Though why I’d chosen to run in the shadow of the damned Needle, the chimney rock formation that Carden could scale and leap from like he was some kind of superhero, was beyond my understanding. Or maybe it wasn’t—maybe this particular workout spot had been an entirely intentional choice. Because, let’s be honest: I wanted to think about Carden. Duh. I wanted him to appear, as he had so many times, coming from out of the blue to nestle next to me in the sand.
The thing with Ronan had upset me, and I just wanted everything back the way it’d been before. But if Ronan was going to be all weird and Carden all gone, then that left me with nobody.
Waves slapped and churned against the base of the Needle. Had I really thought Carden’s head might bob into view, that he might spring from the water, clambering up the side as I’d seen him do before? I decided I was like that rock—alone in the middle of a bleak sea, pummeled by waves…until stupid Carden had climbed me and then leapt free.
“Jeez.” I had to laugh at myself—I really hated my own drama sometimes. “Pathetic.”
I stretched on an exhale, grabbing my toes, pulling hard, folding myself over my aching belly. I inched my fingertips lower on the soles of my feet, wrenching my torso lower, daring my hamstrings to quiver and burn. Daring the pain to wipe out everything else.
“You’ll snap in half,” a male voice said from behind me.
I sprang up on a startled yelp. Josh. “I’ll snap you in half if you scare me like that again.” I glanced around, looking behind him, but he was alone. “Where’d you come from anyway?”
He cupped his hand over his eyes. “I had a Trainee thing. At the keep.”
Sure you did.
“I was looking for you earlier,” he added. The sun wasn’t that bright, but he kept his hand shielded over his eyes, like he was in pain.
“You all right?” I remembered the rogue vampire I’d fought—that Carden had fought for me—and the eerie pale eyes, hidden behind sunglasses, that’d betrayed his ancient years. The older the vamps got, the more sensitive to light they became. It made sense that Trainees would be no different. “Shouldn’t you wear, like, a hat or something?”
“Nah, I’m good.” He plopped next to me on the sand. “It’s just your radiant beauty, it blinds me, yeah?”
I laughed and picked at my sweaty shirt. “The only thing I’m radiating is sweat.” I was lonely and uncertain, but Josh and his easy, Aussie good humor always made me smile. It didn’t hurt that he was pretty cute, too, in a scruffy sun-kissed beach-boy way.
He clutched a hand to his heart. “She denies my compliment.”
Wait…was this real flirting or playful friend flirting? If my tense interactions with Ronan were any indication, I had no clue how to tell the difference between the two.
“Easy, sailor.” I really looked then, reconsidering him. Not as a friend, or as someone I’d gotten to know, but as a guy. Honestly, by that point, I was just that angry at both Carden and Ronan. If they were going to blow me off, then I’d feel free to look at other guys, dammit.
I looked at him, and though I saw the appeal, I didn’t feel the appeal. No butterflies or any of that other good stuff. Sorry, mate, I thought. Maybe in another life.
“Hey, a boy can try,” he said, still doing the flirty thing.
“And a girl could get the wrong idea.” Feeling a mite uncomfortable, I erected the barest of shields between us. Carden had warned me not to trust Josh—not to trust any of them. Though, clearly, I should’ve taken the advice and not trusted Carden.
But when Josh and his flirty eyes still didn’t stand down, Carden’s advice nagged at the edge of my mind. “Hey,” I said, in a bright tone that indicated Major Topic Shift, “why were you looking for me anyway?” Sitting tall, I crossed my legs and began to stretch my arms in front of me, loosening my triceps. That was me, all chillaxed, just doing my workout.
“Looking for you,” he repeated with a smirk. “Looking out for you is more like it.”
The comment had a weird edge that cut me the wrong way. “Oh, so I need a big guy like you to look out for me, is that it?”
“Hey, nerd bird, is that what I said?” He nudged me with his shoulder, his good humor back with such gusto I had to wonder if I’d imagined the dig in his earlier statement. “I’ve just been worried is all. I’ve heard some of the guys talking. I don’t know what you did but, dude, some of them have a real hard-on for you”—he squirmed at his own crude phrasing—“I mean, you know, not in the good way.”
