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.
All it did was make me angrier.
Luke and I headed downstairs to find Riley sitting at the kitchen table, one hand holding a crumpled newspaper, the other curled around a mug of coffee. Ethan stood in front of the oven, poking at a yellowish-white blob in a pan that I think was meant to be scrambled eggs.
"I don't think they're supposed to look like this," he said, looking worriedly at Riley.
"Stop stressing. They'll be fine," she replied, smiling at him.
I scanned the room for a gift-wrapped box or anything else that looked like it might have come from Rachel, but there was nothing – just Riley with her paper and coffee, and Ethan poking dubiously at the eggs.
I hid my own smile. Ethan was cooking breakfast for her. Back when we'd lived with the team, Sophie had been in charge of meals so Ethan had very rarely had to do his own cooking. Even after we moved in with Samuel and Elena and he realised that I wasn't going to cook for him, his culinary skills had never extended beyond the basics – toast, for example. I never thought I'd see the day that he not only attempted a breakfast that wasn't charring a piece of bread, but he was making it for someone else.
Ethan poked the eggy blob again. "Morning, guys," he said, noticing us for the first time. "You want breakfast?"
Luke, being a vampire, couldn't eat eggs and I wasn't particularly hungry, but I said yes anyway, ignoring the knots in my stomach. If I wanted to beat Rachel, I had to keep my strength up, whether I was hungry or not.
Ethan dished up three plates of scrambled eggs and carried them over to the table, undisguised anxiousness on his face. He didn't even touch his own fork until Riley and I had started eating. Unappetising as they looked, the eggs tasted surprisingly good, and we both told him so. Ethan finally relaxed. While we ate, Luke heated up a mug of blood for his own breakfast.
"So what is it we're supposed to see?" I asked Riley.
She pushed the newspaper across the table. "Check the front page." She gave me about three seconds to start reading before telling me what the article said. "Three people found dead, their bodies completely drained of blood. Sounds a little vampy, doesn't it?"
I scanned the rest of the article. There was no correlation between the victims, no discernible pattern except for the manner of their deaths. Riley was right – definitely vampire kills. Since the victims had all been found with puncture wounds on the sides of their throats, the media had – very originally – dubbed them the Vampire Murders. The police probably thought they were looking for some psycho who'd read Dracula one too many times. Only we knew the truth – that the killers in question were real life vampires.
At the bottom of the article was a brief mention of Brian Rathdon, the man who'd died in a similar manner weeks earlier, his body found outside his home. He'd been the very first present that Rachel had left me.
"It's Rachel," I said, tossing the newspaper back onto the table. "Or her minions."
She wasn't the only vampire who hated humans, but even the vampires who thought nothing of killing us tended to do it under the radar. Leaving bodies lying around was a good way to attract the attention of a vampire hunter, and that was something no vampire wanted.
Rachel had done this deliberately, but I wasn't sure why. She knew everything about me which meant she knew I came from a vampire hunting family. Ava and Clara might not hunt anymore, but I couldn't say the same for Noah and Marc. Rachel wasn't deliberately trying to bring hunters down on her head – these killings were a message. I just wasn't sure what it meant.
"That's not all," Riley said, nudging the paper back towards me. "Turn to page two."
I did so and frowned. In addition to the murders, a teenage girl named Jenny Simpson had disappeared the night before, apparently snatched off the streets of Portsmouth while walking home from a friend's house. But that wasn't the part that caught my attention. The photograph of Jenny was.
"Looks an awful like you, doesn't she?" Riley said, around a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
Luke came to stand behind my chair, leaning over and peering at the photo. If the situation had been less serious, he'd probably have made some loyal boyfriend comment about how even though Jenny looked like me, she clearly wasn't as pretty as me, or something sweet like that. As it was, he just stared at the picture, his mouth a grim line.
The girl staring out from the paper did look like me. She wasn't a complete doppelganger – her nose was longer, her mouth fuller, and she looked a couple of years older, but there was a definite resemblance.
"A missing girl who happens to look like you, K-girl? That can't be coincidence," Riley said.
"Maybe it's a mistake," Ethan suggested. "Maybe Rachel was trying to kidnap Kiara, but accidentally snatched this girl instead." The flatness in his voice indicated that even he didn't buy that.
"Rachel doesn't make mistakes like that," I said.
"She made a mistake with Georgia, thinking she was your friend," Ethan pointed out.
"That was different. Georgia was civil to me at work so it's easy to understand how someone looking in from the outside might have thought we were friends. But Rachel doesn't make this kind of mistake – it's too big."
