Hunting the Shadows 1: SasuSaku Fanfic

Chapter 9

His body went rigid at my voice, as if he wished I said the opposite instead. His foot shuffled across the ground and inch before it stopping moving completely. His face reading mine as the night conversed around us.

He nodded once, and then moved quickly through the trees. I followed him, keeping up with his pace. Vampires were fast, but hunters were trained to be just as fast. How were we going to kill something if we weren't able to catch it?

We traveled further and further away from the mountain, who knew how long we had until Gaara and his companion hunter caught up to us. I felt time's cool breath on my neck, and I pushed off the ground harder, willing my body to move faster, faster still. We had such little time, and I didn't want to waste any of it by slowing us down.

He veered left, breaking us through the brush and into a clearing. The grass here was tall and unruly, stretching up to the sky as high as they'd reach.

We walked straight through it, my hands tickled from the light touches of the grass blades. Sasuke made his way so confidently, following the lines of a map I could not see.

In the center of the field, he ducked to touch the ground. He brushed a bit of dirt aside to reveal a small handle. Yanking on it, he opened the ground up to reveal a staircase. The tall grass remained on top of the door, and would act as cover when the door would shut closed behind us.

I tested the first step, and then the second, and slowly made my way down into the pool of darkness. Sasuke wasn't far behind, but my adrenaline picked back up again when the hatch closed shut and left us in the complete dark. I couldn't see an inch in front of my face, so I opened myself up to my other senses.

There was a scratching sound to my left, and then a strike brought a small flame to life. Sasuke's face appeared in the dim glow, his eyes scanning the nearby wall for something.

I saw what he was looking for at the same time he had. We both reached for it and stopped short when we saw how close our hands were. He jerked his hand back, allowing me to grab hold of the torch.

The wood felt solid in my grasp, and I lifted it off its place on the wall to hold before him. He stuck the match to the clothed top and the light grew brighter from it. He gingerly took the torch from my hand and lead the way deeper into the tunnel.

If this was what a vampire's life always looked like, you could definitely count me out. I mean, I never would want to become one in the first place anyway, but to have a life be so filled with all these never ending halls and maze like abodes. How did they function like this?

He stopped short of a doorway, and looked back at me as he turned the handle. We walked inside and he ventured off a few steps to the left, leaning over and extending his arm to lay the torch down on a stone structure. The flames roared to life, licking away at a substance that stretched along the stonehenge lining the entire room. Within seconds, darkness was chased away to make way for the flickering light.

In the center of the room stood a stone pedestal, and in the middle of it was a slightly glowing orb. The dim red pulsed every few seconds, a dying light in and of itself.

Symbols littered the skin of the object, but I couldn't make out what they were exactly, what they meant. My feet carried me over without a thought, and my hand hovered just over the orb without touching it.

Warmth radiated from it.

"This is..." This was the thing that Gaara was looking for. The Sun bomb.

Sasuke walked around to the other side of the pedestal. When he came to a stop, he squared his shoulders to me, facing me head on. His gaze stuck on the orb, but somehow I knew his attention was on me, waiting to see how I'd react, the next thing I'd say to him.