by Jayme Morse
Noah smirked. “I figured you’d catch on to that.”
“If you come to our meeting, you’ll be able to sneak out of your coffin, too. Not just tonight, but for the rest of your time here,” Slade said.
“What kind of meeting is it?” I asked.
“You’ll find out if you come,” he said, his blue eyes staring into mine. “You should know, though, that it’s a top-secret meeting that only a select handful of vampires know about.”
“That makes me want to go more,” I replied.
Slade chuckled. “That was the point.”
“I’ll come. Drew can come, too,” I replied, not giving them an option.
I wanted Drew with me, whether they liked it or not.
The last thing I needed was to get separated from another friend.
Slade’s eyes flashed with a look of annoyance. It was gone almost as quick as it came.
“Drew wasn’t invited,” Slade said.
“Oh. I guess I have to stay in my dorm room, then,” I told him.
“I guess I’ll have to extend my invitation,” Slade said with a sigh. “Make sure you’re both ready to leave by midnight.”
“We will be,” I replied.
“If we get arrested, you can’t talk to the police. You can’t tell anyone anything. You have to keep your mouths shut.” Slade glanced from Drew to me. “Everything that goes on at our meeting, everything you know about our coven, has to stay secret. No one can ever know what you know,” Slade said as he studied my face for a reaction.
“Okay,” I agreed with a nod.
I wasn’t sure what kind of meeting this was going to be, but it sounded serious.
“Why would we get arrested?” Drew finally spoke.
I could tell he was nervous at the idea of it. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he wanted to back out. I was even considering backing out myself.
“Anyone who breaks out of their coffin can get arrested if they’re caught doing it,” Slade said simply.
Drew met my gaze for a moment as we both considered it.
To my surprise, he said, “It would be worth getting arrested. I want us to learn how to get out of our coffins. We’ll be there.”
Even if I got arrested, I had a way to get out of my handcuffs, anyway. All I had to do was shrink my body.
I had something that all of the other vampires didn’t—something that they would never have, since you could only become a faerie if you were born that way.
I smirked as we walked down the empty hallway.
I felt unstoppable.
Chapter 17
Noah
After we dropped Riley and Drew off in the grand hallway and got back to our dorm suite, I started pressuring Slade.
“We do have time to look for Jordan,” I insisted. “We have all day.”
“We don’t have all day. One of us needs to get to her first class of the day.” He grabbed his schedule from our coffee table in the living room and read from it. “Julius’s class with her is first thing in the morning.”
“Well… I thought about it, and I decided that it would be best for Riley if Drew was in all of her classes, so I put them in all of the same classes. That way, they can look out for each other if we can’t be there for whatever reason. It turned out to be a good idea, because we can’t even make it to our first classes with her.” He locked eyes with Slade, who had a look of annoyance on his face. He was mad that Julius hadn’t listened to him, that he’d disobeyed his orders. “We’re really busy vampires,” Julius said with a shrug as he sat up from his bed.
Ever since we learned that we could escape from our coffins, we’d had four matching queen-sized beds delivered to our dorm room. It wasn’t against the rules to have beds in our dorm room. Students were allowed to have beds if they purchased them, but we weren’t allowed to sleep in them throughout the night.
That was where we broke the rules.
Not one of us ever actually slept in our coffins when we were on campus—except for last night.
Even though it had been a long time since I had slept in a bed, I felt bad that Riley had to sleep in a coffin for the first time. We all felt bad for her.
Knowing how horrible it would be for her, we all slept in our coffins for the first time since we’d purchased the beds.
It was only fair.
In the future, after we taught her how to escape from her coffin, Riley could have her pick of any one of our beds.
Slade glanced over at me sharply, a look of anger in his bright ocean blue eyes.
I could tell he didn’t like the thought of us sharing her.
I didn’t like it, either.
None of us did.
“She’s going to choose one of us,” Slade said through gritted teeth.
“You know that’s impossible. As much as we want her to choose just one of us, as much as I want her to choose me, there’s no way she can unless we all give up our rings, or if we somehow disconnect from each other,” I said.
Slade nodded. “We have to break up our coven, then. It’s the best option for all of us.”
“You think it’s the best, until she doesn’t choose you,” Tristan shot back. “Then you won’t have the girl, and you won’t have the coven. You won’t have a ring. Do you remember how difficult life was before our rings could do magic?”
I did remember life before the rings, life before we all found each other. I never wanted to go back to that. I never wanted to be just a vampire, ever again.
“It fucking sucked,” I agreed.
“Can we talk about this later? It’s way too early to talk about all of this,” Julius said through a sleepy yawn.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m trying to become her favorite,” Tristan said, a competitive look in smoky gray eyes.
“And how do you plan to do that?” I asked.
“By finding her friend and bringing her back here,” Tristan replied.
That was my plan. Whatever. I just needed to find Jordan before the rest of them could.
“There’s a thought,” Slade said, suddenly becoming interested in the idea.
