Cool evening air slapped against my face as I sprinted down the road, bringing with it the smell of freshly cut grass. Someone must have mowed their lawn that afternoon. I closed my eyes and breathed it in.

Life was good.

A month had passed since I'd left behind my old vampire hunting team - and my parents - and though I'd all but dropped the brutal training regime my father, Noah, had put me through on a near-daily basis, I wasn't giving up running. That was the one thing he'd made us do that I actually enjoyed.

My running shoes slapped the concrete pavement as I turned the corner, and sudden joy unfurled inside me as I thought of getting home to Luke, the vampire who'd completely changed my life, who'd swooped into my grey world and turned everything to light. Ironic really, considering he couldn't go out during the daytime.

I turned another corner and the Waffle House, a recently-built American-style diner, materialised through the gathering dusk. The neon lights atop the roof were already switched on, shining brighter than the streetlamps intermittently lining the streets. Dalwick was a small, rural town, and this was the first time we'd had anything like the Waffle House here. It felt like the town itself was getting a new start.

As I jogged past the diner, I reminded myself to stop by some time and check out its closing times. If it stayed open during the evening, Luke and I might be able to arrange some dates there. It wasn't the most obviously romantic setting, but there weren't many places in Dalwick a girl could take her vampire boyfriend.

Thinking of him brought another smile to my lips, and I put on an extra burst of speed. A couple of months ago, if someone had told me I'd look forward to going home, I'd have thought they were crazy. That was before I had people I really cared about, before I'd found a real family. Before I'd found Luke.

Now there was nowhere I'd rather be.

I was maybe ten minutes from home when I skidded to an abrupt halt. Houses lined the street in neat rows on either side of me, their small front lawns speckled with clusters of shrubs. And just ahead of me to the right, a pair of feet were sticking out from beneath one of those shrubs.

Unease slithered through me. It was possible that the feet belonged to someone who'd got too drunk at one of the nearby pubs and hadn't quite made it to their front door, but my instincts told me otherwise. And I trusted my instincts.

I cast a look around me but the street was empty. It wasn't late, but with autumn creeping in, it was already dark and chilly enough that everyone's curtains were drawn. I was the only one out here.

I approached the feet. "Hey," I said. "You okay?" I wanted the figure to answer. I wanted them to be that clumsy drunk who'd tripped over their own feet and hadn't been able to get back up. I wanted to ignore the feeling of unease tightening my chest.

The overgrown shrubbery spilling across the lawn was like a leafy shroud covering the figure. I eyed the house at the end of the front garden, but the windows were all dark - no one was home. Unless the homeowner was lying under a bush at my feet.

I crouched down and pushed away the foliage, revealing a man in his mid-forties, his bearded face twisted in a grimace of pain and fear, blood soaking the front of his shirt like a ghastly bib. Someone else in my situation might have panicked, but he was hardly the first dead body I'd seen. The clinical detachment I'd learned as a vampire hunter slid back into my brain, and my eyes narrowed, focusing on the blood soaking the man's collar. Carefully, I eased his collar to one side so I could get a look at his neck. Twin puncture marks glared out from his bloodied throat, ugly ragged holes that his life had drained out of.

I felt cold all over, icy needles pricking my skin. This was a vampire kill. I touched his hand and found it was still warm. The poor man wasn't long dead which meant the vampire could still be in the vicinity.

Footsteps whispered across the lawn behind me. I started to whip around, but I wasn't fast enough. A blurred shape slammed into me. I hit the ground, catching a brief glimpse of a face snarling above me. A fist came at my face and my forearm shot up to deflect it. I slammed my knee into the vampire's side. It made an oofing noise and toppled to one side, away from me. Springing to my feet, I kicked it in the stomach and it curled into itself with a little cry. My hand automatically went to my hip, reaching for a knife. I didn't hunt vampires any more, but I'd been trained to for sixteen years and I couldn't just turn off that kind of indoctrination. But I didn't have a knife, just my feet and fists.

