by Myers, AJ
“I was wrong, I can’t do this,” I whispered, starting back the way I had come. “I’m not ready.”
“Yes, you are,” Kim said, catching me by my elbow and moving to block my path. “Em, you can do this. I know you. Now, put on your big girl panties and suck it up. The Ember I know wouldn’t give up that easy.”
Kim was right. The Ember she had known never would have given in because Stacy had gotten under her skin. I was only half of that Ember, though—and the totally insecure, depressed half at that. The question was, did I give up, slink home with my tail between my legs and admit I wasn’t part of the human race anymore? Or did I stand tall and take control of my life again?
Taking Kim’s advice, I squared my shoulders and told myself I was strong. So what if everyone was staring at me in the hallway? I’d been stared at for a lot worse than some undead hottie makeover. And Stacy had always been a bitch. She would always be a bitch. It was just her role in life to make other people miserable.
She had no idea what real misery was like, though. I had experienced the real thing firsthand. Nothing she did could be more painful than what I’d endured for the last two months, living in the same house with Nathan when he didn’t love me anymore. I could definitely teach Stacy a few things about misery. Hell, I could have written a book on the subject that would have blown her bleach-impaired little mind.
“But, you might want to go wait in the bathroom until your eyes go back to normal,” Kim told me in a whisper, smiling at the new determination blooming on my face. “Blake’s got a point. Your eyes are kind of creepy right now. They’re glowing like blue light bulbs. Mr. Tanner is out with a broken leg and the sub won’t be expecting you, anyway. Go calm down. I’ll see you at lunch.”
Giving my hand a squeeze she turned and ran, Blake right on her heels, just as the first period tardy bell rang. Hitching my backpack higher on my shoulder, I ran in the opposite direction and ducked into the girl’s bathroom. I checked underneath all the stalls for feet, flipped the lock on the door, and finally allowed myself a deep breath.
Get your shit together, Ember, I thought, rubbing my temples. Thanks to Stacy, I could already feel that humming beneath my skin that indicated I had burned off a large amount of the drug in my system that was keeping me from sucking half my classmates dry.
“Just my luck, running into her before the day even got started,” I muttered with an irritated sigh as I set my backpack on the sink and fumbled around inside for one of the syringes I had packed in case of emergency. Seriously, I was starting to think bad luck was the only kind I had.
I had just popped the top off the needle and was pulling my dress up to plunge it into my thigh when I noticed the closet at the end of the row of stalls was cracked a little. I frowned, freezing in mid-motion. Something wasn’t right. The custodians were totally OCD about keeping those closets locked, and had been since my freshman year when some idiot had put himself in a coma huffing cleaner.
Paranoid that someone was in there watching the freak give herself a shot of a shimmery blue new drug, I walked over and tried to kick the door shut. It bounced off of something just inside the closet and opened a little more instead of closing. Irritated that I found it necessary to take care of something that clearly wasn’t my job, I pulled the door open to find out what was keeping it from closing. For one horrible, heart-stopping moment I just stared, the syringe slipping from my hand and clattering, unnoticed, to the floor. I closed my eyes, praying that I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing, and then opened them again only to find the scene hadn’t changed.
Sierra was propped inside the closet, looking as if she were sleeping. Her long brown hair was gone, cut so short that the dull blade that had been used had scraped portions of her scalp away. Her skin was puckered like a prune. There were also big rings under her eyes and it seemed like they were trying to sink into her skull.
But the thing that really caught and held my attention was something no one else could see.
There wasn’t a trace of living energy in her anywhere.
She wasn’t sleeping. She was dead.
I backed away, not daring to take my eyes off her, until I hit the sinks on the opposite side of the room. I jumped when the door started to rattle. My eyes swiveled between the door and the body of my dead friend and back again as panic started to eat at me. Tyler hadn’t covered this kind of situation in Darkling 101. Should I run? Should I open the door and hope for the best? What the hell was I supposed to do?
“Open this door immediately!” a voice from the other side of the door growled, as if in answer to my question.
If things had been bad before, they had just gotten worse. I knew that voice. Without even seeing her, I knew. Constance “Dragon Lady” Cantrell was a legend at Oakhurst. She instilled more fear in her students than any other teacher in the whole school, maybe any other teacher anywhere. Ever.
But for me, it was worse than that. First, she was a witch. Second, she was friends with my Grams. And third, she was one of the few people who knew what I was.
Could my luck get any worse?
“Open this door!” she yelled out, her voice seeping through the metal door and making me cringe again.
Feeling like I was walking toward my own doom, I walked over and turned the lock on the door and it flew open to reveal my worst nightmare. Her hair was pulled back in the same too-tight bun that stretched her skin in painful ways. Her usual black suit, paired with one of her many butt-ugly scarves, still hung limply on her scrawny frame. Her legendary scowl was firmly in place, but when she saw me standing there her eyes widened in surprise.
“Miss Blaylock?” she bit out, giving me a once-over that made me want to take a few steps back. “I was under the impression you wouldn’t be joining us for the remainder of the year.”
“I changed my mind?” It wasn’t supposed to be a question, but, since I was starting to seriously doubt my judgment, that was how it came out.
