She reached the edge and smoothly pulled herself up and out of the pool. We weren’t friends, but we were friendly enough, and she spared me a curt nod as she walked by, headed for her towel. I noted how she didn’t spare a glance for Josh, or any of the other guys for that matter.
We were surrounded by half-naked cuties, but Kenzie didn’t care. She was in her own world. It made me realize something: I’d never seen her with one vampire in particular, which implied she’d made it to Guidon by consuming only the shooters of blood they served in the dining hall. She probably didn’t drink from the source, and yet there she was, power and ease, swimming all over the damned pool. Without breathing.
I’d been nervous about the water, but Kenzie was an inspiration. Not that I’d break my bond with Carden, but if she could accomplish all that, if she could be that strong without a blood bond, then how far could I go? Could I truly break into the keep? Might I uncover their secrets? Discover what’d happened to all those fallen girls?
My journey started now. Here. I’d go to the pool more. Work out more. I’d be a force.
“Earth to Drew.” Josh was looking at me funny. I registered how he’d gone for his towel and come back, and I was still in the same spot, staring at that pale blue water. “You’d better shower up. Curfew’s soon.”
I was the last girl in the showers, hurriedly rinsing the conditioner from my hair as I heard the heavy metal door to the locker room slam shut. I turned off the water, the ancient knobs squealing. There was total silence. I was the last one. I scampered to my locker, careful not to slip. I’d dallied too long.
“Dammit.” I struggled to get my clothes on—I hated putting clothes on damp skin—but I needed to hustle. My hair was soaking—the ends of it would surely freeze on my race back to the dorm. “Damndamndammit.”
I hobbled out of the dressing room, forcing my heels into my boots. I’d just reached the pool deck when I heard a noise—a loud electronic sound reverberating through the pool area. Whoomp.
The lights cut out. I was in pitch-darkness.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I froze. I mean, how much would it suck to accidentally fall in the pool fully clothed? “Hello?” I called out. It was probably just some nighttime janitor out there, doing his job. “Is anybody there?”
There was another click, quieter this time, the sound like a flicking switch. The overhead lights were still off, but the pool lights switched on, looking like white orbs glowing underwater. The pale water shimmered eerily, making the black stripes along the bottom waver. I strained my ears for some movement, but there was just a distant drip-drip. The natatorium at night—creepiest thing ever.
“Hello?” I called again, but there was still no answer.
A door slammed, and I panicked. I’d seen the chain they used to lock up with—I was not about to spend the night at the natatorium, thankyouverymuch.
“Hey!” I called again, louder this time. “I’m still here!”
“That’s the problem.” There was another click, and light flickered behind me. Not the overhead light, but a small bare bulb in the custodial closet.
“What?” I spun, looking for who’d spoken.
He was illuminated from above. In the darkness, the effect was freaky, like holding a flashlight under your chin only flipped the other way. “You’re still here, and that’s a problem.”
“What?” I squinted to see better. “Is that you, Yasuo? What are you talking about?”
“You’re here. She’s not. And now it’s time to eradicate the problem.” He flew at me, grabbing my neck before I had a chance to act. His fingers curled and tightened until I felt the delicate bones of my throat begin to give. He was going to kill me.
I grabbed his wrists and struggled backward. He squeezed tighter, and my body spasmed, fighting for air. I opened my mouth to shout, but couldn’t get a breath in or out.
The rubber soles of my boots skittered on the wet tile of the pool deck and my feet slid from under me. I had to hold on to his arms to avoid breaking my own neck. Finally, my boots got purchase. I got my feet back under me and tried to speak. Stop, I tried to say, but nothing came out. My mouth just opened and closed like a gasping fish.
I stared into his eyes, trying to communicate that way. His were bloodshot, giving him an insane, unhinged look. I wanted to connect. Tried to telegraph something with my pleading expression. Maybe he’d remember how I wasn’t so bad. How we used to be. But he wasn’t there. I stared into those eyes, and he wasn’t home. His gaze was flat and dead. Cold. He’d become something different. Whoever this creature was, it wasn’t my friend Yasuo anymore.
