there specifically for him.
He looked at it.
“Deacon Frost.” Debbie leaned in, blinking as she read the name on the card in Locke’s hand.
“It’s this guy’s card again, Boss.”
Locke hummed in response and flipped the card over.
On the back was a string of numbers.
It was the exact same phone number written on the cards they had found in the other three empty apartments.
As for whom they were intended for, the answer was obvious.
It made sense.
An entire month had passed.
Vampires weren’t stupid.
Watching their clan members who had visited the Satan Bar that night disappear at a rate of three or four a day, they were bound to realize what was happening eventually.
Locke twirled the card between his fingers, lost in thought.
Brown walked up from behind, took a look at the card in Locke’s hand, and frowned.
“Him again?”
“Yeah.”
“What does he want?”
“It’s pretty obvious.
He wants to talk.” Locke smiled and shook his head.
Brown’s brow furrowed tightly.
“This Deacon Frost…
is he supposed to be the leader of New York’s vampires?”
Locke nodded.
Although their cooperation with Natasha had allowed them to gather some intelligence on New York’s vampire population through Blade, they hadn’t been idle either.
Over the past month, while Locke and Brown were hunting down vampires, they had also extracted information about the New York vampire underworld from those who tried to beg for their lives.
To put it simply: there were a lot of vampires in New York.
A massive amount.
A conservative estimate suggested that the number of vampires in New York City had already surpassed the number of illegal immigrants living across its boroughs.
Furthermore, there was a vampire clan that ruled over the city’s supernatural underworld.
This clan was like the royal family of New York’s vampire population, and this royal family was ruled by thirteen pureblood vampires.
These so-called pureblood vampires were those who were born as vampires.
They possessed immense strength that far surpassed ordinary vampires, and every single one of them was an old monster who had lived for hundreds of years—bonafide nobility of the blood.
As for Deacon Frost, who had left the business card, he was a figure who stood below the thirteen pureblood vampires but above the nameless masses of ordinary vampires.
If the thirteen purebloods were compared to a ruling council, then Deacon Frost was the leader elected by this council to manage daily affairs.
And Deacon Frost’s strength was not to be underestimated.
He was at least an A-class vampire.
Based on the intelligence they had gathered over the past month and what they had learned from Blade, Locke deduced that Deacon Frost had been turned personally by a pureblood vampire.
Low-level vampires, those of C-class and below, were hideously deformed.
Not only were they ugly, but they also lacked the ability to turn ordinary humans into vampires.
These low-level vampires were the absolute bottom-dwellers of the vampire hierarchy, the beasts of burden.
Though humans and vampires were different species, the societal rules within their respective populations were largely the same.
These low-level vampires only existed because higher-ranking vampires wanted servants of their own.
If one were to compare these low-level vampires to Deacon Frost, the gap was astronomical.
To use the words of one low-level vampire they had interrogated: even if all the low-level vampires in the city banded together, they wouldn’t even be able to scratch Deacon Frost, let alone bite him to death.
The gap between ranks was terrifyingly vast.
*But…*
*I shouldn’t be far behind him,* Locke thought to himself.
A vampire’s strength was fixed upon transformation.
If Deacon Frost was an A-class vampire, then A-class was his permanent limit.
But Locke was different.
He could level up.
As long as he accumulated enough Extraordinary Points, he could pay to unlock even an SSS-class Vampire Gene.
He just needed to grind hard enough.
Seeing Locke staring silently at the business card, Brown became a bit impatient.
“Are we calling him?”
Locke snapped out of his thoughts and looked at Brown.
“What do you think?”
“I’m not meeting him,” Brown replied without a second thought.
Hunting low-level vampires was a great way to earn extra cash, but the title of “Vampire Leader” sounded incredibly dangerous.
Most importantly, they had already slaughtered over a hundred vampires.
The deaths of their fallen teammates had long been avenged.
Besides, Brown had never forgotten his true purpose for joining the Sentinel Secret Service.
He wanted to eradicate all mutants to avenge his late wife and his unborn child.
Locke wasn’t surprised by Brown’s answer, but he didn’t agree with it.
“I actually think we should have a chat.”
“Why?” Brown frowned, and Debbie looked like she wanted to say something as well.
Locke chuckled.
He pulled out his phone and looked at the two of them, his tone perfectly calm.
“We are the law, and he’s the outlaw!”
“Since the dawn of time, the outlaw has always feared the law.
There’s no reason for the law to fear the outlaw.”
“Let’s talk to him.”