A/N: THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR REVIEWS! YOU ALL ROCK! Like, SERIOUSLY rock!

Now, this is a somewhat good chapter. I had some difficulty and alot of it feels forced, but just let me know! :) THANK YOU AGAIN!

Chapter 8

All eyes bore into Kale. The air was tense with energy, all of it bad. I looked around. People had anger, fear, and above all hatred in their eyes. I had none of these. I was just in complete shock. But none of this affected Kale. He stared at the door, waiting for the inevitable.

As if on queue there was a loud clicking sound as the lock was being turned. Everyone's eyes slowly shifted in terror at the portal into the black box where uncertainty awaited. My heart fluttered in fear and I found myself clinging onto Kale. For a moment everything hung in slow motion, as if fate was dangling the fact that something bad was going to happen in our faces.

The door opened slowly and there stood none other but Henry, flanked by George, Richard, and Michal. His eyes were cold and heartless and there was a sudden harshness about his features. The aura that seemed to seethe off of him was of malice. He was dangerous, sadistic, and above all …evil. He had pulled a cover over my eyes and shown me a false version of what he wanted me to see. But here before me I realized was the true Henry, the vampire and cold blooded killer who was willing to murder a group of people all for a game.

He sneered at us in a cruel laugh and said "Get him."

The three vampires that winged Henry walked into the room. No one dared move or make a sound as they walked towards us.

When they reached him Kale didn't even protest. He gave me a look. One I think he believed would be our last. No words, just a simple understanding. My eyes pleaded with him, but he gently sat me on the ground just the same. He stood up and Richard and Michal's hands wrapped tightly around his arms and started pulling him away.

For a moment it was as if I couldn't believe what was going on. I couldn't move or think. Then everything sped up.

"Kale!" I yelled jumping to my feet.

He looked back at me with a look of fear in his eyes. I could see it. He was being strong but I knew inside he was frightened of what was coming.

"Ah yes," Henry said amusedly. "Take her as well, I might need a snack later," he glared at me venomously.

Oh God! I had time to think before I felt the cold death hands of George on my arms. Without even thinking about it I tried thrashing about but there was no use. His grip was stronger than any humans and could not be forced apart.

"What about us!" I heard a voice from behind.

There stood the scrawny business man with the receding hairline. He looked at Henry pleadingly. Hope and fear mingled in his eyes.

"You said if you got him," he stammered. "You'd let us go."

The vampire seemed to consider this for a moment as we were marched out the door. Waiting in the hall was Hugh leaning against the wall with a big grin on his face. I looked back through the door in fear and horror. Where was Anna! I left her alone!

Henry looked at Hugh who finally came into the view of those still in the room. There was an understanding as their eyes met and then Henry quickly looked back at the waiting faces of those innocent people who had unknowingly gotten on a train.

"Kill them," he said sharply with a slight hint of joy. "Kill all of them."

From inside I heard the sudden burst of screaming protests and cries for help. Henry just turned his back on their deaf cries with a cold heart and walked out of the room, closing the door, and leaving Hugh alone to have fun.

"Anna!" I yelled. As hard as I could I fought against my captor, struggling for any amount of give that I could get free of his hands. I could feel my mind going crazy as I thought of her in that room. "Anna!"

I broke one arm free and reached out as quickly as I could and grabbed onto Henry's shirt. Pulling him to me I pleaded "Please, she's only a little girl! She didn't do anything wrong! Please!"

He just looked at me with emotionless eyes. "You should have thought about that earlier."

"You bastard! " I yelled glaring at him in complete disgust. He didn't pay any attention to my outburst or give me a second thought. I had failed. Tears welled up in my eyes. Anna, I'm sorry! I screamed at myself.

That was the moment I gave up. I let my head fall, facing the floor and allowed George to lead me through the house to where I soon realized was the basement. Kale was walking alongside me but I made no attempt to even look at him let alone give him any sign of 

communication. I was about to die, and I didn't think I could handle looking at him when I was so weak.

