Sean Brooks sat in his car and placed his head warily down on the steering wheel. He had gone by the school earlier that day and had spied on the ‘Royals’; it just figured that Max would get Liz involved in hunting the real ‘Royals’ like an idiot. How the hell was he going to convince them to help him, to helping her? And he had to have their help, there was no other option, he couldn’t do it on his own. Sean sighed and closed his eyes. Damn Liz Parker for becoming so intricate in his life, and damn Max Evans for taking her away just when Sean had realized just how much he had needed her. Sean Brooks had always wanted Liz Parker. Ever since he had first seen her when her parents had moved to Roswell, NM when she was fourteen and he was sixteen, he had watched and waited for her to notice and want him in return. She had finally done so the summer before her sophomore year in high school, barely a year after she had moved to town. Sean couldn’t have been more thrilled. For the better part of two years he had the perfect relationship with her. Yes he had kept things from her, but he had done so for her own good. She it was hard enough to get her to date him when he had told her about his delinquent record, he could only imagine what she would do if she had known who he was…what he was. So he had kept that part of himself hidden from her always. But as want and lust turned into need and love, he had found it harder and harder to keep the truth from her. It had been about a month before her Junior Prom when he had decided that he would tell her everything. He would tell her how he really felt. How ever single time he looked into her deep chocolate brown eyes that he had felt like he was drowning and loosing a part of himself in her and how for the first time in his life he relished that feeling. He would tell her how at night when he went to bed she was the very last thing that he thought about just so his dreams would be filled with her…how she was also the first thing he thought of in the morning because of said dreams. He would tell her what she really meant to him and what that meant in regards to his life. He would tell someone for the first time in his nineteen years exactly what he was and he would pray that she would accept it and love him anyway. And he truly believed that she loved him. She looked at him and saw things that no one, with the exception of his favorite cousin and her mother, ever saw in him. She saw the ability to be something more than the town delinquent and screw up. She looked at him and saw that, and when he looked at her, in her eyes, he sometimes saw it too. She was his everything and he thought that he was everything to her. He thought it until Max Evans moved to town. Max had been in Roswell for about two months. Sean hadn’t thought anything of it, he wasn’t worried in the slightest that his Lizzie would leave him for the pretty boy. So what if she broke a couple of dates to study biology with her lab partner? She was a science geek…Sean knew that about her, in fact it was one of the things that he liked about her. He never once suspected that Evans ever did anything more with Liz at those study sessions besides studying…why would he? He would never even contemplate cheating on her so therefore she would never contemplate cheating on him. That was what he had thought, which is why that night, a month before her prom he had been ready to bare his soul to her. That was why his world ended when before he could she had broken said soul and left with Max Evans. It wasn’t a long drawn out thing. It hadn’t been filled with drama and angst like some horribly written teen soap opera. She had simply, with great regret, remorse and caring told Sean that while she cared for him greatly she didn’t love him…that she loved HIM, Max Evans. She had tearfully begged for him not to hate her, and Sean had looked into those deep brown doe eyes and had known that he never could. Her and no other could hurt him, but he could never blame her, he could never hate her. But he could hate him. And he did. He had sworn that night that he would somehow find a way to make her see that Max was not the perfect knight that he seemed…that he was not the man for her because Max would only hold her back instead of letting her soar like Sean so wanted her to. And when they had turned away from him that dark night, he had caught Max’s eye briefly and in that second he had known…he had known without a doubt that while Max probably wanted Liz, lusted after her, he didn’t care for her one bit. No, Sean had seen the truth in Max…he had seen that Liz was just a pawn for him…for the Hunter…and that he had gotten what he wanted, he had stolen Sean’s heart and soul. ********************* Amy Deluca finished restocking her shelves and sighed as she placed her head warily on the counter in front of her. What was she going to do? She was thirty-six years old and she had fallen in love. And the worst part was that she had fallen in love with a man that hated, hunted and persecuted those of her kind. If Jim ever found out that Amy was a witch he would never forgive her. And if he ever found out the truth about her and