Chapter 9: Hunt

Luke spent the rest of the day agonizing over the half-hour with Whitney. He wanted to call her to apologize, but he couldn't gather the courage. He wanted to go back in time and have any reaction other than the one he had to her advances. He wanted to scream at Abel in his head for making everything unimaginably worse.

Restless sleep took him deep into the night, and he woke up so many times that the boundary between conscious and unconsciousness blurred. He woke up to sunbeams streaming through his window, and anxiety gripped him as he remembered the plans he had to get breakfast with Whitney that morning.

It occurred to him then that she'd probably made those plans assuming that she would've slept over. He ran his hand through his hair, gripping it tightly at the roots, a sharp sigh puffing in front of him.

Luke looked at his phone, and he had a message from Whitney.

"Hey, let's do breakfast another time. I'll let you know when I'm free. Have a good day :)"

Luke buried his face in his pillow and groaned.

"Yeah, let me know. You have a good day too :)"

He tried going back to sleep again to prepare for work that night, but the most he managed was a nap that he woke from gasping for air. He couldn't remember the dream he was having, he never remembered his dreams, but the heavy feeling in his chest told him it wasn't a good one.

Luke spent the afternoon catatonic, and he got dressed and left the apartment without really thinking it through. He rushed away from the church before anyone could see him and ask why he hadn't been to service in weeks now—at least he had his job to blame, though he was sure he'd get guff for working at night from the elder members—and turned the corner towards downtown.

Everything was so different during the day, the area still busy but so quiet compared to walking home amongst the booming music and crowds of voices in the bars at night.

Luke stopped at a crosswalk, and he drew into himself as he realized it was the same crosswalk where he'd run into Abel before. He watched the stoplight turn green and then go back to red at least twice, his mind blank save for the image of Abel's face lighting up as he noticed Luke standing beside him at this same crosswalk.

Luke sighed and set off to cross the street, gritting his teeth.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he was relieved for a distraction for just one moment before he saw the name across the screen.

"Hello?" he answered anyway.

"Where are you? We need you for a hunt," Rob's voice said curtly from the other line.

It was the last thing Luke wanted to hear. "I'm downtown right now."

"Oh, you're not at service? What a shock," he said, dripping with sarcasm.

Luke shut his eyes, annoyed.

"We're going downtown anyway, so just wait there," Rob said, and didn't wait for a response before he hung up.

Luke rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and sought out a bench to sit on and wait for the members to pick him up. He grimaced as he looked down at his white sweatshirt and his light jeans, definitely not something he wanted to go vampire hunting in—not that he wanted to go at all.

He found no pleasure in the idea of killing vampires, which looked and acted so remarkably similar to humans that it always seemed like murder. He'd never successfully killed one, no matter how earnestly he'd tried when he was younger, and having that clean record was shameful for a longtime member of The Faith but fine with Luke.

The familiar van pulled up to the curb, and Luke got on trying not to make eye contact with anyone. He put on his seatbelt and felt the other three's eyes on him, but he didn't say anything.

"We're going ten minutes out. We got intel on another vampire living in an attic," John said from behind the steering wheel, his hair in a low ponytail over his coveralls he always wore to a hunt—Luke had always thought they were cartoonish, with a tacky lily of the valley patch ironed on to the front pocket, but he never said so.

Luke nodded wordlessly. He felt Rob fuming beside him, his broad, muscular shoulders taking up more room in the backseat than Luke did.

"Rob and John will go in first, and I'll be behind them, but we need you to watch the stairs," Dillon said from the front seat, turning around so that he could look at Luke, his curly brown hair falling over his eyes.

Luke gave another noncommittal nod, and he didn't mind the tension that he built in the car with his silence, because it meant that no one else spoke up the rest of the ride there.

They stopped in front of a strip of two-story buildings with businesses on the bottom floors and apartments above them. As soon as they parked, Luke's stomach started to get the uneasy sinking feeling that always accompanied him on vampire hunts.

John led them up the steps of a plain café that looked abandoned from the outside, its windows cloudy, its rickety tables and chairs and linoleum floors in bad shape. Still, an unassuming woman with dusty brown hair greeted John from behind a counter.

Rob shouldered past Luke to hear John and the café's owner more clearly, and Luke figured that it would irritate Rob more than anything if he showed no reaction at all, so he pretended like he didn't notice.

Next to Luke, Dillion slid wooden stakes, handmade by the elders of The Faith in bi-weekly meetings disguised as amiable potlucks, into loops on his toolbelt. He handed one over to Luke, who put it in his pocket, certain that he wouldn't use it.

From what he could hear, Luke gathered that it was a routine job, just a vampire who snuck into the owner's attic and went unnoticed for a few days until the sounds of footsteps and movement upstairs at night caught her attention. She feared the vampire taking her as a victim, or of them bringing a victim upstairs and leaving them to decay, or becoming a Feeder, falling under the curse of a vampire's hypnotism, the usual propaganda Luke always heard.

"We'll take care of it, ma'am," John said with a reassuring nod, and beckoned the other three to follow him.

They marched up the woman's stairs to the second-floor apartment, and Luke was more interested in the strange zebra motif throughout the apartment than he was finding any vampire.

She led them to the back corner of her old, shabby kitchen, where there was a steep, narrow attic staircase. Fear widened her eyes with every step closer, and she pointed to a flimsy door at the top of the stairs. "It's in there."