Downstairs in the parlor the other vampires all sat around calmly. They watched our entry with great care as if it was some kind of show to them. How I wanted to yell, scream, and kick at them for not even having the heart to care about human life.

"Where is Valo?" I heard Henry ask the others.

"He went up to check on Hugh I believe," came Regan's knowledgeable voice.

"Ah, well we will just have to wait for them," Henry said in an upbeat cheerful manner.

I looked at Cordilia and Regan. Both were sitting comfortably and watching the ongoing action as if a spectator to some film or game. Cordilia looked like she was waiting for something big to happen, and Regan just looked thoughtful. Elizabeth, however, wouldn't look at me. Good, I thought. At least someone feels bad around here.

I awaited the long deafening pause that I was sure was coming but to my great surprise Kale spoke up in a determined and confident voice that surprised even the other vampires.

"Let her go Henry," he said forcefully. "You want me, you got me, now let her go."

Henry looked at him as if Kale had just said the most shocking, amusing thing of the century before outright laughing.

"Are you serious?" he laughed. "You know as well as I do she has as much to do with all this as you, don't try and treat me like some ignorant fool."

"What?" I asked jumping into the conversation in shock. "What do you mean I have as much to do with all this as him?" I shoot at him. "I didn't know anything about vampires or him either before getting on that damn train," I yelled. "How could I have possibly had anything to do with this?"

Henry shook his head in mock annoyance, but underneath I saw a smirk on his lips and a gleam in his eyes. Kale kept his gaze on the vampire the whole time not even looking at me when I spoke.

"Let me ask you something Marie darling," he said coming over to me. He stood up against me, pressing up to me and glaring at me as if I where a mouse and he the cat. "What do you know about why we're here tonight?"

"Get away from me you disgusting beast," I snarled under my breath. He just laughed and took a step back.

"Come on, tell me what you know," he smirked

I thought for a moment. What was it he was trying to prove? Was there something I should have known? Or was it something I did know but might have seemed insignificant at the moment, something I overlooked? The truth of the matter was I didn't know anything. I knew as much as anyone else on that train, that we were here because they wanted someone, Kale.

"I see," he said. He turned towards Kale now, hands behind his back in an arrogant posture. "So you haven't told her anything then have you?"

I looked at Kale in complete confusion, but he remained determined not to look at me. He was almost as cold as the vampires around us. I could feel the frustration rearing up inside me.

"Tell me what?" I asked.

Both men ignored me completely. They appeared to be locked in some sort of staring contest. Neither of them budged until Kale said out of nowhere "Please just let her go."

The guy holding me started to laugh and Henry quickly joined in. I had no idea what was going on! Kale looked like he was going to sear Henry with his eyes if he could. Hate and loathing just rolled off of him in thick waves.

"Tell me what!" I finally demanded yelling at the top of my lungs. I looked at Henry with as much detestation I could have mustered. "I've had enough! Stop beating around the bush, be a real man and tell me what the hell is going on!"

In the blink of an eye Henry was standing right in front of me. His nose practically brushed against mine. His cold, blood drenched breath washed over me making me nauseous. My skin crawled at his presence. He bent down, grabbing and holding my head in his hands and tilting my face up towards him.

"Kale lied to you," he said with acid in his tongue.

I shoot a look at Kale. What did he mean? I didn't like where this was going.

"He lied to you and left you completely defenseless," Henry said bending over and coming so close to my wounds that they throbbed in pain and irritation. Please don't do this! I pleaded in my head. Henry snickered in amusement. "Now he's paying the consequences," he 

smirked. "Ask him yourself," he said egotistically as he took a step away from me, opening up a line of site to Kale.

I had always known that Kale hadn't told me everything. I had been fine with it, but suddenly there was a small tear somewhere. I felt vulnerable and exposed. I felt hurt.

