Hide and Seek in the Dark (Being Rewritten)

Chapter 14

14

Gabriel

"What do you mean she's gone?" Nicholas had exclaimed when Gabriel had barged into the motel room he and the others had been waiting in. "How the hell could she be gone?"

"How?" indeed. He'd been asking himself the same thing for nearly an hour. Not that he was cocky or full of himself but Gabriel happened to find himself a very skillful vampire. His hearing was superb, his sense of smell-though not better than Luna's- was keen. He could sense another vampire from nearly a mile away. He was more than capable of leading a 16 year old fledgling to a simple motel to say the least. So how was it that said fledgling was able to disappear under his watch without so much as a sound, without his notice?

He had no clue.

"Are ye pickin' up anything around here, Luna?" Gabriel heard Kiel say from a few yards up. They were currently trudging about the alleyways he and Christine had been taking earlier, searching for any sign of where she could've went. So far they had come up with nothing, and from the look of regret Luna cast the big man they still had zilch to go on.

"You don't think she could've bailed, do you?" Gabriel could hear two of the younger vampires speaking quietly near the back of the group. "I mean with all that talk about how we don't have a chance of finding that kid without her, she couldn't have been bluffing, right?"

The other vampire shrugged and replied in an uninterested tone of voice, "Well, you know what they say; people who talk big are just scared inside."

True, the idea that she had simply gotten cold feet and decided to go back home flitted briefly through his mind after she had first disappeared, And had he not known her better, he would've thought just that. But, no. Christine Thompson- though idiotic and extremely irritating- was determined to find that boy, Benjamin, and save him at all costs. Even now he wasn't sure if that was a trait he should find admirable or simply despise about the girl.

"My Gods..." Kiel gasped up ahead, jerking Gabriel out of his thoughts. Within seconds he was by their sides.

"What is it?" he asked, pushing through the crowd. "What's wrong?"

Luna shifted from her wolf form to human and climbed to her feet. She looked at Gabriel with wide, grief stricken eyes and raised her shaky hands up for him to see. Blood covered her slim fingers, staining her tanned skin red. "Christine," was all she managed to say as she fought back her sobs and held her bloody hands to her chest.

"No," Gabriel shook his head. "There's no way." There was no way that Christine was dead. There was no way she could've died under his watch. There was no way.

"Gabriel." Luna moved towards him with those bloody hands of hers and lifted them to touch him. He moved away quickly before she could.

"No," he repeated again, this time more forcefully. "She's not dead. I refuse to believe she's dead. Gone, maybe. But, not dead."

Kiel rested one big comforting hand on Gabriel's shoulder. "If she's not, they've taken her t' Karnayna," he told him in a regretful tone of voice. "She might as well be dead."

The last thing Gabriel remembered was slamming his fist into the nearest wall, an excruciating pain radiated up his arm. He screamed in rage as the rain picked up again, beating down on them all, slowly washing Christine's blood off the black asphalt and out of existence.