Love & War Book 1 in The Arcadia Falls Chronicles Read online

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  Even though we were on the brink of war with the vampires, I still had to go to school. Not that I minded school when it came to the learning stuff. It was the whole being alone part I had a problem with. I had always been kind of a loner anyway. Now that I had people I cared about, it was strange to be apart from them.

  Especially Drew.

  Drew and I were together pretty much all the time. We lived together and trained together, but to me, it wasn’t enough time. It was the strangest feeling. I couldn’t put my finger on it, because I really didn’t want to be that obsessed teenaged girl. Even a moment apart from him felt like a year.

  School sucked because of the dumb classes I didn’t need that made time drag. I’d never felt that way about school before. I’d always loved to learn anything. With everything that had happened recently—unless it pertained to vampire hunters, vampires, or any sort of supernatural being—I didn’t want anything to do with it.

  In my heart, I knew Drew was the reason I felt that way. I couldn’t help it. No one else I was close to went to school any longer. Drew had long since graduated; Alice was too old for high school; Oscar taught high school, and even Gavin and Christina had graduated while I was a prisoner in my father’s home, leaving me no one.

  The bell rang to signal the end of the day. I quickly gathered my books and hurried to my locker where I threw them in, not bothering with any homework I might have to do. I would get it done in homeroom in the morning.

  Outside, leaning on his old beat-up truck, his blond hair glinting in the sunlight, my boyfriend, Drew, talked to a group of seniors. He glanced up at the entrance to the school and saw me. He smiled and waved me over.

  "Come on, Chloe," he called.

  I smiled and hurried to the truck and hopped inside.

  Drew said goodbye to his friends and slipped behind the wheel. He leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek, which brought another smile to my face.

  "So," he asked, "what should we do today?"

  I was smart enough to realize he wasn't talking about something a typical teenaged couple might do, like grabbing a slice of pizza or heading to an arcade or mall. No, he was talking about training. I would have loved to skip out on training and go make out up at the falls, but he never missed our training sessions. I was currently being taught martial arts, because I sucked at hand-to-hand fighting. We would trade off learning martial arts, training with weapons, and learning to control my fire power.

  "I don’t feel like getting my butt kicked. Let’s do weapons," I muttered. I slid to the center of the bench seat instead of the far side by the door.

  He started the truck, and the old beater sputtered before it finally rumbled to life. I was surprised it didn’t backfire, too. "You’re just saying that because you’re good with weapons. That’s taking the easy way out."

  "It is not." I pouted. "I want to learn something new, like the sword. Alice is learning sword fighting, and that looks like it would be fun."

  "It’s not fun." Drew frowned. "It’s hard work, and Alice is learning it because she's fairly good at it already. Just like you’re gifted at marksmanship, she is gifted at handling a sword."

  "But I still want to learn it," I told him.

  He finally smiled. "If you’re sure you want to learn, then I guess we can work on that."

  "Yay."

  "But don’t think this gets you out of learning to fight."

  I crossed my arms. I knew it. You would think having extra vampire strength and speed would help my fighting skills. Well, not so much.

  While we drove to the gym, I watched the town pass. The New Year had just passed, and the Christmas decorations still dominated the houses, streets, and storefronts. Bright red bows and garlands of pine wrapped around almost every streetlamp, pictures of Santa and his elves were painted onto many windows, but the sparkling silver and gold decorations were always my favorite to look at. I liked shiny things.

  Smoke curled from the chimneys of most of the houses. The whole town smelled of smoke during the winter and fall months, and I loved it. It was a smell that reminded me of home, my home before all the craziness.

  We passed The Java Bean, and I saw a group of people outside, gathered around one of the tables, talking and laughing. I stared, seeing a dark-haired guy with his arm tossed casually over the shoulders of a blonde girl, Sarah, who I vaguely knew. He turned his head and met my gaze. My heart sank.

  It was Gavin, one person I would have never wanted to hurt for anything in the world, but who I had ended up hurting anyway.

  Drew pretended not to see his brother, Gavin, and kept his eyes on the road. The fight with Trevor, my father, on the road had not united Drew and Gavin, just like it hadn't united Christina and me. They were hunters. They fought alongside each other all the time, but that didn’t make them friends, much less make them feel like the brothers they were. Well, half-brothers, at least.

