“Okay,” I agreed, pulling a chocolate bar out of my bag. “Tutor away.”
“Well, the Helios-Ra is named after two sun gods, Helios from Greek mythology and Ra from Egyptian mythology. The League was officially formed in 892 C.E. by Alric Skallagrim.”
“C.E.?” I asked. “What’s that?”
“It means Common Era. It’s the archaeologist’s version of a.d. And before Alric, hunters had their own tribal traditions, some of which were solidified and spread about by the armies of Rome. But they never all officially worked together until Alric.”
“Let me guess, there was a big bad?”
“Several actually. How did you know?”
“There’s always a big bad. Didn’t you ever watch Buffy?”
“Even so, the original tenet of the League was to hunt the undead.”
“They’re not really undead,” I interrupted. “You guys know that, right? I mean, the Hel-Blar are, and most of the others, but not the families of the Raktapa Council. Not entirely anyway. I mean, they get sick and die. Sort of. But not really. It’s complicated.”
“It’s never been complicated to the Helios-Ra,” Jenna said. “Vampire is as vampire does.”
“That’s specie-ist,” I grumbled, frustrated. “Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to me?”
“Vampires drink human blood,” Jenna pointed out. “And I kinda need mine.”
“They don’t have to drink enough to kill you. Just to live. Survive. Whatever.” I frowned. “Don’t be so greedy.”
“Don’t be so eager to give my blood away.”
“Would you donate blood at a blood drive?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, there you go!” I declared triumphantly.
“But that’s different.”
“Why?”
She frowned at Tyson. He frowned back at her. Then they both frowned at me.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “It just is.”
“We know times are changing,” Tyson added, looking interested enough in the quandary that he forgot to be hand-shakingly shy. Instead he sounded as if he was quoting a professor in his head. “We have treaties with some vampire tribes. And we also have several more departments, at the academy and at the college. And in the League at large as well. Things like Tech and Supernatural Studies.”
“What about Vampire Relations?” I asked. Especially with the local newspapers now reporting on the increase in missing persons. Apparently the last time something like this happened was in the eighties. “We need that. I could totally do that.”
“Making out with your hot boyfriend doesn’t count toward your grade,” Jenna teased.
I shook my head. “I knew this place was all wrong.”
“Did Bellwood go through the rules with you?” Tyson asked.
“Probably,” I admitted. “But she talked a lot. And she’s surprisingly intimidating.”
Jenna just snorted.
“The basic rules are pretty self-explanatory,” I recited. “Don’t leave campus after hours, don’t tell outsiders about the school or the League, don’t get caught or tell secrets, and don’t fraternize with vampires. Which is a stupid rule, by the way.”
Tyson looked at Jenna helplessly. When she didn’t offer any advice, he just handed me a printout. “Here’s the homework.”
I groaned. “Homework? Really? On top of all my other classwork?”
“Bellwood gave me a list of essays and papers you have to do to prove you’re catching up.”
I lay my head on the table despondently. “Shouldn’t I be learning how to kill things?”
Jenna checked her watch. “Come on, there’s a kickboxing match in the gym in ten minutes. Afterward, I’ll teach you how to fall down.”
“I know how to fall down, thanks.”
“Trust me, falling down properly is harder than it looks. Learn the right way and you can get back up faster and keep fighting.”
I thought of being in Lady Natasha’s dungeons, of my cousin Christabel being kidnapped because they thought she was me, of stakes flying at my boyfriend, and of Hope taking out half the Drake farmhouse. I bared my teeth.
“I’m in.”
Chapter 14
Solange
Monday, sunset
I woke up missing Kieran.
By the time I’d drunk three bottles of blood and was sated enough to leave my own private corner of the family tunnels, I’d already talked myself out of writing him a letter or checking to see if he’d written me one, about five times. Maybe ten.
The last thing I wanted to do was deal with the aftermath of Sunday night. Mom lost her temper all the time; everyone was used to it. Even Lucy lost her temper enough to give Mom a run for her money. But I never lost my temper. Frankly, until recently you could have been forgiven for assuming I didn’t even have one. Now I just felt it there all the time, boiling and searing under my skin.
