by Tes Hilaire
You, Adia, are an idiot at times.
I sighed, settling into the last available plastic chair in the classroom and dumping my books on the desk between the cabinets and an upperclassman in jeans and black leather. In the grand scheme of things, an hour of detention barely registered as a blip on the retribution scale; hardly worth pulling out the red marker. I mean, if being nominated for sainthood hadn’t put me over the top, then…
I pulled out a spiral notebook, and flipped through my notes from history class. Et tu, Brute? Whatever. Okay, so maybe the history books weren’t far off on the whole Julius Caesar, Ides of March thing, but I’ll say this, Caesar may’ve been stabbed a whopping twenty-three times that day, but the man who started the death ball rolling wasn’t even in the room. I should know. I was there. It’s amazing what goes on in front of us slaves—as if we didn’t have eyes or ears.
That’s right. During one of my past lives, I was a slave. Not the most glamorous reincarnation I’ve had, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, and if being a slave would get me off this gerbil wheel, then I was all over it. Slavery, sainthood, martyrdom—you name it, I’ve tried it. So far, nothing had gotten me my plot on Elysian Isle. Frankly, being the eternal goody-two-shoes was getting old. This time around, I’d decided to go with my baser nature. Going with your gut, as they say… and right now, my gut was saying the boy sitting next to me was hot with a capital H.
I took another quick glimpse at Hottie, concluded he must’ve come in right before me. There was no other explanation why the half-dozen other girls in the room hadn’t formed a harem around his desk. He had that eclectic mix of Goth and biker-dude going on—eyebrow ring, black jeans and t-shirt, leather jacket tossed over the chair, tattoos. Yum.
He shifted, leather boots grinding grit into the tile floor and his bicep flexing so the two-tone tattoo plumped out. Oh yeah. It really was a lovely tattoo. Celtic. And the way the band rippled with each movement…
So engrossed was I in staring, I didn’t immediately realize he’d looked up from his paper and was staring back.
“Like what you see?” His voice was a deep, lazy drawl that sent shivers down my spine.
Heat flooded my cheeks. I jerked my head around, turning back to my doodling. Staring? Blushing? Uh, humiliating. I immediately set to praying I would melt into a puddle under my desk. Right here, right now. Because another week of waiting to die was just going to be too much.
Even so, I couldn’t seem to help myself from daring another peek of 21st century teenage boy perfection. He winked.
All righty then, now I could die of mortification. I took seriously to my task of inscribing my notebook with more flourishes, though really I was paying absolutely no attention to what I was drawing. I was too busy listening to the agonizingly slow tick of the clock over the door to care. Tick…Tock…Tick…Tock…Why was it when I really wanted time to pass it slowed down to the point where each millisecond seemed to drag out infinitely? I needed to get out of here. Regroup and get a handle on the teenage hormones that were obviously throwing me way off my normal stride.
And it was those teenage hormones that had me sucking in my breath when Hottie leaned across the aisle, his chin-length black hair sliding over lips that were just downright sexy. “So, what are you in for?”
That one was easy. A no brainer. And much safer ground than my newfound meekness. I lifted and dropped an apathetic shoulder. “Being a smart aleck.”
And let me say, I excel at that. Sure, I could be charming and docile when I wanted, but really, where had that ever gotten anyone? You wanted something done, you had to be bold and cunning, and thanks to Hermes, I had those qualities in spades.
Hot guy’s gaze roamed over me, lingering—overly long if you asked me—at my chest. When he reached my eyes again, he said, “Don’t look like an Alec to me.”
At the front of the room, the monitor cleared his throat.
I stifled my chuckle, not willing to risk getting a second day tacked on and certainly not willing to let Hottie know what I thought of him, which was, okay, hot and kind of funny.
He smiled, leaning back in his seat.
And conceited. Definitely conceited.
The monitor began attendance and I listened attentively until Hottie raised his hand, giving me a name to go with the yummy face and body. Cole Jager. I rolled the name on my tongue, automatically deriving its meaning: Dark Hunter. Wonder if the name had purposefully been chosen for its meaning, or if the fact it suited him was completely coincidental. Probably the latter. People didn’t consider the denotation much in the giving of names these days.
“Adia… Adia Reed?” The monitor called out.
I almost missed it, piping out a last second, “Here.”
“Knew you weren’t an Alec,” Cole whispered, sending another giddy little thrill through me.
Okay, gotta stop that.
I valiantly faced forward, keeping my eyes on the board as papers were passed out. Busywork, nothing challenging. I finished before the torture session was half over and resumed my doodling, my attention half on the clock and the rest on the boy sitting across from me. He oozed confident bad-boy. I wish I’d asked him what he was in for. Wish I’d flirted back rather than acting like a celestial virgin. Mostly, I wish I had the nerve to ask him for a phone number. But with six days and counting… really, what was the point?
Six days. Damn. And so far nothing major had occurred to earn me my chance at redemption. There’d been little stuff, sure, and I’d done what I could without completely blowing my cover, as it were, but nothing that was going to knock the ball out of the park. If something didn’t happen soon to tip the scales in my favor, then in—I glanced at the clock again—approximately six days, seven hours, and eight minutes, I was going to be back at the Trivium kissing the feet of Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus. I needed a disaster of mammoth proportions to fix, and needed it soon. Personally, given my track record, I wasn’t holding out much hope.
“You think she’s responsible for our misery right now?”
Jarred from my bleak thoughts, I blinked, looking across the aisle at Cole. “What?”
He nodded down at my notebook.
I looked at the clusters of flowers, thorns, and vine-like flourishes I’d drawn. But that didn’t make sense. I let my focus soften. A distinctive pattern emerged, a series of letters, a name—Pandora.
In over a hundred lifetimes, a girl is bound to forget some things. But there’s one thing I haven’t forgotten. I haven’t forgotten my first name.
About the Author
Daphne award-winning author Tes Hilaire started creating whole new worlds to escape Upstate New York’s harsh winters before finally fleeing to sultry North Carolina. Her stories are edgy, exciting, and bring a hint of dark fantasy to all she writes. And no one ever has to shovel snow. For more visit TesHilaire.com.
Sometimes life really bites…
For socially inept nerds like Eva Harper, the junior prom is bound to suck, especially when her date turns out to be a vampire. Eva wakes from the change knowing her life will never be the same. Not only is the vegan teenager now a vampire, but a vicious virus has struck, spreading across the globe and irreversibly changing much of mankind…into zombies.
…and the only thing to do is to bite back
Fleeing from the vampire hive and their controlling queen, Eva takes up with a rag-tag militia in their seemingly insurmountable quest to rid the world of zombies. But little does she know it’s her own secret, a secret she doesn’t even know she has, that will be the turning point for the zombie wars.
Table of Contents
Copyright Information
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Sneak Peak for Fifteen Forever
Chapter One (Fifteen Forever)
About the Author
Back Cover Blurb
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Sneak Peak for Fifteen Forever
Chapter One (Fifteen Forever)
About the Author
Back Cover Blurb
Table of Contents
Copyright Information
Other Books
Dedication
1.
2.
3.
4.
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35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
Sneak Peak for Fifteen Forever
Chapter One (Fifteen Forever)
About the Author
Back Cover Blurb