I clomped downstairs, looking for Luke. Hot shame flushed my face when I remembered my desperate attempts to pull off his clothes last night. It didn't matter that he understood why I'd done it, and it didn't matter that he'd never hold it against me. I still felt ashamed.

Hindsight was such a wonderful thing.

Someone was moving around in the kitchen; I could hear the quiet scrape of feet on the stone-flagged floor. I braced myself to face Luke, even though I knew that he wouldn't blame me for a single thing that had been said. That was why I loved him. Luke had seen me at my very best and my very worst. He'd seen the ugly parts of my soul, and none of that changed the way he felt about me.

But when I pushed open the door, I found Samuel there, not Luke.

He turned to me, his face crumpled with empathy, and my eyes teared up again. Samuel didn't say anything, he just held open his arms and I didn't think, I just ran into his embrace, hugging him like I'd never hugged Noah.

"Luke told me what happened. I'm so sorry," Samuel murmured.

I buried my face in his chest and his shirt grew steadily damper with my tears. Samuel didn't say anything else, he just held me, gently rocking me side to side, and there was more comfort in that than in any meaningless platitudes.

Finally I snuffled and pulled away from him, swiping a hand across my eyes.

Samuel kept his hands on my upper arms, gazing down at me. "You know Elena and I are always here for you, sweetheart. Anything you need, anything you want, just tell us."

I nodded, unable to find words. And suddenly words were there and they needed to be said. There was no one else in the world that I could ever say them to.

"Thank you," I said. "Dad."

Samuel smiled and kissed the top of my head, pulling me back into his arms.

Samuel told me that he'd made Luke go to sleep in the spare room after it became apparent that if someone didn't hustle him off to bed, he was going to stand watch outside our bedroom door all night.

"Where's Clara?" I asked.

"She's fine, she's sleeping on the sofa," Samuel replied.

I remembered her being injured in the fight last night, but Samuel wouldn't have said she was fine if she wasn't, and I didn't want to disturb her if she was asleep. She'd had a rough night too.

I wondered how much Ava's death was hurting her. While I'd never quite been sure that she and Ava were friends in the traditional sense, they had lived in the same house and fought side by side against their enemies. They had meant something to each other, and Clara wouldn't forget that.

It occurred to me that Clara was the sole remaining member of the team. It really was over now. I'd often dreamed of that happening, but I'd never wanted it to be like this – with half of my old family dead. Every part of my old life was gone now, and Clara had evolved from the silent, hard-eyed warrior that I barely knew to a loyal and trustworthy friend. She was the only silver lining standing in the ruined ashes of what had been Noah's team.

I climbed the stairs, leaving Samuel in the kitchen. A few minutes ago I'd been nervous about seeing Luke face-to-face. Now I desperately needed to.

The spare room was at the end of the landing, and I felt a pang of guilt that Luke had had to sleep there. It was the one room that we hadn't got round to furnishing yet, although at least we'd brought the bed that I'd slept in at Samuel and Elena's house. I wasn't sure if it was Alice's or Anna's, but it didn't matter either way. Samuel and Elena didn't need it anymore. Even once the fire damage was repaired and they could move back into their house, their clan was depleted to almost nothing. They no longer needed all those beds.

There was a bitter irony that by meeting and falling in love, by trying to bridge the gap between hunters and vampires, Luke and I had started a chain of events that had all but decimated our respective families.

While we had found something precious and beautiful together, the ugly reality was that a lot of people might have been better off if we'd never met. But I couldn't think like that. Everything that had happened – it wasn't our fault. All we had ever asked was to be left alone to live our own lives in peace.

The spare room door creaked ever so slightly as I opened it, but Luke was deeply enough asleep that he didn't hear it. I stood for a moment in the doorway, watching him. He lay on his back, one arm flung above his head. Usually when he slept, his face was softer, younger, but not this time. His jaw was stiff like he was clenching his teeth, and his eyelids flickered, crinkles appearing at the corners. Beneath the covers, his knees shifted, restless.

Whatever he was dreaming, it wasn't anything good.

I slipped into the room and climbed into bed with him, curling against his body. That mad urge to strip him down and push him to take me to a place where this pain didn't exist, didn't rise in me this time. There was just my need to be close to him.

Luke blinked and opened his eyes, his up-flung arm moving down to fit around my shoulders. He didn't say anything and he didn't need to. I just wanted to be held and he knew that.

After a while, I whispered, "It won't ever stop hurting, but I know I can survive this."

"I know you can too." Luke toyed with strands of my hair, his fingertips stroking the curve of my ear. "You're one of the strongest people I've ever met, Kiara. It's one of the reasons that I fell in love with you. You were just there that night, so bright and so beautiful and so strong. You burned so much brighter than the bonfire."

I smiled a little at that, remembering the night we met, both of us catching the other's eyes through a wall of flames. "I don't think I could sum up all the reasons that I fell in love with you," I said.

I'd never thought of Luke burning brightly or any of the other ways that he described me, but now that I did think about it, it was exactly what he did. I might live in the sunlight, but my world had been dark until he burst into it. He was the glowing spark that had burned through the coldness in my heart and filled me up with light.

I loved him in ways that I could never put into words.

We lay like that for a while, silently holding each other, until my eyelids started to drift shut. The nightmares still lurked at the edges of my mind, but as long as Luke was lying next to me, I wouldn't drift away into that terrible, dark world.

And then something struck me so hard that I bolted upright, my heart hammering. "Oh my God," I breathed, fresh horror sinking into me. "Ava's still out there."

