When Darkness Falls (Book 1, the Darkness Falls Series)

Chapter Six

Any other day I'd have felt elated that the world was free of more bloodsuckers. Instead my stomach queasily knotted. What if lots of vampires didn't drink human blood? We hunters didn't exactly operate by following a trail of corpses. We followed tips given to us by other hunters, or the small network of regular humans who'd stumbled onto the existence of vamps by chance. It was entirely possible that none of the vamps we'd killed had ever hurt a human in their lives. Noah had raised me to believe vampires were monsters, pure evil at the core, but Luke was proof that Noah was wrong. And if he was wrong, if vampires weren't posing a threat to anyone, then they had as much right to live as we did.  

I was so confused my head hurt. I couldn't stay in the living room anymore, not while Marc and Noah discussed the gory details of the night's hunt. Not when it might have been innocent vampires they'd killed. 

My bed was a welcome haven from the outside world, and I crawled under the covers, cocooning myself. I'd barely shut my eyes when there was a knock at the door.  

"Kiara? Are you okay?" Ethan's voice was muffled through the wood. 

I kept my eyes shut and concentrated on breathing, in and out. The familiar smell of my own sheets calmed the turbulence that raged through my brain. Ethan knocked a couple of times more, then I heard his footsteps moving away from the door.  

Drawing my knees up to my chest, I wrapped my arms around myself, squeezing my body into a tight ball. Under these cotton covers I could pretend I was in my own world, one where no one lied to me or dropkicked my life out of balance, a world where I could be Phantom-Kiara, whose main concerns were clothes and boys. I fell asleep wishing I could be in that world, but the nightmares came as they always did, a brutal reminder that I could never escape my life.

It was clichéd to say there was a spring in his step as he walked home, but that was how Luke felt. Born a vampire, he'd never seen the sun, but he imagined it was bright golden and fierce with passion and energy. Kiara was like the sun, and she had burst into his shadowy world and thrown light into every dark corner. It was like a blindfold had finally been lifted from his eyes, but he'd never even known he was wearing it.  

Just thinking about her brought a smile to his lips, and the smile brought a twinge to his jaw where she'd head-butted him. It was lucky he was a vampire, otherwise she could have done some serious damage. You wouldn't think it to look at her; small of stature and sweet-faced, but beneath that delicate façade was a fighter.  

A hunter. 

Luke's smile faded. It was all very well looking at Kiara through rose-coloured glasses, but he couldn't forget that she killed vampires. She could have killed him tonight. She had listened to him, otherwise he wasn't sure he'd still be standing, but he didn't know how much of it had sunk in. How much she'd actually believe.  

He stepped off the pavement, heading down a narrow side-street. There were no street-lamps to light his way, but Luke didn't need them, not with his enhanced vision.  

His house was at the far end of the street. A human would have had to squint to see it through the swathe of shadows. There was something secluded about it, tucked away in a corner by itself. That was why Samuel, the patriarch of Luke's clan, had chosen it when they moved to Dalwick seven months ago. Its location, at the end of a long street with few other houses around it, meant humans were less likely to be sniffing around. It was a little piece of Dalwick that the vampires had claimed for themselves, free from persecution. 

When Luke got home, he found Elena and Samuel in the living room. Elena's shoes were off, her bare feet resting in Samuel's lap as they sat together on the plum-coloured sofa.