His fingers curled tighter, and I felt my eyes bug. Black spots popped into my vision. I was dead if I didn’t act.
Alarm, terror, grief…My emotions were so haywire, I expected Carden to appear any minute. But he didn’t.
Had Yas chained the door? Either way, it looked like I was on my own. Which meant I needed to stop the magical thinking. Strength, I told myself. I’d be strong, not terrified. I was strong.
I uncurled the fingers of my right hand and forced myself to release his arm. Hitching up my leg, I reached down. My fingers splayed, flapped, grasped toward the stars in my boot. But the farther I stretched, the deeper his fingers dug into me.
The black spots in my vision melded together. Became a black veil. My chest was spasming now, my throat making disturbing little croaking noises. But I sensed it as though from the end of a tunnel. I was passing out.
This was it.
I sensed movement. Carden. He’d come at last.
There was a slamming door, a rush of fresh air and light. But Yasuo didn’t take his eyes from me, so surely it was only my fantasy. This was my brain shutting down, me going into the light.
But suddenly Yasuo’s fingers were gone. His spine shot straight and his arms sprang from his sides like he might flap away. His back arched, and he bucked, then bucked again, eyes shut like he was having a seizure.
It was the last thing I saw before my own body took over, and I doubled over, dropping to my knees, coughs racking me. My chest shuddered to pull in oxygen, the moist air burning as it passed my throat.
Finally, my vision cleared and I looked up, expecting to find Carden. But my savior hadn’t been a vampire. It took me a moment to make sense of what I was seeing.
Yasuo was on his belly, and Kenzie sat straddled over him. She’d plunged her sai knives hilt-deep in his back.
She calmly met my eyes and said, “I forgot my goggles.” She glanced from me to Yas. “Just in time, apparently.” She stood and dusted off her knees, giving me a smile. “I hate missing a pool party.”
“Oh my God.” My voice was ragged, barely a rasp. “You killed him.”
She gave me an impatient look. “I’m better than that.”
“You did.” I pointed at the twin hilts, sticking out of him like an X. “His heart. You staked him.”
“Anatomy 101, Acari Drew. I’m a Guidon—I know exactly where his heart is.” Looking almost bored, she drew her finger down to a point just below his left shoulder, between her knives. “His heart is exactly between these two blades. The kid will be fine.”
She pulled out those blades, and Yasuo’s body shivered. So he was really alive?
Oh crap. He was really alive.
And he’d be really pissed when he came to. I wavered to standing. “We should get out of here.”
“He’s out for a while.” Seeing my questioning look, she grinned. “Not my first rodeo, girlie.”
She was cleaning her blades on the hem of his uniform sweater, her posture so cool, it ratcheted her several notches up in my estimation.
“Whose side are you on anyway?” she asked.
My eyes shot to hers. “What?”
The word brought on a fresh bout of coughing, and she waited till I was done to say, “If I’m not mistaken, this Trainee just tried to kill you.”
I gazed at Yasuo’s face. His features were slack, but his ch
est rose and fell evenly now. Alive, just as she’d said. He looked so peaceful—more peaceful than I’d seen him since Emma’s death. “He’s confused.”
“Confused?” She nudged his leg with her foot. “These guys aren’t worth the trouble, if you ask me.”
I thought of Josh, my Australian pal. “Some of them are okay.”
She rolled her eyes at me as though I’d lost my mind. “If you’re into that sort of thing.”
Kenzie had obviously not bonded with a vampire. Lately, I’d thought a lot about strength versus power, but she didn’t mess with thoughts of who controlled whom. She fought. She survived. She was pure strength. A warrior.
I vowed to be more like her.
I hopped into step, catching the door before it swung shut. “Right behind you.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
This thing with Yasuo had to stop.
Maybe if I could definitively prove that Emma was alive when she left the ring, he’d finally understand that her death wasn’t really my fault. In fact, Alcántara had probably targeted her way back in our first semester, when she’d pulled out of the original Directorate Challenge.
