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

Chapter Nine

"Tell me about your family." 

I hadn't planned to ask Luke that, but somehow it slipped out. The moment I said it, I realised I genuinely wanted to know. I wasn't just making small talk.  

"You already know about my parents. Between them they run our clan." 

"Clan?" 

Luke nodded. "It's what we call ourselves once we expand beyond family. When I was growing up, it was just Samuel, Elena, and me. Then we met Anna. She and her daughter, Alice, were on the run from vampire hunters." He shook his head. "Alice couldn't have been more than six at the time." 

I tried not to picture hunters closing in on a kid that young. 

"It was pure luck that they found us," Luke continued. "We sheltered them from the hunters and as soon as we could, we packed our things and hit the road, taking Anna and Alice with us." 

"You left your home for them?" 

Luke shrugged as if it were a paltry sacrifice. "We'd barely been there long enough to call it home. A few months ago we'd got too close to some hunters, so Samuel moved us out to a village in the middle of nowhere, hoping that might keep the hunters from our door. Unfortunately Anna brought them right to us. We couldn't abandon her to them. After that, she and Alice just sort of . . . stayed." 

"How long ago was that?" 

"About nine years." 

I made quick calculations. That made Alice fifteen. A surprisingly potent bolt of jealousy flashed through me when I thought of Luke sharing a house with this girl. After all, she was only a year younger than me. Old enough to know how to flirt. Old enough to be capable of attracting Luke's attention. 

"We picked up Nolan a few years later," Luke continued. "He's another survivor of a hunter attack. When we found him, he was planning on taking revenge on the hunters. Samuel stopped him." 

"Why would he do that?" I couldn't help asking. If hunters had ruined these vampires' lives, why would any of them want to defend those hunters? 

"Because he doesn't believe in vengeance," Luke replied. "Not all vampires refrain from drinking human blood. You thought I was a monster when we first met. There are still monsters out there, Kiara, and Samuel works to . . . help those of us that" - he hesitated - "have lost their way." 

"You mean the vampires that still drink human blood," I said quietly. 

Luke's answer was a stiff nod. His posture was abruptly tense as if he was afraid I'd turn away from him now he'd admitted that. But the knowledge that, just a couple of days ago, would have had me reaching for my knife, didn't seem as significant now. So there were vampires out there that were evil, that did kill mindlessly, but plenty of humans did that too. My family condemned all vampire-kind, but Luke's family hadn't done the same to vampire hunters.  

For the first time in my life, I felt ashamed of what I was.  

"So what happened with Nolan?" I asked. 

"Samuel stopped him before he reached the hunters. He knew that all Nolan would do was get himself killed, and he saw a chance to save a life. He turned Nolan away from his anger and brought him home to live with us." 

"And he doesn't want revenge anymore?" 

Luke shook his head. "Since Samuel brought him into our clan he's never lifted a finger against a human being. He's still not the friendliest guy, to be honest, and he spends most of his time by himself, but he's not killing anyone and that's the important thing."