Child of the Hunt by Christopher Golden & Nancy Holder

Author:Christopher Golden & Nancy Holder [Golden, Christopher & Holder, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Vampires, Fantasy, Young Adult
ISBN: 9780671021351
Goodreads: 293564
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published: 1998-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

AS THE LAST BIT OF Sunlight began to Leak from the sky, Buffy had first begun to jog, and then to run through the neighborhoods of Sunnydale. Though Mrs. Cantwell had actually yelled at her once for doing it, she cut through backyards on her way home. The Cantwell poodle barked ineffectually from behind their sliding glass door, but Buffy didn’t even look back.

When she hit the pavement on Revello Drive, the streetlights had come on.

The sun was gone.

Buffy narrowed her eyes, trying to see her front door, but the pines her mother had loved so much when they bought the house blocked her view. Her legs hurt from the exertion, but Buffy began to sprint. Three houses away, she heard a scream and the sound of glass shattering. There came a loud crash.

“Mom!” Buffy yelled.

She cut across the lawn, bursting between two of the pine trees. The front door was splintered into pieces, one large chunk still hanging by a hinge.

Buffy scanned her yard, looked around the entire area, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. On guard, she stepped over the threshold into her house, and called her mother’s name again.

From the living room she heard sobbing.

The room was trashed. Not completely. A lot of the furniture would be saved. But there were several crates of things her mother had been unpacking for the gallery, and those were pretty much kindling. A pair of crystal lamps had gone over, and no amount of Krazy Glue was going to fix them.

“Mom?” Buffy asked, tenderly, crouching by her weeping mother and reaching out for her.

“I wish . . .” Joyce Summers croaked, then swallowed and spoke again, wiping her eyes and lifting her chin. “I wish you’d told me we had a guest. He scared the hell out of me.”

“Roland did this?” Buffy asked, horrified.

“No. It was the others. Not monsters this time, Buffy, just people. They said they were here to pick him up. And then all hell broke loose.” She looked at her again. “All you had to do was tell me, Buffy. Did he hide in the basement all day?”

“Um, the basement. Yes,” Buffy ventured. “He was . . . moving?”

“What?” Joyce stared at her. “Moving! Buffy, I’m not an idiot. He wasn’t hiding in our basement because he was moving.”

“No. I mean, was he moving?” Buffy knew she was losing precious seconds. She switched gears. “The people, Mom. Tell me about the people. Were they just regular people?”

“Buffy, I don’t understand.”

Her mother tried to regain her composure, but now she dropped her eyes and brought a hand to her forehead. Joyce had a small cut on her forehead, and as she brushed her dirty blond hair away from her face, the blood smeared just a bit. After all they’d talked about this week, this was the last thing her mother needed.

Buffy knew she had to persist. “The people. They came to get Roland, and he fought, and they took him anyway?”

“It happened so fast,” Joyce said.

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