I knew I should apologize, and I meant to, but the minute I came up from the safe house and felt everyone staring at me, the anger came back. I actually glanced down to make sure there wasn’t steam coming off me. I felt full of embers again, instead of blood.
Duncan was sprawled in a chair, looking wary. I should definitely tell him I was sorry, but I didn’t know if he wanted to be reminded that his baby sister had taken him down. Quinn, Connor, and Marcus sat at the table. Only Connor smiled at me. Mom and Dad turned to watch my progress up the last of the metal steps. A candle burned between them. Dad’s worry lines were so deeply etched between his eyes they looked painted on.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Fine.” I didn’t mean to snap the answer; it was just that somewhere between my brain and my tongue everything got jumbled up. “How’s London?” I asked before we could get into another painful discussion about my attitude.
“Better,” Dad replied. “Not at full strength, but she’ll get there. Your uncle’s keeping an eye on her.”
“Oh. Good.” I didn’t know what else to say. I took a step toward the door.
“You’re restricted to the grounds.” It was the first thing Mom had said to me since I’d compelled her. She wouldn’t look at me.
“I know.” They want to keep you weak. They always have.
“That means you stay between the torches.”
“I know.”
“And watch your tone, young lady, or you’ll be restricted to this tent.”
I slipped outside before I said anything to make it worse. The cold night air helped, and the expanse of the star-thick sky made me feel slightly less itchy and claustrophobic. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I wasn’t even sure who to trust anymore. I knew I didn’t trust Madame Veronique, but my parents did, so what was the use in warning them? They’d think I was overreacting. They’d think it was pheromones or regular hormones or whatever other thousands of excuses people had when anyone under twenty-one had something important to say. And it was even worse with vampires, whose life spans were so ridiculously long some would barely acknowledge anyone under two hundred.
A sixteen-year-old girl who’d tried to compel her mother and the oldest matriarch of her lineage?
Not likely.
I stepped out from under the tent awning and wandered down the path, aimless. I tried to ignore the vampires who turned to watch me pass and Penelope, who curtsied so deeply and abruptly she nearly tripped an Amrita dignitary from India. I searched for Constantine’s black hair and his distinctive violet eyes, while trying not to be too obvious about it. For some reason, he always made me feel better. Or at the very least, he made me forget. Maybe he could take me back to the Bower, where I was a dhampir and it was no big deal, where I was a princess and it was no big deal either. The Bower was technically off-limits for me right now, but the ache to be sitting in the parlor under the trees was palpable. I felt better just thinking about it.
Better enough not to notice the way the crowd was parting in front of me until it was too late.
The sound of white damask silk rubbing over wicker panniers was soft as the wind through the snow. Fangs gleamed, diamond shoe buckles glittered, and black feather tattoos seemed to move on their own. I smelled face powder and blood.
Everyone around us stilled. Morbid curiosity thrummed. My heart would have stuttered in my chest, if it still beat. It gave me a jolt to see them looking so identical to Lady Natasha, even though I’d seen them before. Constantine might consider her to be a colonial backwater wannabe queen, but she was still the vampire who’d eaten a raw deer heart because she thought it was mine. Her Furies didn’t intimidate him, not even now, hissing and spitting as one.
Which is why he was the first one to move when the whitethorn stake came at me.
It would have cleaved my heart if he hadn’t been there.
“Solange!” he yelled, even as he leaped impossibly fast and high. He kicked the stake, knocking it out of its trajectory just before it sliced through my shirt. It grazed my skin lightly and landed in the snow. At the same time Constantine threw his own stake at the Fury nearest to us. He was as good a fighter as any of my brothers and nearly as good as my mother.
Even so, he was no match for the Chandramaa. No one was.
