The Vampire Hunter's Daughter The Complete Collection (35 page)

Back at the house, I entered quietly. Finding
no one, I removed my shoes and headed back up the stairs to my
room.

Alice was in bed, awake, staring up at the
ceiling. She turned her head toward me when she heard the door
open. The moment she saw me, her eyes widened. “What happened to
you?”

“Nothing, I just went for a run.” I waved her
off and headed for the bathroom to pee. When I came back out, I
fell down onto the bed beside her.

“It looks like you’ve been crying.” She
turned onto her side to face me.

For a moment, I didn’t say anything.

Finally, I decided to go ahead and let it
out. I told her all of it… Drew, Gavin, my mother…all of it.

When I’d finally exhausted the whole story to
her, she lay there for a moment, taking it all in, and then she
said, “Well, except for the part about your mom not being here,
none of that really sounds so bad.”

I sighed. “Really? Because it feels crappy to
me.”

“I’m sorry it does, but what can I say? I
would love to have two guys after me.”

“But that’s the problem. Drew acts like he
likes me one minute, and the next he ignores me.”

She shrugged like it was nothing. “Confront
him, then. Tell him it’s either one way or the other.”

“He told me that he doesn’t ever want to be
second to anyone,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “So he has already
told you. See, what’s happening here is that he is telling you to
make the choice. You have to tell him now.”

I rolled back over to stare at the ceiling
again. “I’m waiting until Gavin is better so I can tell him first.
I need to make it clear to Gavin that I have feelings for
Drew.”

“Oh, I see.”

We both lay there in silence, staring at the
ceiling. I decided to change the subject. “Alice?”

“Hmm?”

“When we found Oscar, he had all those bite
marks.”

“Yeah.”

“How come I have never seen you with any bite
marks? I know you gave Trevor your blood.”

She released a long sigh and closed her eyes
as if she were blocking out a memory.

“Because they aren’t where you can see
them.”

I must have given her a confused expression,
because she suddenly flung back the purple comforter, and her eyes
filled with sadness. She gently pulled up her shorts just enough to
show me that her inner thighs were thick with the scars of vampire
bites.

“Oh, Alice,” I breathed.

She let her shorts fall back down and covered
up with the comforter again.

I decided that since I’d shared, Alice needed
to share something, too. “Did you love my father?” I asked her.

She nodded. “I did. I don’t know what kind of
love, but he was all I knew.”

I could understand that; I had all along.
“How could you love someone who was so cruel?”

She shrugged. “I don’t really know. I think…”
she thought a moment, “I think that it’s easy to love someone when
they take care of you, give you everything you need, and give you
such a grand home.” She smiled, and I saw her eyes sparkle. “Chloe,
he was never horrible. Not to me.”

I just couldn’t believe that. I wanted to
believe that he was horrible to her on a daily basis, but I knew
that wasn’t true because, somehow, this psycho freak had made my
mother love him enough to live with him and create a child with
him.

“How could you have betrayed me like that,
Alice? I understand you would do whatever Trevor asked of you, but
he was going to kill me.”

“You think I never thought of that?” Her
voice took on an edge. “Do you really think I had the power to defy
him? I wouldn’t dare, not over something like what he had been
planning for you. This plan of his had been in place since before
you were born. I wasn’t about to go there. I never told him no. Why
would I? He saved me.”

I guess I could understand that, but her
betrayal was hard for me to swallow. I just couldn’t trust her.

After a pause, she finished by saying, “And I
didn’t betray you; I betrayed Trevor. I realized what he was doing
to you was wrong, and I was going to help you. I knew it would be
the end of my life if he caught me, but I didn’t care.”

I pondered that for a moment. It was
true.

We both lay back down to stare at the ceiling
and feel sorry for ourselves.

Several days passed quickly. Oscar was
situated with Drew in his room and the house had quickly become
very crowded. It wasn’t a big house, by any means. It was more on
the quaint and small side, so it was hard to get used to two extra
people living with us. For me, especially, since I had just come
from having a whole suite all to myself for almost a year.

We were sort of a silent and brooding bunch,
keeping to ourselves. I still went to see Gavin twice more and
hoped each time his mother wouldn't be there. The whole situation
sucked, because I didn’t want to give Gavin the wrong idea about
why I was coming to visit; I didn’t want him to think I didn’t care
about him at all, either. I mean, he was shot trying to save Drew
and me.

He finally came home the day before we were
supposed to go to the meeting with the lawyer about Trevor’s will.
I knew I wouldn’t see him until after he was up and around. That
was probably a good thing. I really felt like Drew and I needed
some more alone time.

But before the alone time, we had to go see
the lawyer.

The day of the meeting, Luke sat us down to
explain the situation.

Our living room was suddenly bursting with
vampire hunters. Oscar was excluded because there was no reason for
him to be involved in the plans. Alice was allowed, since she was
the reason we were going in the first place, and we needed to
protect her.

“The mission, this time,” Luke stood in front
of the television, speaking to the group, “is to keep the peace…”
He paused. “We have no targets, even though the destination is the
Talon business building, downtown on First Street.”

A round of moans and mumbles made its way
through the group.

I looked from Luke to Drew and around the
group. No one looked happy.

“Why no targets, Luke?” Joe called out.

I was confused. “I don’t understand why you
all look so upset?”

Luke leaned on the wall beside the
television. “The Talon business building is a vampire-run
establishment. Any particular business you can think of that a
vampire would need is run from that building.”

“What? Are you serious?” I threw my hands in
the air. “How come this hasn’t been taken care of yet?”

Drew put a hand on my shoulder in a pathetic
attempt to calm me. “Hunting vampires is not always as simple as it
may sound. We cannot simply stroll in there and annihilate the
whole building.” He removed his hand. “We need to stay anonymous to
some degree, and taking out an entire building that is smack in the
middle of town is not discreet.”

“I just don’t understand. Why can’t we do
that? Then it would be over, and we would have a few hundred less
vampires to hunt than we do now.”

Joe stepped into the conversation. “If we
take out the whole building, we would literally have a vampire
versus hunter war on our hands. And I know it may look like there
are a lot of us, but there aren’t nearly enough to fight a war with
the undead. Besides, there is legal stuff to think about. If we
blew the building up, it would be investigated. Part of what we do
is to stay invisible. There are cops who are vampires, not to
mention agents for the government, and crime investigators. We
cannot risk the community.”

Drew nodded. “Which is why we take them a few
at a time.”

I understood that part. No one wanted to risk
the community. This was our home, children and babies were here,
and no one would risk losing their children to the authorities. I
could only imagine what would happen if the authorities were to
come here and find the arsenals that were stored in the homes.

I nodded. “All right. But now we have to go
in there. With all those vampires?”

I shuddered with thought of being so
vulnerable.

“Yes, we have to go in,” Luke said. “Alice
has to be at the will reading, and this is actually the perfect
excuse for us to get a look inside that building.”

I sighed. It was going to be a long day.