There it was…the sound of my armor cracking.
“I can’t stop thinking about Emma,” I confessed. “I think not all is what it seems. Do you think it’s possible she was alive when they took her?”
“Aye,” he said quietly. “It’s possible.”
I gasped. I’d expected subterfuge. Backpedaling. Question dodging. What I hadn’t expected was this honesty. Though that was the thing about Carden—he’d been honest with me from the start. Those times when there was something he couldn’t share, he’d simply tell me he couldn’t tell me. “What do you know?”
“I avoid Alcántara,” he said, “and for the moment, he leaves me be as well. But I do know this: If your friend once lived, surely she lives no longer. That is the only thing I can say with certainty.”
To have had such hope and then lose it again…I felt rudderless, at sea. I couldn’t begin to imagine what a wreck I’d be if it weren’t for Carden to lean on.
I told myself Emma was truly at peace. I thought it’d ease something in my mind, but instead it had the opposite effect. I needed to know what happened, exactly. What happened to all the girls. Exactly.
“But what…how—?” I couldn’t finish. Yasuo knew something. Something that plagued him. Something that haunted him so much he wanted me to pay for it.
Carden took my chin and tilted my face to his, peering deeply at me. “What more troubles you?”
I couldn’t explain about Yasuo, not completely. I wouldn’t put it past Carden to seek out and snap the necks of every Trainee who’d ever crossed me, and I wasn’t ready to give up on my friend yet. So instead I just shrugged.
“I must know,” he pressed. “Why this despair?”
“Why not despair?”
“Ah, but I have a thousand reasons why not.” He got that look in his eye—that hungry, wicked guy look that made my belly quiver. He brought his mouth a whisper away from mine, hovered for an exquisitely taut moment, then darted in to steal a hard, fast kiss. “There. That is one reason why not to despair. Shall I enumerate further?” He kissed along my cheek. “Work my way through the list?” He kissed the outer corner of one eye and then the other. “It’s a long one.”
His thousand possibilities exploded like a starburst in my mind, cascading down, setting my body alight, weakening my knees. I hadn’t known possibilities until Carden.
My skin buzzed. For now, all else was forgotten. I reached up, standing on tiptoe, stretching my body along his, ready to make our way down this mysterious list, when I heard a door open down the hall. I froze. It was probably just some girl going to the bathroom, but still, instinct was strong, and I held my breath, waiting for our Proctor—lovingly nicknamed Killer Kenzie—to come and bang on the door and flay me for having a guy in the room.
He read my mind. “There’s no need to fear when you’re with me.”
“But curfew.” I mouthed the words almost silently. Because, yeah, Kenzie was a Guidon and there probably wasn’t that much to fear from her where Carden was concerned. It was the other vampires I worried about. “It’s soon.”
“Aye.” He gently laced his fingers through the sensitive hair at the nape of my neck. “We have little time.” His other hand took my waist. It felt broad and sure. “I’ll not waste it.” He pulled me closer.
Kissed me.
Vampires, curfew, old friends, and new enemies…it all fell away. When he parted from me, it took me a moment to gather myself. To catch my breath.
The guy could kiss.
He said nothing. Carden merely let those eyes bore into me, a promise of more and later.
The intensity made me oddly shy. I had to fill the silence. “So you could tell I was sad?”
“Indeed. Now will you tell me why?”
I remained wary of confessing my concerns about Yasuo, but I had no such qualms about his pals. Rob, in particular, flashed into my head, how he’d slammed my tray down. How stupid I’d felt tugging at the thing. He might as well have had me pinned to that table. I’d have been just as frozen in place.
“I’m weaker than the guys,” I confessed. “I’ll always be the weaker one.”
He sighed, thinking. After a moment, he said, “There’s a difference between strength and power.”
My warm and fuzzy mood of a moment ago was fading fast. “Are we doing the speaking-in-riddles thing again?”
But he didn’t take the bait. For once, Carden’s expression remained dead serious as he met mine.
