I zipped my coat. Tightened my messenger bag against my side. My eyes adjusted to the darkness.
And then he pounced.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Yasuo. I recognized him instantly, even in the darkness. I’d know that telltale silhouette anywhere—tall and lean, with wiry muscles and black hair that still managed to have a hip LA vibe despite the fact that we were on an island in the middle of the North Sea.
He tackled me, and I shoved him off easily. “What the hell?” I rolled to my feet, dusting off my arms. The attack had felt halfhearted, so maybe he didn’t really want to hurt me. Maybe he just didn’t know how to broach talking with me. I jogged back a step. “If you want to talk, just say so.”
His only answer was the rasp of his heavy breaths.
“Earth to Yasuo,” I said uneasily. “Please, can we just stop for a second?”
But he still didn’t answer. He just stood there, trembling.
It was full dark now—most of January was—and I angled my body to let the moonlight hit his face. Something was wrong with him, and it wasn’t that he had that detached, vampiric thing going on, either. He appeared stricken, with glazed eyes that stared out to some distant place.
I stepped closer. “Are you okay?”
His attention snapped to me—it was like he’d forgotten I was there—and he leapt again. His fangs were bared this time, and I narrowly ducked out of the way of his gaping mouth.
I shrieked and stumbled back. “What the hell?”
He came again and kept coming, slashing his hands, pawing at me, diving for me, but I skittered backward, using quick left and right hooks to deflect his advances. I shouted, “What is your problem?”
There was clearly something very, very wrong with him, and I needed to do something before he sank his teeth into me. I couldn’t turn and run—no matter how trembly he was, with those long legs, he’d beat me in a foot race. My only hope was to fight him off. Maybe talk him down enough to get some answers.
First step was getting away from his crazily windmilling limbs. I lunged and ducked under an arm, grabbing his coat and shoving him in front of me. He doubled over easily, and I hopped onto his back, snatching him into a basic choke hold, using both arms to trap his neck from behind.
He wriggled madly, clawing at my forearms, but my wool coat was too thick for him to get purchase. His moves were spazzy and weak. Had something happened to him? Was he sick? “Did someone attack you?”
He laughed, a disturbing cackle, and dropped to his knees. The hideous noise he was making faded, but not completely, and I realized he was muttering to himself, nonsensical sounds, with no real words coming out.
“You’re freaking me out.” I released his neck and shoved him to the ground, quickly readjusting my pose, straddling him as he lay on his belly, and wrenching his arms up behind his back. I curled my full body weight over him and snarled in his ear, “Tell me. Just…dammit”—I struggled to keep hold, riding him like a bucking bronco—“tell me, Yas. What’s going on?”
He was shaking like mad now. I could feel the tremors reverberate up my body. “Do you think I’ll see her?” he said, and his cracking voice made him sound like a boy.
What the—?
I froze. “Emma? But she’s not alive.” I told myself hope was dead, that he was just hallucinating.
“Stop,” he shrieked, turning his head, resting it on the ground. “Stop saying her name. Emma’s gone. So just…fucking…stop.”
He snapped then, just lost it completely. His body gave up, and he became boneless beneath me. A horrible keening sound cut between us—and oh God, Yas was making that sound—as he began to cry great heaving sobs where he lay in the icy dirt.
It was like his mind snapped, too, and he began to babble again, but loudly this time, manic, scattered gibberish. About Emma. About the castle and vampires.
About her heart.
For the first time, I wondered if there’d been a bond between him and Emma. Could Trainees even bond? Surely they’d had some sort of connection. Would her sudden death cause a pain even deeper than grief? Would it be a pain great enough to drive a person to madness?
I shook him, pleading, “Why are you acting like this?”
I knew if a vampire left, it could be devastating to his bonded partner, but how did it feel for the vampire?
How had I never broached this with Carden?
Carden. Damn him. This latest attack only served to remind me of his absence. I blamed him for my vulnerability.
