Stalked By The Game

Chapter 5 - Set Up

::HANNAH::

My feet hit the pavement fast and hard as I ran along. For once, I was glad that Ari had followed protocal and let me know where she'd be. It meant that John and I knew where to find her when we recieved the emergency message from her phone. She almost never used it so we both knew something was terribly wrong.

As the house drew into sight, I wanted to just burst in but the weight of John's hand on my arm told me that we were doing this the right way. But it's Ari, I wanted to shout. I couldn't let anything happen to her. She was my friend, my only friend. Carefully, John flanked one side of the door frame, making sure he had his stake in one hand, the gun in the other as he entered the house. I drew my own gun but waited for the all clear.

There were two bodies on the floor. A teenage boy who was already turning a pale colour underneath the blood that soaked his body. The other was Ari. She was breathing, I think. I hoped. I didn't need John to tell me what to do next. I dialed emergency services, requesting an ambulance. What a mess this was. How were we going to explain this one away? If it had been any other hunter, I might have been tempted to just leave them there. Sounded cruel, but it had been done more than once before. John was on the floor kneeling beside her, checking for a pulse.

'She's still alive, just barely,' he told me.

I was relieved. Somewhere inside of me as I'd looked at her, I had already thought she was dead. Her tshirt and hair were stained with blood, her blood. Without a second thought, I pulled off my own shirt and crouched down beside John, searching for her wound. I checked the obvious spots first, seeing if it was freak attack, maybe a human one and didn't find anything until I came to the marks on her neck. If you could call them that. Anyone who thinks that vampires are neat and tidy really needs a lesson in animal behaviour. Usually, the victim just looks as if they've been mauled by a bear or a tiger. The ugly red slashes across her neck were still bleeding so I did what I could to stop the flow. It was probably too late for my effort to make much of a difference but I felt I had to try.

'Do you think .......'

'Anyone else Han, I'd say not a chance but we're talking Ari here. Anything is possible.'

Despite the horrible situation, I couldn't help but grin. John was right. Ari was a fighter, always had been and if anyone could pull off a miracle and survive this, it was her. I felt a shudder roll over my body as I remembered her words the day before. 'I've found him,' she said. I knew who the him was. Ari had been helping her father track Mick McConnell since she was nine and with his last breath, Jonathan Nicholls had made his daughter promise to finish what they started. He had no idea what a task he asked of her.

Very few vampires we hunted had the reputation that McConnell did. By vampire standards, he was quite young, just barely a hundred but it was his intelligence, his ability to be cruel and ruthless that made him so dangerous. I knew all the background, we all did. He moved from place to place, finding it easy to feed, easy to get away with the kill. I guess it helped that he was easy on the eyes. I had been with Ari one night when she tracked him. It had been so strange. Repulsive, disgusting but at the same time, both of us had been fascinated. None of the background we'd been taught or heard really prepared you for the real field work.

No one knew if it was fact, but the rumour around other hunters was that McConnell had killed Ari's mum. Jonathan never said anything about it and it might have just been some story to make the chase seem more dramatic. Either way, when he'd died, Ari continued the hunt. It became an obsession and I had warned her many times that it was dangerous, could kill her. It was like a game of cat and mouse and while Ari thought she was the cat, I secretly thought she was more the mouse. Her call today proved that I had been right.