Chapter 2: Going Home

The plane ride from Paris to Kansas City was excruciatingly long for Cadence Findley, and even though she attempted to rest, she could not keep her mind off of Jack. Despite the fact that she had been up most of the night and engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an ancient, evil Vampire, the weariness of her body was not enough to keep thoughts of how her friend back home was doing from invading her mind.

She glanced down at her iPhone for about the thirtieth time, wishing she had taken a moment to check her messages before the private Gulfstream G5 had taken off. While it might be possible for her to dial into her voicemail now and see what her friend Taylor had been attempting to tell her in those seven messages she had left before Cadence departed from Europe, she was not exactly sure she wanted to find out. If Jack's illness had finally overcome him, and he had passed on, did she really want to learn this information while she was over the Atlantic Ocean? She resolved to wait until they reached Kansas City to listen to Taylor's messages. After all, there would be nothing she could do to help or comfort anyone from her present position. Yet, every few minutes, she glanced back at her phone, not sure if her decision was the correct one or not.

The rest of the members of her team were sleeping for the most part, even the majority of the Guardians, who didn't necessarily need as much rest as the Hunters. They had flown to Paris just a few days before in pursuit of Holland, a Vampire queen who had sworn vengeance upon Cadence for killing her lover, Carter, only a few weeks ago. Though not a lot of time had passed on the calendar since the incident in late November, as far as Cadence was concerned, the events since then had changed her life so dramatically, her existence prior to the Eidolon Festival the night before Thanksgiving seemed ages ago. That night, her life had changed forever, and she felt like only a fragment of the person she had been for the nineteen years leading up to that evening.

Thinking about the festival made her remember her dear friend, Drew. She had met Drew in high school where they were on the cheerleading squad together. When the attractive, petite blond had started dating a member of Cadence's close circle of friends, Kash, Drew had made her way into their group. Even though the couple had split quite some time ago, the girls had stayed close; Drew had remained part of Cadence's intimate group of friends. When everyone else went off to college that fall, Drew had been left behind. She was almost halfway through her senior year of high school when she found the flyer mentioning the Eidolon Festival and had begged her friends to go. Despite the fact that the other girls in the group, Taylor and Sydney, had been frightened, and Cadence warned it was not a good idea, Drew was able to convince her friends to accompany her. They hadn't been there very long when Carter almost literally swept Drew off of her feet and whisked her away, deep into the forest. Cadence, Kash, and Jack had followed but lost track of them long enough for Carter to make his move. By the time Cadence had discovered their location, Drew was dead, and it was obvious that Carter was not what he had appeared to be. He was a Vampire.

Cadence did not have any idea what she was capable of up until the moment she discovered Carter in the woods, still clutching Drew's body, blood flowing freely from the bite mark in her neck. In that instance, instinct had taken over, and Cadence had unleashed the Hunter coding in her DNA, easily decapitating Carter with her bare hands. Through the help of the Guardians, a group Cadence didn't even know existed prior to that night, she and the rest of her friends were able to escape the furious clutches of Holland and the rest of her clan. Since that time, Cadence had gone through the Transformation process, completely activating the coding in her DNA that changed her into a powerful Vampire Hunter. She was now part of an elite team of Vampire Hunters and Guardians, working to locate and annihilate Rogue Vampires, the dangerous creatures who preyed on innocent humans.

Cadence glanced around to see if anyone else was awake. Across the aisle, she could see that Eliza was not sleeping and appeared to be playing a game on her iPhone. She was a Guardian, assigned the task of keeping Hunters safe while they tracked down and destroyed Rogue Vampires. Next to her, Jamie, the Healer of the group, seemed to be sound asleep. He had been called upon to use his power to heal two of his teammates during the confrontation with the Vampires, and it had drained him to the point of exhaustion. He had been in the process of undoing the damage caused by an unexpected bullet that had struck their Guardian Leader, Aaron, after the battle was over when Jamie's powers had been completely drained, and he had collapsed on the floor. Now, the color was beginning to return to his face, and Cadence was relieved to see that it appeared that Jamie would make a full recovery by the time the airplane touched down in Kansas City, the location of their training facility.

It was all Cadence could do to keep from glancing toward the back of the plane where Aaron was also sleeping. As much as she wanted to check to see if he was feeling better, she knew their complicated relationship must take a backseat to the situation with ex-boyfriend, Jack. Contemplating whether or not Aaron actually had feelings for her or not, paired with the idea that Jack may not have recovered from his illness, left Cadence with a queasy feeling in her stomach, and she determined it would be best not to think of Aaron at all for a while, if she could help it. She wished she could also push thoughts of Jack out of her mind until she was in a better position to ascertain his situation, but she knew it would be impossible not to think of him. Not when she was so overcome with concern about whether or not he was still alive.