“All right,” I said, considering his words in earnest. “I’ll bite. Strength is different from power. I still don’t have either.”
“Don’t you? Strength is physical. But power…power is strategy. Control. The capacity to act. Power is mental.” He shot me a sly smile. “Aren’t you the one who’s always saying how your mental faculties are superior?”
“I do not.” I gave him a little shove. But the lightbulb had gone off over my head. We’d discussed this once before. He’d told me how I wasn’t helpless, but I thought he’d referred only to physical power. I’d listened, but I hadn’t heard.
“Do they have power over you,” he mused, “or is it merely that you allow it to be so? Power is a thing to be given or taken away. When, unthinking, you do as Hugo asks, you give him power.”
“I can’t just hop on the next boat out of here,” I protested. I felt a stab, remembering my friend and former roommate, Mei-Ling. She had hopped on a boat out of here—I knew because I’d put her on it. “I need to play the game.”
“I know,” he said gently. “I’d be on that boat with you if I could. But trust me, love. I know better than anyone. Power is the game.”
For a few minutes, he just held me. I became aware of his thumb rubbing circles along my side. “You do realize your melancholy isn’t the only reason I’m here.”
A switch flicked in my body, giving me that wiggly, lit-up feeling again. I tried my best womanly voice. “It’s not?”
He pushed away from me with a grin. “No, dove. And it’s not that either.”
“Wait? What’s the other reason?” It was a struggle to concentrate.
He pulled completely away now. “Do you truly not know?” He wore a bemused smile that made him look suddenly boyish. It gave me a pang of sadness for the innocent he’d once been, for the innocence in him I’d never see.
I stared, thinking hard, but pulled a total blank. Slowly, I shook my head.
“What day is it?” he asked.
“It’s January….Oh.” My birthday. Suddenly my eyes burned and my vision blurred. I didn’t blink. If there were tears in my eyes, I’d refuse to let them spill. I wouldn’t cry in front of Carden like some mopey adolescent.
And yet.
I was touched beyond reason. Today was my eighteenth birthday, and somehow he’d known.
“You were born today, were you not?”
“How’d you know?”
He grinned, wicked Carden once more. “I have ways.”
I gave a quick scrub to my eyes, anxious to put a chirpy face on it. “The whole all-powerful, omniscient thing really seems to work for you.”
He barked a laugh, and I hushed him. The walls had ears. Maybe the other Initiates weren’t a threat, but there were secret vampire sympathies that were.
“I simply make it my business to know about you,” he added in a lowered voice.
“Eighteen. Hey, I can vote. Or be recruited. Oh wait,” I added, fighting my returning melancholy with an attempt at humor. “I already was recruited. I’m boots-on-the-ground in the vampire army.” I stepped away, blithely asking, “So what’d you get me?”
He pulled something from the pocket of his coat.
“Wait,” I said, taken aback. “I was kidding. You really got me something?”
“Naturally.” He waved the little parcel before me. It was rectangular and wrapped in plain paper.
“But you just gave me something. For Christmas.” I stared at the package like he was offering me a bomb. I didn’t get a lo
t of presents, and this marked the second one from Carden. The first had been the awesomest throwing star ever, with a bird’s wing etched along the steel, though it was unsettling how I’d become the girl whom guys wooed with weaponry. “You’ve already given me so much,” I added dumbly, my mind going to all those emotional places I didn’t like to think about.
It appeared I was crushing pretty hard on my ancient Scottish vampire.
“Do you not want it?” He faked like he was going to tuck it back in his pocket.
“No.” I snatched it from him. “I want. I want.” The thing had some heft to it, and I could feel the spine of a book through the coarse paper. “Can I open it?”
He raised a brow, apparently an ancient Scottish way of saying duh. “Would you rather I did?”
I shot him a look that made him grin, and forget the gift, just the fact that I could make Carden McCloud grin sent warm tendrils of contentment through my veins. I sat on the bed, and he sat beside me, the bed sinking under his weight.
I carefully unfolded the paper. I’d keep it. I’d keep and treasure all of it.
