Terraplane Sun - Get Me Golden

I just hope there aren't too many mistakes :'(

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[email protected] - Kate just said u won't be in class for a while? X

I skimmed my fingers over the keys of my laptop before replying:

[email protected] - yeah. It's nothing too bad I promise. X

[email protected] - is it anythin to do with Reeves? He looks... Gr8? and as if to sound even more sarcastic, there was a slightly blurred picture attached of Michael standing at the front of class. I grimaced at the way his jaw was so obviously clenched and the sharpness to his usually bright green eyes. 

At the sound of the fridge opening, I lifted my eyes to John taking out a bottle of water. After my small breakdown on Saturday, Mike and I moved in yesterday - Sunday - morning. Amy was glad for the company, we hadn't stopped talking. But after the first hour or so, she began to tire out; her words were breathy, her sentences were shorter and she looked as if she were going to fall asleep mid sentence.

Michael had spent most of the day out of the house with John so we both had time to catch up with our best friends.  

"Damn. Mike looks like shit."

I shook my head back into reality and tilted my gaze to John suddenly standing behind me. "I don't think he's fed in a while."

"Try two weeks."

I frowned. "I told him not to get this bad for crying out loud."

"He has been preoccupied"

"Haven't we all." 

[email protected] - He's having his man period. Throw him some chocolate and he'll love u x

"I heard the new plan you came up with." John said. "Well done to you." 

"Thanks. Have they also told you how Florence is basically making my life a living hell and I can't be compelled anymore?"

"The former than the latter. Did Kate give you something?"

"Some witch crap, I don't know. Tasted disgusting though." I smiled as I sent my reply. "How's Amy this morning?"

"It's a bad day." His eyes saddened and I placed my hand on his arm. "She'll be bed bound today. Maybe this evening she'll walk around but..."

I searched his eyes for what seemed like forever until I said, "Why, 'but?'"

"She can't bounce back like she could at the beginning. You can go up and see her though. She won't mind the company a bit later."

"And why not now?" 

"She's sleeping. Speaking of sleeping, I saw you taking up residence in my study earlier this morning. It's ok, I don't mind. You're not used to sleeping here and to top it off it hasn't been lived in in just over two months."

"I had to dig around the cupboards for non-expired cans, John." I teased trying to change the subject of my lack of sleep. 

"Kate volunteered the get the groceries. She'll be here after class."

I closed the screen of my laptop and exhaled. "Is that for Amy?" I pointed at the bottle.

"If she wakes up thirsty." 

I then watched an odd process of which John opened the bottle, poured half of the water down the sink, grabbed a sharp kitchen knife from the block and-

"John," He slid the tip of the blade along the vein, exactly the size of the bottle cap and held his wrist over the bottle. The water diluted from clear to dark blood red within seconds. 

"Its only if." He murmured before disappearing upstairs.

Laura and I exchanged a few more e-mails before she left me to go to her next class. I clicked back to the attachment on our previous e-mail of Michael and sighed. It truly did break my heart to see him this... troubled. It was almost a part of him, going this long without feeding. He'd forget or he wouldn't think it was important. Michael felt helpless, I wasn't blind. Actually almost all of them felt helpless. I saw the look in all of their eyes when they'd gathered to see Amy the other night. It was just another thing to worry about. Amy's impending transformation and a smaller mouth to feed. 

And the worry of everything not going according to plan. Like Amy dying. Permanently.

I shouldn't be thinking like this. 

The doorbell rang throughout the house. I stood and rounded the island to answer it but before I could, Lewis came bounding up the stairs with a large worn out leather back book.

His bright eyes caught mine and he smiled. Something about his smile brought my gaze back to the book in his hands again. He's found something. "Aren't you supposed to be in class?" He questioned, sidestepping me into the living room. 

"Aren't you supposed to be teaching?" I countered.

"Day off. But I'm glad you're here. I have something you and John might find helpful. Where is he?"

"He'll be down in a few, what is it?"

I joined him on the sofa and watched him place the book on the coffee table. The front had an odd symbol. It resembled a family crest but within the shield were two stakes across one and other with a large 'H' overlapping it. And on both sides of the shield there were two animals. Not lions but... "Are those leopards?"

"Panthers." 

I just about remembered a small detail a long time ago I'd read online about vampires an the mention of panthers. But it couldn't be true. "Werepanthers... don't exist right?"

