Forever Night (Darkness Falls Book 3)

Chapter Ten

The next morning I woke up pissed. The grief over the senselessness of Georgia and Leon's deaths had hardened into ice-cold anger. Rachel had threatened, hounded, and murdered, and she wasn't going to get away with it. If she wanted to play games, so be it, but I was going to beat her.

I rolled over and came face to face with Luke, still sitting by the side of the bed. His face was tired, his grey eyes the faded colour of predawn, but they brightened when they saw me, like I was the rising sun breaking into his night-time world.

"You really kept watch all night," I murmured.

He took my hand and kissed it. "I promised you I would."

As I gazed back at him, the hard anger inside me briefly gave way to a sensation of being completely humbled. My relationship with Luke hadn't exactly got off to a smooth start. I'd kicked him in the face the first time we met, and the fact that he was still interested after that spoke volumes about what sort of person he was. And even after that, I had found it hard to let go of my indoctrinated belief that vampires were inherently bad. Anyone else would have written me off as a lost cause, or decided that I simply wasn't worth the hassle, but not Luke. He'd seen something in me, something that called to his heart and soul, and that had made me worth fighting for.

Sometimes I thought I'd never appreciate just how incredibly lucky I was to have found him.

Luke shifted into a kneeling position, looking down at me. "How are you feeling?"

I replied honestly: "Seriously pissed off."

"That's what I thought."

Luke had seen me almost come apart once before, back when Sophie died. He knew that even if I broke down, I would pull myself back together with greater urgency than before. He knew that I'd only wallow in grief and the useless side of anger for so long, before I was driven to take action.

I sat up, shoving tangles of blonde hair off my face. "Is Elena still here?"

Luke shook his head. "Samuel tracked down Riley and Ethan and brought them back home last night, but I wouldn't let them wake you. We told them what had happened. Samuel went back to the diner to find the knife you dropped and to clean up any evidence, and then he and Elena went home."

I hadn't even thought about the stupid knife or the blood that the injured vampires had left. I'd told the police about Georgia smashing a jug against the head of one of the intruders, hoping that that would account for the splashes of blood from the vampires I'd knifed. At least Luke had seen the bigger picture – I couldn't exactly maintain my story of innocent teenage bystander if the police found a bloody knife with my fingerprints on it. I'd have a lot of explaining to do, and I couldn't begin to think what kind of lie would dig me out of that hole.

Pushing back the covers, I climbed out of bed. My cheek throbbed from the punch I'd taken yesterday, but it was a muted hum compared to the anger inside me. It wasn't that hot, violent anger that drove me to fight, but a slow, icy rage – the kind of thing I could hold onto until the time came to let it go.

"She's not going to win. You know that, right?" Luke said, as I headed for the bathroom.

I stopped, turned, and gave him a cold smile. "Oh yes, I know that."

I showered and dried off as quickly as I could, and when I re-emerged from the bathroom, Luke was standing outside the door, his face serious.

"Riley just shouted upstairs. She says there's something we need to see."

Rachel had probably delivered another of her disgusting gifts. Throwing on the nearest jeans and top I could find, I braced myself for whatever new horror the mad bitch had dreamed up. If she thought terrorising me was going to break me, then she was barking up the wrong tree.