“Oh. A dictionary.” It was a basic Old Norse dictionary. Standard issue. In fact, I already had a copy, only mine was paperback, and this one was an awkward hardback in what looked like an older, outdated edition. I gave him a look that I feared was more like a mask than a smile. “Thanks.”
He grinned. “For someone so lethal, you are remarkably polite.” He took the book from my hands and turned to the back flap. Looking closer, I could see the binding wasn’t paper; rather, it had more of a leathery sheen. He picked at the corner, and it took a moment for him to get purchase with his short nails. “When will you remember? Things aren’t always as they seem.”
He finally managed to loosen the top corner, and the binding peeled away to reveal a hiding spot.
I gasped. “Oh, wow. Cool.”
“There is no more clever a hiding spot than in plain sight.”
“Thank you. Just…thank you. I love it.” To the naked eye, it would just seem like a musty old used book. The false cover was shallow, but just the right size to hide a key. Or a photograph. “It’s perfect.” I flung my arms around him. “Perfect.”
In that moment, to me, he was perfect.
He chucked my chin. “For a woman with secrets.”
Then it really struck me—I was eighteen today. I was a woman.
Raised voices echoed from down the hall, rumbling their way toward us. I picked out Kenzie in the din, giving the first warning—lights-out soon. I checked the clock on my bedside table. “Crap. Three minutes to curfew. Frost will be back any minute.”
“In one minute, to be precise. That means it’s time for me to leave you. But we’ll pick this up again, sweet. And soon.” He stole a kiss, pulling away just as I began to melt in to him. He felt my reluctance, and something in his eyes glinted in response. “I’m glad your gift pleases you. Though nothing could match how greatly you please me.”
And with that, Carden disappeared.
I clutched my present to my chest. I’d ribbed him about it, but my vampire truly was all-powerful. I’d been on the brink of despair, but for the moment he’d made all that go away, and to me, there was no greater, no more awesome a gift than that.
CHAPTER SIX
I was sitting on the beach, stretching out my legs when I heard it. What the—? I tilted my head, straining to listen. Yep, there it was again…a whimper.
I hopped to my feet and dusted the sand from my hands. Today’s martial arts class had been held at the shore. Priti had blindfolded us so we could take turns attacking one another. The sand broke our falls…or that was the theory, at least. In my experience, it remained precisely that—a theory.
It was pure coincidence that I was even still on the beach—everyone else had left long ago—but I kept having the same charley horse on the sole of my right foot, and though dehydration was probably to blame, I’d stayed after to work through a yoga series to stretch my legs.
I heard the sound again and froze. It was somewhere between a cry and a moan—if not for a trick of the wind bouncing off the rocks, amplifying it, I would’ve missed it. But now that I knew to listen for it, it was all I heard. It was more urgent now. A keening hmmmm, quiet, like someone out there was swallowing her pain.
I jogged up to the path to check it out. Once I was off the beach, the weird cries came to me loud and clear. Only now I heard another sound, too.
Snarling.
I broke into a run.
Potentially, it was a stupid thing to do—curiosity killed the cat and all. But I had to pass by here to get home anyway, I told myself. Plus, if there was some sort of attack happening, I’d much rather be on the offensive than be caught unawares. And so I pumped my legs and ignored my internal alarms.
I reached a part of the trail that wound through tall stones—prime hiding-place territory—so I opened my senses and, sure enough, as I rounded one of the larger boulders, I had to skid to a stop. The whimperer was Regina, aka Curly. The one I’d helped in the dining hall.
She was bloodied. Terrified. And hemmed in by three slavering Draug.
Their stench hit me instantly, the reek of decomposing flesh so fetid, so overpowering, it seared into my sinuses and throat. Eyes watering, I slapped a hand to my mouth—it was like I was tasting their foulness. I swallowed convulsively, fighting an instant gag reflex.
Regina was freaking out. I needed to catch her eye and calm her down—immediately.