his dead wife, he would be destroyed. Amy shut her eyes and rubbed her temples as her headache raged anew. Goddess above would the headache ever go away? Would the heartache? She didn’t think that it would. Maybe the headache, when the situation with her children (and they were all her children in her mind…all of them) was resolved and they were all safe. But the heartache…that was different. She thought that she had known heartache, how to deal with it, how to move on from it. Could she have been more stupid? What Brian had caused in her, the grief, the pain, the anger and finally the cool indifference to those of the male persuasion, was nothing to what Jim would cause in her when he found out what she was. And Amy didn’t disillusion herself into believing that he wouldn’t find out. What had she been thinking when she had thought that she could play this game and come out unscathed? She was an idiot twice over because this time she was causing her own pain. But what choice did she have? The only way to protect herself would be to remain closeted behind the walls that she had built after the Brian-Ursula ordeal. And she couldn’t do that. To shut Jim out would be to leave him vulnerable to the powers that were around him…the elements that cared not for Hunters and had no problem whatsoever getting rid of them. No, she had to stay near him, had to have him in her life, so that he would survive…so that he would live. And the sacrifice that she had to make to do so was something that she knew she couldn’t afford to make but knew without a doubt that she had to. Every moment that she spent with him she lost more and more of herself in him…in them…and soon there would be no Amy Deluca without Jim Valenti. And when he left her, and she knew he would once he realized what she was and what she had done to him, she would die. Maybe not in the literal sense, but her heart, her soul, would leave with him…and not even the love and comfort of her ‘children’ could save her from that. She gave into her weakness and sobbed into her arms on the counter, crying at the injustice of finally finding her life and then having the power to see that she would loose it. The sound of the bell jingling on the shop door as it opened alerted her to the presence of a customer. She wiped at her eyes as she raised her head. Her light hazel eyes locked with a pair that she hadn’t seen in over three years. A true smile lit her face, as she looked warmly into those sea-green eyes, eyes identical to a pair that she loathed with a passion so great that it scared her sometimes. “Well I certainly didn’t expect to see you walking in my store. What are you doing here oh great nephew of mine?” ********************* The Master looked at the locket around its neck and smiled as one well manicured hand ran over it slowly. It really was like finding an old friend. This locket had been a part of the Master for so long, and then it had disappeared, it had been like loosing a bit if itself. But now it was back, and even better, it still had its power. Many had always wondered about the locket…about why the Master had coveted it so much. And it was simple. The locket spoke to the Master, it guided the Master and help clarify matters so that plans formed easier and less complicated. And it was speaking to the Master now. It was speaking loud and clear and it was confirming something that the Master had been seriously hoping was true. The Master smiled as it looked into its own mirror on the visage of Max Evans and Liz Parker. The two ‘Hunters’ were sprawled out on the floor with Liz passed out in Max’s lap. A cruel smiled filled the Master’s visage as it took in the picture before it. The Master wondered if Mr. Evans realized just what he had in front of him? The Master pondered with an amused thought if Evans realized that he was merely biding the time until his death. The Master wondered if he realized that his greatest weapon against his greatest enemy was right in his lap…literally. The Master laughed as it knew that Max Evans, in his self-centered world, did not realize the truths staring him in the face. It would be a pleasure to kill someone so stupid as to think that they were the Hunters instead of the Hunted. It would be a pleasure to set the weak man right and to collect the treasures that Max Evans wasn’t even wise enough to realize that he had. ********************* Maria was in heaven…really she was. What more could a witch/shapeshifter ask for? She was on a beach…a private beach with no one else around…with her boyfriend, her boyfriend that happened to be her soulmate. A young man that sent sparks of awareness through her entire body just by glancing at her briefly. A young man that sent her into a fury quicker than any other person on the planet, a young man that calmed her down in the same fashion, and that same young man was sending all kinds of fireworks through her system at the moment. “Michael,” she moaned as he nipped her throat. He growled to let her know that he heard her, but he didn’t stop in what he was doing. “Michael…not that I don’t really, really, like what your amazingly talented lips are doing to me at the moment, but