  I had once thought Gavin and I would be together, like… more than friends. We had dated, gone to a dance together, and even shared a first kiss together. It wasn't that I didn't like him. It was just that… well, Drew was different. There was something special about him. As it turned out, I chose to be with Drew, because he was the one who had come for me. He was the one who had risked his life, no matter the cost, to come for me.

  I tore my gaze from Gavin and his piercing, accusing green eyes. I wanted to shrink into the seat and disappear. He had done nothing except like me, and I liked him, too. Unfortunately, when things came down to it, I didn’t tell him right away that I had chosen Drew. I hadn't wanted to hurt him, but he ended up being hurt in the long run.

  By the looks of him getting cozy with blondie over there, it appeared, at the risk of sounding conceited, that maybe he was getting over me. I was truly glad he was busy with someone else, but I had to admit a tiny part of me had liked the fact he pined over me.

  The moment was gone. We had passed them completely and were nearing the gym. After parking the truck in the small dirt lot on the side of the building, we hopped out and entered the gym. The gym hadn’t started to fill up with the after-work crowd yet.

  "Let’s go warm up." Drew ran his fingers over my dark hair.

  I waved him off. "You go ahead and start. I need to put my workout clothes on."

  He shrugged and walked toward the mats where he could stretch. I hurried to the bathroom that had a couple sets of lockers, so it was technically a locker room. I changed into my black yoga pants and purple tank top, and then I pulled my long black hair into a ponytail so it would stay out of my face.

  I left my bag next to the bank of lockers and hurried back into the gym. I scanned the mats, looked for Drew, and spotted him in the corner of the gym beside one of the weapons walls. Alice was with him. She was dressed in workout clothes and wore an armored breastplate over her outfit. She held a long, thin sword with a jeweled hilt.

  Seeing Alice with her sword was strangely akin to how I felt about my gun and my bow: Those weapons had become an extension of me. I was proud to see her learning to fight. There were other things she still needed to learn, however. Lately, we had been discussing how to find out about her heritage. Sostrate had told us Alice was a Child of the Earth, a witch, but she hadn't known this because she didn’t know her family.

  We had tried to make her understand we needed to find her family. She refused, so we were left to search the libraries to try to find any information we could on witches, or the Wiccan spiritual path, to learn more about witches who were born witches and practiced earthen magic.

  On that note, there was more information than we could possibly go through in a lifetime on the subject.

  Drew showed Alice how to do a move. He was behind her, holding her hand with both of his and helping direct her sword. An unexpected wave of jealousy washed over me without warning.

  Ugh! No!

  I didn’t want to be jealous. I didn’t care what they were doing.

  Oh, for crying out lou
d, yes I did. I didn’t want him touching other girls like that. I started forward, when a hand stopped me from descending upon them.

  "Don’t," Oscar whispered. "It’s nothing."

  "I know that."

  "No, you don’t, or you wouldn’t have even tried. I saw the look on your face."

  Oscar removed his hand from my arm. I looked at him; his blond hair had gotten longer since he’d been with us, and he was also wearing workout clothes. Oscar really liked Alice. He had since we’d been back at Trevor’s house together. I knew Alice liked him, too, so I didn’t know why they didn’t just start seeing each other. So strange. Maybe it was weird, because we all lived together.

  I moaned softly. "I hate feeling this way."

  Oscar considered that for a moment. "You have to trust. Think of it this way: Of all the people you know, who is the person you trust most in this world, above all the others?"

  It was my turn to consider, but it took like a millisecond for me to answer. "Drew."

  "Well, there you go."

  He was right. I had no reason whatsoever to be jealous. Drew was my constant. No matter what happened, he was there. Most of the time, it was him saving my butt.

  I continued to watch Drew guide Alice through some moves. He stepped back and motioned her to try it by herself. She must have executed it perfectly because Drew smiled and spread his hands as if to tell her, ‘See, you did it.’

  Oscar nudged me forward. "Come on." We approached them.

  Drew caught sight of us coming toward them. "Oh, there you are. You still want to learn this, Chloe?"

  Actually, I didn’t any more. I had more than enough weapons to keep me occupied. "No, I’m good. I think I’m just going to go use the weights for a bit, and then we can practice kicks."

  "I’ll spot you." He nodded. He was probably happy I didn’t want to learn another new weapon any more.

  "I’ll stay with Alice," Oscar offered, "but we are using the wooden ones."

