---Shannon---

"Mom, what the hell is going on?" I demanded her. I had seen her drive a stake through the vampire that had just attacked us a second ago, and she knew way too well what she had been doing.

"Shannon, Dan . . ." Mom trailed off as she came back inside the house, blood still on her hands from the vampire outside, and she sighed, shaking her head. "There's so much I need to tell you."

"Obviously," Dan told her, and I crossed my arms over my chest. I didn't get what was happening other than the guy outside, dead on our porch was a vampire, he attacked me with Dan and Mom and Zakary inside the house . . .Zakary had saved me . . . Mom staked the vampire dead . . . .

What the hell was going on?

"Just start from the beginning," I suggested, a little too rudely.

Mom hesitantly nodded, and she held her hand out to the dining room, telling us to go in there and sit at the table without saying a word.

"Where's your friend?" Mom asked after we got into the room. "I'm pretty sure that he's most likely as scared as you are."

Dan shrugged. "The last time I saw him, we was upstairs."

Mom nodded and we all sat down at the table together, and she was having a tough time starting. "Just tell us the truth, Mom," I told her.

Mom nodded after a breif second and breathed heavily. "Okay."

Story time.

"Do you remember you telling me that you were sick a few nights ago, and you felt like dying, but it just went away a few seconds afterwards?" Mom asked. Dan and I both nodded. I had felt the same thing tonight. "And you felt the same thing tonight, didn't you?"

"Mom, what does this have to do with anything?" Dan asked.

"Everything," Mom answered. She had been shy on telling us this a few seconds ago, and now she was getting stronger. "That feeling that you guys got, the feeling you were sick and you were going to die was a . . . warning."

"A warning of what?" Dan asked.

"A warning that vampires were near."

If it hadn't been for the dead vampire out on the porch, I wouldn't have believed my mother for a second, but now I did. "Why would we get a warning?"

Mom bit her lip, but shrugged it off and went on. "You got a warning because that's the effect that vampires have on Hunters."

"Hunters?" I asked. "What does that mean?"

"It means that these Hunters are hunters of the vampires, the hunters of the innocent." Mom took a deep breath and looked at both of us. "I'm a Hunter. And so is my blood, passed on to--"

"Us," Dan whispered.

"Passed down to us," I realized what they were getting at.

"We're Hunters?" Dan asked.

Mom didn't hesitate. "Now, that you have recieved your first two warnings that vampires were near, now you are."

"What does that even mean?" I demanded.

"It means that Hunters fight the vampires," Mom answered.

"You want us to fight them?" Dan demanded.

Mom shook her head quickly. "No. I never wanted that. That's why I never told you, but . . . Then you told me, without realizing it, that vampires are back in town."

I scoffed. "Vampires in Raytin?" I stood up from the table, pacing around the room. "That's . . "

"Crazy," Dan finished my trail off.

"It's not," Mom argued. "They've been here before, a long time ago."

There wasn't any other sounds until Dan asked, "How many other Hunters are there?"

"You're actually believing this?" I demanded. Mom gave me a look that I ignored and went on. "If Hunters are supposed to fight vampires, then how come I couldn't fight against that thing?"

"Because you haven't had training," Mom answered, and turned to Dan to answer his. "There aren't many left. Four of them are in this house, but I don't think Drew has made that change yet." Yet. How could we even talk about this about a four-year old boy? "But there used to be more of us, and more than one family of Hunters used to live in this town."

"You mean Dad, don't you?" Dan asked, realizing Mom's pained look before I did.

Mom gave her answer with a nod.

Okay, Mom was a Hunter. Dad was a Hunter. Drew might have been down the road to becoming one, and Dan and I were becoming one. I didn't want to be a Hunter.

"And that's what got him killed, isn't it?" I demanded. "He was fighting when he died?" I didn't need Mom's answer to know I was right. She nodded anyway. I scoffed. "Dad died because of being a Hunter, and now you're saying that we're going to be Hunters? And Drew too?" Mom didn't give any answers. "How could we be what got Dad killed?" 

