Char would be absolutely crushed.
“I actually don’t give a fuck where Charlotte Russell goes, just as long as she stays the hell away from your house. She’s welcome to head over to the pool house right now and throw herself at every guy with a bank account. That’s why she showed up here, anyway.”
“Get the fuck off my porch,” I growled up at him.
“Your porch?” he finally pushed off the wall to gesture out to the field around the garage house. “This is all mine.”
“Much happiness it brings you, Justin Roberts.” I pointed down. “But we’re done here. Stay off this porch area . . .” I gestured to the rectangle of cement, “And don’t bother me again. Just try to remove my friend because you think you know what’s better for me than I do. Just try.” I opened the door and slammed it behind me, locking it for good measure.
I took a moment to catch my breath in the shadows of the stairway. Damn it. How could I possibly head upstairs and tell Char that Justin planned to rip away the thing she cared most about.
A soft knock came at the door, and I put my hand on the lock, hesitating for about thirty seconds before I opened it.
Justin stood there, leaning in again. The anger had faded from his expression, but he didn’t say anything.
I leaned into the doorsill inches before him. “Don’t do that again, okay?”
“She’s just going to stab you in the back repeatedly. She probably already has,” he said.
“Maybe she will. Maybe you will. I’ll be strong enough to deal with both.”
His hand came up and wrapped around the back of my neck, and his thumb brushed along my jawline. “I came to tell you that I have to cancel tonight. Something came up. Can you make it until tomorrow?”
“I can make it longer than that,” I whispered.
“But, there’s no reason to. How about tomorrow?”
I sighed and leaned into his chest. “Only if you’re not going to be asshole Justin.”
He rubbed his hand down my back. “I thought it was evil Justin?”
“They are one and the same. Can you please not be mean to Char, too? I’m sure there are enough people doing that to her.”
“I loathe her and her mother.” The vitriol in his voice really bothered me, but then again, I despised Mrs. Russell right now, too.
“Just agree, please.” I craned my neck to look into his face. “I don’t want to be constantly stressing out that you’re going to be screwing with her out of some misplaced overprotective instinct. And, I will stress about it. I’ll also take her side if you’re an asshole to her in any way because she’s done absolutely nothing to deserve it.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that,” he grumbled. Leaning down, Justin kissed me once, softly on the lips. “I’m going to kick out whoever shows up at my house around four tomorrow. They’ll take forever to leave, so I’ll come by at seven. You can tell your grandmother that I’m helping you study or some shit if you want.”
Ha.
The boy was planning on doing the exact opposite of help me study.
He cocked an eyebrow. “Or, you could just tell her that I’m taking you out on a date.”
I leaned back. “Seriously? So, it’s okay for my grandmother and my friends to know that we have something between us, but it’s not okay for your family and friends to know.”
He smirked. “So, you’re saying that you think we have something going on between us?”
“That was so not what you were supposed to take away from that.”
He stepped back and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, it was what I took from it. You’re kind of making a lot of assumptions. Why don’t you qualify this something you think we have?”
“Bye, Justin,” I said as I stepped back through my door and closed it, a lot more gently this time.
I rubbed my forehead as I trudged up the stairs, wondering what the hell I was going to do with that boy.
Char waited at the top of the stairs, her arms crossed. “So …” she gestured to the living room window, which — damn it. I must have left it open. “How long has that been going on? Because that seemed like a whole lot more than a three-day level of protectiveness.”
“Char — I . . .” I shook my head. “We’re not actually together. Well, not long term.”
She gave me her are you kidding me right now? head tilt. “Well, he thinks you are. You know Justin Roberts is cruel and abusive to just about everyone who isn’t in his socioeconomic class, right? The Elites and legacy students at Blackburn are awful, but Justin Roberts is the absolute worst.”
“Says a person who hangs out at his house every single day.”
Even though I fought Justin tooth and nail to ensure Char’s freedom to Justin’s house and property, I suddenly wanted to kick her out myself. “You know, Char, I really should study —”
She held up my calculus book. Too late, I remembered that I’d told her that I was supposed to give Justin his calculus book back. Clearly, I was shitty at making up excuses.
“Thanks,” I said, taking it.
“I’ll sneak out of here. But, January, I love you.” She reached out and hugged me. “I just know that the only example you ever saw of romance was abusive, and I don’t want you to fall into that.”
Well, didn’t that make me feel awful.
Char stopped at the door to the stairwell. “I’m not jealous if that’s what you’re thinking, January. I just know that you deserve better people in your life than I do. You deserve the Lucas Baldwins of the world — not the Justin Robertses. Even I haven’t earned enough bad karma to deserve the Justin Robertses of the world.”
With those parting words, she left.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Deep in the night, I sat with the BioChem textbook in my lap, scanning over the information. For hours my mind had wandered listlessly around, unable to take in the material. Only at eleven p.m. had I really started to concentrate. When one a.m. rolled around, I realized that I had to wake up in three hours anyway, so I kept working. The fact that it was after midnight, and I officially only had three days left until the exam was ever present in my mind.
