Digging the item I’d picked up from my pocket, I glanced down. It was a silver necklace with some kind of pendant on the chain. I would have to try to find the girl and return it to her, though I was sure she had other things to worry about right now. I didn’t want to go chasing after the group, waving the necklace around. I had attracted enough attention to myself already, and I didn’t intend on creating any more. It was better if I slipped the jewelry back to her unnoticed.
I twisted the pendant in my fingers and frowned. The pendant was a silver circle with a star in the middle. I had seen a symbol similar to that before. The last time I’d come across it, magic had been involved.
Cold clutched at my heart.
“What have you got there?”
I turned at the sound of Laurel’s voice, quickly closing my fingers around the pendant.
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
She laughed. “Don’t be silly. I saw you pick something off the floor.”
For some reason, an instinct perhaps, or maybe something else, I didn’t want to show her. The pendant tingled and burned in my palm. I wasn’t imagining that there was more to this piece of jewelry than just a circle of metal.
“A button pinged off my jeans,” I told her. I gave a half-embarrassed shrug. “Guess I’d better start cutting down on that junk food.”
She frowned at me, her eyes narrowing behind her glasses, and my cheeks heated, knowing she didn’t believe me. My quip about me being a pathological liar was starting to feel like the truth.
Music started back up, and people began to close in around the gap where the girl had collapsed. Some couples started dancing again, while other stood in groups, chatting. But the mood of the party had grown subdued, as if an unseen force was pressing down on everyone. People smiled a little less willingly, danced with more reserve.
I kept my eyes peeled, trying to spot if Flynn or Dana returned to the party. I didn’t see them inside the hall, so figured I’d try outside. I told the others where I was going, but Brooke barely glanced in my direction, and the other girls just nodded and smiled, and then continued their conversation. Probably sick of my lies, Laurel had taken herself off to talk to a different group of girls.
Deflated, I headed outside. The air was warm, but felt cooler than the muggy interior of a couple of hundred sweaty, hot teenagers.
I caught sight of the now familiar shape of Flynn’s broad shoulders and buzzed head. He was sitting on the grass on his own, his back to me, looking out over the lit parking lot. I glanced to either side, but didn’t see Dana anywhere. He appeared to be alone.
Breaking into a gentle jog, I headed over to him. His arms were rested on his bent knees, his feet planted on the ground. He must have heard me approach because he looked up at me with a frown.
“Beth. What are you doing out here? Shouldn’t you be with your friends?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think I know them well enough to call them friends yet.” I experienced a pang of guilt for brushing off Laurel so easily. She seemed like the kind of girl I could be friends with, as long as I never inadvertently touched her.
I sat down on the grass beside him. “I just wanted to check that girl was okay.”
“Melissa?”
“If that’s her name.”
“Yeah, she’s fine. Dana is a first-aider, and she’s taken her back to her room. She was coming around as soon as we got her out of the hall. It might have been the heat or something.”
“Really? It seemed a lot worse than the heat. Shouldn’t someone have called an ambulance?”
“Nah, no need to get the authorities involved. She was fine, I promise.”
The necklace in my pocket seemed to vibrate. I wondered how long it would be before the girl—Melissa—would notice the chain was missing. I had a feeling she would panic when she did.
I needed to find out more before I gave it back to her. From experience, I knew that those connected with magic weren’t always on the good side.
Something I’d considered earlier came back to me. I jerked my head toward the tall, expansive buildings of the dorms.
“So what’s with all the names?” I asked, referring to the names each building had been given. “It’s all a bit … herby.”
He laughed, making his Adam’s apple bob, and I relaxed slightly. “Goes back to when the town was first started. There’s a rumor some of the founders of the town were into their herbal medicine, if you know what I mean?”
I pretended I didn’t. “What, like drugs?”
“No, like spells and stuff.”
“Witchcraft?”
“Oh, don’t worry. It’s only a few rumors.”