"What's he mean Kale?" I asked softly.

He didn't move for a moment. His head rose slightly to look me in the eyes. There was almost no strength there, no will to do anything. Something inside him was hurting him as well.

"Please Kale," I cried softly. "Just tell me. Why am I here?" I asked. I stopped for a moment, gathered my strength and finally asked. "What do I have to do with this?"

He didn't say anything. I wanted to cry but somehow managed to keep it in for that moment of deep silence. In the background I heard Henry's voice goading Kale on. "Yeah Kale, why are you here? Why is she here? Tell us, we'd all like to know." Kale seemed to try and not pay attention to what the vampire was saying, but I saw him twinge as he spoke.

"Tell me," I said looking straight into his eyes.

He nodded. "I am the one they are looking for, but," my heart stopped for a moment. "I was on that train, because of you."

I didn't understand at first.

Behind me I felt the vampire shift. "So you see," my captor said bending closer behind me. "Those people wouldn't have died if it wasn't for your stupid boyfriend here and he wouldn't have even been on the train, if it wasn't for you."

None of it made sense. How could Kale have even known about me. We'd never meet; therefore it would be impossible for him to need to be on the same train I was on. All this had to be coincidence or something. It just wasn't possible!

"But wait!" Henry mocked in a commentator's voice. "There's more!" he said walking around Kale. "Tell her why you where on the train for her," he demanded. Kale's jaw tightened in rage but said nothing.

"No wait," he corrected himself as he stood right in front of Kale looking him dead in the eye. "I want to save that piece of excellent news for later." His gaze was ice and hatred and dropped all pretences of humor. When he spoke his voice was deep with laced with malice. "Tell her what you really are."

I didn't say anything at this. I couldn't guess anymore, couldn't even begin to understand what was really going on here. I had been stretched to my limit, torn, ripped, and cut down as much as I could be. There was nothing now that could do anything to me. So I just looked at Kale. He looked back and I think he saw there how I felt, that it was ok, just tell me and I would be fine. Things could not get any worse, not anymore. This was the end of the line.

"My parents lived in England up until I was born," Kale started. "They were a somewhat older couple, older than a normal couple to have such a young son, but they didn't mind and neither did I. We weren't normal, and it wasn't because they were older and having a kid, but because…" he looked at me seriously. "They were vampire hunters."

Was he serious? I was shocked. "Vampire hunters?" I stammered. "What do you mean vampire hunters?"

"Hunters are a group of people," Kale said. "A separate nation apart from the rest of mankind that kill and destroy vampires, especially those who step over the line way to much," he added throwing a piercing glare at Henry.

The vampire was standing looking at Kale as if he could have killed him right then and there. "Tell her what kind of hunter your parents were," he sneered in loathing.

"I will get there," Kale shot back and for once silenced the monster before returning to his story. "As I told you earlier, my parents had another son before I was born and that he was fourteen years older than me, but what I didn't tell you is how he became a vampire."

"My mom and dad were not normal hunters. In our culture bloodlines mean just as much to us as they do to the vampires and my bloodline is," he paused thinking for a moment. "Very important, so to speak."

"Important?" snickered Henry. The vampire shifted his gaze from Kale to me. "In their culture your friend here is practically royalty, one of the princes of the whole nation."

Could that be? I wondered. He always seemed to have a façade on, a mask to from the rest of the world, and I already knew there was more to him than he told me. But a prince? A hunter?

"The tattoo on his arm gives him away," Henry pointed out.

So that's what he meant when he said it was a mark of his family. It was a marker for a hunter, and a prince at that.

"Ok, that makes sense," I said. "But what does it have to do with anything? How did your brother die?" I asked him.

