Gone Guardian: The Chronicles of Cassidy Book 7

Most people probably have a pretty good idea how their life is going to go. At sixteen, there may be more than one path ahead, several options to choose from, but most kids my age are thinking about finishing high school and then going on to college or a trade school, getting a job, getting married, living the life. Some more ambitious people might be thinking about making it big in one industry or another. I have friends at Shenandoah High who still dream of being rock stars. That’s cool—I wish them well. But chances are, they will eventually succumb to the reality of a 9:00 to 5:00 job where the most exciting day of the week is Taco Tuesday. It’s not a bad way to live, mind you. It’s predictable—unless fate has some messed up screwball to throw you and something tragic happens. That will probably never be the case for most people.

It seems like it’s a daily occurrence for me.

I know, I know. Whiney Teenage Girl, Party of One. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but when a Vampire Queen wants you dead, your parents want to lock you in your room, and you don’t know from one day to the next if someone you love is gonna get killed in the line of duty, life is a little more interesting than deciding where we’re going to hang out after school or whether or not the new boy was staring at you in Chemistry class.

Things actually died down a little bit on the Vampire front after we took out all the major cells that night in April. That was the night I had to take things into my own hands at the amusement park and literally stood Elliott up with my new levitational powers so he could battle Sam, the same Hunter who had killed him the year before, now in Vampire form.

I thought maybe hearing about my ability to catch and drop bullets before they could hurt me or anyone else would make my parents a little more comfortable, but relaying that episode to them had almost given my mother a heart attack.

Anywho... other than a few Vampires we’d missed, and a few Compliants suddenly turned Noncompliant after we slew their brethren, for the most part, there wasn’t much going on. This was great for ending the school year on a high note and having a chance to catch up with my friends, but it left me restless. I knew it wasn’t over, not by a long shot, especially when Holland disappeared off of my radar sometime in June.

That’s right, the Vampire Queen was MIA.

It took me a few days to tell my sister I couldn’t see her anymore. I felt like that, “You had one job!” meme was coming to life. I mean, basically all I had to do was make sure I knew what “her highness” was up to, and then one day, I reached out to her, and she was gone. I couldn’t find Holland, Hines, the demon baby—none of them.

I kept searching for days, trying to figure out what was going on. I reached out to every other Vampire I could find to see if maybe I could read her location in their minds, but no one seemed to know anything. Holland wasn’t communicating with her own people anymore either, which was good for us because it meant it was easier to kill Vampires, and we didn’t have to worry about shapeshifting, etc. But eventually, I had to tell Cadence that Holland was gone from my mind.