Shadow Born: A Joseph Hunter Novel: Book 1 (Joseph Hunter Series)

to Mel, but getting distracted by signs of her existence in the house. A doll sat on the couch with a small blanket wrapped around it. In the kitchen, Mel had a toy kitchen set. A plastic frying pan with plastic eggs and bacon inside it remained on the plastic range. Had she cooked dinner with her adopted parents that night?
Moving on, I found myself in a stairwell. Derek’s wife lay at the bottom of the stairs. Her head faced the wrong direction, and bite marks littered her body as well. After apologizing to her, I moved upstairs.
I found Mel’s room after peering through the second door in the upstairs hallway. I hesitated before entering, grabbing my wedding ring to prevent my hands from shaking—to give me strength. With a deep breath, I walked in.
She hadn’t made the bed that morning, and a mountain of stuffed animals sat piled atop the mattress. One of them was the monkey I’d bought for her shortly after her birth, before I had to give her up. I picked up the ragged animal. It was missing a beaded eye and the fur had faded to a soft brown. Stealing the creature from her room, I shoved it in my coat pocket.
Papers lay scattered around the floor. Bending over, I picked them up and looked through them. Most possessed nothing more than black and red scribblings, as if she had taken two crayons and dragged them back and forth across the page. But one was a depiction of Mel and Marie and Derek sitting around a fire in a forest. For a second, I held the picture in trembling hands, staring into the cartoonish red and orange flames. After a time, I folded the drawing and stuffed it into my back pocket. I ignored the remaining jagged, scribbled pages.
I shuffled around her small room, scanning the titles on her bookshelf, sifting through the toys in her chest, opening the drawers to her desk—it was an investigation to find evidence about Mel, not her captors, but I couldn’t help myself. This was the closest I had ever come to knowing my daughter, to seeing who she really was.
She had a coloring book and loose crayons and blank paper spread across her small desk. A family portrait stood on the corner of it, framed and propped. I picked it up. The three of them smiled, and my breath hitched. I blinked rapidly to clear my vision, to see the picture better—to see Mel’s smile. She had Callie’s beauty—pure joy and life highlighted by dark hair that curled on the ends and a splatter of freckles beneath her dark eyes.
I tried to recall the last time I had smiled, truly smiled from happiness and excitement, and I couldn’t. For me, smiling was the biggest lie I could tell another human. The closest I ever came to happiness was the bottom of a bottle filled with a clear, fiery liquid—and that’s only because it let me forget about my life for a brief amount of time.
Setting the picture down, I dragged my feet to Mel’s nightstand and opened the drawer. I removed a spiral notebook that read MEL’S JOURNAL in sloppy block letters. Apparently, she had acquired all of her mother’s looks, but my handwriting skills. Opening it, I flipped through the pages one by one. Most of them contained drawings—the same black and red scribblings as the papers I’d found on the floor. Some of the pictures had captions beneath them. Other pages lacked any artwork at all. Instead, she had written capitalized text down the entire page.
I sat on the edge of her bed and read the journal from front to back, stopping once to read a single sentence about a thousand times. She had written it near the middle of the notebook. A drawing took up half the page—the cereal aisle of a grocery store, with a tall man and young girl standing in front of the Cheerios boxes. Beneath the image, Mel had written a caption in purple crayon: Maybe he can save us.
I tore that page from the journal after memorizing every detail about it. What did she mean? Save us from what? And who was us? I shoved it into my pocket with the other drawing and exited her room, returning downstairs.
I saw Xander in the kitchen. He leaned over the counter and scrolled over his phone’s screen.
“Any security cameras around?” I asked, joining him. “Neighbors see anything? 9-1-1 calls? Fuck, man. Anything?”
“Not that we’ve seen or heard,” Xander said, clicking off his screen and setting his phone on the counter. “I’ve instructed some technicians to look for hidden security—like nanny cameras—but nothing has come up yet. One of the neighbors called emergency services. Reported, and I quote, ‘Something strange happening over there.’ A police cruiser showed up about fifteen minutes ago. He was pretty upset that we didn’t immediately notify his department about the double homicide and kidnapping.” Xander shrugged. “M.I.S. has precedence on supernatural matters, though."
“You send him on his way?”
“We contacted his field supervisor and we’re working it out with her. The officer is still outside our taped perimeter.” He cleared his throat. “You notice anything?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Same as in the parking garage. We have Ravens traveling together. They feasted on Derek and Marie, but allowed Mel to live. Too many inconsistencies there. Ravens don’t work well together, first off. They would kill each other for the blood. Second, they wouldn’t have the control to kill twice, to taste blood, but let Mel—” I bit my lip, hesitant to speak the next part, “a virgin, live.” Virgin blood held purer life force than any other blood. That’s why vampires preferred to feed on children, when possible—that, and children were weak and vulnerable. “It only adds up to a Nephil—which doesn’t add up at all.”
In my mind, it was simple. There were two types of vampires—those cursed and in service to a Nephil, and those just cursed by a