  Alice laughed and sheathed her blade. "What, are you afraid I might hurt you?"

  "Uh, yeah," Oscar said. He took two of the practice swords off the rack. They had real practice swords, too. They were swords with edges that weren’t sharp, but a bad slip and someone could still get hurt with them. Alice liked to practice with the live blade as much as she could, so she could get a feel for the weight and balance of her own weapon.

  We spent a few hours at the gym, while I mostly tried to kick Drew in the chest, and he deflected by throwing me to the ground. It sucked. I knew I needed to get better at hand-to-hand combat, or I was certainly going to die at the hands of a vampire.

  "Tomorrow, we're going hiking," Drew told me on the way home.

  "But tomorrow’s Saturday. I thought we were going to spend the day at the library."

  He shook his head. "Nope. Hiking instead."

  "Great," I told him in a grumpy voice.

  I cuddled up into his side while he drove us home.

  At home, Luke was in the kitchen preparing dinner. It looked like he was making some kind of salad and a chicken dish. We strolled into the kitchen, and Alice and Oscar were right behind us.

  Luke looked up and wrinkled his nose and pointed his giant spoon at us. "You all need to go take showers. Every single one of you. You stink! No one sits at my table who isn’t clean. Now go!"

  With mock moaning and groaning, we filed out of the room and up the stairs to bathe. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. We only had two bathrooms, so two of us had to wait for the other two to get out. We also had to be conscious of the length of the shower to save hot water for the next person.

  Apparently everyone was hungry, because showers didn’t take long. Alice wasn’t in the room when I came out of the bathroom, so I headed down the stairs and found everyone waiting for me at the table. All but Luke had wet hair and clean clothes on.

  I pulled out my chair, situated between Drew and Alice, and sat. "Sorry. You guys didn’t have to wait for me."

  Luke waved it off. "Of course, we were going to wait for you. Now, let’s eat."

  I dug into my chicken with fervor. I hadn’t realized I was so hungry. It must have been all the training I’d been doing lately and not eating much during the day.

  For a few minutes, there was nothing but the sound of scraping forks and chewing. Finally, Alice started the conversation. "Has there been any word from the board about a plan of action?"

  We all knew she was referring to the vampire war.

  Luke finished chewing, swallowed and said, "Not yet. They don’t appear to be very concerned about the warnings and insist on concentrating on the current missions."

  I sat back in my chair. "That’s ridiculous! We can’t just sit around and wait to be attacked. We need to be ready…. to prepare!"

  "They don’t believe us, do they?" Oscar asked quietly.

  Luke lowered his head and then looked away from our penetrating eyes. "No, they don’t."

  I was shocked and threw my fork down onto my plate. "But we all saw Sostrate. It isn’t possible that all of us could have hallucinated that. We would never make something like that up. What good would that do?"

  I could tell Luke felt bad, but I was mad. I didn’t understand how they could just blow us off like that.

  He shook his head. "I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do. We have brought it before the board, and they have dismissed it."

  "But we had a warning! We need to prepare!" I felt Drew’s hand on my leg.

  "If the board says no, there's probably nothing we can do to convince them," Drew told me softly.

  "That’s bull," I muttered in response.

  Luke finally met my eyes. "The board’s decision does not mean that we should not prepare. We must keep doing what we've been doing so far. You all are progressing wonderfully."

  He nodded at Alice and Oscar, and I could see that he was, indeed, happy with their training progress.

  "I fully intend to hatch a plan," I declared. "I am not going to wait to be attacked. We have to be ready, or even move first."

  "If we move first, then we are starting the war," Drew countered.

  "No." I didn’t know what else to say. He was right, but I didn’t want him to be.

  "Yes." He removed his hand from my knee, and I saw his green eyes sparkle while he stabbed a piece of lettuce. "It would be on us."

  I thought about that for a minute. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it was on us. Heck, my ancestor, the warrior angel, was sent to rid the world of vampires. That was our job, too. Our work as hunters would never be done as long as vampires plagued the earth, so we needed to get rid of all of them.

  I figured there was no better way to start than by taking out the Talon Building, where the vampires regularly met with each other, where large numbers of them congregated.

  Everyone else had moved on to conversation about the new vampire practice targets we had down at the range while I had been thinking. That was good. I needed some time to get my plan in order, especially if I was going to get anyone on board with me. I didn’t want to do it alone, but I would if I had to.