I needed to get closer to the truth, which meant getting closer to Alcántara. It all came back to him.
And, I just realized, he was currently eyeing me again. I shifted in my seat, pretending to write something in my notebook. Every time he looked at me, I felt it, like a warm breeze blowing over my skin or a little shiver of relaxation at the base of my spine.
I girded myself. Sat tall. I’d lost my best friend. My other best friend was doing his best to kill me. And it was all the fault of this vampire.
He was lecturing on assassination techniques. Historical examples. Issues of distance. Questions of proximity, of position. And I wasn’t hearing a word he was saying. I was plotting.
I dared not confide my plans to Carden…and where was he, anyway? I hadn’t seen him since that intense night we’d spent together.
Had I done something to make him keep his distance? I replayed our final conversation in my mind. I hadn’t said anything too strange about Ronan, right? I would’ve known at the time if he were upset.
He was probably just busy.
So why hadn’t he come when I needed him? I’d gotten used to my vampire coming when he sensed me upset, and when your supposedly good friend tries to kill you, it definitely falls under the Upset column. Surely Carden had felt my alarm. My anguish.
Maybe since Kenzie had come to my aid so quickly, he’d felt he hadn’t been needed. Maybe Carden even purposely stayed away to avoid discovery of our bond. Both were good excuses, but neither completely erased the pang of hurt.
I was telling myself to grow up when I heard Alcántara pause and clear his throat. Crap. I looked up, and those fathomless eyes were waiting for me.
A smile curved the corner of his mouth. An I’m-watching-you smile.
Pay. Attention.
It was no secret that Alcántara was one of the main baddies in this place, but how could I get more insight than that? I pretended to take notes, writing down random phrases from his lecture—secrecy…motives…Shakespeare’s Macbeth?—embellishing the words with squiggles and curlicues, considering Alcántara’s secrecy. Alcántara’s motives.
Lissa asked a question, and as I turned to look at her, only then it struck me. There were empty seats—like, a bunch of empty seats. The realization shot me back into the present. If Emma were alive, she’d want me focusing on guarding my own hide and less on what’d happened to hers.
I wish I’d done a head count that first day. Just how many girls were missing from class? Did those empty seats represent girls who’d tried—and failed—to execute Alcántara’s assignment? (Pun intended.)
Rather than listen to Lissa’s question, I was mesmerized by the look of her. She was pale and drawn. I realized her pert-nosed friend was conspicuously absent. When Alcántara had given our assignment, he’d told us the cost of failure would be our life. So I guess Lissa’s friend was a fail.
My roommate, Frost, rose from her seat.
What the—?
My attention snapped completely back into class. Frost was about to report on her project.
Already. She’d already killed her assigned Trainee.
Jeez…these people. I was still trying to wrap my mind around what this whole business entailed, and yet there was my roomie, going to the front of the class so calmly you’d have thought she was about to give an oral report on Jane Eyre instead of detailing for us the finer points of her first successful assassination.
Bloodthirsty much?
“Acari Frost.” Alcántara purred the name—and how annoying was it that even the vampires no longer called her Audra? “Tell us, did you successfully complete your assignment?”
“Yes, I did,” she said proudly.
“Well?” Alcántara looked like his patience was wearing thin already. Apparently, Frost wasn’t every teacher’s pet. My feelings for the Spanish vampire aside, I found his distaste to be just the slightest bit gratifying. “Why don’t you begin by outlining the details of your personal assignment? For example, do you know why you were assigned the target you were?”
So there was a method to Al’s madness. What did it mean that my assigned victim was Trainee Farm Boy? He’d asked that our assassinations have some sort of poetic twist. Horrific. Alcántara wanted a story, and I was suddenly curious to hear Frost’s.
“Yes,” Frost said. “Trainee Marlin Grosse was my assignment.”
