Shadows Rising (Darkness Falls Book 2)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

When I got downstairs, I wasn't surprised to see Clara at the kitchen table, sharpening a knife. The sight of her blonde head bent over her work, and the scraaaaaape of whetstone and blade combined, was so familiar to me that for a moment I felt like I'd been whisked back to the team's house.

Then I focused on Luke and his parents sitting around the table, each with a mug of blood, and I relaxed. I wasn't back with the team. I was still here, with my family, where I was supposed to be.

"Where's Ava?" I asked. No need to ask about Ethan – as soon as I vacated his bedroom, he'd hurried back inside to be with Riley.

Clara stopped what she was doing and jabbed a thumb at the living room door. "She's crashed out on the sofa."

I nodded. By this point everyone was looking at me, and I felt suddenly awkward under their scrutiny. They were waiting for me to bring up the subject of Leon, but I wasn't sure what to say. Almost since the moment I met him, I'd been trying to save him, and I didn't know how to throw all that away.

In the silence that followed, Luke got up to make me a coffee. I smiled gratefully at him when he returned and pushed the steaming mug into my hands. He responded by dropping a kiss on my temple.

"Okay, I'll say it since no one else is going to." Clara put down her knife and whetstone. "What are we going to do with Leon?"

At least her bluntness saved me from bringing it up.

"He can't be allowed to run free, not after what he's done," Samuel said, regret weighing heavily in his words. Samuel believed in the sanctity of life. He wasn't stupid enough to think there weren't vampires out there who still drank human blood, but he wanted to help them find a different path, one that wouldn't end with an angry hunter breaking down their door. Not for the first time it struck me how much more like Samuel than Noah I was.

"Then what are our options?" Elena said. She said it like there actually were options.

Luke pulled out a chair for me and I sat down, my hands wrapped around my coffee. "We can't turn him over to the police. As far as they know, Riley was never even missing, and it's not like we can tell them that Leon's trying to rid Dalwick of vampires," I said.

And even if we wanted to go to the police regarding Riley's kidnap, any evidence would have been destroyed when Ethan cleaned her up. That bridge was burned; we had to deal with this problem ourselves.

"Equally we can't let him go. He's too dangerous," I said.

When it came to actual fighting, I was still confident I could take him, but that didn't mean he couldn't sneak up on me one night and crack me over the head with something. The same went for any of us. We couldn't spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders and wondering if he was following us. It was bad enough that Rachel was doing it – we couldn't let Leon do it too.

Luke took a seat beside me, his face grave. "Not really so many options, are there?" he said.

That truth was a bitter pill I was still struggling to swallow. I knew what had to be done and I knew we'd been left only one choice. But knowing something terrible and actually doing it are two very different things. I'd killed before. After Sophie's death, I'd planned to kill Caleb. But Leon was different. He wasn't the cold-blooded psycho that Caleb was. He hadn't killed anyone. And if we killed him, it would be when he couldn't fight back, when he was tied to a chair in an abandoned asylum.

Clara picked up her knife, testing the freshly sharpened edge against her thumb. "When it comes down to it, we don't really have a choice here, people. Leon's a threat. Threats have to be eliminated."