aren’t we supposed to be here to try to concentrate our powers so that we can determine where this ‘Master’ has Evans and Parker hid?” “Uh huh,” Michael mumbled as he moved his lips from her throat to her collarbone. He nibbled there and smiled as her whole body shivered and melted into his instantly. Maria’s biggest erogenous zone was her collarbone and neck and he really loved exploiting that fact. “And we are doing that,” he whispered in her ear seductively before he sucked her earlobe into his mouth. “Our powers become greater the closer that we are together, the more we link to each other. So…if we connect before we try to concentrate them…well…then we’ll have that much of a better chance of finding the Hunters before it is too late.” “There’s a problem with that logic somewhere,” Maria said in between groans as his hands worked their way under her jacket and inside her shirt. The two of them lost their footing and fell gently to the sand, Michael on top of her. “I know that there is a huge flaw in that argument,” she continued as her own hands began their journey under his jacket and shirt before beginning to work their way down to the belt buckle on his hips. “But I just can’t seem to work up enough want to care about it at the moment.” “That’s good,” Michael told her with a smirk, the same smirk that caused her to want to do all sorts of wonderful, torturous, sensual things to his body. “Cause I wasn’t about to let you when it anyway.” He sucked in a breath as her hands grazed him as she began to unbuckle his belt and started to work on the buttons of his jeans. “Goddess above Maria you’re killing me.” “That’s the plan Michael,” she told him with a gasp as he got her shirt completely open and began to trail kisses all the way down to her navel. “Turn about is fair play after all. You are so going to beg me for mercy before I’m finished with you. You are going to wish that you never even started this by the time…Damn!” She exclaimed as her cell phone rang in her bag that was on the sand beside them. “Don’t answer it,” he growled into her stomach. “You have voice mail. Use it. Don’t answer the…Damn it!” “Hello?” Maria said breathlessly into the phone. “This had better be really good.” “What had better be really good is your explanation of why you answered the phone so out of breath young lady,” Amy Deluca’s voice rang clearly and loudly through the small phone. That tone and the person who used it, worked faster than any cold shower ever had in the history of mankind. Michael and Maria jumped away from each other like God himself had descended down upon them. “Sorry Mom,” Maria said as she hurriedly buttoned up her shirt and zipped up her jacket. Beside her Michael was re-fastening his pants and belt even faster than Maria had unfastened them. “Michael and I were in the middle of research and I had to run to the phone,” Maria lied effortlessly. Michael arched an eyebrow at how flawlessly the lie dropped from her angelic lips and she stuck her tongue out at him. “I’ll believe that Maria Deluca when the Easter Bunny walks through my front door,” Amy Deluca said smartly, not believing her daughter for a minute. “But we will deal with Michael, his overcharged hormones, and the state of your resistance to them later. Right now I need you two to get to the shop with everyone else. There is someone in town that wants to see you all and that I’m pretty sure you all will want to see. So, you and Michael make your way over here right now and stop groping each other on the beach and I’ll find the others.” “Yes Mom, we’ll be at the shop in a few minutes,” Maria said as she turned the phone off to look at it in horror. “How the hell did she know we were groping each other on the beach?” She asked Michael as he helped her up off the sand, all the while staring at her cell phone as if had betrayed her. “Maria,” Michael laughed as the two of them made their way to the Deluca shop. “You’re mom’s a witch. How the hell do you think she knew what we were doing on the beach? Plus she’s a grown woman…I’m pretty sure she knows what two teenagers of the opposite sex get up to on a deserted private beach when left alone.” He smirked at her as they reached Main St. and turned toward the shop. “Might as well wipe that smirk off your face Spaceboy,” Maria told him with a smirk of her own. “Cause who do you think she’s going to come after for what we were doing on that beach? She’ll yell at me…but what do you think she’s going to do to you?” Maria had the satisfaction of seeing her boyfriend that scared whole football teams on his own turn pale at her words and swallow audibly with nervousness. She laughed happily as they reached the shop and opened the door. Her smile faded into a look of opened mouthed shock when she caught sight of just whom her mother had been speaking of on the phone. What was her cousin doing in town? It was Michael that found his voice first, his smirk firmly back in place. “Long time no see. What is it that you need this time? An alibi? Money? Blood?” The stranger just looked at Michael coolly out of sea-green eyes and Michael grinned in genuine welcome. “How’s it been Sean?” TBC

Part 30