Jack Cook stumbled through the front door, careful not to wake his parents, who probably wouldn’t be up for another hour or two, and headed for his bedroom. He was exhausted, but thoughts of what had transpired that night flooded his mind.It was quite evident as he carried Drew’s body into the emergency room that there was nothing the doctors could do for her. When the hospital staff began asking questions about what had happened, Jack didn’t know exactly how to respond, nor did any of the rest of Drew's friends. Luckily, their good friend Elliott showed up shortly after the

“Cadence, darling, do you know what the word clandestine means?” Grandma Janette asked.Nodding her head, Cadence said, “Yes, it means secret.”“That’s right,” Janette concurred. “What about the word ternion?”

Cadence gasped. Her entire reality was being tipped on its head. “How is that possible? If you were a Hunter and he was the Guardian Leader, how could that have possibly happened?”Cadence could tell by Janette’s expression that she really wished to say no more. A glance at Jamie and Eliza showed nothing but concern for her grandmother.Janette had tears in her eyes, and sh

There is a small threshold of consciousness, somewhere between waking and dreaming, when one is not quite cognizant of all the waking world holds, nor has one quite lost the grip on those fleeting fragments of dreams that linger. For Cadence, this was the most dangerous and feared state of mind because she knew, even before she fluttered off to sleep that, upon waking, for just a brief synapse, she would, in fact, forget that Drew was gone. It was in that moment, just before fully rejoining the wakened world that her mind would momentarily allow her to believe that all was as it should be, and then, as the memories rushed in, filling the vacant tidepool of her conscious mind, so too would the realization that something was amiss, an occurrence had transpired. Just as the pounding waves crush and carve the

Aaron turned back to face her but seemed to purposely avoid looking directly into her eyes. Maybe he had noticed how anxious she became whenever she looked him in the eye, and this was one of his tactics to keep her calm. Staring at a spot on the wall a few feet away from her, he said, “Well, Holland has your card.” He laid it out for her in black and white. “She holds you personally responsible for Carter’s death—her mate of over a thousand years—and she wants to destroy you and your family.”He paused for a moment, giving the weight of his statement