I’d once been just as terrified of Draug—I knew girls who’d lost their lives to them in hideous and gruesome ways—but now I knew better. Now I knew Draug weren’t the demon hell spawn they appeared; they were just kids, Trainees who hadn’t survived their transition to Vampire. They were senseless, like rabid animals without reason or thought, questing for a meal. They thrived on blood, but their true craving was for the taste of others’ fear.
Which meant Regina’s panic was about to get her killed.
“Regina.” I shouted at her while keeping an elbow over my mouth—anything to blunt the festering stench that stung my nose and pricked tears in my eyes. “Look at me.”
What I should’ve done was back away slowly. But seriously, when did I ever do what I should?
I sized up the situation. One of the Draug was newly made, with bloated flesh so pale it looked lavender. The other two were older, in late stages of decay, their skin blackened and grizzled like jerky. No matter their age or condition, each had a pair of shining fangs, as lethal now as they’d ever been.
“Hey, you, Curly,” I shouted mercilessly, but she just stood there frozen, making that keening, whimpery sound in the back of her throat. It was really beginning to grate. “You have got to calm down.” I approached carefully. “Calm. The hell. Down.”
The girl was obviously a trouble magnet, and with all that whining, she’d make herself a Draug magnet, too. The creatures might’ve fed on blood, but they were sustained by fear, and at the moment, Regina was radiating enough terror to power an entire continent of them.
“Hey, guys, over here.” My shouts drew their attention. “Yeah, that’s right.” I waved my hands. “Look at me instead.”
They tilted their heads. I didn’t have the stink of fear, and it confused them. But the moment they’d glanced my way, stupid Regina snapped to life, spinning and running. A jolt moved through the beasts, and they snapped to life, too, their attention shooting back to her as though they were a trio of wild dogs and she were a rabbit bounding from long hiding.
“Wait!” I shrieked. Tom the Draug keeper had once told me to treat the monsters like dumb livestock, that terror was the thing that sparked their bloodlust. So I raced toward them, swatting and shoving at their backs, screaming at Curly to calm the hell down, all the while hoping Tom was right because otherwise I was tempting a world of hurt. Though, truly, fear wasn’t my problem—revulsion was. I commanded the Draug over and over to stop, all the while trying to ignore the repellent fe
el of their rotted flesh squishing under my hands. “Regina, stop moving.”
She did, finally. Panting hard, she stopped, frozen in terror, looking over her shoulder at me and the Draug who’d paused mere inches from her back. “Please,” she whispered, pleading. “Run. We have to run.”
The beasts’ gazes shifted between the two of us, gaping and confused, like a macabre Three Stooges. Regina was bleeding profusely now, and they wanted that blood. The only thing holding them back was their dim fascination with me. Draug kept some vague set of memories in their addled brains, and I must’ve been a total anomaly in their little world.
“No,” I said loud and clear. “Don’t run.” I stepped closer, putting my hands up, trying to look calming, to her, to them…to any other monsters who might be looking for a girl to snack on. “They’re like wolves. If you run, instinct kicks in and they’ll automatically follow.”
She stared, her eyes wide as dinner plates, too terrified to speak. Her foot edged forward in the gravel. She was losing her nerve.
“Did you hear me?” I snapped. “You run, they chase. Get it?”
She gave a slow nod and that foot stilled. “Okay. Got it.”
I approached slowly. “You’ve got to relax. They’re thirsty, but mostly they get off on your fear.”
I pushed my way through to stand by her, protecting her. I was shaking, but not because I was scared—mostly I was totally revolted by the smell of them.
Who were these strays anyway? Why were they even out here? Tom held them in a pen south of here. They were well fed. They had no need to wander.
But now, standing close to Regina, the answer became clear. She was soaked with blood—even I could smell it. It was her blood that’d called them.
“What happened to you?” Because it wasn’t the Draug that’d done this to her. She wouldn’t be standing if they had—once a Draug began to attack, it didn’t stop. Only staking or fire stopped these monsters once they began to feed, a horrific fact I knew from personal experience.
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