Yeah, right. I knew where rumors came from, and pretty much all of them had at least one foot in reality.
He rubbed at his square jaw with one strong-fingered hand. He was just a little too perfect, I decided. Too much like a young, aspiring catalog model. Definitely not my type, if I even had a type. But there seemed to be something behind the good looks and the swimmer’s body. There was a sharp glint of intelligence behind his green eyes.
“Seriously, Beth,” he said, looking at me. “Don’t worry about stuff like that. Just concentrate on getting good grades and doing what you want when you get into the real world.”
I smiled. “You’re parenting me again.”
“I was, huh? I really must stop doing that if I ever want you to think of me as anything but a father figure.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to his comment, but the roar of a motorbike, its headlight blazing, rolled into the parking lot. The rider stopped the bike suddenly, letting it fall to the ground as he climbed off. My eyes widened, and I jumped to my feet. Riley stormed toward us from the direction of the parking lot, his leather jacket flapping in the wind his motion created. His dark blue eyes appeared almost black in the moonlight, his expression grim.
My heart leapt in my chest, and I bit my lower lip in anticipation of what was to come.
Flynn got to his feet beside me. He radiated tension, his shoulders back, fists at his sides.
“Hey, Icy,” Riley said, coming to a stop in front of us. He didn’t smile, his eyes narrowed. The flirty demeanor he’d displayed in my room had vanished. He was deadly serious. “We’ve just had the cops come see us.”
I stared back. “So what?”
“They’ve implied that you suspect the ride was sabotaged on purpose.”
My mouth fell open. “What? I never said that!”
I tried to remember exactly what I had said. I’d been so desperate to get out of the cop car and away from them, I might have mentioned something about sabotage, though I was sure I’d quipped that I was the one who’d sabotaged the ride and then changed my mind. In hindsight, that probably wasn’t the smartest of things I could have said.
“Yeah, well, now the guys I work for are seriously pissed. There’s going to be repercussions, Icy!”
The tightness of his jaw made his cheekbones appear even sharper, his cheeks shadowed hollows beneath them. His blue eyes were big, fringed with dark lashes, though at that moment his appearance was more dangerous than anything else.
Flynn stepped forward. “Don’t you threaten her!” he snapped, one finger pointed in Riley’s face. “Your type shouldn’t even be on campus.”
Riley Draiodh was half a foot shorter than Flynn, and probably weighed twenty pounds less, but he didn’t seem in the slightest bit intimidated.
His nostrils flared. “Yeah? And what exactly is my type?”
“A carny. Most of you are freaking criminals anyway!”
“Flynn!” I couldn’t help my exclamation. His view shocked me.
Riley’s head cocked to one side, and his eyes remained locked with Flynn’s. “And what about what you are, huh?”
Alarm jarred through me, thinking Riley had somehow figured out about my half-vampire genetics, but then I realized he was still speaking to Flynn. What was he talking about?
Flynn shot him a warning gl
are. “Takes one to know one.”
“What the hell are you two talking about?” I demanded.
“It’s nothing,” Flynn said, taking me by the upper arm to try to pull me away. I wasn’t going anywhere.
“Anyway, I’m not here to fight,” Riley said to Flynn. He turned to me. “I’m not threatening you, Icy. I’m trying to protect you. I tried to tell you before. The guys I work for won’t put up with any shit. If they think you’re going to be a problem for them, they’ll make sure you won’t get to open your mouth again. If the cops come to see you again, just tell them you don’t know anything.”
I threw my hands up in exasperation. “I don’t know anything!”
Flynn stepped forward. “You heard her. Now get the hell out of here.”
His interference was starting to get to me. While I didn’t like what Riley was saying, I also didn’t like Flynn hovering over me like some kind of over protective father figure. I already had one of those, and I’d moved thousands of miles away to create a life of my own.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with you, Flynn,” I told him.
“Someone needs to watch out for you.”