Clara had dragged her body out of the road, either for practical reasons – so we didn't trip over her while we were fighting Rachel – or for more compassionate reasons – so we didn't trample her during the fight. Clara had dragged her into the trees that fringed that road...and she was still there.

The thought of my mother's body lying out there like abandoned rubbish turned my stomach.

"I have to go back for her." I scrambled out of bed and bolted for the door. Luke followed me as I clattered down the stairs.

"Kiara, wait," he called.

"I can't leave her there," I said.

Apart from the fact that she was my mum and I wasn't leaving her to rot, if someone else found her, they'd report her body to the police. It was cold as ice to think in those terms, and it actually made me feel a bit sick to do so, but I simply couldn't afford to get any more involved with them than I had been over Georgia's death. Killing Rachel was the number one priority now, and I couldn't let anything else get in the way of that.

Luke cast a frustrated look at the curtain-covered windows, knowing the lethal daylight that lay beyond them. "I can't go with you and I don't want you to go alone."

"She won't be alone," said a voice behind me, and I turned to see Clara standing there. "She's got me."

The sky was that early morning blend of pale pink and gold, melting to blue in the middle, and birdsong provided a gentle background hum. One or two cars trundled past, but for the most part the streets were quiet.

I stole a glance at Clara as we walked. A series of white butterfly stitches held the gash on her left cheek closed. She'd done a good job of it, but there was no way a cut like that wouldn't leave a scar.

She caught me looking and gave me a rueful smile. "I've got scars everywhere else but I've always managed to protect my face. Until now."

"I'm sorry," I said, because I didn't know what else to say. It was my fault that she'd got hurt. If I had kept my head last night and hadn't started a fight I knew I couldn't win, she wouldn't have had to jump in and help me.

"Don't be. If you hadn't taken a swing at that bitch vampire, I would have done. None of us were going to just stand by and watch her kill Ava. Nothing that happened was your fault."

Maybe she was right, but I couldn't help my eyes from stealing back to her stitched cheek and wondering what the scar was going to look like.

A self-deprecating twist caught Clara's lips. "Good thing I wasn't that pretty to begin with, right?"

I studied her, cataloguing her features in a way I'd never done before. There was a hard cast to her face, a sharpness to her nose and cheekbones that kept her from being what most people would describe as traditionally pretty, but there was something striking about her warrior-like appearance, her black clothes and sinewy, scarred arms. A scar on her cheek wouldn't change how she looked. Weirdly, it might even make her look more striking.

"Thank you," I said. "I mean, really. Thank you for saving me last night."

"Don't mention it."

We walked in silence for another few minutes, and then Clara said, "It's not over, you know. This thing with Rachel."

"Yeah, I know."

"I mean it's not over between me and Rachel." Clara touched the butterfly stitches holding her cheek together. "Next time I face that bitch, I'm going to kill her."

Grimly, I replied, "Not if I get there first."

Going back to the place where I'd seen my mother murdered was almost impossibly hard.

The sloping, tree-flanked road was achingly familiar to me – I'd so often walked it on my way to college – and now I doubted that I could ever walk it again without remembering Rachel's nails slicing into Ava's throat, and Ava's boneless fall to the ground.

As we drew near to the spot, my feet started to drag. Already I could see the dark splotches of blood on the tarmac – Ava's blood. I wanted to scrub it away, scrub so hard that I erased the last few hours.

Clara hadn't said it out loud but I knew she was planning on carrying Ava's body back herself. She'd never ask me to do it.

My feet dragged even more as we approached that dreaded spot. I was practically shuffling, zombie-like, up the road, even though the coldly logical part of my brain kept telling me that I needed to get a move on before the town really came to life. Dalwick was a virtual ghost-town in the early hours of the morning, probably one of the reasons Noah had chosen to settle here – because if we came back late from a hunt, no one would see us covered in blood. But time was marching on, and the streets wouldn't be this quiet and empty for much longer.

All too soon we were there.

I stared down at the blood on the road, already dried to a stain under the morning sun. Anyone who saw it would think it was just oil leaked from a passing car. If they noticed at all that the colour was a touch too brownish-red and there was too much of it to be oil, then the part of their brains that wanted to protect them from the shadows would simply insist it was oil in a much louder voice. Even when they noticed something was amiss, most people had a tendency to bury their heads in the sand.

Droplets of dried blood formed a trail away from the road and up onto the pavement, clearly marking where Clara had dragged Ava's body away. My feet rebelled, refusing to move, and I sent them a stern mental order. Reluctantly, they started shuffling forwards. Clara had hidden Ava among the clusters of trees, and I realised now that she had probably done it not only to protect Ava from getting trampled, but so we could come back today and retrieve her. Even in a sleepy little town like Dalwick, a body in the road wouldn't go unnoticed for long.

I owed more to Clara than I think I ever gave her credit for.

At the edge of the pavement, where the strip of concrete gave way to a grassy dip before rising back up into a line of trees, I paused.

"You don't have to do this, you know. You can just turn around and let me handle it," said Clara from behind me.

Yes, I could, and that would be so easy. But I wasn't going to bury my head in the sand. Ava was dead, and I had to deal with that. I couldn't do that if I was hiding.

"I'm fine," I said, and started down the grassy verge.

I wasn't fine.

I didn't want to see Ava's body.

I was already reliving the horror of the night before over and over and over, and seeing her body would only make that worse.

But in the end I didn't have to.

Ava's body was gone.