The published version of  Hunted is NOW available on Amazon and Barnes & Nobel!

Roux

Standing at the entryway to the Belle Morte dining room, Roux Hayes squeezed her best friend's hand. "It'll be okay," she said.

Renie managed a nod. She was always pale now, thanks to having become a vampire a few days ago, but it seemed to Roux that she was even paler than normal today, as if any hint of colour left in her face had simply drained away.

But that was hardly surprising considering that she might finally be about to find out what her future held.

Only a handful of days had passed since Belle Morte had been taken back from the clutches of Etienne and Jemima, the two vampires who had been so determined to expand their own positions of power that they had nearly destroyed the whole system that allowed vampires to peacefully coexist with humans.

Lamia, Midnight, and Nocte Filii had been reclaimed without a fight, and the remaining traitors weeded out and imprisoned, though there were far fewer of them left than expected. Jemima really had overstretched herself, and her forces had been spread far thinner than maybe even she had realised.

The aftermath of her coup with Etienne wasn't pretty. Vampires and humans alike were dead, including the innocent donors who'd been caught in the crossfire as two vampire factions went to war against each other.

Now, none of the survivors knew where they stood with the human world, or what their future was going to be. This was tough for all of them, but Roux thought it was probably toughest on Renie. The other vampires knew what it was like to live in the shadows. They'd existed for hundreds and hundreds of years before revealing themselves to the world, and they could go back to that way of life if they had to. It wouldn't be fun for any of them, but they had coped with it before and they could cope with it again.

But Renie had only been a vampire for a few days. For eighteen years she had lived as a human, in the human world. Adjusting to a life inside a vampire mansion would be hard enough, but the prospect of losing all that? Roux couldn't begin to imagine how that would feel.

Her hand-squeeze didn't seem to have helped, so she placed both hands on her friend's shoulders and turned Renie to face her.

"Listen to me," she said. "Whatever happens today, whatever Ysanne tells us, we'll get through it."

Renie smiled at her, but it was wan. Her future was literally on the line here, and it was a terrifying prospect.

"You know you don't have to be here," she said.

Roux wasn't a vampire. She wasn't sure she was even a donor anymore, because no one knew if the donor system was still in effect. She and Jason certainly weren't feeding the vampires – they were surviving on bags of donated blood.

The other donors who'd survived the attacks on Belle Morte had been returned to their families, and none of the donors in the Houses of Midnight, Lamia, Nocte Filii, or Fiaigh had been harmed, though they'd all been sent home, too. They couldn't be expected to stay in the Houses after everything that had happened.

Roux's contract as a blood donor to Belle Morte was effectively null and void and there was nothing keeping her here.

Except her friends.

Renie and Jason had become the best friends she'd ever had, and she wasn't leaving either of them. Jason felt the same way. Neither of them knew what lay ahead for anyone, but they both knew that they couldn't leave – not yet. They were still a part of Belle Morte.

For the last few days the pair of them had been doing all they could to keep Renie's spirits up, and to distract her from the noise outside – the muted shouts and cries from the group of anti-vampire protestors who'd set up camp outside the mansion's walls.

Roux rolled her eyes. "Right, like I'm just going to walk out of that door and abandon you."

If the donor system was unsalvageable, if the vampires' place in society had been revoked, then Roux wouldn't be able to do a thing. She wouldn't be able to help Renie, and she wouldn't be able to follow her wherever she might end up going.

But she couldn't think like that. For ten years vampires had been the ultimate celebrities. The sudden explosion of death and violence that had occurred in England's most famous vampire House had rocked the country, but Roux had to believe people wouldn't forget that not all vampires were like that. For every vampire that had joined Jemima and Etienne, there were many more who had fought to protect their way of life and the humans in their care. Roux hoped that the human population remembered that, and didn't turn on all vampires for the crimes of a few.

Renie turned, reacting to footsteps that she heard long before Roux did. Edmond Dantès glided up to them, his dark hair spilling around his shoulders, and his shirt open at the neck. Something soft and warm bloomed in Renie's eyes as she looked at the vampire she'd fallen in love with, and suddenly Roux felt a bit like a third wheel. She looked around for Jason, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Ever since the House had been reclaimed, Ysanne Moreau, Lady of Belle Morte, had been working with human authorities in an attempt to fix the damage that Etienne and Jemima had wrought, but any progress had been kept under lock and key.

