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Melissa and Chris stopped beside her, their heads turned slowly as their gazes fixed upon the woods Nothing stirred a was out there Knew that whatever it was it was evil, and it was thirsty She shivered, her arms wrapped instinctively around herself in a useless atteht off the ice in her veins

The crowd of students hter loud in her frozen ears Their joy was oddly out of place in the pulsingher Whatever was out there, she could feel its eyes upon her Feel it watching her

"We have to go," Melissa said softly, her norhtly

Cassie tore her attention froain He was no longer watching her as he had turned back to the forest His attention was riveted upon the woods, his body taut once h Cassie as she realized that somehow, she didn’t possibly kno, he felt the evil too

CHAPTER 13

"I believe that an Elder is here"

Cassie’s legs ceased their swingingupon as Luther slapped the paper down in front of the ANOTHER WOMAN KILLED BY WILD ANIMAL Though she tried, she could not tear her gaze away fro, but she had thought nothing of it as she breezed by to grab a box of cereal Then again, she had not thought about much since Devon had entered her life But now, for the first tihts

Horror and nausea rolled through her Her stomach in a tumult, her body broke out in a cold sweat, and her temples pulsed with the fierce beats of her heart For abefore her eyes, but then she realized it was just white lights blazing because she had forgotten to breathe She inhaled sharply, the air burned through her tortured lungs

"An Elder?" Chris asked softly, his voice tight and choked

Luther nodded vigorously, shoving his glasses back up with his index finger "Yes, murders are up, and animal attacks have doubled over the past couple of weeks You knohat thatvampire, but I don’t believe so"

"But you don’t know for sure?" Cassie asked her voice higher pitched than she would have liked

He nodded again, his gray eyes grave as theyhas been stalking people for a little while now It’s covering its tracks very well, soer vampires are not so discreet about, and tend not to do I wouldn’t have noticed the trend if I didn’t follow the newspapers so carefully I fir is older,here"

Cassie shivered; she wrapped her arain The painful knot in her sto to twist her intestines An Elder They had never dealt with an Elder before, never even come close to one And she had never wanted to

It had been The Elders that had grouped together to destroy The Hunter line, deterh they had not cohter hundreds oftheir parents The , broken, scattered and lost across the globe The survivors had fled for their lives,about continuously in order to stay hidden and alive

Before the carnage there had been almost six hundred Hunters After, there were only thirty two known ones left That number included Cassie, Melissa, and Chris who hadn’t been old enough to walk, let alone fight for their lives when The Slaughter occurred It had been left to her grandmother, Luther, and Chris’sthe truth when he’d said that Luther was good friends with Melissa’s parents Luther had also been their Guardian; one of the people entrusted to train and protect The Hunter line His duties as a Guardian consisted of schooling theh Vaht When The Slaughter occurred Luther had fled with Melissa to Germany, then Japan, and finally to the US where they had bounced around in search of survivors During the carnage, Guardian’s had also been slaughtered; there were only twenty one survivors that had been accounted for Her parent’s own Guardian, Brent, had been hter occurred

All the Guardians had knohere The Hunters had been located before The Slaughter, but in the aftermath, many had been lost, maybe forever Luther continued to search for more survivors, but his journeys always came up empty handed, and Cassie kneorried that he wouldn’t find anymore

With the small number of survivors, it was feared that The Hunter line would eventually die out Cassie did not plan on having children There was no way that she would leave the them to this life And if she didn’t have kids, and the others did not survive to have children, then it was only a matter of tiest fear; after their deaths, of course

Cassie tried to s the hard lu her, cutting off her air as it reed in her windpipe It seemed that their time had come, much sooner than she had expected, far sooner than she had wanted Tears burned the back of her eyes However, they were not tears of pain or sorrow, but of anger

She was angry at fate, and this monster that had come into their lives It was not fair that she had finally found so to lose it She glanced around the roo for the only family she had ever known Chris looked shell shocked, Melissa’s gaze was distant and unfocused; Luther was frantic

"What do we do?" Chris asked softly

Luther turned toward him, the normally soft lines in his face hard and fierce "We run"

There was a moment of stunned, breathless silence, before Cassie and Chris exploded at the same time "What!?"