The rest of the room was silent as well. Some kids were hurriedly trying to get the answers on their tests in. Others were working on other homework or messing around with their own tablets.
There was a knock on the door.
The teacher Mr. Dwight looked up from his desk, annoyed at the interruption. So as not to disturb us, he went over to the door and opened it. “Can I help you?” he said quietly.
There were two girls at the door. One I recognized. She was a cheerleader named Cheryl. Her hair was incredibly sleek and shiny. She sat in front of me in biology, and sometimes, I’d spend the whole class period staring at her hair.
“Hi, Mr. Dwight, you have a new student!” Cheryl’s voice was really loud and bubbly.
Mr. Dwight’s face got red. “I’m giving a test, Cheryl.”
“Sorry,” Cheryl whispered. But her whisper was really loud too. It carried over the room. “This is Paige. She’s in this class.”
Cheryl nudged the other girl into the room.
This girl had blond hair, which wasn’t as sleek as Cheryl’s, probably because it was kind of wavy.
The girl looked around the room.
That was when I realized I recognized her too.
She was the girl from my dream.
My lips parted.
The girl stopped looking and locked eyes with me.
We stared at each other.
“Well, that’s great, Cheryl,” said Mr. Dwight, “but the bell’s about to ring, so why don’t you take her to the next class on her schedule, and I’ll get her situated tomorrow?”
“Can’t,” said Cheryl. “I’ve really got to go.” She ducked out of the room, waggling her fingers buh-bye at Mr. Dwight.
The sound of the bell splintered the air, and everyone started to get up.
Mr. Dwight looked frazzled. “Somebody needs to help Paige to her next class.” His gaze swept the room and settled on me. I was still staring open-mouthed at the girl. “Hunter.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Help her,” said Mr. Dwight.
I closed my mouth. “Um, right.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
~azazel~
I loaded the last of the dishes into the dishwasher and closed it. “Chance isn’t a kid anymore, babe.”
“That’s not an excuse.” Jason was wiping down the counter. “He’s more mature, he should be less of a jerk now than he was a few years ago.”
“Well, things were hairy for a bit back then. He missed the chance to be a teenager. He’s making up for it.” I leaned against the dishwasher. “I kind of did the same thing, if you remember.”
He threw the paper towel he’d been using in the trash can. “Yeah, and all that drinking you did ended up getting you in trouble.”
I raised my eyebrows. “It did?”
He sighed. “Well, I didn’t like it, anyway.”
“I don’t like what he’s doing either,” I said. “It’s too dangerous for him to be out at all hours, completely inebriated like that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him wanting to have a good time, but I don’t think it’s safe for him. That’s what worries me.”
“Exactly,” said Jason. “So, we should talk to him again.”
“Baby, we talk to him about this every day when he comes home.”
“No, I mean sit down with him when he’s sober and explain to him that he can’t keep going out like this.”
I shrugged. “We could try, I guess.”
He looked around the kitchen. “Anything else you need help with in here?”
“Nope,” I said.
He loped out of the kitchen and into the living room. “You don’t think he’s going to listen, even if we do talk to him, do you?”
I followed Jason out. “I think he already understands what he’s doing, and for some reason, he doesn’t care.”
Jason collapsed on a couch. “Why wouldn’t he care?”
I sat down too. “I don’t know. Maybe because he’s lived his whole life this way? He’s never had the opportunity to do anything remotely normal? You and I lived through a lot of crap by the time we were his age, but we also had brief periods of time when there was no one after us and nothing was going wrong. He’s never had that.”
“There have been lulls,” said Jason. “Like right now.”
I twisted my hands together. “I think he wants to leave.”
Jason furrowed his brow. “What? He can’t leave. Imri would find him and use him against us. God knows what he’d do to him.”
“I know that,” I said. “Chance knows that. But I think he resents it. Imagine being his age and still living with your parents.”
Jason raised his eyebrows.
“Okay, I know you never did live with your parents, but…”
“Azazel, we’re not those kinds of parents,” said Jason. “We don’t keep him from doing the things he wants to do.”
“Of course we do,” I said. “He’s twenty-four. He’s never had a serious girlfriend that we know of.”
“Well, he wouldn’t put someone in danger like that.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, for how long, baby? I mean, Hunter’s almost eighteen years old. Are we going to keep both of them here forever and ever?”
“What else are we going to do?”
“Maybe it’s time to revisit the idea of launching some kind of offensive on Imri,” I said. “I mean, every time we talked about it before, we’ve always decided the boys were too young. And we haven’t talked about it in a while, because we’ve been distracted by one disaster or the other.”
“Right,” said Jason. “They always find us.”
“Right,” I said.
Jason took a deep breath. “Well, the boys are definitely not little kids anymore.”
“They’re grown up,” I said. “And they’re both very capable. We taught them well. I think if we could remove the threat of Imri, then the other threats are pretty minimal in comparison. They could probably take care of them on their own.”
