Ashton quickly made his way back to the mansion. Thankfully, his journey back inside was fairly uneventful. Everyone was still asleep or hiding, and the sun was still down. This helped Ashton to et back to his room without any worries.

As for his smell, he had already taken care of that as well. The mistress was sure to teach him about everything related to werewolves and one of the most important things she taught him was to erase his presence.

For all intent and purposes, the werewolves were like wolves. Thus they had a weird stench around them. There were two ways to get rid of their smell, either blend themselves with the surroundings or make the surroundings blend in with you.

This necessarily meant to either blend your smell into your surroundings or mark everything to smell like oneself. Since doing the latter would not have helped him in any way, Ashton decided to do it the other way.

He rubbed the scent of everything on him, thus even the sharpest of noses would not have been able to trace the killings back to him. At least he hoped so and started waiting for the hell break loose when the sun came up.

***

With sunlight came chaos in the city of Maddencreek. The citizens had followed the scent of the dead and found the dead bloodsuckers in the abandoned barn. All of them were aware of who these two bloodsuckers were.

They were two of their national guests who had been helping his majesty the king with taking care of the night creatures in the wastelands. They also knew that the two of them were hunting last night in their city.

However, with them being dead, most of them were happy as they had spent last night in worry of what would happen. The mistress, on the other hand, could not help but get worried. The national guests were killed in her city, and it wasn’t exactly a secret that she hated her sperm donor more than anyone else on the planet.

If someone wanted they could easily turn this incident into a way for the mistress to show her rebellion against the empire. Even though she was strong, she was nowhere near strong enough to take on the empire by herself. If she did, she would have already overthrown her so-called father and become the monarch of the kingdom.

Everyone in the city was rounded up and their whereabouts of the last night was being asked. But it wasn’t like she had a way to rebuke them.

‘If only the surveillance were allowed to keep on we would have already caught on to the culprit!’ The mistress cursed her father in a way she never had, ‘That prickly bastard king might have plotted this all from the beginning. After all, it gave that bastard a chance to get rid of me.’

They had surveillance all over the city, but under the Bloodsucker’s and his majesty’s order, all of it was switched off. The bloodsuckers did not want anyone to know what they did or how they did it. Which was a clean tactic to be honest.

But now that the Mistress thought about it, it could have also been the king’s or one of his advisor’s plans to mark her as a traitor and get rid of her. She failed to realise this and now she might have to pay for the foolishness.

Little did she know that the stars were still shining above her. The corpses of the bloodsuckers had been sent for autopsy and the results that came back were… fascinating, to say the least.

“Vampire and Undead?” Mistress asked Donovan who presented the report to her, “Since when did those species start getting along enough to hunt together?”

“That’s what confusing me as well.” Donovan shrugged his shoulders, “But the report clearly states that one of them died from either her life being sucked out or because of the gaping wound in his chest and as for the male, he died after blood of some undead entered his body.”

“If the bloodsucker died by the blood of the undead, then it has to be fresh blood…” Mistress handed the report back to Donovan, “It doesn’t matter if a vampire and an undead are working together. With this autopsy report, at least the king or his men would not be able to blame this incident upon us.”

Donovan silently nodded along, he had had the same thoughts when he read the report first. If the king and his council had really planned to get rid of his mistress then they would no longer be able to do that. But there was another thing…

“The king might be anything, but not a fool.” Donovan mumbled curtly, “If they were truly trying to frame you, then they would not have had a Vampire and an Undead take care of the bloodsuckers.”

The Mistress immediately understood what Donovan was trying to say and he was correct. The king probably did not know about this. Which made things complicated as well.

Because in that case, the Vampire and the Undead responsible for killing the bloodsuckers could as well be a threat to them. Thus they needed to swiftly take care of the issue right away.

“First the ghoul in the training tower, then this… I have a feeling these two incidents might be linked together.” Donovan continued with what he wanted to say, “I will organise a team and hunt down everyone who is responsible for this.”

“Do as you please.” The Mistress mumbled and walked towards the exit of the room, “Just take care of this. I already have enough things on my plate that I need to take care of.. I do not need any more issues.”