The Hunted by Kristy Berridge Page B

for the rave.
    I switched the bedroom light off to make it seem like I had gone to sleep, and then climbed up onto my window sill, mounted the side of the newly replaced guttering, and climbed onto the roof. This was one of my favourite spots around the whole house. No one else was game enough to climb up onto the roof without a ladder, for fear of plummeting head first into the ground below. My self-healing ability robbed me entirely of any fear of falling, and as I’d already done it a million times before and had broken more bones than I could count, I was immune to the pain. Anyway, it was the one place in the entire house that I knew no one would follow me.
    I sat down on the corrugated sheeting, and dangled my legs over the side. I watched the happenings of the street and listened absentmindedly to the sounds of the night. The street was relatively quiet except for the usual traffic—a handful of cars that occasionally drove past or parked in nearby driveways. People were returning home from a hard day at work, a casual afternoon spent with their families, or from enjoying what was left of the weekend.
    I closed my eyes and focused on my other senses. I could still smell what was left of dinner resonating in the air around the house, and my nostrils wrinkled in disgust. Across the road I could smell the neighbours having a barbeque, cooking sausages and charcoal steak. The aroma was exceedingly appealing compared to what I’d just ingested.
    The smell of the raw meat they were yet to cook cut through the air. It appealed to my senses the most. The sweet stench of blood, tainted with salt and metallic undertones.
    I wondered if it tasted exactly how it smelt—would it be different when I became a vampire? Why could I smell blood so vividly but I could not scent people? It didn’t make any sense. People had individual aromas, I was sure of that. Yet I could not smell anything on anyone except whatever artificial smell attached itself to their skin, like perfume or aftershave.
    I sighed. There were so many questions about myself that were always going to go unanswered. Susan and George were reluctant to discuss my past and I had no one else to turn to for answers.
    I knew very little about my natural mother, except for her name, Elena , and even less about my father. I had no idea where I was born or how I had come to be the adopted daughter of a family of Protectors.
    My father had to be a vampire in order for me to be conceived, but Susan and George had sworn to me that they knew nothing of him. I still felt like they were keeping something from me. I had no choice but to believe them. I could do no research of my own into the truth of their words—my files were all located at the headquarters of the IMI in Bucharest, Romania. But even so, no one thought that requesting them for me was a priority. Susan always said that no good came from digging around in the past. Yet despite that fact, she had agreed to tell me everything before my eighteenth birthday when she and George deemed I was mature enough to handle the information. I just didn’t know if I could wait that long. What harm could really come from knowing more about myself? If I wanted answers then I was either going to have to fly to Romania to discover the truth, or hope someone finally slipped up.
    It would also stand to reason that if my father was a vampire, then there was a good chance that he was still out there. Didn’t I at least have a right to that information?
    I had been sitting on the roof for just over an hour, contemplating my life, when I felt the beginnings of pins and needles in my feet and bottom. I hadn’t changed positions in quite some time and was starting to feel it.
    I tried to stand, pulling myself upright and grabbing my sore legs. I hopped clumsily from foot to foot, trying to get some feeling back into my limbs while I tenderly massaged my backside. A few seconds later all feeling was regained.
    I sat back down again, rolled