Riley lay on a dirt floor, her hands twisted and bound behind her back. Her ankles and knees were roped together, and a filthy gag was stuffed in her mouth. Her red hair looked like blood in the darkness, shocking against her pale face.

She wasn't moving.

"Riley?" I whispered, real terror gripping my heart.

She couldn't be dead. We couldn't have fought this hard to save her only to fail now. I reached out and touched her shoulder.

Riley's eyes cracked open. She tried to shuffle away from us but there was nowhere to go.

I crouched down, making my voice as soft as I could. "Riley, it's me. It's Kiara."

She blinked, and the wild, terrified look faded from her eyes, replaced by wary recognition. I pulled the gag from her mouth and she sucked in a shuddering breath.

"K-girl?" she whispered, and burst into tears.

Behind me, Luke called back to the others. "She's here. We found her."

I barely had time to cut Riley's bonds before Ethan shouldered me aside, scooping her into his arms and carrying her out of her tiny prison. Riley clung to his shirtfront, sobs shaking her body. Ethan's face was a blank mask, but tears rolled down his cheeks and dripped onto Riley's head.

Sudden exhaustion rolled over me. I sagged and then Luke was there, sliding his arm around my waist, holding me steady. I wrapped my hand around his wrist, feeling the comforting throb of his pulse. He kissed the top of my head.

"She's safe, Kiara," he murmured.

But she nearly hadn't been.

Fitting everyone back in the car wasn't easy. In the end, I had to sit on Luke's lap so there was room for Ethan to cradle Riley without her getting squashed between us. The whole way home, he never stopped stroking her hair and her face, and murmuring soothing nonsense into her ear.

Seeing the way he looked at her, I remembered what Ethan had said about realising that he wasn't in love with me. He looked at Riley not as if she was the most important thing in the world, but as if she was the only thing in the world. She was the sun at the centre of his universe, the same as Luke was for me and I was for him.

Ethan loved her.

Maybe even he didn't fully realise it yet, or maybe he was resisting admitting it because they hadn't been together for long, but I knew love when I saw it.

I looked down at Luke, slightly lower than me now I was sitting on his lap. He smiled, his eyes burning with that same beautiful, protective light that I'd seen in Ethan's. He kissed me and, though it was just a chaste peck on the lips, there was still something so softly intimate about it that it made my soul ache.

We couldn't risk driving the car back to the clan's house, not when the police could already be on the search for it. There was a chance the owners hadn't even reported it missing yet, but we couldn't take that risk. We abandoned the car in a quiet street opposite the college, and went the rest of the way on foot. Clara strode ahead of us, checking that the coast was clear every time we turned a corner or crossed a road. The fewer people who saw us, the less attention we'd attract, and that was exactly how we wanted it.

Finally the clan's house came into view, and tears of relief pricked my eyes. We were home. I wasn't stupid enough to think this thing was over – Leon was still a problem, and I didn't know how to even begin tackling Rachel – but just for now, we were home and we were safe.

Ethan whisked Riley straight off to his room to take care of her. Beyond some abrasions from the ropes, and bruising on her arm where Leon had grabbed her, she wasn't physically hurt. But an ordeal like that damaged people in ways other than physical.

I wanted to go in and see her but Ethan, firmly though not unkindly, shut the door in my face. My own bedroom door seemed a million miles away so I just slumped down on the floor. I should have been happy. Riley was back and she wasn't hurt – I should have been jumping for joy and waving a set of pom-poms in the air.

But it was difficult to feel happiness through the awful anger that still poisoned me, and the lingering fear that we might have been too late. I couldn't just shrug that off, even though Riley was safe and sound in the room in front of me.

Luke came and sat next to me, and I leaned my head on his shoulder, breathing in the smell of his skin and hair, all the little things that made up the boy I was so desperately in love with.

"I can't help feeling like this is all my fault," I murmured.

"Don't say that," said Luke. "There's nothing you could have done to stop this."

"I could have let everyone kill Leon when Ethan first suggested it." I said 'everyone' though I didn't have a clue who would have carried out the actual act. Neither Elena or Samuel would kill someone in cold blood, which left Ethan, Luke, and me. Would any of us truly have been capable of that? I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

"You were trying to help."

"I risked Riley's life for a stupid dream."

Luke slipped his fingers under my chin, careful of the bruising, and tilted my head back so I was looking up at him. I gazed at the strong, handsome lines of his face, the black sweep of his hair, the storm-and-steel grey of his eyes. This was the only place I ever wanted to be, right here in his arms.

