Chapter 397
VOLUME 7: GONE GUARDIAN
Most people probably have a pretty good idea how their life is going to go. At sixteen, there may be more than one path ahead, several options to choose from, but most kids my age are thinking about finishing high school and then going on to college or a trade school, getting a job, getting married, living the life. Some more ambitious people might be thinking about making it big in one industry or another. I have friends at Shenandoah High who still dream of being rock stars. That’s cool—I wish them well. But chances are, they will eventually succumb to the reality of a 9:00 to 5:00 job where the most exciting day of the week is Taco Tuesday. It’s not a bad way to live, mind you. It’s predictable—unless fate has some messed up screwball to throw you and something tragic happens. That will probably never be the case for most people.
It seems like it’s a daily occurrence for me.
I know, I know. Whiney Teenage Girl, Party of One. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but when a Vampire Queen wants you dead, your parents want to lock you in your room, and you don’t know from one day to the next if someone you love is gonna get killed in the line of duty, life is a little more interesting than deciding where we’re going to hang out after school or whether or not the new boy was staring at you in Chemistry class.
Things actually died down a little bit on the Vampire front after we took out all the major cells that night in April. That was the night I had to take things into my own hands at the amusement park and literally stood Elliott up with my new levitational powers so he could battle Sam, the same Hunter who had killed him the year before, now in Vampire form.
I thought maybe hearing about my ability to catch and drop bullets before they could hurt me or anyone else would make my parents a little more comfortable, but relaying that episode to them had almost given my mother a heart attack.
Anywho... other than a few Vampires we’d missed, and a few Compliants suddenly turned Noncompliant after we slew their brethren, for the most part, there wasn’t much going on. This was great for ending the school year on a high note and having a chance to catch up with my friends, but it left me restless. I knew it wasn’t over, not by a long shot, especially when Holland disappeared off of my radar sometime in June.
That’s right, the Vampire Queen was MIA.
It took me a few days to tell my sister I couldn’t see her anymore. I felt like that, “You had one job!” meme was coming to life. I mean, basically all I had to do was make sure I knew what “her highness” was up to, and then one day, I reached out to her, and she was gone. I couldn’t find Holland, Hines, the demon baby—none of them.
I kept searching for days, trying to figure out what was going on. I reached out to every other Vampire I could find to see if maybe I could read her location in their minds, but no one seemed to know anything. Holland wasn’t communicating with her own people anymore either, which was good for us because it meant it was easier to kill Vampires, and we didn’t have to worry about shapeshifting, etc. But eventually, I had to tell Cadence that Holland was gone from my mind.
My sister sent a team in to the last known location, an old castle in Hungary, to see if they were still there but just masked. Unfortunately, there was no sign of Holland there and not a clue as to where she might’ve gone. It was more than a little unsettling not to have any idea where she was, but the general consensus among the team members was that she was using all of her power to hide herself and those closest to her, which meant she couldn’t be up to too much trouble.
But we also knew she hadn’t just rolled over and died, either. There was no way in the world she would just give up. Holland had to be planning something, and when she reappeared, I had a feeling it would be a fight to the death. I remembered catching a few words in Hines’s head about something happening in the late summer, and while he was doing his best to keep it from me, the words “passage” and “Guardians” had come through loud and clear every time he thought about whatever it was on the horizon. So I did my best to snoop around in other Vampires’ heads to see if any of them had any idea what it might be that Hines was planning on pulling off, but no one seemed to have any sort of useful information whatsoever.
And since June wasn’t late summer, I did my best to keep it in mind but focus on other things, like the fact that my best friend, Lucy, was undergoing her Transformation process, and I needed to be there for her as much as I could.
The day she’d undergone the procedure, a day after she’d turned seventeen, Lucy’s mom and my other friend, Emma, had come up to visit. It was nice seeing them, especially Emma because FaceTime just isn’t the same as a face-to-face conversation. Lucy’s mom, Annie, looked like she was still struggling with her husband’s death. And who could blame her? But she spent time with my mom, which was good for both of them. Mom needed to talk to a human for a little while, especially one her own age.
Lucy’s recruiting class was the smallest in ages because there didn’t seem a need to keep up with the enlisting after we’d basically annihilated the majority of bad Vampires and even taken out some of the good ones along the way. Crime was up because of that last decision Aaron had approved before Holland started messing with his mind. We’d been killing off a lot of Compliant Vampires, too, which left a lot of bad guys on the street. Now, the Vampires who were still around seemed to be lashing out, no longer caring about who was an Innocent and who wasn’t, so for that reason, we’d take anyone who wanted to Transform, even if they didn’t end up combatting many Vampires. It was just safer that way—make as many people less vulnerable as possible.