Thank goodness I knew quite a bit more than I initially thought. I could take a little bit of relief in the fact that I was ninety percent prepared for all but one subject in the Academic Trial. Hopefully, my high score in that would negate the big fat zeroes I was going to get in my obstacle course and character interview trials.
Yeah.
That was a big fat no.
My phone beeped at three-thirty, and though it had been the alarm I set expecting to snooze for another forty minutes, I climbed out of bed.
For once, Bailey was fast asleep and had no interest in getting up for a run.
It only took me ten minutes to get ready and head down from the apartment. The grounds were dark as I stepped outside with very few lights disrupting night’s hold. My eyes adjusted almost instantly, and as I headed through the grounds, I realized that I could see into every pine tree’s shadow.
Knowing that I had more than enough time to make it to midtown by five a.m., I took the route at a slow pace, strolling up the winding streets of the gated community and down to the gatehouse.
The blond cowboy sat in his booth, illuminated in the night like the contents of a display case. He was deep in reading a worn-down paperback, and even as I approached the guy, he didn’t look up. Just for the sake of seeing if I could sneak by him, I stepped onto the grassy center divider and tiptoed along the backside of his compartment. I held my breath as I crept past the open window, going within a foot of Cowboy, but he just turned his page and kept reading.
A little thrill thrummed in my chest as I realized that I snuck within a foot of someone, and they hadn’t even noticed.
A small wooded area separated the gated community of Brightside from the rest of the city. Away from the few artificial lights of the neighborhood, I could see everything nearly as well as in daylight, but yet, it was more like every
bush, branch, and tree illuminated from within.
A flash of white moved in my periphery, and I spun, looking into the forest to see a glowing bluish-white figure peeking out from behind a tree several feet into the woods. I couldn’t make out any details because of the glow, but they were definitely watching me as I was them.
The person stepped out, showing just how enormous they were. The figure was over six feet tall and built like a Roman god. They looked like a glowing marble statue with its features worn away. The figure just stood there. I felt their gaze on me like a physical weight.
My heart picked up its pace, as I remembered the girl in the alley and the fanged bat-faced creature she turned into. This figure was so much larger. From my other side, another blur of white separated from the forest. They hunched down and started crawling toward me.
The hairs prickled on the back of my neck, and I turned enough to keep both figures in my periphery.
“I see you both,” I yelled as loud as I could.
Cowboy was only a couple hundred yards away, and I was hoping that my voice would travel that distance. They were close enough that if they jumped out of the forest and pursued, they could catch me long before I made it to Cowboy. “You.” I pointed to the one sneaking up on my left. “Stop fucking around. I always run armed.”
It was a lie. I always ran or walked with Bailey, and I hadn’t even thought of bringing a weapon this morning. Back when I lived on the other side of Brightside, I knew which areas to circumvent and why to avoid them. Here, I was walking through multimillion-dollar homes with personal guards and state of the art security systems.
“What are you?” The figure on my right asked. The voice sounded unfamiliar, male, and deep. They stepped the littlest bit forward, and I realized just how much taller and heavier they were than me. They had to be 300 pounds of muscle, maybe more.
“What are you?” I called back. “I’ve been guessing that maybe we’re similar.” Admitting this was half in an attempt to get information and half telling them to please not attack. “We might even be the same.”
“We’re not the same. We’re not on the same side, either.” The massive figure leaned up against a tree five feet away.
On my right, the other person started creeping closer.
“Dude.” I pointed down at them. “Don’t come any fucking closer. I’m serious. I don’t know who or what you are, but I am not on anyone’s side. I just woke up like this a year ago with a note in my hand. I called the number, got fixed up with supplies, and I’ve been doing my best to live as normal a life as possible.” I took a step back toward the complex.
“She’s lying,” the person on my other side said. Their voice also sounded male. “They told her all that shit. She’s just a new kind of sab we haven’t seen before.”
A little way into the forest, a third glowing white figure crawled out from behind a bush. And further, a fourth.
Fuck.
I lifted my hands and backed towards the gate booth. “Look. I have no idea what a sab is or what you are. I have no idea what beef you’re talking about.”
When I peeked back at the immense man, three more pale, glowing figures were creeping in from behind him. Their shapes were human, but their movements were like spiders scuttling.
Suddenly, headlights broke the darkness, and the street flooded with light. For just one second, I saw the massive man who stood feet from me. The guy looked at most mid-twenties. He had cropped blond hair, lips a startling shade of red, and ice-blue eyes.
The headlights approached from behind me, and I stayed where I was and held out my arms. I courted death standing in the middle of the road, but if that vehicle passed me, these creatures would close in. Whoever those pale, glowing people were, they’d laid a trap, and I stood smack dab in the middle of it.
I heard the vehicle slowing, and a second later, Cowboy’s wonderfully familiar voice called out, “January, is that you?”