"It's not a stupid dream," Luke said. "You're trying to help people –"

"And look where it got me!"

"You're trying to help people," Luke repeated. "You have helped people. You've helped yourself and Ethan; you've helped Ava and Clara."

I snorted, remembering Ava's refusal to come inside the clan's house, and Clara's own admission that she still didn't quite know how she felt about vampires. "I'm still not sure they're ready to leap on the pro-vampire bandwagon."

"They're here, aren't they?" he said.

He had a point. When we'd followed Ethan and Riley upstairs, Ava and Clara had stayed downstairs to tell Samuel and Elena what had happened. It had only been a matter of hours since I told Clara I couldn't bring her home with us, but there was nothing I could do about that now. And, the more I thought about it, the more I realised I trusted her. I'd initially refused to bring her here because I hadn't trusted her enough. But she'd done so much for us in the past few hours – I couldn't believe that hadn't changed her; changed us. There was a bond between us that hadn't been there before, the warm threads that wove together to form friendship, and I hoped Clara felt it too. I didn't want her to walk out of this house and go back to the team.

I didn't want Ava to either. I'd been angry when she didn't come after us even though Clara had, but, as far as I was concerned, she'd more than redeemed herself. If it wasn't for her – I couldn't even finish the thought.

Luke gently traced the outline of my bruise, and his jaw tightened. "All you're trying to do is help people, and I love you for that."

I sensed a 'but' coming.

"But maybe some people can't be helped."

And that was the truth I couldn't admit to. Every time I saw Leon's blue eyes, I saw Caleb – shooting Luke, stabbing Sophie, relentlessly hounding me with that mad, fanatical look on his face. He could never have been helped. He didn't want to hear the truth. Caleb had been crazy, and his hatred of vampires probably stemmed more from his sick love of killing them than some misguided sense of justice or protection. But Leon hadn't been raised on that anti-vampire diet. He'd made up his mind about them solely from reading Caleb's hateful journals. He hadn't even been doing this for long, and I'd hoped that his mind wasn't already so twisted that I couldn't pull it back from the edge.

Luke put his arms around, enveloping me in a warm embrace. "You did all you could for him, but Leon doesn't want to change."

"And where does that leave us?" My voice was muffled against his chest.

Luke went very still, realising what I'd just asked. I'd refused to let anyone murder Leon in cold blood because I'd wanted to save him. But if I couldn't save him, what were we supposed to do with him? We couldn't let him wander freely around Dalwick now – he knew where we lived, he knew where I worked, and he wanted to kill the clan. We are all in danger as long as that man was alive. I knew what that meant, but I didn't think I was ready to face it yet. I'd been okay with wanting to kill Caleb, but Leon wasn't as savage or as ruthless. He was just tragic.

I snuggled harder against Luke's chest. When I was here, the rest of the world didn't matter so much. I could pretend that nothing bad had happened to us; that nothing bad was still happening. But I couldn't keep that up for long. I wasn't the kind of girl who ran away from her problems. Of course that didn't mean I wouldn't hide from them for just a little bit before gathering the strength to face them.

Luke didn't push me to talk about Leon or what we were going to do with him. He knew I'd address the problem when I was ready, but I just needed a few minutes respite.

We sat on the floor outside Ethan's bedroom for a while, just holding each other, both of us listening to the beat of the other's heart.

"Screw Leon," I said at last. "He can stay in Greylark and rot for all I care."

It wasn't a solution and we both knew it. None of us were arrogant enough to assume that Leon had no way of getting free, and – I hoped – none of us were cruel enough to leave him to die of starvation instead of killing him quickly. Of course that just brought me back to the problem of who would actually kill him. It was easy to threaten to kill someone. It wasn't so easy to put a knife to the throat of a man who couldn't fight back, drive a blade into soft flesh and watch his life spill out.

But Luke didn't point any of this out, nor did he push me to address the problems. That was one of the reasons I loved him. He never pushed me, never tried to make me do something I didn't want to. He was just always there when I needed him, endlessly patient and endlessly loving.

I could have stayed in his arms forever, but I'd already indulged myself with a brief escape from the world. Reluctantly I disentangled myself from him and climbed to my feet.

"Come on," I said, holding out my hand to help him.