I scowled, my annoyance ratcheting up a notch. “Don’t give me that bullshit, and stop acting like either of you can protect me. If anyone is going to be doing the protecting around here, it’s me. I’m stronger than the pair of you put together.”
“Don’t be crazy, Beth. You must barely weigh one hundred pounds.”
I resisted the urge to growl at them. Instead, I clamped my teeth together to prevent myself spitting out the words, ‘I’m half-vampire’ just to see the expression on their faces.
I took a deep breath and tried again. “I’m trying to say that I don’t need one baby-sitter, never mind two.”
As if to prove my point, I stepped forward, pushing between them.
“Beth!” Flynn protested, but Riley said nothing. Even so, I sensed his gaze burning into my back as I walked away.
Don’t look back, don’t look back, I told myself, knowing so much as a glance would make me lose my cool.
Chapter
11
With my heart pounding, I stalked across campus, planning to go back to my room. The last thing I wanted was to get into a conversation with anyone else, but Erin and Kayla stood in the middle of the path ahead of me. I ducked my head down, hoping to somehow go unnoticed, but they’d already spotted me.
“Hey, Beth, there you are,” Kayla said. “We wondered where you’d gotten to.”
Erin frowned. “Everything okay?”
I forced a smile. “Oh, fine, thanks. I just got chatting with a couple of people, that’s all.” I noticed the threesome was missing one. “Brooke not with you?”
“Nah,” Erin said. “She said she was tired, and went back to your room.”
My heart sank. The last thing I wanted to do was go and hang out with Brooke. Hopefully, she had gone to bed already. I waved goodbye to the other girls and headed back to my room.
I stopped outside the door and placed my hand on the solid wood, intending to push it open. An image flashed through my head, making me gasp. A couple of burly guys, both wearing wife-beater shirts and cheap tattoos, entered the room. Was this a premonition or something that had already happened? As I opened the door and stepped through, another vision hit me. One of the men lifted Brooke around her waist, her back pressed against his chest. She kicked out at the other man, but they both laughed.
Oh, no.
Brooke wasn’t in the room. The bedcovers were tangled and half spilled on the floor. An unusual scent filled the air, a combination of stale tobacco, sweat, and alcohol. The men had been in here. What I’d seen wasn’t going to happen in the future. It must have only just occurred.
Shit.
I hesitated. What now? The men must have come from the carnival, here to warn me off personally. But why had they taken Brooke?
The worst fears ran through my head—strange men and a pretty, young college girl was never a good combination, at least not for the college girl. I remembered the card the cops had given me earlier that day. I’d flung it onto my nightstand when I’d changed earlier. It had quickly become lost among my books and other paperwork, but I rummaged through and found it. Fingering the soft cardboard, I thought hard. Should I call the police?
But what would I tell them? I hadn’t seen anything, and Brooke was old enough to be out by herself. So what if her usually immaculate bed was a mess? Slovenliness was hardly a crime. I certainly couldn’t tell them I’d had a vision of men coming into the room, and that I could still smell them on the air.
My other option was to go and find Flynn, and tell him I was worried about Brooke. After all, he’d been there when Riley told me about the carny guys being angry with me, though that still didn’t explain why they’d taken Brooke and not waited for me. Had Brooke threatened to scream, or even had screamed, and so they’d needed to shut her up?
I trembled. Though I didn’t have much love for the other girl, I never wanted to see her hurt, especially not because of me. Yet I remembered how Flynn had been toward Riley, a definite disdain for the carny folk. I didn’t want him going in there, all guns blazing. I’d never find out anything that way.
I groaned and sank down to the edge of my bed, my forehead in my hands. I’d basically just convinced myself it was a good idea to head to the carnival and try to find Brooke myself.
No, I’ll find Riley.