"I don't want you to be what I am, Shannon," Mom answered finally, shaking her head. "I never wanted any of you to be what might destroy your lives."

"At least your honest now," I spit out.

"Shannon, stop," Dan whispered, and nodded to Mom. "Go on." 

"Well, the vampire outside was only one of the vampires that you sensed. The one that activated you, so to speak, is still out there, and you will have no idea who that might be."

"What about that warning you were talking about?" Dan asked.

Mom shook her head. "The Hunters have a strict way of making sure that the world has a balance. A Hunter can only sense one vampire once, and the vampire also has that warning, but if neither kill the other that first time, then that warning is gone for good, for the certain vampire or Hunter, leaving both blind when one decides to attack the other."

"So what you're telling us is that there's a vampire out there that we sensed, and we'll never know who it is?" I demanded.

"And he won't know either, unless he saw you."

"Great," I muttered. "Just great."

"Shan--" Dan tried to get me to stop again.

"No, Dan." I glared at Mom. "She has been lying to us our whole lives, and those lives nearly got us and Zakary killed tonight." I turned my anger to who it was for in the first place. "So forgive me if I don't want to sit around and listen to you try to explain us everything that you conviently forgot to tell us was to protect us."

I stalked out, going up the stairs and slamming the door to my room, sitting on my bed and never wanting to leave again.

---Dan---

I wanted to follow Shannon, to tell her it was okay, maybe to yell at her a little to stop treating Mom that way, but Mom stopped me.

"Let her go," she said as we heard her bedroom door slam shut. "It's too much for her right now."

I sat down again and asked, "Why didn't you ever tell us?"

"It was to protect you," she answered, and she took in a deep breath. "I know it's hard to understand, but I can't just say it all without having Shannon here so I can explain it to her too."

"Good luck with that," I told her. "That'd might take a while."

Mom nodded. "I know, and I feel guilty, because everything she said was right. I shouldn't have kept it from you. I should have told you and trained you so something like tonight didn't ever happen."

"It's just that, why didn't you? You said that Dad died because of this, but was it because he didn't have enough training or . . .?"

Shaking her head, Mom said, "No. He was one of the best. He died because he was surrounded, and he was alone when it happened. I couldn't be there to help him." There was a pause of pain. "Help save him."

"You blame yourself for what happened to him," I realized, and she looked away from me. "You should've been with him, and you weren't, and you blame yourself for him dying." The silence was the answer. "And, from keeping the truth from us, you figured we wouldn't have to go through this, and we would be safe."

"I hadn't expected for the vampires to return to Raytin," she explained. "I thought that you could lead a normal life with Drew and Shannon without all the Hunter business, but it didn't turn out that way."

"Clearly."

"I'm so sorry, Dan," Mom apologized. "I never thought any of this would happen, and I should have prepared you for it, prepared Shannon for what's to come, but I didn't know how after your father died, after his death."

"Mom, the point is that you train us now," I said. "If what you said is right, that vampire that activated us might know who we are, and might know just what to do to kill us. I'm not sure that Shannon wants to do this, but I do know that this shouldn't end this way. We have to fight back."

Mom looked at me with a sort of proudness at my words, and I didn't know if it was because I was being strong, if I was being authorative, if I was being commanding and taking charge, or maybe all three.

Clearly, we had a lot to do.

---Zakary---

The slamming doors and the talks downstairs were clear it meant one of the Hunters were on board with the fighting, and one was not.

The older one, the brother, Dan, thought he could actually train well enough after his whole life not having any experience and driving a stake through my heart.

Fine, let him believe. As long as I got what I came here for--the death of the Hunter family, the girl, the sister, Shannon, Dan, the mother, and the youngest one, the baby.

I wanted their death as much as I wanted revenge, but I also wanted to play with them, torture them, turn them against each other so they would have no one to trust. Then they would be alone, forever.

And that's the way I wanted them to be.

There was only an amount of time before I had them there, and then it would make things more fun for me, and things would turn into something they never thought possilbe.

Just how would that happen, in a different way than I played all my other games?

I'd start with Shannon.