Hey guys, I am really sorry for the wait, but I was playing games a lot over the weekend, and I didn't write much. I promise to try and finish this week!

I think it will only be 11-12 chapters instead of 15-16, but the sequel, "Uprising", will be much longer! (I renamed this one because the name Uprising suited the sequel better.)

Thanks for reading, and please keep supporting!

Chapter Nine - Picking Up The Trail

Twenty four hours after the attack, we sent Guardians and Moroi to see if the house was abandoned, they told us it was clear, so we went for a search, hoping we would find info about where Rose had fled to. We searched the house and mostly found bloodied corpses of our dead and several of theirs, until we got to the basement elevator.

"Sweet Jesus...," Harkin muttered as he walked into the hallway at the back of the house. "What in the hell happened here?"

As I walked into the hall, I found myself asking the same question. There were five Strigoi corpses lying there in pools of blood, there was splatter on the walls, and the bodies were missing various limbs. We moved carefully to the elevator, and found two human bodies in the office next to it. There was a computer console that was quietly beeping a warning, of course none of us understood it.

"Damn, does anyone here have experience with computers? Or can someone try to make some sense of this?", I asked to the small group of Guardians with me.

"Well, I did take a few courses in programming in my spare time.", One of the Guardians said as he stepped over and sat at the computer. He typed in a few things and looked up at me.

"Do you have any idea what these computers are here for?", I asked him.

"Well, this one is the elevator control system. And this one," he said as he moved to the other one, "Is the environment control for the basement. The warning this thing is beeping means that all the air was pumped out of the basement, and the elevator was sealed."

"Can you reverse it? And maybe figure out what happened?"

He smiled, "I can try. No guarantees though." As he started typing, me and Andrew left to check the rest of the house.

It was, obviously, clean. There was no real evidence of any sort left behind. Rose had made sure that they had moved everything. Hopefully though, there was something in the basement that we could use. We went back to the elevator to check up on the Guardian and he told us he had started the ventilation, but it would take about twenty minutes for a suitable amount of air to pump in. After the wait, we headed down.

The basement was full of more dead Strigoi, but there was no blood, these ones had all suffocated. After a short search of the six rooms, we hit the jackpot. There was a room in the center of the floor and it was filled with computers and paper documents.

The Guardian that had dealt with the computer moved to a stack of what looked like books that was on a shelf in the corner of the room. He smiled and laughed.

"What exactly are those?", I asked him.

He smiled back, "These, are external hard drives, 20 Terabytes each. These things could hold a lot of data, and a lot of evidence."

Harkin looked at him, "Well, lets start sifting through them."

It took us three hours to figure out what the drives were for, and it was shocking.

Each drive was full of construction orders, reciepts, and blueprints for a Bunker built in a different country. At first, we thought that this could make our search long and difficult, but then, we noticed that only one bunker had been completed, the other ones were months away from being completed or still in the planning stages. Then we noticed where the bunker was, it was outside of Anchorage, Alaska.

"This, is odd. Why would Strigoi be hiding in Alaska?", Harkin sounded really confused.

One of the Moroi with us, apparently an expert on Strigoi anatomy, spoke up. "The Strigoi like the cold better, and they know that we would have a hard time fighting them in it. So they chose the largest city in Alaska."

"Well, I guess we had better start planning and get moving. We need to find Rose and deal with her before she starts an army again.", My voice was confident, but had a hint of worry to it.

Truth is, I was hoping we could turn her back, because even though Lissa could heal me, I doubted that she could heal a torn apart heart and soul.

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-Nueemann :)