He might act like an asshole most of the time, but I was sure he’d genuinely been trying to warn as opposed to threaten me. The stupid, traitorous part of me couldn’t help but be a bit excited at the idea of seeing him again. I wanted to be in his presence, that hint of danger, or darkness about him. I recognized it because it was in me too, drawing me toward him. I couldn’t explain how everything dark, wicked, and gothic made my heart rate step up a notch, but in a good way. It was so unlike when I was in the presence of anything sweet or girlie. The darkness made me feel alive, true to myself. Real.
I pushed my thoughts away and forced myself to my feet. I took a breath, steadying my nerves. I’d do my best not to be noticed, but if I was, I needed to remember that I was stronger and faster than any of them. They might only see a slim, dark-haired, dark-eyed slip of a girl, but I could be wicked when I wanted to be.
Hoping not to be stopped by anyone, I grabbed my jacket and slunk from the room. I kept to the walls of the hallway, sneaking down into the stairwell to run the steps two at a time. I exited into the cool air, trying to spot any signs, physical or psychic, that might give me an idea about which direction Brooke had been taken.
I glanced around. Surely they couldn’t have brought Brooke this way? Groups of students still hung out, chatting and laughing. A few gave me a fleeting look as I walked out, perhaps spotting my pallid face in the moonlight. If they’d brought her here, they’d have been noticed, and the alarm would have been called. But what other options did they have? Had our bedroom window been open again? I hadn’t thought to check. The fire escape led down the back of the building, but I was sure the alarm would have gone off if someone had opened it, unless they disabled the alarm first.
With my head down, I walked at a fast pace toward the rental car I’d been loaned. I wished I had my old car back, wanting the comfort of slipping into the soft leather and ‘new car’ smell that reminded me of home.
The SUV would make me fit in better, especially around the carny guys, but that didn’t stop me longing for home.
I could always call Mom and Dad.
But no, I didn’t want to do that. My parents had taken care of me all these years. They’d spent time apart so I was never without someone in the daytime. I knew how hard it must have been for them. My mom, Serenity, had always been awake in the day to be with me, and then she’d needed to sleep when the night came and my dad, Sebastian, finally woke up. I was an adult now, and this was their time. They’d done everything for me, and I loved them dearly for it. I ne
eded to repay the favor.
Climbing inside the truck, I turned the key in the ignition and started it up. The engine grumbled to life around me. I suppressed a smile, imagining what the rest of the L.A. crowd would have said if they’d been given this car as a replacement to their flash vehicles.
Yanking the shift stick into reverse, I slung my arm over the passenger seat and backed out of the lot. No one paid me any attention.
I drove down the road, the forest looming on one side, the buildings that made up Sage Springs on the other. Some buildings were still lit, but many now resided in darkness. My eyes were drawn back to the forest. Something about the tall pines seemed menacing, the spiky leaves reaching across the road.
Bypassing town, I took the route down toward the beach, planning on pulling over before I reached the parking lot where most of the carnival had been erected and walking the rest. It wasn’t far. Within five minutes, I pulled the SUV over and parked beneath a tree, trying to ignore the rustling branches that felt like they were whispering a warning.
Moving quickly and almost silently on my sneakered feet, I hurried down the road, toward the carnival. No cars passed by, and I was thankful not to meet anyone else on foot either. I preferred to go unseen.
I rounded the bend, and the carnival stretched out before me. The line of the beach and the sea lay beyond, moonlight glinting off the waves. The shapes of the rides rose up into the moonlit sky like sleeping dinosaurs. It felt strange to see the place in darkness, void of bright lights, music and laughter. There was something creepy about the place now, threatening, though I suspected the vibrations I picked up were mainly caused by my knowledge that the people within might be dangerous.
The trailers where the carnies slept were positioned beyond the fairway. Lights beamed from the mobile homes, so I knew people were still up. Could one of the trailers contain Brooke? And which one did Riley live in?
Did he live alone, or with his parents? Hell, he might even live with a girlfriend for all I knew, though from the way he looked and spoke to me, I’d feel damn sorry for her if he did.
Twisted Dreams Page 8