Forever Night (Darkness Falls Book 3)

Chapter Thirteen

My immediate reaction was relief. When I'd seen the misery on Ava's face, my first thought had been that something had happened to someone I cared about. If Clara hadn't been standing there, I'd have thought it was her Ava was crying for.

Clara was worth shedding tears over. Noah wasn't.

Nonetheless, I beckoned them inside and ushered them through to the kitchen. "What happened?" I said.

"Someone called in sick at work so I had to cover an extra shift and ended up working late," Ava said.

I hadn't even noticed that she was still wearing the shapeless navy-blue uniform of the pharmacy she worked at.

"When I got home...the front door was hanging open," Ava whispered. Her voice broke off and she pressed a hand to her mouth.

Elena fetched a handful of tissues, which Ava accepted with a grateful look.

I waited for her to find her voice and finish the story. Noah would never be sloppy enough to leave the front door open, nor would he allow any members of the team to do so.

Ava dabbed at her eyes, crumpling the tissues in her hands. "She was inside, waiting for me."

"Who was?" Elena asked, but I already knew the answer.

A hard edge entered Ava's voice, and I was suddenly catapulted back to the days when I'd lived with her. That was how she used to speak to me, hard and cold and dispassionate. It was the voice of someone emotionally distancing herself.

"Rachel," she said.

"She was in the house?" Elena sounded alarmed.

Rachel had done a lot of things to us, but she'd only gone into Elena's house once – to stop me leaving on the night of the fire. It wasn't like her to venture so far behind enemy lines when she had minions to do all that for her. Maybe if the team had still been together, she wouldn't have been so bold. But they were fractured, broken, the members either dead or defected. Noah, Ava, and Clara were all more than capable of holding their own in a fight, but without a full team to back them, Rachel probably didn't consider them as much of a threat.

Clara spoke up. "I'd just like to add that I wasn't home either, or that mad bitch wouldn't have got past the doorstep."

I tried to guide Ava into a chair but she resisted, clasping the back of the chair for support.

"She was so calm."

I could sympathise with that. I'd seen firsthand how eerily calm – conversational even – Rachel could be when she spoke about doing terrible things, like slaughtering everyone I loved.

"What did she say?" I asked.

Ava swallowed and tried to compose herself, but her voice was still thick with tears. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her cry like this – I wasn't sure I ever had. Ava didn't exactly have a history of being overtly emotional.

"She said she'd heard of the vampire hunter, Noah Morrow, and that she'd always sworn that if she ever met him, she'd make him pay for every drop of vampire blood he's spilled."

That sounded like Rachel.

Ava clenched the back of the chair until her knuckles turned white. "I always knew this might happen one day, but –" She pressed her lips together to stifle another sob.

Honestly, it had never occurred to me that Noah's notoriety as a long-time and very successful vampire hunter might bring enemies like Rachel to his door some day. When I was a kid, Noah had seemed formidable, a human Terminator that steamrolled over vampires like they were nothing. No one could hurt him; no one could even touch him. I didn't consider that the more vampires he killed, the more his name would spread among vampire-kind. The more chance he stood of attracting the attention of vampires looking for vengeance. Even when Rachel turned up in Dalwick after having heard of me, I didn't consider that she might have heard of my whole family.