The vampire rolled away from me and clambered to its feet. I could see now it was a man, tall and lanky, with brownish-blond hair that seemed to sit on top of his thin face like someone had dropped it from a height. I frowned. There was something oddly familiar about him, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

He charged at me, swinging his fists. I ducked under his arms and pummelled his gut before sidestepping and kicking the back of his leg. He tried to crawl away from me, but I grabbed him by the back of the neck and hurled him onto his back. I brought my foot down onto his throat, pressing down just hard enough that he knew I meant business. Crushing a vampire's windpipe wouldn't kill him, but it would hurt like hell.

He glared up me, hatred twisting his face. "Go ahead, you vampire bitch. Kill me," he spat.

"Wait, what?" I frowned, easing some of the pressure on his neck.

"I'm not afraid of you." He tried to scrabble away from me as he said it, which rather ruined his declaration.

I reapplied pressure to his throat and he froze, his Adam's apple bobbing against my foot. "I'm not a vampire," I told him.

A sneer pulled at his lips. "Of course you'd say that. You're trying to protect yourself."

"From what?" I spread my arms. "Looks to me like you're the one on the ground. If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead."

He pressed his lips together, his breath huffing through his nose. His gaze flicked to the dead man, lying a foot or so away from us.

"Wait, you thought I did that?" I shook my head in disbelief. He wasn't a vampire, he was a vampire hunter. Just when I thought I was rid of that life, it sneaked back up on me.

The hunter continued to glare at me. Bending over him, I bared my teeth, lifting my upper lip so he got a good look. "See, no fangs. Are you happy?"

The anger finally drained from his face, leaving traces of confusion. "I thought you were a vampire," he muttered.

"I noticed." I didn't add that I'd thought the same about him.

I stepped away from him, giving him space to climb to his feet. He did so slowly, wrapping his thin arms around himself and putting another foot of space between us. While he sized me up, I cast a flurry of quick glances around the neighbourhood, checking for twitching curtains or any other signs that someone was watching. Luckily there was nothing. The fight had been brief and quiet, exactly how I'd been trained - to sneak up in the night, kill the vampires, and then disappear before ordinary people knew something had happened.

"If you're not a vampire, who are you?" the man asked.

"I could ask you the same thing."

"I asked first," he snapped.

I folded my arms and simply stared at him. A dead body lay not more than three feet away, but the lanky guy in front of me wasn't responsible. I didn't think I had much to fear from him, not after his lukewarm performance on the fighting front. But he was still a hunter and I wanted to know what he was doing in Dalwick.

The man frowned, his eyes raking over me. For some reason his stare sent a chill down my spine, that flicker of familiarity that I still couldn't place. "You're a hunter," he guessed, and some of the tension went out of his stance.

"No, I'm not."

The frown returned to his face. "It's okay, you don't have to lie to me. I'm a hunter too."

I opened my mouth to deny it again, but something stopped me. I didn't know this man. I didn't know what he was doing here. But something about him had my hackles raised and my nerves on edge, and I didn't want him knowing anything more about me until I knew something about him.

The man studied me again and sudden clarity brightened his eyes. "Wait, you must be Kiara."

I stiffened, suspicion a hot flare in my brain.

The man made a sudden move towards me and I stepped back. I might have beaten him in a fight, but I didn't trust him one inch and I wasn't letting him any closer until I knew what was going on.

The man held out his hand as if he expected me to shake it. I stared at him, keeping my own arms folded. After an awkward moment, he let his hand drop. "Didn't...didn't your dad tell you about me?"

Noah? What did he have to do with anything? My father had cut all ties with me when he realised I'd fallen in love with a vampire. In the month since I'd left the team and moved in with Luke's family, I'd hadn't seen so much as a hair on Noah's head. That was how we both wanted it. So why did this man think otherwise?

The lanky man was still watching me. "I'm Leon," he said when I didn't react.

I racked my brains but came up blank. I'd never met the man, never even heard of him, but something about him was eerily familiar. I didn't like it.

Leon stuck his hands in his pockets, suddenly looking more like a petulant teenager than the thirty-something man he was. "I thought he would have told you."

"Told me what?" I didn't point out that Noah and I were currently estranged, and neither of us had any plans to change that.

"My father was murdered a few weeks ago," Leon said. "I came to Dalwick to avenge his death."

Something horrible was curdling in my stomach, a dreadful premonition. I wasn't going to like whatever Leon was about to tell me.

"Who's your father?" I asked.

And Leon replied, "His name was Caleb."