Shadows Rising (Darkness Falls Book 2)

Chapter Two

The bottom seemed to drop out of my world. I think I swayed, and only a sharp mental command from my head to my knees kept me standing.

Now I understood why Leon seemed so strangely familiar. How could I not have noticed it before? It was the eyes. Facially, Leon bore little resemblance to Caleb, but they shared the same eyes - the same icy blue, pitiless eyes that still haunted my nightmares even now Caleb was dead and rotting in the ground.

One month ago Caleb, a savage and fanatical hunter, had come after Luke. He'd come after me when he realised Luke was my boyfriend. His blind hatred of all vampires had led him to kill my friend, Sophie, and relentlessly hound Luke and his family until an equally savage vampire had finally taken him out. I'd thought I was rid of him. Now it was like his ghost was standing in front of me.

"Caleb never said he had a son." The words slipped out before I could stop them. If Leon's words hadn't thrown me so badly, I'd have considered whether it was a good idea to admit I'd known Caleb.

Leon's thin shoulders slumped, making him look shorter than he was. "He didn't...we didn't know each other."

Sadness softened the angles of his face. I'd have felt sorry for him if I didn't know firsthand what a monster his dear daddy had been.

"When I was about ten I finally tracked him down," Leon explained, "but I was too scared to confront him."

Understandable. Caleb had been a very scary man.

"Instead, I broke into his car and stole his journal," Leon continued. He didn't seem to think there was anything abnormal in telling all this to a complete stranger. "That was when I first learned about vampires."

I stiffened at the way he said the word, like it was poison in his mouth. That was how Caleb had sounded when he talked about vampires.

"I thought he was crazy, you know, but years passed and I started to get more intrigued by the possibility of vampires being real. I did some investigating and -" Leon shrugged and spread his palms.

He didn't need to say any more. He'd investigated, discovered vampires were real, and shouldered the savage and bloody mantle that had driven his father to indiscriminately kill.

Leon's face hardened. "It was their fault. My father couldn't be there for me because he was off hunting vampires, protecting the world. He was a hero."

I remembered the mad glitter of hate in Caleb's eyes. I remembered his machete plunging into Sophie's chest. Bile rose in my throat.

"How did you know he was here?" I said, stalling for time as I struggled to corral my scattered thoughts, and decide what to do about this unexpected - and unpleasant - development.

"I spent years looking for him, but I never found him again. Until recently." Leon blinked, his eyes gleaming with sudden tears. "When cancer took my mum a few months ago, I used all the money she left me to hire a private investigator. The PI tracked my father here to Dalwick, but..." A shudder rippled through his thin body. "He was dead. Murdered."

Hardly news to me. "So what are you still doing here?"

Leon lifted his eyebrows, surprised at my bluntness. "I told you, I'm going to avenge him."

"How? The police don't have a single lead." I'd kept up with local news after Caleb's death, following the police investigation from a distance. The police had found nothing and they never would. The vampire that killed Caleb was already dead, by my own hands no less. Maybe I should just have told him that, but the fanatical gleam in Leon's eyes mirrored his late father's. He didn't know that Caleb had been killed by a vampire and if I told him, it would only reinforce his hatred of them.