Giving me another unpleasant sneer, she pushed past me into the bathroom and glanced around, obviously trying to find a reason to hand me a detention slip. And, oh, was she ever going to find it. When she saw Sierra’s body, I was going to be lucky if I didn’t end up in a jail cell, actually.
“What have we here?” she snapped, walking toward the open closet at the end of the row of stalls.
I closed my eyes, kissing normal life goodbye. She was going to take one look in that closet and it was all going to be over. I would never be able to convince her I hadn’t killed Sierra. I was the only life-sucking monster there!
When I didn’t hear a scream—or feel a salt-encrusted golden stake planted in my heart—I cracked my eyes open to see what she was doing. She was standing in front of the closet, staring down at the dead girl inside with a cold, blank expression. I frowned in confusion. I mean, shouldn’t she have been screaming bloody murder? Shouldn’t she have been doing something?
Her eyes flickered toward me for a second and, noting my frown, she turned to face me. Her lips flattened into a thin line and her slashing emerald green eyes narrowed to slits. But when she spoke, she sounded smugly pleased.
“Well, this is unfortunate, isn’t it, Miss Blaylock?”
I thought that might have been the biggest understatement ever.
Chapter 12: Drama! Drama! Drama!
Three hours later, I had been interrogated—twice—by the police, had an argument with Headmaster Grayson about calling Grams and not my parents, and was one smartass remark away from totally losing it and killing someone myself. So when I walked out of Headmaster Grayson’s office to find Tyler leaning against the opposite wall, I was far from thrilled.
“What do you want?”
Without waiting for an answer, I adjusted my backpack on my shoulder and headed for the door. Since he had made it pretty clear we weren’t friends anymore, I didn’t think it was necessary to be polite. I had spent weeks calling, texting, and e-mailing him, hoping for any kind of response, anything to let me
know he still cared. I’d even wrote him a damn letter, but he hadn’t responded to any of my attempts to reach him.
“I wanted to see if you were all right,” he said, jogging to catch up with me.
“I just found a dead darkling in a broom closet, Constance Cantrell made me out to be the prime suspect for her murder to the police, and I still have to go home and deal with Nathan. What do you think?”
“I think you probably need someone to talk to,” he said as we pushed through the doors leading to the student parking lot.
His words echoed in my head as I dropped my backpack and turned on him, seething with hurt and anger.
“Now you want to talk? Why, Tyler? I wasn’t good enough for you to talk to last week or the week before or the week before that. What is this? Morbid curiosity?”
“It’s not like that, Ember,” he said, the surprise on his face sending my temper into orbit.
“Oh? Then how is it, Tyler?”
“I…I…” he stammered.
Propping my hands on my hips, I arched an eyebrow at him and waited. When he didn’t say anything else, I had my answer.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Snatching my backpack up, I resumed my march across the student lot. Don’t get me wrong, I know how bad it looked. I’d had plenty of time while I was waiting to be interrogated over and over to think about it and it just didn’t add up. There hadn’t been any signs that another darkling had been there other than me and the dead one in the closet—and Tyler had been sure to teach me how to tell. There was no lingering undead scent. No sense that a competitor was poaching on my territory. Nothing.
But what really had me convinced that it had been a set up was the fact that whoever had done it had left proof. Darklings got rid of their victims, they didn’t leave them lying around in broom closets for anyone to find. It would be the definition of stupid.
But, somebody had killed Sierra. The question was, who? Only a demon could have sucked every single bit of life out of her and left her a dried up husk. No, there was something I was missing. I just didn’t know what that something could be.
“Ember! Wait!” Tyler called out behind me. “Damn it, Ember! Stop!”
“Leave me alone, Tyler!” I yelled without even bothering to turn around.
“I said stop!” he roared.
I did, only not voluntarily. My leg muscles seized up, refusing to obey the orders my brain was sending them to keep moving. When Tyler walked around to stand in front of me, I was plotting his murder. If he was smart, he would make sure he was long gone before I got control of my legs back.
“Are you ready to listen to me now?” he asked, arching an eyebrow at my dark, chilling expression.
“It’s not as if you’ve really given me a choice!” I hissed. “Fair warning, asshole, when you undo whatever you just did, you better run.”
“I’ll take that under consideration,” he said, smiling at me. “I just want to talk to you, beautiful. Why do you always have to make things so bloody hard?”
I was making things hard? Yeah, because him being an ass was my fault! I wasn’t the one ignoring him. I had tried repeatedly to talk to him, desperate for someone to lean on, only to be rejected again and again. What did he think I was going to do? Fall at his feet in appreciation because he had deigned to speak to me?
Oh, he really needed to get over himself!
“Tell me what happened,” he said again.
“I just found my dead friend in a broom closet. I think we’ve already covered this, Tyler,” I bit out, grinding my teeth when he frowned at me like I was leaving something out. That’s when I figured out what he was really asking me. “I didn’t kill her! I may not have been her biggest fan at first, but I didn’t hate her that much!”