A long breath shuddered from Yasuo, and I actually had to pause and tune in to see if he was still even breathing. A thin rope of foamy spit dribbled from his mouth onto the dirt.
He was making some sort of transition, and it wasn’t a good one. Was he injured? Was this a broken bond? Merely grief? Something haunted Yasuo deeply, and it gave me a chill.
I slid from him and rubbed between his shoulder blades. He was limp as a rag, and I was confident—kind of—that his attack had paused for the moment. “Are you okay?” I asked quietly.
He hitched up to his elbows and stared at me.
It was then I noticed his eyes.
“Oh, Jesus, Yasuo.” I sprang backward in the dirt, snatching my hands to my chest as though burned.
He dragged himself to his hands and knees and began to skitter away. Finally, finally, he uncurled his body and stood, loping into the night.
His eyes, they’d glowed red. Gone was the stillness and blankness of Vampire. When he’d looked at me, he’d looked like a rabid animal, lacking reason or focus.
He’d looked like a Draug.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It took me several minutes to calm down. My heart pounded, my hands shook, but still I managed to do a body check. Adrenaline could mask pain. I’d seen girls so involved in a fight, they were unaware they had a weapon sticking from them. But as I tugged my clothes back into place, I saw I was relatively unscathed—physically, at least. Emotionally, I was a wreck.
I was shocked. Shattered. Grieving. I was steeped in my grief—choked by it.
Yasuo was Draug.
Draug meant dead.
Yas was dead.
Or he might as well be, if what I’d seen was really true. I still couldn’t wrap my brain around it. I couldn’t believe it. But I’d seen his eyes, those red, soulless eyes that I’d seen before. I thought of the Draug in Tom’s pens, remembered those hands reaching through bars, clawing the air, mindlessly swiping for food. Anxious to taste blood. To taste fear.
Was that why Yas had been so unhinged lately? I’d imagined that when a Trainee turned Draug, it would be an immediate thing. An instant change. But if Yas was any indication, it was a slow, laborious process. Like devolving into madness.
It was a madness that had its roots in the castle, in what they did inside the castle. What they did to the guys. To the girls. To all of us.
“Annelise?” The familiar voice pulled me from my morbid thoughts.
“Ronan?” I gaped at him, completely thrown now. I was reeling, unable to make sense of anything, and it was surreal to see Ronan. In my moment of need, it wasn’t Carden who’d appeared, but him.
“Are you going to dinner?”
“Huh?” I looked from him to the dining hall and back again, realizing I’d just been standing there, staring at the students spilling from its doors. For an instant, each was illuminated by a pool of light before walking into the night. Their bellies were full; they were sad or happy or anxious, each immersed in his or her own world, completely unaware of me in my hell.
A hell where Yas was gone from me. From everyone. Forever.
“Annelise?” He peered at me, equal parts concern and puzzlement. “I said, are you going to dinner?”
“Dinner.” I shook my head, shaking my mind back into reality. “No. Not happening.” I doubted I’d ever eat again, my stomach was in such knots.
“Are you all right?”
I couldn’t deal with this right now, this co
ncern from Ronan. Was he here to protect me or simply because he’d wanted to seek me out? It made me feel confused and exposed. “Yeah,” I answered tightly. “I’m fine.”
“I say you’re not.” He stepped closer and took my arm, and I flinched away, but he took it again, at the elbow, with a grip both firm and gentle. “Come.”
I looked over my shoulder at the dining hall and asked, “Don’t you need to eat?” But deep down I hadn’t really meant that. If I’d wanted to voice what I really thought, I’d have said something like, I want out…. I need help…. I want someone to take me away.
But those were dangerous thoughts, each one a brutal reminder of why I was here in the first place. “You.” I tugged at my arm. My life in Florida had sucked, sure, but it hadn’t been like this. This unending parade of terror and heartbreak. “This is your fault.”
His face fell, hearing my words. He knew what I meant, and still, he didn’t let go. He only pulled me closer. “Come with me,” he said, and this time his words were a soft lull.