I spun, shading my eyes against the headlights to look up into a large, worn-down truck. Without asking permission, I rushed to the side of his vehicle and grabbed at the door handle.
Cowboy leaned across the cab and pulled up the lock.
“You want a ride?” he asked without irony while I scrambled into his cab.
“Please.” My breaths were coming short and fast as I slammed down the lock. “Please, just drive.”
“All right. You okay?” He threw his car into drive and sped up the street. No one dove out at the truck as we continued, and when I peeked back, I saw only mist, swirling in the red illumination of the taillights.
“January?” Cowboy asked, his purple eyes were heavy with concern as he examined my face. “What happened back there?”
Holding my hand over my chest, I begged my heart to slow. “Usually I run with my dog, and when I was out there this morning, this big guy came out of the dark and started talking total nonsense.” I rubbed my hands over my face. “I really got the feeling that he was going to attack.”
Cowboy’s jaw fell slack. “Oh, damn. Right back there in the woods?”
“Yeah. Do you think the people in the neighborhood are safe?” I hadn’t even thought of that. “My nana is back there.”
“I should hope so. It’s the most secure neighborhood in the city.” Cowboy peered into his rearview mirror. “I’ll call the guard who took over for me after I drop you off, and he’ll inform all the residence and bring in more security to comb the woods.”
I couldn’t help but notice that Cowboy didn’t mention anything about calling the police. We took the rest of the short ride in silence as I attempted to convince my body that I was no longer in immediate danger.
Cowboy parked and turned to me. “I’m sorry you went through that.”
“I’m pretty sure that you just saved my life back there.” I held out my hand. “And, I am so sorry to ask this because I know Lucas told me at least twice, but what’s your name?”
Cowboy grinned, his purple eyes twinkling. He shook my hand, his fingers warm and dry. “Nice to actually meet you. Don’t sweat it — both my name and the fact that I got off shift just in time to be at the right place at the right moment. My name is Braiden.”
As I climbed out of the truck, Braiden called over, “You might want to keep your dog close and avoid walking at full dark for a little while.”
“Oh, you definitely don’t need to tell me that.”
I didn’t want Bailey anywhere near those people, but I was without a doubt making a different arrangement in the mornings.
“Well, thank you again,” I said as I closed Braiden’s truck door.
The window rolled down, and Braiden leaned over. “You want me to stick around here for a little while?”
Stars still speckled the indigo sky, but the sun had just begun to peek over the midtown shops, sending golden rays over the deserted park. A few cars were in the lot, and I saw some of the store windows lighting up. A coffee shop had already opened its doors, and a woman was wiping down the outside tables.
“You know, I’m just going to head over there.”
“Yeah. You’re safe here,” he said it like he knew that I was safe, which brought me a lot of comfort. Braiden bobbed his brows. “Hey, January. I know this is the wrong time to ask you for your number again, so I won’t do it, even if you want me to.”
Braiden was cute, sweet, and bashful. It would be so perfect if I wanted him to ask my number, but I didn’t.
He laughed. “Nah, I’m just kidding. You be safe, all right.”
I gave Braiden a wave, thanked him once again, and headed off toward the coffee shop. Maybe the middle-aged barista saw how shaken up I was because when I leaned against the wall a few stores down, she offered me a seat at the outside table. Fifteen minutes later, she brought out a coffee and asked, “You want our first cup of the day?”
“I don’t have any money, but I can bring some by tomorrow.”
“This is the taste-tester cup,” she said with a wink. “No one
pays for the taste-tester cup. You just tell me if it’s too strong.”
It was perfect. Sipping my hot brew, I watched the sun rise over the park, wondering what those people lying in wait in the forest were. They weren’t vampires. If they were, they’d have known that there was no possible way to sneak up on me in the darkness. They had asked me what I was, not who I was, meaning that they knew I was something.
I couldn’t help but wonder if it was that moment of contact that I had with that girl. There had been a static shock feeling, and then her face had changed. She’d jumped back from me and fled like she was terrified. Did that all have some greater significance?
Richard and Susie pulled into a parking space a few stores down and, seeing me, headed over.
“You doing okay?” Susie called when they were still a little way away. From the weight in her question, I suspected she already talked to Braiden.
“My nerves have settled, yeah,” I said as I stood. “Now I’m just kicking myself for letting my guard down so much. The thing that freaks me out is that I really got the feeling that he was lying in wait behind that tree. It made me wonder if he saw me run by for the last two mornings with Bailey and came out when he saw that I was alone.”
“Probably,” Richard said as he pulled up beside me.
“One good thing did come out of that horrible experience, though. I think I know what I want my accommodation to be,” I said as we headed out toward the park together. “Can I request an accommodation that isn’t an object?”
“You can,” Richard said as he pulled to a stop next to a park bench. “People have requested that no one wear night vision goggles.”
Susie climbed up and perched on the backboard. “Someone once requested that loud music played through the whole arena.”
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