Julius came over to the coffee table. He unrolled a map onto it, setting aside our TV remotes and coffee cups.
“There are four main threats in the woods,” Julius began.
“Six, if you count the gargoyles and the poison arrows,” I corrected.
“Five total threats. I don’t count the gargoyles. The gargoyles are pretty easy to get past,” Tristan said.
“What are we going to do about the poison arrows? They shoot off at you from random directions,” Julius said as he boxed them in on the map with a black marker and doodled a few small arrows. “They’re in the first mile around the school.”
“It’s not random,” Slade told him. “The arrows shoot at you if you cross their path. Stay out of the way of their sensors, and they won’t shoot.”
“How about we bypass them completely?” I asked.
“I like how you think,” Slade said with a nod. “We’ll save a lot of time if we just use the portal.”
“And we won’t get poisoned by the arrows or burnt to death,” I agreed.
“How do we know that Jordan even made it past the arrows?” Tristan questioned.
“She probably did,” Slade answered, his eyes flicking over to meet his gaze. “She was in her wolf form. She was probably just the right height to avoid the sensors. They’re up a little higher in the trees and in the stone pillars than that.”
“That leaves us with only having to worry about the dragons, the ogres, the basilisk, and the dark fae,” Julius said as he circled each one on the map with a different color.
“Only,” Tristan repeated with a snort. “That sounds like a lot, if you ask me.”
“Do you want to split up?” Slade asked, looking around at the rest of us.
His gaze met each one of ours.
Julius’s eyes flickered with fear. “Separating sounds like the worst thing we could do
.”
“We’ll get done faster if we do,” Slade replied.
He looked a little amused that Julius was nervous about tackling one of the areas by himself.
“I call dibs on the faeries,” I said, before anyone else could choose it.
“You can have them,” Tristan replied with a shudder. “I’d rather not step foot near those evil little things.”
Slade eyed me curiously. “Why would you choose the worst one?”
I shrugged. “I’m taking one for the team.”
Julius furrowed his brows as he studied me. “There’s so many dark fae out in the woods. I don’t even want to think about how much magic they have combined. They’re capable of, well, anything. The ogres, the dragons, and the basilisk would be a lot easier to tackle alone. Are you sure you don’t want to change?”
I blocked the other guys from hearing my thoughts then. If I wanted to be the one to win Riley over and get all of the credit for saving her friend, I couldn’t let my thoughts tip them off to her whereabouts.
I didn’t know for sure that this would be a saving Jordan mission rather than a finding Jordan mission, but with all of those threats in the woods, she had to have found herself in some sort of trouble.
And I was almost certain that Jordan was with the dark fae. I would have bet my life on it. Faeries are crafty. They probably sensed that we’d brought Riley and her faerie magic into the Academy.
I wasn’t sure how fae magic worked. I just knew how my coven’s magic worked. It was the same way that I had been able to tell that Riley could help me get out of my coffin. I could just feel her presence. I could feel her ring nearby. And then, when I allowed my mind to tune into her, I could hear her thoughts. I could hear her conversation with her friends.
Fae magic was probably similar.
They’d probably been expecting Riley to escape from the vampires and run into the woods to hide out with them.
Riley would have been safe with them. She was one of them.
Too bad they’d gotten Jordan instead.
“We can double up,” Julius offered, looking at me.
I considered it. As much as I wanted to be the one that Riley saw as her hero for saving Jordan… I had to be realistic. Could I take on the dark fae alone?
“I’ll go, too,” Tristan said.
“Don’t die trying to be a hero,” Slade said, his eyes staring me down intently.
I wasn’t sure what the dark fae would do to a werewolf/vampire hybrid.
I wasn’t sure what they would do to me, if they managed to capture me.
I let out a sigh, knowing it would be a stupid move to go alone.
“Okay. You can come,” I agreed as I glanced into all of their faces.
“Yay,” Julius said half-heartedly.
“You sound like you’re really looking forward to this,” Tristan said with a laugh.
“Oh, I am ecstatic. We might all be dead as a doornail by lunchtime,” Julius said as he rolled up the map and slid it into his backpack. “Won’t that be fun?”
“You don’t have to come. You can stay home,” Slade told him.
“No, I can’t,” he said with a firm shake of his head. “You guys are going to need me. I just need to get my complaining out of my system.”
If my coven was this nervous about stepping into the dark fae’s territory, it meant a lot. They didn’t scare easily.
I just hoped that we would be bringing Jordan back in one piece.
Chapter 18
Riley
“Thank you for joining us at Nightshade Vampire Academy. We hope that it will be everything you have ever dreamed of and more,” the woman paused, smiling warmly, as she glanced around the surprisingly full room.
I’d thought that Drew and I were going to be the only ones here.
It turned out that we weren’t the only new students.
There were about twenty others in the room with us. Each one looked just as frightened as the next. It made me think they had all been recently turned, just like us.
“It is very unexpected and unprecedented to have so many new students joining us in the middle of the school year, but I am sure we will make you all feel at home.”
I shot a glance at Drew.