Even through my thick coat, I felt the warmth begin to buzz from his fingertips. I stared at his hand nestled in the crook of my arm. “You’re doing your trick,” I said, though at that point, I didn’t even care. If it could put me out of my misery, I welcomed it.
He shrugged and gave me a sad, halfhearted smile. “It seems an emergency, aye?”
“Fine,” I said numbly, falling in to step beside him. “I’ll go with you. You don’t even need to do your special voodoo grip.”
We walked for a while, headed toward the cove where we’d had so many of our swim lessons. Finally, my curiosity got the better of me. “Where are you taking me?”
“It’s where I go when I’m low.”
I sighed. Whatever. I’d lost Amanda and Judge. Emma was dead in a way I presumed so horrific it’d been enough to make her boyfriend snap. Carden had disappeared off the face of the earth. And now Yasuo was transforming into a monster before my eyes. Maybe this little jaunt would make Ronan feel better, but I doubted I’d ever feel better again.
I assumed we’d head down to the water’s edge and was surprised when he led me off the trail. “Off the path? Hasn’t there been enough trouble?”
“And can’t you be quiet for two minutes?” he snapped back, but even in the dark, I saw in his eyes how he wasn’t truly angry. He led us to a spot looking down at the shore. It was nestled in the hills, perfectly situated so that neither people on the path nor those on the beach would’ve been able to see us.
“You’re full of secrets,” I said.
“I’m not the only one.” The way he sat next to me—sat close next to me—swept the thoughts from my head like a bracing breeze might clear smoke from a room.
As he watched the waves, I stole glances at him. Because, why? Why was he doing this now? Why couldn’t he have taken me on moonlit walks to secret spots before I’d bonded with a vampire? What was he up to?
For once, he was the one to break the silence. With a heavy glance, he asked, “Are you going to tell me what’s on your mind, or are you going to just sit there and brood?”
I whipped my eyes away from him, looking down at the water instead. Bright shards of white moonlight danced on the inky black waves. “I’m not brooding.”
He laughed. A Ronan laugh was a rare thing, and it unsettled me.
I changed the subject. “So your family lives here somewhere?” My gaze swept south, imagining the distant fishing village I’d once spotted from the water.
“I have people here, yes. In a manner of speaking. They’re like…my foster family, I guess you’d say.”
Foster family? This was news. “What happened to your—?” I trailed off, uncertain what the protocol was for conversations like this. Already we were navigating depths that Ronan and I had never plumbed before.
“To my blood kin?” he finished for me. “They’re…elsewhere. But aye, they live.” He phrased it awkwardly, his words bearing a strange echo, like awe, or fear.
“Why aren’t you with them?”
“It’s not my time,” he said. “I grew up here. I am required here.”
His time? How weird was that?
But I quickly forgot about weirdness as something he’d said clicked. “So the sister you told me about…” My heart soared. “She was just a foster sister?” He’d once said I reminded him of his sister, but really, who wants to be sisterly?
“No, Annelise. Charlotte was my real sister.” Damn him, he’d sounded amused. Or patronizing. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I cringed. Again I wondered, why was he doing this? It made me feel embarrassed, or like a kid. I didn’t even understand why we were having this conversation. Why had he brought me here? It gave me a stab in my chest that sharpened words I might have softened otherwise. “Where exactly is your blood family? Are they on another island?”
I thought of Mei-Ling, who’d escaped. Tom the Draug keeper had put her on a boat, headed toward what he’d called “friends.” Might Ronan’s family be with “friends,” too?
“Aye,” he said, his words clipped and tight with emotion. “My mother…she’s on a different island. With others.”
The honesty surprised me. There were so many stupid, frustrating secrets all around me. A million more questions sprang to mind, but I knew not to push it. This was already way more than I’d ever thought he’d tell me, more than I’d ever expected.
Again, why? Why was he confiding in me like this? Why this casual little glimpse into his life?
Aside from my Scottish vampire, Ronan knew me better than anyone on this island—now that Emma was gone, at least. I was certain he’d guessed at the connection between me and Carden, and yet, thus far, he’d kept his judgments to himself, and for that I was hugely grateful.