"Of course they exist but they're more so shifters than werepanthers. They're just not as stupid as vampires to reveal themselves. We don't hunt them or have any sort of alliance with them but I can tell them from left and right."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean they're as easy as sensing vampires for me but on a different spectrum. They're quiet, to themselves, sometimes large if male, sometimes tall beautiful but shy if female. They're quite polar opposites to their human selves. I can point one out to you if you want. There are about four in col-"

"To be honest," I interrupted already overwhelmed. "I'd rather you didn't."

Lewis smiled. "If you say so. Anyway, that wasn't what I wanted to show you or say. A while ago, I said I was going to visit my dad about all of this Florence stuff but he's been a bit crabby since I'd told him I was working with vampires. But yesterday he'd finally agreed to listen to me. And after I'd explained that the gene could be broken for whoever after me, he practically shoved this book into my hands. He told me everything from the first hunter up until my grandfather was in this book. According to my dad, we're not the only ones that have tried to break this curse. But what each one of the hunters before me have lacked is witches."

He flicked the book open and came across some sort of contents page. Each few lines possessed different handwriting; some harder to understand than the obvious modern ones nearer the end of the list. Along with some sort of language I vaguely recognised.

"That's Latin right?" 

Lew nodded. "The spell that bound me. Dark magic not to be messed with. There's information that could help us here, things like what weapons and herbs that could immobilise a vampire. Sort of like a hunters guide."

"I've come in at the wrong time obviously," Johns voice echoed behind us. "I heard you from upstairs, do you think it will help?"

"Maybe, maybe not but all we can do is look."

For the first few pages, I revelled in the smell of the pages. I absolutely loved the smell of old books. Some say they're musty but it just means they've been used, read over and over again until the paper is ripped at the turn. Honestly, I thought we'd be here all day with this six-hundred page book but the first twenty-eight pages had a pattern. A pattern we completely overlooked.

"Her maker?" I asked. "Did no one find him?"

"We'll have to carry on to find out." Lewis sighed. "Duncan, my great-times-four grandfather, the second hunter, said something about her maker being a very, very old vampire. He'd caught onto his trail but," He turned the page and pursed his lips. "His time as a hunter apparently ended at that last paragraph. Meaning he was killed leaving a son and a wife."

"So your gene wasn't mutated yet." John concluded.

"It must have happened after her maker killed Duncan. The hunters before him only lived for a good forty-fifty years if they were lucky but after Duncan the pages of one hunter go on for longer." He flipped through the pages and paused. A black and white illustrated image of two men with long hair filled half of the yellowing paper "These are the fifth and fourth hunters. Twins. Which only screwed up the gene more." Lew mumbled more to himself as he turned to the next page. "They went after him together. They died almost immediately but what they found was that they both woke up as if nothing had happened. But like morons they thought they were invincible. One of them died after being stabbed by a human. The other lived on and continued his life as a hunter."

"What's that?" I pointed to an underlined name. "Christian... That's his name. Her maker's name."

John rubbed a hand over his face. "It looks it."

For another hour and a half we studied the pages of the guide, sometime in between getting a pen and paper to write down anything important. By the second hour, Katherine had wandered in with Nate in tow carrying grocery bags. We paid them no bit of attention even as they unpacked in the kitchen.

Five hundred and two pages in and we'd found the current details:

"Her maker's name is Christian. He's over nine-hundred years old now. And it seems five out of ten hunters wanted everything to do with him." I read out. "From five hundred pages that's all we've got?"

"To be honest," John said. "I think that's all we need."

Lewis and I turned our gazes to John. "You have a theory?" 

"I think I do too," Kate's voice carried through to the living room. "You have to find that vampire and you have to bring him to us. Hey, maybe Nate could do it. Isn't he like your vampire grandfather- ow! I'm stating a fact!" 

I rolled my eyes. "What do you plan on doing with a vampire as old as that? Hmm? Kill him? Ask for his help? Better yet how the hell do you plan on finding him? He could be in England, Italy, Greece who knows. He could even be dead."

"I doubt he's dead." Nate walked into the living room. "Unless he's killed himself. A vampire that old would be too smart to be killed."

"And I can find him no problem. Well yeah, little bit of a problem. I'd need my gran's help but it can be done probably by this evening."