It was unprecedented to have so many new students in the middle of the school year? Why were there so many new students now?
“Do you think Noah, or one of the other guys, turned everyone in this room?” Drew asked so quietly that I could barely even hear him.
My stomach tightened into a jealous knot at the thought of it.
I glanced around the room, taking in all of the new faces.
Had the guys turned them all?
If they had turned them all into vampires, it didn’t look like they had chosen a specific type to turn. There were two pretty petite brunettes, who looked kind of athletic. They could have been cheerleaders in the human world.
There were a few tall, muscular guys who looked like they spent a lot of their time at the gym.
Then there were a few nerdy-looking ones who had probably been turned into vampires on their way home from the library.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back.
“You may have already seen me walking around the halls. That’s because I’m your new Headmaster,” the woman went on. Her brown lipstick-coated lips remained in a smile as she spoke. “You may refer to me as Headmaster McCullough. I’d like you to take one moment to text or call your parents to let them know you’ve arrived safely.”
Cell phones actually worked here?
Drew pulled his phone out right away and started typing.
“I can’t tell my parents the truth. They’ll think that I’m crazy or on drugs. What should I say?” he whispered to me.
“Just let them know that you’re okay for now,” I whispered back.
It wasn’t like we could ask them for help.
Drew nodded and finished typing his message. Then he showed me that the message had been delivered.
I had a new plan to get out of here. All I had to do was let my grandma know where I was. She was a faerie. She had to have known about Nightshade Vampire Academy.
I typed a quick text to her and sent it.
“And tell them what?” a girl with tan skin and dark eyes asked, her voice full of attitude. “Huh? What am I supposed to tell them? That some random lady bit me in a bar and now I’m a vampire going to a vampire school?”
I let out a sigh of relief. If a woman had bitten her, it couldn’t have had anything to do with my guys.
Headmaster McCullough’s eyes narrowed.
“You were bitten?” she asked.
She directed her gaze to all of the students in the room. “Were you all bitten?”
As the other vampires began to talk over one another, I squeezed Drew’s hand.
“Something tells me we should keep it a secret that we’ve been bitten,” I whispered to him.
“But what if it helps us out if we tell our story? Maybe they’ll realize we don’t belong here,” Drew whispered back.
I shook my head. “I really don’t think that will happen.”
Headmaster McCullough cleared her throat. When that didn’t work to get everyone’s attention, she shouted.
“Quiet!” she said, her voice booming.
As a silence fell over the room, she smiled sweetly.
“Now. Please raise your hand if you were bitten,” she instructed.
A few hands shot up.
“Is that everyone?” Headmaster McCullough questioned. “We don’t want to miss anyone.”
Drew began to slowly let go of my hand. I squeezed even harder.
“Don’t,” I whispered to him.
A few more hands raised in the crowd around us.
“That’s better,” Headmaster McCullough said with an approving nod. “Could you all wait here for a moment? Please keep your hands raised.”
She turned on her heel, slipping into a door on the left-hand side of th
e hallway.
After she disappeared, I noticed Noah, Slade, Tristan, and Julius standing at the end of the hallway.
They waved me over to them.
“Let’s go,” I told Drew.
“Do we have to? You’re supposed to hate them, remember?” he asked, shooting me a pointed glare.
I’d had enough time to fill him in on everything he’d missed out on while we waited for Headmaster McCullough to show up.
“I know, but…” I trailed off. Even I could barely make sense of why I didn’t hate them. Well, I sort of did, but I mostly didn’t. I wanted them all more than I hated them. I wanted them bad. “You know that I can’t help but have feelings for them.”
“I don’t know why, though. They’re not even that cute,” Drew said as he eyed them down.
I shot him a doubtful glance. Tristan, Slade, Julius, and Noah were wrong for me in so many ways, but they were all the most attractive guys I had ever laid eyes on.
“Okay, they’re hot,” he admitted.
“I know that you don’t want to be a vampire. Neither do I. But honestly? The only one that actually did anything wrong is Noah.” Of course, Noah was the one that I felt the strongest connection to. But I didn’t want to tell Drew that. “Tristan, Slade, and Julius saved all of our lives. They brought us to the same academy that they go to, so that we can learn how to be vampires. They’re trying to help us.”
I assumed that was what we were at this academy for. I wasn’t really sure what kinds of classes vampires would have to take.
I didn’t give Drew the opportunity to try to talk me out of it. I grabbed his arm and started walking towards the guys, pulling him behind me.
“You just have to get to know them better,” I told him.
Then he would see why I liked them so much.
“We both do,” Drew pointed out. “But you’re right. They’re the only familiar faces around here. At least we know how bad they can be. At least we know that only one out of the three is willing to murder us. We just have to keep an eye on Noah. The other guys are probably pretty cool.”
I was grateful that my back was turned, so that he didn’t see my eyes roll.
I reminded myself that it didn’t matter that my best friend didn’t trust Noah. He would grow on him in time. Or at least I hoped he’d be able to tolerate him.