"There was a severe outbreak of vampirism in England a year before I was born," Kale told me. "The worst that has ever been recorded. Hundreds of people where dead. My family and the other hunters in the country fought and tried to stop them, to kill the one who had started it all, a vampire by the name of Abraham. But he was too much, too smart, and too horrible to even conceive. He was a cold hearted demon, even by vampire standards. There was no way they could beat him, so the only thing left to do was to form a truce."

"There was a meeting between my father and Abraham. Conditions where written up and everything was discussed. My family would leave England forever and the country would be left in control of the vampire, though some hunters would stay behind to make sure that everything went as planned. But there was one more condition on which everything hung. Without it the vampire would continue the slaughter and all the hunters in the country would be killed within a week, or so Abraham swore."

"And what was that?" I asked softly.

"The condition was that Abraham wanted a son," Kale said looked dead in my eyes. "And leverage on the situation. His last demand was that my parents give my brother over to him as a peace offering."

"Oh my God," I exclaimed. "That must have been awful for them. To have to choose whether to give up your son or condemn a country, I can't imagine what they must have gone through."

"Yeah, it was," Kale said. "To this day my mother regrets it, but at the time what were they supposed to do? Should they cause the deaths of hundreds, possibly thousands of other people, and the death of the hunters and their own family, or should they take a sacrifice themselves for the greater good," he said suddenly openly aiming the comment at Henry.

"In the end, they did what they thought was best and gave my brother over to Abraham," Kale said. "He was only ten years old at the time, the same age I would be when he would try to kill me. Abraham raised him and eventually turned him when he was twenty-four and ever since then he has been on a path of revenge to make me pay for something I had no control of, that I had nothing to do with, that's why I'm hear."

It took me a moment to realize what he was truly saying. When it hit me I felt the world shift under my feet. I looked back and forth from Kale and Henry and back to Kale. They had different hair, different eyes, and different muscle builds, but their nose was the same, their jaws, the lining of their lips was identical and they carried the same attitude on their shoulders. There was no mistaking it.

"So that means?" I said not wanting to finish the sentence.

Kale nodded. "Henry is my brother."

I stood numb for a minute, unable to really rationalize what was going on around me. Kale was Henry's little brother. Henry was the one who had left those horrible marks down the side of Kale's neck. So all this time Henry had been after Kale for the revenge of a life he never got to have.

"Speechless?" Henry asked with a smirk on his face. "Well, you have one more important thing to find out before we bring on the grand finale."

I looked at him confused. "What do you mean? What is there left to say?" I asked not understanding how there could possible be more to this horrible nightmare.

"Ah my darling," he said coming over to me. He stood behind me and rested his head on my shoulder and said "I can't believe you forgot the one most important question that you want to know and that changes everything for you."

My heart jumped in my chest and my blood ran cold as he smiled and whispered "Why are you here?"

I looked at Kale in fear. He was locked in a staring battle with Henry. The tension flew between them so hard and so thick, no one would have dared come in-between them.

"Hunter's are generally human," Henry said on my shoulder. "They are mortal, they make mistakes, but they have some defining characteristics that make it so easy to, how do I say it?" he asked giving Kale a cocky smile. "Get to them."

"What do you mean?" I asked shaking where I stood.

Henry moved away from me and started walking over towards Kale.

"They are a little stronger than normal people," he said. "So that they can fight us, as well as that they are quicker, but just like vampires they also have their own mysterious curse called a Sole Mate. No one knows how it started in the race, but it is something that every man in the Hunter nation experiences. It happens when they see someone that causes something deep inside to start coming alive. That person is imprinted into them and becomes a part of who they are and in reality they become a part of each other. They are the lost halves of one another. I know, so romantic right?" he laughed childishly standing right beside Kale as if to mock him. "But true. So what this means is…"

"Kale and I are sole mates?" I asked finishing the sentence off for him.

He nodded.