It all happened so fast, it was as if the snow froze in midair, as if everything else had stopped moving altogether. The Fury who’d attacked me crumbled into ashes, leaving behind an embroidered white dress that drifted to the ground as if it were underwater. Someone shouted but the sound was elongated and strange. Red arrows fell like angry rain, creating a sort of fence between me and the other Furies. Constantine was facing me, about to land on the frozen ground.
He didn’t see the crossbow bolt, also red, whistling toward his back.
Chandramaa justice was blind. He’d taught me that.
I had just enough time and presence of mind to kick his kneecap with my boot. He dropped painfully out of his graceful descent, the look of surprise on his face nearly comical. I threw myself across him, covering him before he’d even landed. The jolt of hitting the ground snapped my jaws together. I lay there with my eyes scrunched tight, wondering if I was about to feel the bite of a crossbow bolt in the back.
Nothing happened.
I opened one eye, then the other. Constantine lay very still under me.
“I’m not dead?” I asked.
His mouth curved in a half smile but his eyes were fierce. “Too many bats.”
I blinked, turned my head slowly. He was right. There were just enough bats dipping and somersaulting over us to block any arrows or stakes from the trees. The Moon Guard couldn’t see us to kill us. The Furies were still hissing, but they were too frightened to cross the line of red-tipped arrows.
I told you I’d protect you. We are stronger together.
I stayed where I was, sprawled on top of a very handsome vampire. “Now what?”
“I have no idea, princess.”
For someone who’d just saved my life and had nearly gotten staked for his trouble, he sounded pretty calm.
But that was only because he’d never met my mother.
“Solange Drake!” Mom’s black braid snaked behind her like a whip as she and the rest of my family shoved through the crowd. She paused, seething when an arrow nearly stabbed into her toe. Sebastian put his back to her, guarding her and glaring calmly at the trees. “I can’t even begin to express how much trouble you’re in,” Mom said between her teeth.
“It’s not my fault!” I tried to glare at her, but I couldn’t quite contort my neck that way. “They tried to stake me.”
“What?” Mom’s voice dropped until it was such a cold, dark whisper several of the bystanders backed away. Dad’s fangs gleamed. The crowd chattered so loudly among themselves that when they stopped abruptly it made me flinch.
A woman marched toward us. She was young, with short black hair. “I represent the Chandramaa,” she announced, as if the red moon stitched on her black leather jacket didn’t give away her or her vaguely menacing stance. She was too young to be full Chandramaa and she’d let us see her face, so she was clearly not a full initiate. “Release him to us,” she said to me.
I knew what that meant. Constantine would be executed for saving me.
I was not going to let that happen.
“No.”
The guard blinked, nonplussed. “Perhaps you didn’t understand me. I was sent by the Chandramaa.”
“Solange,” Dad said tightly. “What are you doing?”
“Constantine saved my life,” I answered as the bats grew agitated overhead. “Don’t let them kill him.” They don’t understand. They never will.
“He interfered with Chandramaa justice,” the girl said sharply. “There are no exceptions.”
“Kill her!” the Furies chanted, softly, viciously. “Kill her now! Blood traitor!”
Constantine moved so that his hands were on my hips. His eyes were like amethysts. “What do you want to do, princess?” he asked quietly, so only I could hear him. His lips tickled my cheek.
What did I want to do?
The fact that he’d asked me, the fact that he was waiting for me to decide my own fate made me all the more determined to save him from his.
“We run,” I whispered back.
“Kill her!”
I wasn’t sure yet how I seemed to control bats, but I thought about them now, as hard as I could. I imagined them swarming through the trees toward us, floating like a fanged black cloud, swallowing the stars and the arrows of the Moon Guard. I was visualizing them so intently that it took a moment for me to realize the sounds of hundreds of leathery wings weren’t in my imagination. Bats darted and dive-bombed around us, cutting off anyone who tried to get too close, even my parents.
“Solange, wait!” Dad shouted, ducking as a bat flew past his head. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”
Let go. Let me protect you.
“If you cross the Chandramaa, you’re exiled from this place,” the guard added, looking angry and confused. A bat went for her eyes and she shrieked. “An instant death to you and yours should you return to this place.”