He looked abashed, and it endeared him to me.
“Oh. That.” I dug out a clump of wet sand and crushed it between my fingers. Deciding these weren’t exactly secrets, I explained. “Yasuo blames me for Emma.” I paused, studying his face—did he know about Yas? His expression didn’t betray a thing. Deciding there might’ve been a little truth in Carden’s warning after all, I used care as I continued. “And Rob, well, he was assigned to…I don’t know…bite me, or whatever you guys have to do for schoolwork—” I glanced up, hoping he’d fill in the blanks.
But he raised his hand, stopping me altogether. “Hey, we’re not the ones who are supposed to go around assassinating people.”
“You heard that, huh?” Wary, I caught his eye, but all that met me was his broad grin, and I couldn’t help but smile back. “By the way,” I added with pretend solemnity, “‘assassination’ is so gauche. We prefer the term ‘elimination.’”
As our smiles faded, he grew serious, quietly mimicking what I was doing, picking up and breaking apart wet clumps of sand. “Just look out for yourself,” he said finally. “This island would be pretty boring without you.”
The sentiment was unexpected. He might not have been my type, but I took companionship where I could get it, and I was happy to be getting it, period. I flicked sand at him. “You’re just nervous because I still owe you a favor.”
The comment puzzled him for a moment, and when it registered, his eyes widened. “You still remember that?”
“How could I forget it?” He’d once saved me from some pretty gnarly hazing—involving urine—and I felt I still owed him, even if he didn’t. “It was my first big run-in with Rob.”
“Kind of like your anniversary,” he teased.
I shuddered. “Puhleez.”
We were laughing, which meant I was sideswiped when, totally seriously, out of the blue, he said, “So tell me for real, Drew. What are you plotting?”
In a matter of seconds, my heartbeat went from calm to chaotic.
Panic must’ve shown on my face because he burst into laughter. “Chill.” He patted my shoulder. “Kidding, D. Kidding. But look at you. All alone here.” His sweeping arm took in the empty beach and the gray, roiling sea. “You look depressed and you’re way too much of a little hellcat for that, which means you must be plotting. So tell me.”
“Hellcat?” I exclaimed, but he just sat there, waiting for an answer, so finally I just said, “Fine. I’m not plotting. I was just…thinking.”
“Uh-oh. Sounds painful.”
He looked like he might’ve bought the lie—because I sure as hell was plotting—but then I thought, maybe I could trust him. Maybe I should, just a little. After all, as a Trainee, he got to go inside that castle every day of the week. I’d need to trust someone if I were to get anywhere with my plan.
Baby steps, I warned myself. Asking about the keep could make him suspicious.
So what were my next steps? I’d been working on a strategy, trying to figure out how to convince Ronan to help me, when he’d almost kissed me. Was that why he’d done it? I had to hand it to the guy; it sure had been a clever way to put a stop to my scheming. Before the weird tension, though, he’d mentioned villagers.
There were villagers on this rock who knew about the vampires’ midwinter ritual. I needed to know what they knew. Any insight I could get into the vampires’ world was information that could help me take them down.
“Did you ever wonder where the people live?” I ask
ed suddenly.
“Huh?” Josh looked flummoxed. “The people?”
Cool, a train of thought he hadn’t expected. That was a good thing, because if he’d expected me to ask about the villagers, then it’d mean he was suspicious of me. Gawd, all these paranoid mental acrobatics. It was proof that sides had already been taken—with me on one end and Trainees on the other.
“You know, the people.” I consciously maintained my pleasant expression, feeling my shields reinforce just a bit more, because what was that thing I just saw flicker in his eyes? “The people who drive the trucks and operate the boats, that sort of thing. I heard someone talking about a village. And where there’s a village, there are villagers.”
Josh’s pause wasn’t long, but it was enough for me to glimpse the machinations going on in that mind of his—a mind that was, I guessed, not nearly as laid-back as he pretended it to be. I couldn’t let myself forget how, in his life before, he’d been Harvard premed. Not quite the sandy surfer dude he liked to portray.
