The Vampire Hunter's Daughter: Part I (3 page)

“Are you OK?” asked a male voice from behind me. “What are you doing on the floor?”

I tried to get up and fumbled because I was still holding the picture. I felt warm hands gently circle my waist to help lift me up.

“I dropped this picture off the dresser and slid when I bent to pick it up,” I told him. I turned around and found myself staring straight into those emerald eyes that had saved me from Eli and those other goons.

He nodded. “Well, are you all right? You look like you’re crying. Did you hurt yourself?”

“No, I’m OK. It’s just… these bruises, my… uh, my whole body is kind of bruised.”

He turned his lips up into what almost looked like a sneer. “Gotta get toughened up now. You're going to have a lot more bruises than that after you start training.”

While I was busy looking surprised and thinking he should have been a little bit more sympathetic, he gave me a little push toward the bed to get me moving.

I climbed back in the bed, and he sat in the chair that the old man had used. I still had the picture of my mother in my hand, so I placed it on the nightstand next to the lamp.

Finally, annoyed with this guy enough to ignore his cuteness, I curtly asked him, “So are you going to tell me who you are?”

He tilted the chair back a little bit and rocked it. “My name is Drew.”

“Why are you here, Drew?”

“I live here.”

I shook my head in frustration. “No, I mean, why you are here in this room?”

“Luke told me to come in here and talk to you about where you are and what we do.”

“Well, start talking then.” It was painful, but I defiantly crossed my arms over my chest.

He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t have to be rude.”

“Huh?” Against my will, my eyes widened. “You were the one who was rude!”

“I did nothing rude.”

Ugh
. He was right. All he had done was tell me I needed to get tough. I was just being a baby because I felt sorry for myself.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m just having a hard time right now.”

Again, he nodded. “Do you think you’re up for taking a walk?”

“I just got back in bed.” I paused. “I don’t have any clothes.”

“There should be clothes in the closet. Why don’t you find something that fits you? I’ll wait outside the door. I want to tell you about us, and it helps to be able to show you what I am talking about.”

I nodded and waited until he left the room. Why in the world did he let me get back in the bed in the first place if he was just going to make me get out again? With an enormous sigh and one last glance at my mother's picture, I lifted myself out of bed.

I managed find a top that looked like it was from this decade and a decent pair of jeans in the dresser. There were also plenty of shoes in the bottom of the closet. How weird that Mom had thrown her shoes on the floor of her closet too. I had never known that about her. Maybe she stopped doing it when she became a mom and had to be all responsible and tidy.

After I dressed, I cracked open the door and peeked out.

“You ready?”

Startled, I jerked backward, but then I realized it was Drew. Boy, I was jumpy.

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

I stepped out into the hall and looked around. The floors were a dark hardwood like in the bedroom, and the walls were a creamy pinkish color. There were pictures on the walls, everywhere, in those huge frames that hold, like, ten different photos. While we walked down the hallway, I also noticed that all the doors were shut on the top floor.

“Whose house is this?”

“It’s your grandfather’s, Luke’s,” he answered.

“Oh.” I had kind of figured it was, but thought it best to ask before assuming. Down the stairs we went and onto the main floor. From my spot, at the base of the stairs, I could see part of the kitchen and what looked like a living room.

Drew saw me straining to see the rest of the house. “Would you like to see the house first or take a look around when you get back?”

I shrugged like I didn’t care. “I’ll just explore after we get back. That’s fine.”

Drew opened the door and I followed him outside. It was super chilly and broad daylight. I hadn’t realized that when we were back in the bedroom. I wondered just how long I had been sleeping and how long I had been here.

“See that?”

We stood at the railing on the covered porch connected to the house. He pointed directly in front of us.

“I see that we aren’t in the city anymore.”

He nodded. “We aren’t in the city, but we aren’t out of it either. Our community is sort of like a suburb. It’s gated. No one comes in or out, except mostly just the people who live here.”

Wow.
They were a whole community of just vampire hunters. That was wicked. “How many of you live here?”

“There are about one hundred homes in this community. We aren’t the only vampire hunter community. There are many, many more all over the world.”

“Wow!” That time I said it out loud. I could see the tops of many houses poking up through the trees. The view was spectacular. In the distance, the lush green mountains rose high into the clouds. I saw the tiniest bit of snow on the top of the mountains, and the trees cascaded down into the valley where they surrounded the houses.

I turned to look at Drew. “It’s beautiful here.”

He simply nodded. “Let’s move on.”

We took a path through the woods instead of the gravel driveway leading out to the road.

“This path is a shortcut into the main village,” he told me while we walked.

I followed without saying anything. The path was covered with leaves, so the only sound I heard was our footsteps crunching over them. When we left the forest, we were on a street. A few blocks more and we were on what I assumed was the main drag of a small town. We passed a diner, a quickie mart, a drug store, a video store. There was even a flower shop and a bakery.

Nice.

The street came to a split where we could only go left or right. Drew veered us to the left. We passed a cute little church with beautiful stained glass in the windows and continued walking until we came to a large building that looked like a giant shop. Drew held the door open for me, and I quickly passed through it. Once inside, I stood in awe, with my mouth hanging open.

It was a training area… a very big training area.

Drew appeared beside me. “Most everyone who lives in this community has training equipment and space in their own homes, but this one is open for everyone.”

There were people using weight machines, cardio equipment and sparring. On closer inspection, I realized there were also children using the training equipment. Drew followed my gaze to one particular little girl who had her hair in a ponytail and was hacking away at a punching bag.

“We start early here. I have been training for this since I could walk.” He paused. “And you probably would have too, if your mother hadn’t taken you away.”

I jerked my head to face him. “What would you know about that?”

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.

Excerpt from The Vampire Hunter's Daughter: Part II

Lifting the gigantic book off the shelf, I made my way to one of the tables and began to read.

The spread of vampirism was a relentless disease, so a warrior angel was created and sent to battle the vampires. This angel found love with a warrior woman. She was uniquely gifted: a demi-god, born of a human and a god.

The union of the angel and the woman produced four children: two boys and two girls. Their offspring became a new kind of warrior, gifted with both the blood of an angel and a god. Out of this unique mix, the vampire slayer was born.

I looked up from the text. I came from the blood of angels, gods and in my own special case, vampires.

Now that was deep.

About the Author

Jennifer Malone Wright resides in the beautiful mountains of northern Idaho with her husband and five children. Between the craziness of taking care of her children—whose ages range from fourteen all the way down to six months— and being a homemaker, Jennifer has little time left for herself. The time she does have left, usually leading far into the night, is spent working on freelance work or her beloved fiction.

While she grew up, Jennifer always had her nose in a book. She has been writing stories and poems since grade school. This love of the written word and her strong interest in the paranormal is what led her to write her first novel THE BIRTH OF JAIDEN.

In addition to being a mother and homemaker, Jennifer is also a very proud military wife. Moving around the country for the last ten years has made her a bit of a nomad, and she finds it difficult to be in one place for too long.

Jennifer is also the author of THE BIRTH OF JAIDEN, a paranormal novel filled with action, suspense and even a love story.

Find out more at http://www.jenniferwrightauthor.com.