He got it. Got how complicated and lonely life on this dark isle could be. But he’d always maintained a veil of formality between us.
What had changed?
Did he just feel sorry for me? He’d seen how distraught I was, how much I needed it. Was this pity bonding?
The optimist in me said it was because he finally trusted me, but my inner pessimist countered that it was because I served some mysterious interest known only to him.
Who knew? Maybe the explanation was as simple as him assuming Carden had already confided everything.
Or…maybe he just felt safe telling me these things precisely because Carden was out there, somewhere, with a claim to me, and therefore Ronan couldn’t make one himself.
That last one gave me a shiver.
Regardless, he’d confided and now it was my turn.
“At least your mom is alive,” I said. “All I’ve got for family is a no-good dad and my”—I made air quotes with my fingers—“stepmom.” I couldn’t even say her name without irony, she’d been that crappy to me. “I had what felt like a family here for, like, half a second. Emma and Yas. Amanda and Judge. Mei-Ling. But they’re all gone.” I stole a look at him, a quick millisecond under my lashes, before looking away. I spoke the words before I chickened out. “Everyone’s gone except for you.”
I could hear in the cadence of his breath that he’d heard what I was really saying—the implication that he was also like family. He didn’t press it, though. He didn’t make some elaborate show of thanking me or act like he had to return the sentiment, and I was grateful.
Instead he said, “Yasuo. You’ve seen him?” Something in his tone told me that he already knew what I’d suspected.
“I did see him. He’s been on me like white on rice, actually.” I let out a humorless laugh. “He blames me for Emma.”
Ronan slid a hand onto my arm. Not the special hypnotic touch…just his touch. “Emma wasn’t your fault.”
“I know.” I shifted away, quickly changing back to a subject that was no less heartbreaking. “Yasuo, when I saw him, he was acting funny. Not like funny ha-ha,” I clarified. “He was off.”
“Yes,” Ronan said, and there was a heavi
ness in his voice, a heaviness that told me he knew exactly what I was talking about. “I’d hoped to find you myself, to warn you. I’ve been growing concerned. But I suppose you’ve seen for yourself—?”
I did see, but it didn’t mean I understood. “Will he be okay?”
“No, he’ll never be okay again. Yasuo is becoming Draug.”
Draug. Even though I’d guessed, hearing the word made it real. My stomach dropped. “Why? How?”
“I don’t know,” he said, sounding suddenly angry. “There is much I don’t know about the vampiric transition. I know what I’m told, and I’m not told much. Something happened to derail the transformation. I’ve seen it before. Many times.” His anger collapsed into sadness. “He’s gone, Annelise. You must give up on him.”
“On Yasuo? No way. I can’t.”
“You can,” he said sternly, “and you will.”
How could I mourn Yas when he was still here physically? And more than that, there’d been something left of him, something more than just that shell of bones and fangs and wild red eyes. He’d had some memory—he’d spoken of Emma. The last remnants of him were in there somewhere.
Did that mean he still had a soul? Was it leaving his body? Would it eventually leave him completely? I hoped so. I hoped there was a heaven for kids like us. Who knew, maybe there was a big juvie in the sky.
Or was that what ghosts were? These Draug, bearing wisps of memory of a life lived, but cursed to walk the earth. Would Yasuo haunt me?
Tears burned my eyes.
“I’m sorry, Annelise. Truly I am.”
It was an easy, standard sentiment to say, but from Ronan, I appreciated it. I’d lost roommates, friends, and was now watching Yasuo devolve into some mindless monster, and yet I got the sense Ronan understood the desolation I felt.
Could it have been mere pity that drove his words? Did he simply feel bad for me because I was ditched by my vampire boyfriend?
I’d had a million questions about why Ronan was all of a sudden around at just the right times, but oddly, just then, the reason didn’t matter. Whatever his motives for seeking me out, there was one thing I knew: Ronan had lost people, too. He understood my grief.
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