In Plain Sight (A Hunted Rose)

Chapter Ten

River cleared his throat and looked anywhere but me. "Well..."

"I saw you cut someone's head off. You guys killed him," I said.

"He would have killed you," Cameron said. "Did you not see the way he jumped at you?"

"Yeah," I whimpered. I played the scared human role. I needed them to tell me what happened. "Then I saw him be pushed backward by nothing! Tell me what that was. Tell me what he was, because he was not normal. I saw him. He wasn't human. The look in his eyes, it was animalistic."

"You're right," Jason said. "He wasn't human. He was a vampire."

"What the hell, Jason!" Ryder exploded at him. "Now she will really think we're crazy!"

"I believe you," I interrupted Ryder. "There's no other way to explain what I saw." I sniffed. "What did you do? What was that?"

"Well," Seth said. "You now know that he was a vampire, but we," he motioned with his arm around the semicircle of guys surrounding me, "aren't human either."

"What?" I asked. I knew they weren't, but if I was the ignorant human girl, I would ask, "Are you guys vampires too?" I leaned back into the couch to act as if I was scared. I was wary, and seeing what happened earlier, I hoped they didn't know who I was, or, well, what I was.

"No!" they all cried out at once.

"We're the opposite," River said.

"What?" I asked again, even more confused.

"We're vampire hunters," Cameron said with a proud smile.

"Well, hunters in training," Jason corrected when he finished.

"I guess this is sharing time when we tell her everything about us?" Ryder asked with a small frown on his face.

"She saw everything that happened, and River is having performance issues," Cameron said with a pointed look at River, "so it seems like we have no choice."

"Can we get back to the fact that you guys just told me you are vampire hunters? In training," I added on second thought.

"We grew up knowing about this our entire lives," Jason said to me. "Our parents, well, our dads, grew up the same way we did. Pretty much since we could walk and use our abilities, we were training in martial arts, weaponry, and knowledge of the supernatural."

"Abilities?"

Seth sighed and started speaking, "We have... powers that help us in combat."

"Or when we are looking for the vampires," Jason added.

"Or dealing with cleanup after any attacks," River said. "That's what I was trying to do earlier. I'm what's called a Bender; I can manipulate human thoughts and memories. It helps if a vampire attacks a human and we need to do damage control. Well, it works most of the time; I don't know why it didn't on you."

Ryder spoke when River was finished, "I'm an Elemental. I can control anything that comes from the earth. Things like dirt, metal, and sometimes on a lucky day I can control water."

"Interesting," I said. "So, you can like make a giant ball of dirt come up out of the earth and hit a vampire on the head with it?"

He let out a small snort and said, "I guess so. It doesn't normally work like that though."

"So what do the rest of you do?"

"I'm a Telepath. I can move things with my mind, and I can put things back together if they're broken or something." Seth looked at me and then spoke again, "Are you okay? You aren't freaking out as much as I thought you would."