Until today.

Ysanne had announced a House meeting for that morning, undoubtedly to answer the many, many, many questions that everyone had, and to finally let her people know if they actually had any sort of place left in the human world.

Renie had arrived at the dining hall early because the tension had simply got too much for her.

"How are you feeling, mon ange?" Edmond asked, cupping one palm to Renie's face.

"Nervous," she admitted. She shot Roux a quick grateful look. "Roux's been helping me keep my mind off it, though."

Usually Edmond would have considered that his job, but he'd taken it upon himself to make sure that everyone who was meant to be at the meeting knew that they needed to be there soon. Renie wasn't the only one chewed up by nerves and anxiety. Edmond might have turned down Ysanne's offer of becoming a Lord of one of the Houses – a replacement for either Charles or Henry, both of whom had died in the attacks – but someone still needed to make sure that Belle Morte and its inhabitants continued to recover, and Ysanne couldn't be everywhere at once.

"We might as well go in," Roux said.

No one else was here yet, but the alternative was to hang around outside the dining hall, waiting for everyone to turn up.

"Are you joining us?" Edmond said.

"Of course I am."

Edmond frowned and started to say something, but Roux abruptly cut him off. "No, no, no, don't even think about it."

"You don't know what I was about to say," he said.

"I can take an educated guess." Roux narrowed her eyes. "You were about to tell me that I'm not invited to this meeting because I'm not a guard or a vampire, but you can forget that. I'm as much as part of this as anyone."

"I'm not sure Ysanne will see it that way."

"Tough. I fought for this House too, and I'm not being cut out of anything now," Roux said.

She wanted to be there for Renie, to give her maximum moral support, but she also wanted to know what was going to happen. Renie and Jason weren't the only people she cared about – she wanted to know that Edmond, Ludovic, Gideon, Caoimhe and all the other vampires who'd survived the battles were going to have a future. She wanted to know that Ysanne herself was going to have a future, and although she didn't work at Belle Morte or live there permanently, she had a right to know what was going on.

"Damn right you're not," Renie said.

Roux strode into the dining hall ahead of her friends, and took a seat halfway down the long trestle table. In happier days this was where the donors used to sit and eat together, served delicious meals by human staff flitting in and out of the small kitchen at the back of the mansion. Like the donors, the staff were gone now. Even some of the guards hadn't stuck around. Belle Morte was a ghost of its former self, and it made Roux's heart ache to think of what it had once been.

She believed the mansion could recover. She believed that vampires could come back from this and restore their place in the world, but at the same time she knew there was a significant chance that they couldn't. The tide of public favour could have turned against them so thoroughly that they would simply drown under the weight of fear and hatred.

Renie and Edmond sat down beside her, their hands tightly clasped. Roux smiled at them. Ever since Belle Morte had been reclaimed, the pair had been practically inseparable. When Renie was still human, a large part of their relationship had taken place in secret, thanks to the law that dictated vampires could not have relationships with humans. Now that neither of them were bound by those laws, they could be as free and open as they wanted with each other – and neither of them were shy about public displays of affection. Sometimes, when Roux caught them kissing in one of Belle Morte's many corridors, she'd tease them and tell them to get a room, but the truth was that she loved seeing them so happy.

Footsteps clomped on the parquet floor, and Roux knew it was Jason without even turning around. No vampire would walk that loudly, and if any guards were joining the meeting, they probably wouldn't sound in such a hurry.

Jason threw himself into the chair on Roux's other side. His hair was mussed in a style in that looked casual and effortless, but that he would have worked hard to create. Jason loved hair, and he loved finding new, fun things to do with it.

"Fashionably early, are we?" he said, and his voice echoed around the huge room. He winced.

The dining hall wasn't a library; no one was expected to talk in whispers, but Roux and Jason were used to this room being full of people, full of voices laughing and joking with each other. Without that the room seemed too big and too empty, a stark reminder that many of those voices had been silenced forever.

Roux shrugged. "Didn't have much else to do."

A flash of nervousness crossed Jason's face. "Do you think Ysanne will kick us out?"

Roux shot a look at Edmond, but his expression was vampire-blank, giving nothing away. She decided to interpret that as he didn't know what Ysanne was planning. Edmond loved Renie more than anything else in this world, and he knew how much her friends meant to her. There was no way he'd sit there and say nothing if he knew that Ysanne had plans to make Roux and Jason leave the mansion.