“Solange, don’t!” Mom pleaded. I’d never seen her sound so scared or look so torn.
But I couldn’t just stay here and let Constantine be killed. That wasn’t justice; it was murder.
“Are you sure?” he asked as I tensed to jump to my feet. “There’s no turning back.”
I met his violet eyes. “I’m sure.”
He launched off the ground in one fluid movement, one arm pinning me to his chest. Bats crowded around us. Everyone was shouting. Chandramaa bolts snaked between the bats, but they just landed in the frostbitten dirt. Only snow hung in the cold air, not ashes.
Constantine and I broke into a run, dodging helpful hands and harmful ones. We plunged into the dark forest, still trailing bats. Someone gave a strangled yelp from the top of a pine tree. A crossbow fell to the ground. Bats winged between the trees, as if they’d been released by an invisible slingshot. I ran as fast as I could, convinced I was going to be impaled on an arrow or a stake flung from above. Constantine held my hand tightly, dragging me over roots and under moss-draped branches. Ferns flattened at our passing.
We left the torchlight of the Blood Moon camp behind us, along with my family and everything I’d ever known.
Chapter 15
NICHOLAS
Monday, early evening
We were patrolling on the very edges of the forest when Karim, the guard walking next to me, fell apart into ashes.
The bolt pierced his heart and thunked into a pine tree. Splinters ricocheted as I reached for a stake and launched into a run at the same time. There was no smell of mushrooms or rot, no clacking of teeth. Not Hel-Blar, but definitely vampires. They moved too fast to be hunters.
I could hear them in the trees, up in the branches, down in the ferns, everywhere. There were a lot of them; that much I could tell. I ran faster, until everything
blurred. It wasn’t enough. Another crossbow bolt whistled by my head. A stake landed in the dirt by my left foot.
I was seriously outnumbered.
I hit the alarm on the GPS tag Connor had just recently programmed for everyone in the family. If we activated it, a message was sent immediately with our location. Assuming I was in range of any signal and assuming anyone else had a signal to even receive it.
Assumptions that could get me killed a whole lot faster.
I darted around a hemlock and slid into the yellowing grass of a narrow valley on the edge of the forest. I was far from the encampment, far from the farmhouse, even far from the royal caves. I’d never even seen this part of the mountains. I thought I heard screaming, faintly, but it faded and I was running too hard to be sure. If I’d still been human, my heartbeat would have drowned out every tiny sound; as it was, the rush of my blood through my veins was like needles of rain and wind. The part of me my mother had trained remained calm and removed, as if I were watching a movie. Clods of mud and dead flowers broke up under my boots as I pushed on. If I lost my cool now, I’d be dead for sure.
I had a moment to feel grateful that none of my brothers were with me. Losing Karim was bad enough. He was dead because of me. He could have been back at the encampment with his own family, or at home, wherever that might be. I’d only just met him before setting out. I didn’t even know his last name.
But dying now wouldn’t help him.
I could try to shake them in the labyrinthine caves of the mountains, but I was as likely to trap myself in a dead end as not. I might be able to outrun them, but there were no guarantees. There was also no decent place to make a stand, nothing solid to put at my back besides the mountain. A quick glance showed rock and stunted wind-bent pine trees, and another vampire sliding down toward me from up high. A flash of pale skin on my right, a gleam of fangs behind me.
“Enough play,” someone barked, violent laughter in his voice.
The first grab caught my jacket and yanked me to a stop. I had just enough room to maneuver out of the sleeves and leave it behind. The cold air slapped my bare arms, but I wore the coat mostly out of habit anyway. I didn’t need it. And I certainly didn’t need it to fight. I managed to get just out of reach, but the way was blocked by a pile of boulders from some long-ago avalanche. Moonlight fell on moss and frost and the leaf-bare silhouette of twisted trees. I leaped forward, intending to scale the uneven pile. I’d take my chances with gravity over the lot behind me.
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