Jason leaned forward, rubbing his hands together. “Going on the offensive, huh?”
I playfully shoved him. “Oh, look at you. Getting all excited.”
He dropped his hands. “I’m not excited.”
I arched an eyebrow. “You are so. Chance is right that you get all twitchy when there’s nothing to shoot. You can’t even deny the fact that you were stalking that little redhead that works at the convenience store.”
“I wasn’t stalking her.” Jason got up from the couch.
I put my feet up on a foot rest. “You kept volunteering to run all the errands, which I started to find suspicious. And then I saw her—”
“I haven’t done anything like that since before Hunter was born,” said Jason. “And I wouldn’t. Not worth it.”
I sighed. “I know that. But we have a deal. You’re supposed to talk to me about it when you start feeling tempted.”
He flinched, turning away from me. “It’s embarrassing, Azazel.”
I got up from the couch and wrapped my arms around him from behind. “Oh, please. It’s me. How could you be embarrassed? I know all your dirty secrets.”
He laughed softly.
“I do, baby. And I’m not going anywhere.”
He sighed. “So, fine, there was a little bit of temptation. But I didn’t do anything.”
“You want to tell me more about it? You want to tell me what you were thinking about doing?”
He extricated himself from my hands. “No, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You know it’s better to talk about it than do it, right?”
“Right,” he said. “But trust me, I’m not in a bad place with it yet. Planning a mission against Imri might be just what I need to keep my mind off it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Good. I’m thinking that maybe we might be able to strike during the big public merger than Chance was talking about this morning.”
“What?” said Jason.
“Im
ri’s buying Phorm Industries,” I said.
“What? Why would he want to buy a food corporation?”
“I couldn’t figure it out either,” I said. “But I was thinking about it while I was eating, and I think I might know.”
“Okay. So, what’s he up to?”
“Imri’s main reason for doing everything he does is to share immortal blood with as many humans as possible, right?”
Jason nodded. “Yeah. So?”
“So, I think he’s going to put it in the food.”
Jason’s eyes widened. “Crap.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, we got to stop that anyway,” said Jason. “We can’t have everyone in the world wandering around addicted to immortal blood and invincible against any kind of hurt.”
I nodded. “It could get bad really fast.”
“Well, it’s decided, then, we have to do it.”
“Okay,” I said.
“What do you say, Azazel? You up for stopping Judas Iscariot from spreading the blood of Christ to every tribe, tongue, and nation?”
I grinned. “You bet, baby.”
* * *
~hunter~
My hands shook as I held up the new girl’s schedule. “Um… so you’ve got Spanish next, which is upstairs on the second floor. I can walk you there. It’s on my way to my class.”
She smiled at me. “Thanks.”
“Sure.” I handed her back her schedule. I was on high alert, expecting her to whip out a gun at any second and blow me away. Sure, there were metal detectors that we had to walk through to get into school every day, but that didn’t mean there weren’t ways to sneak guns in.
I’d dreamed about this girl.
Every other time I’d dreamed about someone, they’d been a threat to me.
That meant this girl was a threat too.
But she didn’t do anything except keep smiling as she tucked the schedule on top of her stack of books. “I don’t think I got your name.”
“I’m, um, Hunter.” I looked her up and down, sizing her up. She was a few inches shorter than me, and she didn’t look like much of a physical threat, but appearances could be deceiving.
She offered me her hand. “I’m Paige. I’ve kind of got this new girl thing down. This is my fourth school this year. Usually, the names of people start blurring together, but I don’t think I’m going to forget your name, Hunter.”
I swallowed. Was that a threat?
I gestured for her to start walking. I wasn’t going to turn my back to her. “The stairs are that way.”
She started to move but looked back at me expectantly, as if she expected me to keep up with her.
I let my gaze sweep her body one more time, looking for weapons, and then I fell into step with her.
She didn’t have any weapons—none that I could see, anyway, and her jeans were kind of tight. Probably too tight to conceal anything. She kind of had nice legs, though.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” said Paige.
I shrugged. “Don’t have anything to say right now.”
“You’re a little jumpy too.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “You’re a new kid too, aren’t you?”
I furrowed my brow. “Why would you say that?”
“I can tell. Kids like us, we have a look. You’re a loner, and your family probably moves around as much as mine. You don’t bother making friends, because… what’s the point, right?”
She was right about me, but it wasn’t because I had a look. It was because she’d researched me, and she knew all about who I was and what I could do.
I stopped walking. “Look,” I said through clenched teeth, “who are you? What do you want?”
Paige made a confused face, pulling back. “I told you, I’m Paige. I don’t want anything particularly, I guess. I just want you to walk me to Spanish. And maybe…” She dragged her top teeth over her bottom lip and dropped her voice several decibels. “What lunch shift do you have?”