He stared up at me, beautiful as an angel, before taking my hand. As he rose to his feet, he pulled me against him, his hands at the small of my back, pressing my body to his. A shiver ran through me and for the first time in what felt like forever, it wasn't fear. I loved Luke. I would love him for the rest of my life so it wasn't as if we needed to rush to cross a certain line. But I wanted to. I wanted to give Luke every part of myself. I wanted him to give me everything in return.

Closing my eyes, I reminded myself that we still had all the time in the world. Once we'd dealt with Leon and Rachel, our lives would be ours again. And then maybe we could take that step.

"We need to get downstairs," I said. "Ava and Clara are still down there with your parents, and that's probably no fun for any of them."

Luke grimaced. "Good point."

We trooped downstairs and found the others in the kitchen. Apparently this was fast becoming the meeting spot. My eyes slid to Elena, noting the unusually stiff way she held herself, and the wary looks she aimed at Ava and Clara in turn. Samuel stood next to Elena. He was more relaxed than his wife, one hand shoved in his pocket, the other resting on Elena's hip, but his expression was sterner than usual, something dark flickering in his eyes. Luke's parents were grateful to Ava and Clara for helping us, but no one could blame them for being uneasy about having two hunters in the house, regardless of who they were.

Relief lit up Ava's face as I came into the kitchen. She'd positioned herself as close to the back door as she could without actually going outside, and though her arms hung loose at her sides, her hands were slightly curled, ready to form fists at any moment. Luke's parents weren't the only ones uneasy with the situation.

Clara on the other hand was lounging in a chair, cleaning her short nails with one of her knives. She might have said she still wasn't sure how she felt about vampires, but she didn't seem the least bit fussed about being in the home of a vampire clan.

Luke pushed two chairs together, guided me into one and took the other for himself. He sat there, silent and still, my hand clasped in his, as I recounted what had happened in the woods. When I reached the part about Rachel punching me, I heard him suck in a breath. If I looked at him, I knew his eyes would have turned the colour of thunderclouds, but I didn't look.

Partway through my story, Elena suddenly sat down. Her face was pale, unnaturally so, and I almost paused but she waved a hand at me to continue. Something was wrong, but I didn't ask her what until everyone in the room was brought up to speed.

Samuel put a hand on Elena's shoulder and she absently reached for it, an automatic gesture rather than something she'd consciously thought about.

"I've heard of this vampire, Rachel," she said, her voice so heavy that she clearly hadn't heard anything good.

Even Samuel looked surprised.

"She hates vampire hunters, loathes them with every cell in her body," Elena said.

"Madeleine didn't think too highly of them either," I pointed out.

Elena shook her head. "This is different. Madeleine believed vampires were at the top of the food chain, but Rachel is much worse. She believes that humans are merely slaves to vampires."

"How do you know about her?" Clara asked.

"When I was younger I heard rumours about the vampire who dedicated her life to wiping out hunters. That's what I always thought she was – a rumour, but..." Elena's voice trailed off.

"But why come after Kiara? She's not a hunter anymore," Luke said.

"That doesn't matter to Rachel," I told him. "All she cares about is that I used to be one. Apparently she doesn't believe in change." I kept my tone light-hearted to disguise how badly the fear on Elena's face had unsettled me. I'd never seen her look that scared.

Clara decisively flipped her knife in the air and caught it again. "Okay, so we find this Rachel and put a knife in her heart. Problem solved."

"If it was that easy, don't you think someone would have done it already?" said Elena. It wasn't quite a snap, but it was as close as I'd ever heard her come.

Clara, of course, didn't know her and wasn't fazed, but Luke and Samuel exchanged worried glances. Elena was the calm one, the motherly figure who comforted the rest of us and kept us from losing our cool. This wasn't like her.

"If the rumours about Rachel are to be believed then –" Elena hesitated. "She is exactly the kind of vampire that causes hunters to do what they do – a true shadow-stalking, throat-ripping nightmare."

And she had her sights set on me. Lucky me.

Luke's hand tightened around mine again.

"Rachel delights in tormenting hunters. She sees them as subverting the natural order of things, and she considers it her job to restore that order by killing them all," Elena went on.

"But she doesn't just kill them," I said, thinking of the dead rats. "She likes to play with them first."

Elena nodded. "The rumours all said she played games with her targets, but no one ever seemed to know specifics. If they had, I could have put the pieces together days ago."