"I'm sure she's got more important things to worry about us," she told Jason, but inside she wasn't sure.

The survival of the vampire race was more important that whether or not Roux and Jason stayed at Belle Morte, but they couldn't stay there indefinitely and everyone knew it.

And it wasn't as if neither of them wanted to go home – they'd both contacted their families to explain that they were safe and well – but Roux just didn't feel she could leave yet. Jemima and Etienne were dead, but the mess that they had created was far from over.

Some of their newly turned vampires had escaped the final fight and disappeared into Winchester. Roux had no idea where they were now, what was going to happen to them, or how their disappearance would affect everyone in Belle Morte. Hopefully that was something Ysanne would bring up when she got here.

More vampires started to trickle in, but none of them spoke, and the silence grew even more oppressive.

Jason sat up a little straighter when Gideon came in, but the blond vampire had his eyes fixed on the floor. When the loyal friends of Belle Morte had taken back the House from the people who'd stolen it, Roux was sure she'd glimpsed some serious sparks between Jason and Gideon. Since Jason had been nursing a serious crush on Gideon ever since he first laid eyes on him, the possibility of something actually developing between them had delighted Roux. But, although he was confident in every other walk of life, Jason hadn't yet plucked up the courage to approach Gideon, and the vampire seemed to have retreated into his own world over the last few days.

The vampires all took their seats and, mingled with them, Roux spotted the familiar faces of Belle Morte and Fiaigh guards. Seamus, Head of Security at Fiaigh, took up position near the top of the table. He had stayed in the mansion ever since it had been reclaimed, and it didn't seem as if he had any plans to return to his own House just yet.

Roux was glad; Belle Morte needed strong, competent people in charge, now more than ever, and Fiaigh was the one House that had never fallen to their enemies. It didn't need Seamus like Belle Morte did, not right now anyway.

Ludovic took his place next to Edmond, and Roux was surprised to see a flicker of real nervousness in his eyes. She didn't know Ludovic all that well, but she'd seen him fight and he was a force of nature when he wanted to be. The uncertainty she could see on his face now...it made him look more vulnerable, more fragile than she was used to.

Edmond leaned over and murmured something to his friend, but Roux couldn't hear what it was. Ludovic gave a tiny nod, but the look in his eyes didn't change.

Maybe she'd been wrong, Roux thought. She'd assumed that if the donor system collapsed and the vampires were evicted from their Houses, they could cope with going back into the shadows, but maybe they couldn't. Maybe Ludovic couldn't.

Roux looked around the room again and tried to picture how the mansion would look if no one lived here. She hadn't died and become a vampire like Renie, but her whole life had still changed in this place and Belle Morte would always mean something to her.

But it meant so much more to the vampires.

It was their home. It was where they had all lived for the last decade, the place where they had once been safe.

What would happen if they were kicked out?

Where would they go?

What would happen to the mansion?

Roux wasn't sure exactly who could kick the vampires out of their home, but if the donor system had crashed and burned, and if anti-vampire sentiment continued to rise then they wouldn't be able to leave Belle Morte. Eventually they'd starve to death.

She tried to drag her thoughts away from worst-case scenarios. It wasn't doing her any good to think like that. Yes, people were scared and when people were scared they lashed out, but that kind of mob mentality didn't rule everyone. There had to be people who knew that not all vampires could be tarred with the same brush, and if things got really bad, Roux hoped these were the same people who would fight for vampire rights. She'd fight alongside them if that's what it took.

Ysanne swept into the room, her high heels clicking crisply across the floor. Looking at her you'd never know that, for however brief a time, she had lost her House and had seen some of her own people turn traitor. Her hair was a pale sheet down her back, not a single strand out of place, and her white sheath dress clung to every line and contour of her body. She looked beautiful and regal, a queen once again. But Roux had glimpsed the real person behind the icy mask, and she honestly found it hard to be intimidated by Ysanne now.

Under one arm Ysanne carried a small sheaf of papers, and she placed them at the head of the table. Her chair was already pulled out, waiting for her to sit down, but instead she placed both hands on the table and surveyed the room.

Roux realised she was holding her breath. Whatever Ysanne had to say wouldn't affect Roux directly, but it would affect her friends and, as far as she was concerned, that was just as important.

Under the table she crossed her fingers and hoped and hoped and hoped that Ysanne had good news.