I started walking again, letting out breath. This girl was starting to confuse me.
She came after me. “What? I thought maybe we could eat together.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re really weird, Hunter,” she said, laughing. “But it’s okay, I like weird.”
I started up the steps to the second floor, taking the stairs quickly so that she had to push herself to keep up.
When I got to the top of the steps, I pointed. “There’s your class.”
She was a little out of breath, but she was still smiling.
She really was pretty.
I looked away.
“I have second lunch,” she said. “Maybe if I see you—”
I shook my head. “I have first lunch.”
“Oh.” She looked genuinely disappointed. “Well, do we have any other classes together?”
“Why do you care?” I said.
Her face fell. “I’m not trying to…”
I felt bad. I’d hurt her feelings. “I’m sorry. I just… I can’t…” What if she was just a normal girl who wanted to get to know me? What if she wasn’t a threat?
She lifted her gaze. “This is gonna sound weird, but have you ever… dreamed about someone before you met them?”
I shook my head, backing away from her. How could she know that? I hadn’t told anyone about that dream.
“Hunter!” she called. “Maybe after school?”
I turned away and pushed into the other bodies in the hall, trying to get away from her as fast as I could.
* * *
When I was a little kid, my mom had explained the dreams to me. They were part of the power I had, which I had sort of inherited from her. She used to have it when she was younger, but her dreams hadn’t started until she was a teenager, and my dreams had started much earlier than that.
According to my mom, the dreams were prophetic dreams, and they usually used symbols to communicate a message. Pretty typically, that message was one of doom and gloom. Of danger.
But she’d never specifically said that the dreams always had to be about something bad.
So…
Maybe this one wasn’t.
Maybe the girl in my dream—Paige—wasn’t actually someone bad. Maybe the dreams were only trying to tell me that I was going to meet a pretty girl.
I wasn’t sure what the lightning stuff had been about, but that didn’t even make any sense, because it wasn’t raining today.
It was bright and sunny—albeit kind of cold. It was February.
Anyway, when I got a text from my mom telling me that she and my dad were going out for some supplies, so I shouldn’t worry about their absence, I decided that maybe I would try and stay after school and talk to Paige.
Just to, you know, see.
Try to figure out if she was actually bad news or not.
When I’d looked at her schedule earlier, I’d seen that her last class of the day was gym. So, I waited outside the gym doors for her to come out after the last bell.
Which she did, her face was flushed, her wavy hair up in a ponytail.
When she saw me, her eyes lit up. She came over to me. “Hey.”
I felt nervous. I cleared my throat. “Uh, hey.”
“I thought I freaked you out earlier.”
I didn’t know what to say. Now that I was here, trying to act normal and feel her out, I realized that I had no idea how to talk to girls. “No, it’s okay.”
She rearranged her backpack on her arm. “So, the thing about the dream? I mean, I don’t even know what that was about. The more I think about it, the guy in the dream might not have even been you. How could he have been, right, because I never met you before? So, you should forget I said anything.” She laughed a little.
So, she was claiming that she had a dream too. I hadn’t really gotten that before. I thought she’d been talking about my dream. Reading my mind or something creepy like that.
Maybe she was.
Paige shifted on her feet. “We don’t even have to talk about that anymore. We could change the subject. What do you want to talk about?”
I had no idea what I wanted to talk about. I stared at her, my mouth half-open, like it had been when I first saw her, feeling really stupid.
Other people were walking out of the gym into the hall, and we were standing still.
She looked at the rest of the students. “Um, you want to… walk?”
I nodded. “Okay.”
She smiled. “Okay.”
We walked.
We didn’t say anything until we got out of the school into the parking lot.
“You have a car?” she asked.
“Uh, no,” I said. I could drive and everything, but car ownership was pretty difficult for my family and me, considering we were always switching our identities. “Do you?”
“No.” She stuck her hands in her pockets. “I, um, have a bike.” She gestured to the bike rack with her head.
“Oh,” I said.
We were quiet.
Paige started laughing.
It startled me, and I looked up at her.
“Let’s start over,” she said. “I feel like everything’s all weird and awkward between us. So, maybe we should pretend like—”
“Did you really have a dream about me?” I asked her.
She cringed. “I thought we were going to pretend I didn’t say that.”
“You ever have dreams like that before? About things that haven’t happened yet?”
She wrinkled up her nose. “I don’t know that what happened in my dream is going to happen.”
“Why? What happened in your dream?
She looked down at her feet, giggling. “I was probably confused, you know?” She met my gaze. “You think I’m totally weird, don’t you?”
I shrugged. “I thought you liked weird.”
“I do.”
I debated. She seemed so normal. She didn’t seem like someone who would try to kill me. Could I trust her? If I couldn’t, I’d probably be safer someplace where I had access to guns. Which wasn’t here at school. I looked up at her. “You, um, you want to come back to my house?”
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