In my head I thought about it. A memory came into my head seemingly out of nowhere. It was sunny outside, the sky a beautiful shade of blue, the kind that only comes out in the fall. The air was crisp and full of flavor and excitement. I was playing on a playground with a boy of about my age. We laughed together and played all day. But the time the sun was setting and our parents were calling us home he was my best friend in the whole world, like no one else I had met or ever would meet. The rest of my life I remembered this boy. I had always thought it was strange how he never truly left my mind. I suddenly realized this was the happiest moment of my life. That night my dad would die in a car crash, we would move to New York in a week and I never saw him again. My life had gone downhill since then.

"You were the boy on the playground, weren't you?" I asked Kale softly and I found I couldn't help a small smile from creeping into the side of my mouth.

He grinned back. "Yes, that was me."

I smiled. "I wondered why I could never forget you," I told him in a caring voice.

He looked shocked that I had said this out load but I knew right way that he was glad I had. "I never forgot you either."

"How did you find me after all that time?" I asked him.

He sighed. "I was walking down at the campus that day that we took the train that night in the morning when I saw you across the common on your cell phone. I didn't think anything of it until I got this feeling like I had seen you before. From there it only grew. It was the strangest thing. One moment you were a stranger, the next I felt as if my whole life was wrapped up in you and then I remembered you from that playground as if I had only been gone an hour and returned to find you right where we had left off."

To a normal person this might have seemed so crazy, but unlike anything else I had just heard, this was the only thing that I understood. It made sense.

"Why didn't you tell me on the train?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I was scared. When you're a hunter it's not wise to get involved with someone or something that can be manipulated against you. It makes you vulnerable."

"Which brings us back to the matter at hand," Henry said suddenly bursting his way into the picture. For a moment I had forgotten he was even there.

"I really should thank you Marie for how helpful you have been," he said with a smirk. "If it wasn't for you I wouldn't have found him, you see. You drew him right out into the night, took him on a train away from all the other hunters and any form of help he could have hoped to reach and made him completely defenseless just by his enamoration of you," he laughed maliciously. "In the end, if it hadn't been for you, none of this could have been possible."

"No!" I yelled looking from one to the other. Had this all been my fault?

"Oh yes!" he exclaimed. "But what was really interesting was how you came into play after we had captured our little hero."

"What do you mean?" I snapped. "I never helped you or anything!"

"Yes you did," I heard a voice and was surprised to find it had come from Kale, not Henry. The vampire smiled and then waved his hand in a signal for Kale to continue the story. "He knew that if he could get to you then I would be truly defenseless. But I had been stupid. I thought it was going to come from one of the other vampires in their attacks on us. I didn't think about how…" he trailed off.

"That was a little bit of genius wasn't it brother?" the vampire said, toying with Kale.

"But it's over now!" Kale yelled at him. "You have me! Just let her go."

"No!" the vampire said in a suddenly harsh town that made me jump in terror. "Not yet! One last game little brother."

My insides went cold and fear prickled up my spin like tiny spiders. Henry's face was contorted in a look of pure evil glee. This was what he had been waiting for, what all this had truly added up to.

"There are two choices for Marie's fate," he told Kale stiffly. "And it's all up to you. She is infected and therefore she will die, which will happen very slowly. She will go insane with the disease that now runs thick in her veins. This will happen right in front of your eyes if you should not do as I say," he spat. "And the second option is she gets to go free which might or might not help, depending on if she can get to your precious hunters before it's too late to use the cure. But there is some hope that she will live."

"What is it you want me to do?" Kale asked without hesitation. Was he really willing to do what Henry told him, just to save me?

Henry sneered in joy, reveling in his position of power. "What more could I want than to be reunited with my little brother," he said in mock happiness.

My mouth dropped in complete astonishment and horror. Kale's eyes were wide and fearful. There was a disgust and horror there that surprised anything I had seen up to that point.

"Oh yes," snickered the evil vampire. "I want you to become a vampire."

A/N: Now, if you feels I did alright, let me know what you think! THANKS SO MUCH AGAIN FOR VIEWING MY STORY!