Darkness Comes by A.C. Warneke Read Free Book Online

direction, she asked, “Why? What have you done that needs forgiving?”
    “There’s so much that I need to tell you, so much that you need to know, about you, about me; but I don’t know where to begin,” he lamented, busying himself with pulling the needles out of their arms and covering the puncture wounds with band aids. As good as she was feeling, her stomach was in knots over what her father was telling her. “I don’t know if you’ll understand.”
    “Tell me,” she whispered when he didn’t speak for uncomfortably long moments. Her stomach was clenching inside of her and she didn’t want to hear what her father had to tell her, not when it made him look so wrecked.
    “We’re not like other people, Mal,” he said softly, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped together between his legs. It was obvious that whatever he had to say was difficult. It was unfortunate that her brain was so muzzy, still trying to wrap itself around this new course Gus was traveling. What did he mean they weren’t like other people? Of course they weren’t; they had spent their lives fighting mythical monsters that weren’t actually myth.
    “Of course we’re not,” she concurred, nodding her head in assertion. “We continue to fight even as everyone else buys into the vampire lies.”
    “That’s not what I mean.” He shook his head in obvious frustration, his lips thinning and his nostrils flaring as he contemplated his next words.
    When he didn’t continue, with her thoughts crashing against brick walls of ignorance, Mal asked, “What do you mean, then?”
    “Do you remember the story I told you?” he asked, frowning. “About one of our ancestors escaping a village that had been destroyed by vamps almost four hundred and fifty years ago.”
    She nodded slowly, “I do.”
    Gus nodded his head slowly, ruefully. Laughing without humor, he scrubbed his hands through his short hair. She could see the torment in his face as he tried to explain, how difficult it was for him to find the words. “In order for you to understand, you must know that it was my father – your grandfather – who was the man who escaped that village. With me when I was but an infant.”
    Malorie stared at her father for a long moment, confusion on her face over that fantastical bombshell her father just dropped. “What?”
    “The Hunters have very long lives,” Gus said understatedly. “Unusually long lives.”
    Melanie’s mouth dropped open and she would have slumped in her bed if she wasn’t already slumped about as far as she could slump. “You’re four hundred and fifty years old?”
    “Something like that,” he nodded his head, his eyes pleading with hers. Sucking in a breath, making a soft hissing sound, he said, “But my age doesn’t matter. The man who bit you is… I fear it was an Aradian, and they are the very thing my father wished to escape from.”
    “An…an Aradian?” She was even more confused and overwhelmed with what her father was telling her. She wasn’t sure where to start examining the information, what it meant for her and Toby. She had never even heard of these Aradians before but if they were so dangerous, why had her father never told her about them? “What the fuck is that?”
    “They are a race of very powerful… beings descended from gods or aliens or something that need our kind,” Gus answered, not very helpfully. Gods or aliens? And Malorie thought the existence of vampires was fucked up. “They use our kind and discard us at whim and what you need to know is that you, Toby and I are most likely the last of our kind and the Aradians would be very eager to learn of our existence; of your existence.”
    “Why?” she asked in breathless anticipation. “What are we?”
    He laughed bitterly, his eyes shimmering with frustration and anger. “I don’t know; my father never explained that; he only told me to keep away from Aradians and so I have; for over four hundred and fifty years I have