I felt the wave of panic rise up inside me. My hands started to shake. I dropped the letter, which floated its way to the floor.

Crap! What the hell was I going to do?

The cabin started to spin around and my eyesight began to cloud over. I grabbed the counter and took deep breaths until the shaking stopped and my eyesight went back to normal. The last thing I needed right now was to lose control and transform.

Yeah, I needed that like a silver bullet to the head...

Looking around, I saw the bottle of brandy still sitting on the side. I grabbed the bottle, opened it and took a long sip.

Oh, fuck me that's good...

The burn of the alcohol helped to focus my mind somewhat. Looking around, there was one of Kian's blood bottles by the fridge. Putting the brandy down, I picked up the bottle, it was half empty. Well, at least it wasn't Kian's blood on the letter. That was something. Maybe he just couldn't find a pen... although we always kept a few in the draw.

I opened the drawer where all our random junk tended to end up; there were odd batteries, phone chargers, two pairs of 3-D glasses and... at least five pens.

What the hell Kian? There had to be an explanation for this. I really hoped that there was. Nothing about this made any damn sense, and there was a horrible nagging feeling in the back of my mind telling me that Kian was in danger. That feeling just wouldn't go away.

Damn it! I had nothing to go on and nobody to ask for help... actually, that last part wasn't true. I grabbed up the letter and ran over to the small log burner.

Of course, there was somebody who would understand. Victoria. She probably had a spell or two up her multi-coloured sleeves to be able to track Kian down... or whoever had taken him.

I grabbed up a red sachet from a small box next to the log burner, opened it and threw the contents into the fireplace. There were no flames, but, I prayed that the magic would still work. I needed it to. I needed to know that I wasn't going crazy.

Come on, Vic... Come on...

A few minutes passed. Nothing. Crap. Maybe the fire had to be going for the magic to work?

I headed back to the kitchen, there had to be some matches in the draw. Pulling out the batteries, pens... we had to have matches!

"Alec? Kian?"

I dropped everything and ran over to the log burner where a faint image of Victoria's face was just visible.

"Vic?! Thank God it's really you..."

"Alec? What's up? The connection is really bad. Did you not light a fire before you called?" Victoria asked, frowning at me.

"That's not important." I said hurriedly, kneeling in front of Victoria's floating face "Kian's gone and I think somebody took him."

"Are you sure?"

"He left me a note written in blood, Victoria. I'm pretty damn sure he wouldn't do that under normal circumstances." I replied, "Everything about this makes no sense."

Victoria said nothing for a moment. She is never usually this quiet. She frowned even more than before and then jumped towards me.

Knowing what was going to happen I just managed to jump out of the way as Victoria lept from the log burner. Her bright pink leggings and yellow t-shirt were covered in soot, but she didn't seem that bothered. She marched over to me and grabbed the letter from my hand and began to read it, her bright green eyes darting across the page.

"Well?" I asked after a minute or two "What do you think? Am I just being crazy?"

Victoria looked up from the letter, her brow still furrowed in concentration.

"No, your not." She eventually replied "But, there's not much to go on here. If someone, or something, came and took Kian then he went without a fight, and that's not like him at all. I think your right to say he was taken, I'm just not sure how they did it."

I felt somewhat relieved, although, I would take having Kian back over knowing that he had been kidnapped any day of the week. It just didn't feel right that he wasn't here...

Fuck it, now I'm getting emotional.

"We'll find him, Alec, we just need a plan of action. Retrace his steps." Victoria said "I really wish that Harry was up to travelling. We could use all the help we can get."

"Well, all we have is us and that letter." I said, "It doesn't exactly give us a lot to go on."

"No." Victoria agreed "It doesn't, but it's all we have, and if your right then Kian needs our help. I might be able to use the letter to rig up a tracking spell, but I'm not sure it'll be enough to get us a location. Sorry, I'm not being much help."

"The fact that you're here at all is enough." I replied, "And, anything we can do to try and find him has to be better than nothing."

I just hoped that whatever we did, it would be enough to find him. If it wasn't and we were too late, well, that just didn't bear thinking about.

What we needed was a way to be able to follow Kian's steps, his scent. What we really needed right now was a bloodhound, one able to follow the supernatural. What we really needed was a vampire.

"Vic, I think I might have an idea of how we can track Kian, but I'm not sure you're going to like it."

"Well, let's hear it anyway."

I took a deep breath, to be honest, I wasn't overly thrilled with my idea, but it wasn't like we had a lot of options to choose from. We needed a vampire and apart from Kian, I knew of only one other vampire who might just agree to help us - Will Jackson.