No, there were definite machinations. He was weighing what he was and wasn’t allowed to tell me, all the while wearing a pleasant expression that mirrored my own. Eventually, he said, “I guess they have to live somewhere.”
I not only guessed. I knew. They lived north of here. I’d seen the settlement from the water, tiny white dots that had to be homes. But I didn’t share that much with Josh—it was too fun testing the boundaries of what he was willing to tell me. I decided to move down the map. “Have you ever been to the southern end of the island?” I asked innocently.
Finally something clicked in his expression, and I knew I was seeing the real Josh. “South?” He shivered. “There are all those Draug out that way.”
His reaction made sense. The Draug would probably freak out any Trainee—the monsters would serve as a reminder of how it could all go very wrong on their own road to Vampire.
I knew I’d never be able to look at a Draug again without thinking of Yasuo.
Wait a minute.
I bit my lips, trying not to lose that pleasant face I’d been working hard to maintain. But my mind was whirring a mile a minute.
The Draug. There was my strategy. Or rather, the Draug keeper.
I let my chat with Josh peter out. He cracked some jokes about growing up in a village on this rock. I cracked some jokes about men with thick accents unburdened by a surplus of teeth.
I stood, brushing off. I needed to get rid of Josh, which meant it was time to bring this meeting in for a landing. There was another man I needed to be talking to right now: Tom, the guy who acted as a sort of shepherd of the Draug, keeping them in pens like livestock. He was older, quirky, and plainspoken—and not surprisingly, not a big fan of the Directorate. He’d helped me before, in a big way, and I was hoping he’d be inclined to help me again.
Tom would know secrets of village life. And I knew just where to find him.
Josh might’ve been scared of the southern end of the island, but I knew better. South didn’t scare me.
Well, not too, too much.
We said our good-byes, and I jogged inland, taking a short-cut—a dangerous shortcut—through Draug country. To say I needed to be careful would’ve been an understatement. They were terrifying, mindless creatures who rotted like corpses, but were cursed with the thirst, strength, and immortality of vampires. In ideal circumstances, the Draug might’ve behaved like livestock, but like livestock, one or two sometimes slipped through for a little rampage, which was where the careful part came in.
I stayed on the path as long as I could, then swerved off in a dash, picking my way along the desolate landscape, going fast enough to make good time and avoid company, but not so fast that I broke an ankle. Random snippets of an old Beastie Boys song ran through my head, the same lyrics running on a loop…Listen all y’all it’s a sabotage. God, how I used to love music. What new songs were out there now? Which new bands? It’d once all been so important, and now it was so unreal. A universe away. I’d have given a week’s ration of blood to recall the full song, but I was left with the same few lines, and I chanted them over and over—I can’t stand it…I know you planned it—anything to push other thoughts from my head.
To push away the fear.
I couldn’t let myself be afraid. I couldn’t afford it. On this part of the island, fear smelled like dinner.
Tom had been the one who’d told me that, though the Draug fed on blood, it was fear that sustained them…the taste of it, the whiff of others’ terror, that was what they really craved.
I upped my pace, mouthing lyrics. Good thing it was Saturday—no classes. The island was small, but still, it’d take me a good forty-five minutes to find his cottage. If I hustled, I’d have time to find Tom and double back to the dining hall before it closed.
I stopped to check my watch—early afternoon yet. But this time of year, I was looking at three thirty twilight. Full dark by five o’clock. I grabbed my right foot and pulled it to my butt, stretching my quad. I looked to the horizon, scanned the terrain around me, gauging my location.
It meant I was distracted. Checking the time, the sky, the landscape, my leg muscles…I was minding everything else but what I should’ve been minding.
My back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Bitch.” A pair of hands shoved me, hard.
No time to brace, I lost my footing and slammed face-first into the gravel, my right ribs and elbow taking the brunt.
“Goddammit.” I instantly curled my legs, reaching for the stars in my boots, but before I could grab them and roll to standing, a large male body flung itself onto me. My lungs expelled a disturbing whump sound, and black spots swam before my eyes, resolving into snapshot images of lanky hands and dishwater brown hair.