I was shocked. Completely lost for words... for about five seconds. "Have you all lost your damn minds? You're going to find a vampire almost the age of a millennium and kill him?"

Katherine came into view with her all knowing smile not at all easing the apprehensive feeling inside me. "No, not kill him. We're just going to get some... information. Because I have another theory. One that'll help you Lew. I'd said before that if we kill her the curse will be broken. But thinking back, this witch had created the curse because of him. Your whatever grandfather wanted the witch to turn Florence back but compromised by making him an advanced hunter to get revenge on Christian. Think of this as yet another loophole: Christian releases her as his protege cutting all ties he has to her and this curse then we kill her, mumble a bunch of spells just before and boom. We're happy, Lew's happy and we can live happily ever after."

**

And to be honest it sounded like a perfect plan. Ana confirmed it to be logical later that evening when Kate had gone over to explain. And currently we, as in me, Nate and Callum were waiting for them to locate him. Lewis couldn't come with us even if we found him because quite frankly the nine-hundred year old would probably know. And Michael... well...

Um...

"I'm coming." He stated as he threw his tie onto the bed. 

"No," I sighed. "You're not. You're thirsty and grouchy and to be honest I think we could use less of a grouchy-thirsty Michael."

His nostrils flared. "You're not going."

I narrowed my gaze and purred, "I love it when you tell me what to do." 

Again, his nostrils flared. "Evangeline, I'm not kidding."

"And I want you to stop arguing with me and feed. I'll be fine with Nate and Callum if Katherine finds that he's close by. Okay?"

"You think he'll hesitate to kill you?"

"No, I don't. But he'll hesitate if we say the right things. I'll be fine."

"You have no reason to go."

"I want to go. Think of it as mutual ground. I won't exactly have anything to threaten him with will I?"

I wasn't surprised to hear most of the house silent. I crossed my arms over my chest and waited. He knew, he knew, he wouldn't be any help to us if he was thirsty. Michael would jump the gun at any chance he could get at the slight smell of danger or fear.

My phone rang before he could argue further. I put it on speaker. "Found him?"

"Oh, yeah. We found him. Took a bit of experimenting especially since we don't have anything of his. We got a general area though you're not going to like it. Hope all of your passports are renewed."

Crap.

"He's in Anchorage."

Silence followed. Why couldn't it be somewhere hot. "As in Alaska?"

"As in freezing cold Alaska yeah. We've booked three rooms, which you owe me money for by the way. Cal, Nate and Mike are going with you. The rest are staying here to make sure nothing gets too out of hand. Your flight is tomorrow morning at six. You guys should be there for three days. Check-in online."

Michael's smile was triumphant after I'd hung up. "Go feed, Mike. I'll talk to you later."

His smile vanished. "You hate it when I'm like this. I know I've left feeding for a while but I'm just..."

"I know, don't worry. Here," I pressed my lips to his cheek and smoothed my palm over his jaw. "I don't hate it."

His thumb and forefinger suddenly pulled my bottom lip from between my teeth. I hadn't even realised I'd started chewing it. "I know every single expression you make, Evie."

"I just worry that's all. Feed. I'll pack our bags and check-in. I don't even want to know how they knew our passport details to book our tickets."

I dropped my hand and turned to make my way to the bathroom but he grabbed my arm and pulled me into a hug. I could feel him trying to relax as much as possible but the reality of him losing the slightest bit of control was obviously pushed to the forefront of his mind. 

"I'll be back very soon." A peck to my head and he was gone. 

Although I hadn't planned on waiting up for him, after packing winter clothes and checking-in online I lay in the middle of the bed thinking about going to Anchorage. It was a fifty-fifty chance really. He could be gone by the time we got there, or he could slaughter all four of us with the click of his fingers. Why Anchorage? It could be one of the many questions I could ask him I suppose. Such an odd place to go.

I flinched but then relaxed when a warm half clothed body crawled in beside me. I lay my head on Michael's bare chest and smiled at the steady heartbeat beneath my ear. "Well fed?"

"Very," He mumbled. "I don't know what to expect with this vampire, Evie."

"That's the beauty of having two all seeing witches. They know exactly what to expect."

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An update? Yes you're not all crazy. And things are totally getting interesting. I can't wait for you to meet Christian! The idea came to me when I got a little bit of a block. This will move things along swiftly and smoothly. OH and I may have spent the past two days watching three series of Teen Wolf :|.