"And I'm not just any vampire hunter," I said. I wasn't one at all, but Rachel didn't care about that, so it seemed a moot point to keep saying I wasn't. "I'm one who's living with vampires." I looked sideways at Luke. "In love with a vampire."

"Rachel would see that as an insult of the worst kind," Elena said.

"You never told me any of this," Samuel said.

She gave a shaky laugh. "All these rumours were flying around before we even met. I never put any stock in them. I thought Rachel was some sort of vampire bogeyman. Until just now I'd forgotten that I'd ever even heard of the woman."

Clara shrugged and tossed her knife again. The blade spun in the air before landing back in her practised hand. "I still don't see what the problem is. She's just one fang."

I shot her an annoyed look, not appreciating the derogatory term. "She might not just be one. Rachel told me that she'd heard of me through those rogues of Madeleine's, the ones who escaped."

Samuel's hand still rested on Elena's shoulder, but it curled into a fist. He was the one who'd let Madeleine into his clan and family. He was the one who'd put a lot of trust in that woman only to have her betray him. It hadn't been long enough since her death for the sting of that betrayal to have faded.

"It's not so hard to believe that they could have teamed up with Rachel and come back here to Dalwick," I said.

The previous consensus regarding the surviving rogues had been that they wouldn't return without someone to lead them. Well, Rachel could be that someone.

"It is possible," Samuel conceded, his face troubled. "And if that is the case, we have no idea how many we could be up against."

It wasn't like we'd had time to count them before they made their escape. And if Rachel did have recruitments, we could be in trouble. The last time we'd fought a gang of rogue vampires, we'd had Anna and Alice to back us up, as well as Noah's entire team. Our ranks had thinned a bit since then.

I glanced at Clara, still flipping her knife, and Ava, hovering by the door. I wanted to believe that if it came down to it, they'd fight alongside us, but I couldn't assume they would. Clara had really come through for us, but now that Riley was safe, she might consider her involvement with us done. Ava was trying to build bridges and I didn't want to believe she'd leave us to face this threat alone, but I'd been let down by her too often in the past to blindly put my faith in her. I wanted to trust them both, but I was still afraid to.

"I think Rachel's working alone," Clara said. "The things she's said to Kiara imply that is a personal vendetta. She wants to take Kiara out herself, not enlist a bunch of rogues to do it. Plus, we haven't seen a single scrap of evidence that she's working with anyone else."

"That doesn't mean she's not," I countered.

Clara looked at Elena. "All the rumours you heard about her when you were younger, any of them mention her recruiting other vamps to have her back?"

"Well, no, not that I heard," Elena admitted.

Clara spread her palms. "The one thing Rachel hasn't done so far is lie to us. She admitted that she killed that guy, Brian, she admitted that she was behind the rats, and she admitted that she's come here to kill Kiara. If she does have help, what's the point in lying and pretending she doesn't?"

I shrugged. "All I can say right now is that Rachel is incredibly strong, probably stronger than any vampire I've ever faced. Even if she doesn't have backup, she won't go down easily."

"She's an idiot if she thinks we'll just stand by and let her hurt you," said Luke fiercely.

The only thing that scared me more than the thought of Rachel coming after me was the thought of her cutting down the people I loved in order to get to me.

"The good thing is that we have time to work out a plan," I said. "She told me that she likes to play games with her prey."

Luke shifted angrily in his chair, a reaction, I assumed, to me referring to myself as prey.

"Why are you so sure we have time?" Ava asked. There was genuine concern on her face.

"Because Rachel's not done playing yet. She wants to torment me, to scare me, to intimidate me, and she knows she hasn't done that yet," I replied. Actually, she had, just a little, but I wasn't admitting that. "She'll carry on playing her games for now, which gives us a window of opportunity to try and track her down, see if she does have any friends or followers in Dalwick, and then work out how we're going to kill her."

Simple. If only.

Leaning my elbows on the table, I hung my head. Caleb and Madeleine were both dead, but their poisonous presence still hung over my life, like I was tangled up in their ghosts.

Luke abruptly stood up, helping me to my feet. "We can decide all that later. You need sleep."

I started to protest, then realised I was too tired. Luke guided me out of the kitchen before anyone could say another word.

Halfway up the stairs, I paused, one hand on the banister. "Wait."

"No arguments, Kiara. You're going to run yourself into the ground at this rate."

"I will get some sleep, I promise." I gazed into his eyes. "But first, there's something I want to show you."