I searched my memory banks…Marlin Grosse. I’d never met him—I mostly knew the Trainees in Yasuo’s circle—but I pictured a tall, gangly guy with a blond buzz cut. Grosse—I’d assumed it was German, but it could’ve easily been Norse. Had he been in one of Frost’s advanced Norse classes? She was obsessed with it—if he’d been competition for Dagursson’s attentions, I’ll bet she hadn’t liked that one bit.
“Due to our mutual interest in Old Norse literature and mythology, we’ve had several classes together,” she said, confirming my suspicions. “I believe he was my assigned Trainee because…”
She faltered, and I shot up in my seat. Was I about to glimpse into the truth of Frost’s tiny heart?
She cleared her throat. “Marlin has troubled me in the past. I believe this is the reason he was my target. To force me to face my…problems.”
She’d been about to say face my fears—I’d have put money on it.
Alcántara steepled his fingers, cocked his head, and furrowed his brow. “What is the nature of the trouble he’s given you?” His fake sympathy made me sick.
“He tried things,” she said simply. From the steel in her expression, I could guess what those things were. Some of the guys on this island were real scumbags. Rob had tried things with me. I got where she was coming from.
“This made my strategy easy.” The way her eyes pinched at the corners told me not all of it had been that easy. “I got him alone. I told him…I’d changed my mind. About him, I mean.”
She slowly began to unfold a square of linen, and everyone—even Alcántara—leaned forward to see. “The next question was, which weapon to use?” She revealed the long, thin knife that’d been tucked inside.
I craned my neck to get a better look. I knew for a fact this wasn’t her weapon—she carried some obnoxious Viking ax thing (of course)—and at closer inspection, this didn’t seem like the typical choice at all. Sure, it was a knife, but the blade looked shoddy, like it was a kitchen implement bought on the cheap rather than a prized weapon.
“Tell us about this crude blade,” Alcántara said.
“When considering how to do it,” she continued, “how to kill him, I began with his name. Marlin Grosse. From there, it was simple.”
“Simple…how?” Alcántara seemed interested now.
Frost clearly liked the attention. I watched her loosen up. Warm to it. “It’s a fishing knife that I…borrowed from the kitchens.” She looked up through her lashes and smiled
at Alcántara. She loved the vampires, loved life on this island, and it made me sick to watch her fawn like this.
“Fine, fine,” Alcántara said, sounding impatient again. “Perhaps you’ll share with the class the significance of this choice.”
“I’m from Maine,” she continued. The warmth had bled from her voice and she was robotic again. “My father was…is…a fisherman. I know how to use a boning knife.”
There were a couple of chuckles in the room, and her eyes shot up. “Yes, ha-ha, boning. A boy like Marlin would’ve had the same reaction.”
“And that is why you chose this particular blade?”
“Well, that and the fact that his name was Marlin. You know”—she paused, waiting for the dimmer kids in the class to get it—“like the fish.”
“Lovely,” Alcántara cooed. “Tell us how you orchestrated your execution.”
She nodded, and though her gaze was aimed straight ahead, I was sure she was focused on nothing but what she saw in her own head. “Marlin was going to, you know, force me.”
Jesus. I stared. I might’ve even stopped breathing. What the hell had Frost gone through? What were we all going through? And why were so many of these girls set on going it alone? She hated me, but she could’ve trusted me. She could have told me all this stuff was going on for her.
“He kissed me,” she went on. “He told me if I let him…do things…he said it would only hurt a little bit. I let him kiss me while I slipped the knife from my coat pocket. And then I told him he was wrong. That it would hurt a lot. For him. And that’s when I did it. I stabbed him.”
You could’ve heard a pin drop. Nobody made a sound. Nobody, that is, until Alcántara broke the silence with a majestic slow-clap.
“Brilliant,” he said as a blissful smile spread across his face. “That was lovely. Thank you for sharing. Truly, that was a triumphant moment for you.” He turned to the rest of us. “Acari Frost has followed my instructions to the letter. Her assassination had meaning. It was clever and brave and, I daresay, poetic.”
The Keep: The Watchers Page 11