Darkness Falls by Jessica Sorensen

Darkness Falls #1

Book Summary via Goodreads:

"When the disease spread through the world, people had no choice but to go into hiding. The Colony is hidden deep underground, far away from the vampires—humans that were transformed by the disease. The vampires are hideous, starving, and they will kill any human they come across.

Seventeen-year-old Kayla is a Bellator, a warrior that protects The Colony. In order to survive, there are three rules she must follow:

       Rule #1—Never go out after dark. 

       Rule #2—Always carry a weapon. 

       Rule #3—No matter what, never EVER get bit. 

But what happens when the rules Kayla has always lived by can no longer apply? 

The Highers run The Colony and accept nothing less than perfection. One slip up can mean death. Kayla has always worked hard to follow the rules and strive for perfection. But during a moment of weakness, she lets her imperfections show. Her punishment is worse than death. She is chosen for The Gathering and is thrown out into a world full of starving vampires.

No one has ever survived The Gathering, at least that’s what Kayla’s been told. But when she runs into a group who insist they were once part of The Gathering, Kayla discovers the Highers have been keeping secrets. Secrets that could lead to a cure"

This is a story about a girl named Kayla Juniper. She lives in a world where a plague has broken out and the land is swarming with vampires. She has been conditioned to be a Bellator, someone who hunts and kills vampires to protect the only colony of living unaffected humans. She slowly learns that the people in charge of the colony, people they call Highers, are keeping things from everyone and that the plague may not have been an accident. On a routine mission, she discovers that the vampires, grotesque creatures that are covered in rough black skin that bleeds constantly,  are afraid of her and won't touch her. When she is chosen for The Gathering, she learns that the others chosen in the past were sent to the desert to die.

I honestly wanted to like this book. And I did really enjoy the story for most of the book. I have an e-book version so the page numbers are slightly different from a physical copy, but around page 100 of my book, I felt the story was starting to drop a little. Kayla meets a character named Aiden, a boy from her past, who was erased from her memory just like everybody else chosen for The Gathering.  I could tell that the author wanted us to like him, but he was just really over-baring and pushy. Kayla had a choice to make, whether to keep her ultra fighting skills, or to let the serum that had been injected in her, and all the other Bellator's, drain from her system. And instead of letting her make that decision for herself, he kept lying to her to try and take away all that was given to her that made her a fighter. Because he remembered her from before he was chosen for The Gathering, and wanted her to be the person that she used to be. Even though it had probably been years since they last saw each other. I'm not saying that this book was bad, I'm just saying that it could have been better. It has a really great foundation for a great story, it was mostly the possessive  bossy ex that made me cringe a little.

I think this book could have been better had the story tried not to shift focus from the strange things she was discovering about the world she thought she knew, to a romance that isn't needed when the rest of the story is so damn good. This book could have been so much better and it makes me a little sad that it wasn't as good as it could have been.