The Vampire Hunter's Daughter: Complete Collection(7)

He shrugged. “We all know about it. Trevor has been attacking directly at us since your mother ran with you. Obviously, we would have to know about you guys so we would know why we were being attacked.”

“I’m going to kill him,” I whispered.

“I’ll help you.” Drew met my eyes with his flashing green ones, and for a moment, I felt a strange connection to him. With a jerk of his head, he tore his eyes from mine and turned away. “Let’s go, we have more to see.”

Confused by the brief moment we had, I stumbled through the door behind him. After seeing the gym, we went to the shooting ranges. By this time, I wasn’t surprised to see that there was a range for guns and another for bows. When we left the ranges, we paid a visit to the library. The library was awesome. It was a huge, two-story stone building with tons of old books inside. I immediately fell in love with the library. While we strolled through the shelves of books, I wondered how often the people in town actually used the library. “Don’t most people use the Internet for researching stuff nowadays?”

“You‘d be surprised,” Drew told me. “When it comes to killing vampires, and other things, most of what we need to know we find in here.” He gestured to the shelves. “These books are ancient. They aren’t your basic encyclopedia or articles written by a blogger.”

I walked among the books and decided the library was probably going to be my favorite place in town. After we left the library, we went back to the old man’s house. Well, I guess I could call him Luke, since Drew had told me his name.

Once back in the house, we found Luke in the kitchen making a salad.

“Hey, Luke,” Drew greeted him when we entered the room. Drew pulled out a chair and sat.

It dawned on me, when Drew had said he lived, here he really meant that he lived here, in the house. I wondered why he live here with my grandfather. He hadn’t said anything about us being related.

“Drew, Chloe,” Luke nodded to us. He pointed his chopping knife at the pile of lettuce on the table. “One of you wash that lettuce, and the other can get those red bell peppers sliced up.”

“Chloe, did Drew show you around town?”

I nodded. “Yes, it’s a very quaint little community.”

“Well, I hope you are going to like it here. I had some of the crews who weren’t busy go after your things. I hope we got everything you would have wanted. I told them to make sure to get any and all photographs or memorabilia for you.”

I stopped slicing the peppers and realized what I had failed to before: This place was going to be my home. My mother was gone forever. Her family I had never known were vampire hunters. My father was a vampire.

Life as I had known it would never be the same.

“I’m sure whatever they bring will do,” I told him blandly.

I gripped the knife even tighter. Far off in the distance, I could still hear them speaking, but only one thing was clear in my mind: Trevor, my father, was going to die.

From that moment on, I was Chloe Kallistrate, a vampire hunter.





THE VAMPIRE HUNTER'S DAUGHTER





PART II





POWERFUL BLOOD





“Ouch, damn it!”

I hit the floor on my side, my hip and elbow making the most contact with the hard floor of the gym. I rolled onto my back and rubbed my elbow but stayed on the ground.

I was tired.

Drew stood aside and watched me struggle to get up, without offering to help. I should have been irritated, but I’d become accustomed to his refusal to help me with anything during training. He insisted helping me would not help me in the long run.

I had been training with the vampire hunters for two months, and I still fell on my butt about thirty times per day. I had sworn to myself I was going to be the best, like my mother was, but that didn’t seem to be happening.

Seriously, I woke up at oh dark thirty and ran the trails in the woods for an hour. I ate breakfast and showered. I went to school, and after school, I worked out in the gym with the machines. Finally, I got my butt kicked by Drew or someone else for two hours. Yeah, it was pure hell. I knew I was getting in better shape, but I really sucked at fighting.

One thing I was good at was shooting. With both guns and archery, I had a knack for marksmanship. Twice a week, I went to the ranges and practiced shooting. Turned out I was a natural, and I enjoyed it, which was a plus.

“I’m done,” I told Drew while I got to my feet and grabbed my water bottle. “I’m so tired I can’t even stay on my feet. I need a break.”

Drew shook his head. “Chloe, you can’t quit just because you’re tired. You have to build your endurance.”

“I have been working my ass off every day since I got here. I need a break!” I blew several strands of dark brown hair out of my eyes. My hair never stayed in its ponytail.

“I thought you wanted to be like your mother.”

“Don’t you pull that crap on me!” I knew what he was trying to do. It had worked on me before, and he assumed it was going to work again. He was using my mother to get a charge out of me. The last time he had done it, I showed more fight than I ever had before. My mother had been one of the best vampire hunters there was, until she fell under the spell of my evil vampire father. She had hidden me from him all my life, but he found us, somehow, and had his minions break into our house and murder her.