I studied Jenny's face again. She did look like me, but not enough for Rachel to have been fooled into thinking she was me. Besides, Jenny wasn't even from Dalwick. There was always the slim possibility that Rachel had nothing to do with her disappearance, but I didn't believe that. As Riley said, it was too much of a coincidence.
I pushed the newspaper away, not wanting to look at the poor girl's face anymore. If Rachel was behind her disappearance, I doubted she'd ever be seen again. Not alive, anyway.
"Besides, Ethan, you're misunderstanding Rachel's goal. If she just wanted to kill me, she could do it easily. She knows where I live, she knows where I work, and we both know that she's stronger than me. Killing me is the icing on the cake. Her goal is to destroy me first, by taking away everyone that I love."
"So what does this lookalike have to do with anything?" Ethan asked.
"I honestly don't know." A worm of suspicion wriggled through my brain. I hated not knowing what Rachel was up to. It was like treading water in the open seas and knowing there's a shark gliding somewhere beneath your feet, but not knowing when it was going to strike. "I can't think of a single thing that Rachel would want with some poor girl who happens to look like me, but she'll have her reasons. She always does."
Luke's hand touched the back of my neck, his thumb rubbing small circles and easing out the knots of tension that were starting to build up.
Riley propped her chin on her hands. She'd gone for dramatic makeup today – heavy mascara, thick sweeps of dark eyeliner tapering to points on either side of her eyes, and plum lipstick that made her look like she was permanently pouting. It should have looked absurd with the red-and-purple streaked hair that she wore in a big, messy knot on top of her head, but Riley had a knack for making outlandishness seem oddly attractive.
"Okay, so we know Rachel is behind all this, but why is she still playing these games?" she said.
"It's what she does," I said, thinking of the dead rats she'd tried to torment me with a few weeks ago.
"Yeah, but she must have realised by now that it's not working. All the games she played with you before were supposed to scare you. They were supposed to put you on edge so you'd always be looking over your shoulder." She shifted position, resting her palms on the table. In the middle of each blue-painted nail, I noticed that she'd drawn a tiny black letter. Even upside down, I could see it was Ethan's name, spelled out across the nails of each hand. "But that didn't work. And Rachel's not stupid; she must know that. I understand why she killed Leon and Georgia – she thought they were your friends so it's part of her campaign against you. But killing three people you've never met and kidnapping some girl? Where does that fit into her plan?"
Something sparked at the back of my mind, a twitch of memory from the night I'd fought Rachel in a burning house. What with the various injuries I'd incurred and the smoke I'd inhaled, it was understandable that certain things had slipped my mind.
"War," I murmured.
Luke stopped massaging my neck, and leaned around so he was facing me. "What did you say?"
"The last time I faced Rachel, she told me that war was coming to Dalwick." With the house burning down around us, there hadn't been time to get more information out of her, and she'd disappeared after leaping through a window.
Ethan frowned. "What does that mean?"
"I don't know."
Rachel had escaped the last fight with just a handful of rogues left over from Madeleine's schemes – maybe three if she was lucky. That wasn't enough to take on my friends and family. But there'd been eight vampires at the diner last night and I'd never seen any of them before. They weren't Madeleine's rogues. They were new blood.
"This isn't just about me," I said, realisation sinking in my gut. "She's got a bigger agenda than that, and I don't know what it is."
Luke absentmindedly placed his hand on mine, rubbing his palm back and forth across my knuckles. His eyes were still fixed on the photo of my missing lookalike, his eyes shadowed with something between pain and anger.
"Hey," I murmured, placing my other hand on top of his.
He blinked, tore his gaze away from the photo, and met my eyes.
"That's not me."
"I know but..." He trailed off.
Jenny Simpson wasn't me, but she looked enough like me for it to affect him. Leaning over, I planted a gentle kiss at the corner of his mouth. "It's not me," I repeated.
"Maybe it's time to call Ava and Clara, and let them know what's going on," Ethan said.
Guilt swept through me; I hadn't even considered that they were in danger too. But Ava was still my mother and even though our relationship had been strained lately, it wasn't the tattered wreck it had been back when we lived together. And Clara had helped us more times than I cared to remember when it came to dealing with Leon and Rachel. She wouldn't persuade me to try makeup or share gossip, or occasionally try to force-feed me brownies the way Riley did, but she was still my friend and that meant she was a target for Rachel's sick plans.
I pushed back my chair. "I'll call them now."