Rob. Scrambling to pin me in a standard-issue wrestling hold.
I burst to action, squirming beneath him. “You gonna bite me?” I managed, wriggling into an angle that bought me more air. I coughed, gasped for breath, coughed again. “Oh, right. You can’t.”
He sawed his arm, aimed at my neck. I tensed and tucked my chin down, but he managed to pry past my hunched shoulders, crushing my throat. “Go ahead and joke. Like a prisoner’s last meal.”
I twisted from my side onto my back, and in the half second it took for him to readjust, I snapped my hands up, guarding my neck with my forearms and bucking my hips, trying to fling him off.
He lost his balance and fell forward. He was still on top of me, his chest crushing my face, but with a quick scramble and scoot, I turned my head, clutched him close, and wrapped my legs around him, pinning him to me. Not a great position, but at least it gave me some control of his movements. “You’re lisping, Rob.”
“I don’t need fangs to draw blood.” He relaxed into me, crushing his body to mine as he grabbed for whatever he could get hold of. He grabbed, and I squirmed, and we grappled, him trying to use his weight to immobilize me, while I wiggled like a wind-up toy, bucking my hips, fighting to free my arms.
“What are you going to do?” I said, pausing and panting. “Hug me to death?”
“Nope.” He reached down, his hand clawing for my neck. “Strangle.”
I bit his wrist. As he flinched away, he dug his fingers into my forearms and slammed his elbows onto my biceps, bending my arms and pinning me. Grinding me into the dirt. “You’re going to suffer for what you did.”
“Oh, Robbie, did the other boys make fun of you?” I couldn’t budge, and I couldn’t budge him, either. My arms began to burn, my muscles quivering—he was just too heavy. I could drink all the blood in the world and I’d never be able to fight a big Trainee boy, especially one who’d also been getting doses of the blood. My words were one of the last weapons left to me, and I let them rip. “Just think how special you are. There can’t be many other vampires who have just one fang. It’s actually quite piratical.”
“Shut up.”
“Do you even want to grow it back? You might want to consider
—”
“I’ll shut you up.” He let go with one arm and clawed for my neck. I hunched my chin into my chest, but he just snatched at the collar of my coat instead.
“That all you got?” With my free hand, I punched at him, but I couldn’t hold him back for much longer. “It’s not over yet.”
His fingertips grasped the fabric, then began inching lower, twisting and tightening it around my throat until it became hard to breathe. “Isn’t it?”
As I struggled to loosen my collar, his other hand wrenched between my forearms. I tried to block, but I must’ve slipped, because suddenly I felt his thumb on my skin. His palm on my throat. He laughed.
Then he squeezed.
Instantly, I flashed back. Instantly, I was in the ring with Emma, her hands on my throat, choking me just enough to make me black out, our plan to fake my death.
It’d worked.
And then she’d been the one who’d died.
Despair swamped me. My legs thrashed and my feet kicked the dirt, just as they had with Emma. My lips opened, mouth gasping for air that wouldn’t come. Just like that day.
And, like that day, the world went dark.
SOMETHING COLD SLAPPED MY FACE, and I gasped. Deep in my muzzy brain, I rejoiced at the rush of sweet air. Greedily, I sucked it in, but was slapped again.
Cold water. I accidentally inhaled it. Choked and coughed. Panicked.
My eyes shot open.
The sky was dark gray. Late afternoon. I could breathe. But I was…tied.
I shifted, assessing. My arms were numb, bound behind and under me. Something sharp dug into my spine. A rock. I was lying down, tied on top of a rock.
I wrenched my arms, adjusting my hands, nestling them into the small of my back. Rope cut into my wrists with every movement. Two lengths of it were stretched over me—one slashed across my hips and the other across my collarbone. I wriggled, but that only cinched the bonds tighter. “What the hell?”
There was rustling and I craned my neck, peering up over my head. Rob had knocked back the last of his water and was zipping his canteen into his pack.
The Keep: The Watchers Page 17