“I know you didn’t kill her, Em.” His voice was calm and soothing and I reacted to it without meaning to. It didn’t really alleviate my anger, but it helped take the edge off and keep it from turning into a homicidal rage. I really hated that he could do that. “Did you notice anything when you walked in the bathroom? Anything that didn’t seem right? Any scents?”
I didn’t want to play twenty questions. I just wanted to go home and hide under my covers and never come out. When I realized I was only going to have to play another version of the game there, I decided I would really just like to sink into a hole and never come out. Either way, I was going to have to answer the questions I could see in Tyler’s eyes. I might as well get it over with.
“No, there wasn’t anything there. Nothing. Trust me, I’ve gone over it and over it in my mind, and there was no sign that another demon had been there, just me. I didn’t see anyone. There was nothing out of place except the closet door being propped open when I know for a fact they keep them locked. Have I answered all your questions?”
“No.”
He didn’t even flinch when I growled at him, more than a little frustrated. I had already been interrogated by the police and Headmaster Grayson. I didn’t have anything else to tell. And why wouldn’t he just leave it alone? I mean, it’s not like he could do anything to help me unless he could turn back time and bring Sierra back to life.
“Why won’t you leave me alone, Tyler?” I asked, my voice as cold as an iceberg. “You sure haven’t had any problems ignoring me for the last month. Why don’t we go back to that arrangement? It seemed to be working so well for you.”
Rather than answer, he just stood there and looked at me. It wasn’t the same look all my classmates had given me when I had walked in the door that morning to make my darkling debut. He wasn’t seeing my new unnatural perfection or the way my eyes were glowing. No, he wasn’t looking at something, but for something. I didn’t have to wonder what. I couldn’t find me, so I doubted he would be able to, either.
“Why are you so angry, Em?” he finally asked softly, reaching out to touch my cheek. I swatted his hand away. “What’s really going on with you?”
I stared at him in disbelief, and then, for some weird reason, I started to laugh. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. There was no joy or amusement in it. It was dark and bitter and I heard everything I’d been feeling for the last two months echoing through it.
“Where would you like me to start?” I finally asked, getting control of my manic laughter.
“Where do you want to start?”
He leaned against the hood of a nearby car with his long legs stretched out before him and crossed his arms over his chest like he was ready to stay there all afternoon. I just glared at him. He had left me, just like everyone else, and I wasn’t about to pour my heart out to him.
“I had to leave, Ember,” he said, staring down at his feet. “I didn’t want to, I had to. Putting some distance between us was the only way to make sure that we…that you…”
That I wouldn’t search him out to feed on him again. He’d had to run from me to make sure that I didn’t try to suck the life out of him again?
If he thought telling me that was going to make me feel bad and get him off the hook, he was out of his mind. If anything, it just made me madder. Yes, I still wanted his essence, I won’t lie, but weeks of lessons on controlling myself had made all the difference. Because as much as I might want another taste of him, I wasn’t going to give in to that desire. I knew how to fight it now. I was stronger than my demon, and as long as I remembered that, I was safe.
And so was Tyler.
“I told you it wouldn’t happen again,” I said, keeping eye contact even though what I really wanted to do was look away. “I would have kept that promise. That’s more than I can say for you. You promised you would be there to help me, Tyler. You lied.”
“I thought I left you in good hands,” he said, sounding more than sad. “Tell me I didn’t drop the ball, beautiful. Because, I have to tell you, you don’t look like you were in the capable hands I believed you to be in.”
“Nathan’s?” Another bitter snort of laughter exploded from me before I could stop it. “If you thoug
ht Nathan—”
I was just about to tell him just how capable Nathan was when the familiar drone of a car engine caught my attention. I heard the gears shifting from where I was standing, and the sound of tires squealing into the parking lot behind me gave me a pretty good idea who might be driving.
I groaned when Nathan’s smoke-black Aston Martin screeched to a stop to my right, then just closed my eyes and waited for the coming explosion. I heard the door of the car open and was immediately surrounded by a cloud of deliciously scented air.
Blake was right; I was in deep shit.
“Ember, get in the car!” Nathan snapped.
Telling myself not to be such a coward, I opened my eyes and met his gaze head on. His tall, muscular, body was coiled with tension. The planes of his face were hard enough to have been carved out of stone, and his hair was standing up in a way that made me wonder if he hadn’t been trying to rip it out at some point. But what really hurt was the anger turning his hypnotic hazel eyes a glowing white.
“I can’t,” I muttered, glaring at Tyler.
“Em, I’m really not in the mood—” he began, his voice brittle with anger, but I cut him off before he could tell me what he was or wasn’t in the mood for.
“I said, I can’t!” I yelled. “Do you honestly think I would have been here waiting for you if I could move? If you do, you’re not as bright as I thought you were, Nathan!”
He stared at me, his mouth falling open in shock, and then turned to look at Tyler. To his credit, Tyler didn’t seem all that impressed by my outburst. Of course, he had just spent the better part of fifteen minutes listening to me be a total bitch. Maybe he had just become immune.
“Let her go, Jordan,” Nathan told him, sounding tired. Tired of me. “This isn’t the best place for her to be right now. And after what happened the last time the two of you were alone together, I really don’t believe she needs to be anywhere you are.”