In a flash, she has transformed from a legacy with a frightening power and an agenda for all of Elmwick to the girl I’ve always known—gentle and innocent. She grasps the hand I’ve reached out.
“It’s over,” I whisper.
“What happened?” Her voice is frail and hoarse, but her eyes search the crowd and land on the charred remains of the ambulance. Her fingers tighten around mine. “Vaughn?”
I can’t bear to confirm it out loud, so I shake my head.
She exhales through her mouth as if she’s counting every breath to calm down. When she nods, I help her up, one hand on her waist and another grasping her arm under the elbow to support her in case her knees buckle.
Now that we’re up, I become aware of the legacies from her circle, gathered around us. “She’s fine. I’ve got her.”
They don’t move until they hear her confirmation. “I’m all right.”
One by one, they peel away, giving us some space. Jean leaves last, and most reluctantly.
“How did it happen?” Cami’s eyes are still on the burnt-to-black ambulance.
“I don’t know.” Her shock is enough to sway me from looking for the guilty party among the legacies. None of them has the gift of fire anyway, though it’s possible Vaughn’s misfortune could stem from a curse. I decide against asking Cami about it in her state.
Tears of bitterness pool in her eyes. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. If I hadn’t lost control, he wouldn’t have been in the ambulance...”
I shake my head. “I know you’re not a murderer.” The rest of my thoughts come spilling out. I can’t filter them in the confusion of this night. “Cami, you’re not a murderer and you’re not a soldier. This—” I gesture about, though I mean her speech. “What you said tonight is insane. You can’t go to war with the hunters, ally yourself with Jester. What’s next? Turning Elmwick into Jester’s personal blood bag?”
She shudders and stares at me with guilt.
“Are you serious?” I want to shake her out of her stupor. “Think about the humans in town, not just the legacies. There’s a reason Jester and most of the cold ones weren’t allowed to live here and were banished to that castle, away from civilization. This can only end in bloodshed. Please.”
Cami widens her stance. As soon as she does, she slips out of my grasp. “I’m doing the best I can. I refuse to be a target anymore. You, of all people, should see how unnecessary and aggravating the hunters’ attacks have been.”
“I do. I see that,” I hurry to say. “But this can’t be the answer. You’re placing the entire town in danger. And you’ve painted a giant target on your back. The hunters won’t back down. They’ll come at you even harder now.”
“Let them,” she squeezes through her teeth. “I’m done hiding in the shadows. I’m done cowering in fear and playing by the rules when they don’t. I wanted peace, but they brought war to this town.” Her expression turns stony. “If that’s the only way, then war it shall be.”
I gape at Cami in denial. She can’t mean it, but an uncomfortable feeling settles in my gut. She really seems to.
The girl I’ve adored isn’t all sweet smiles and innocence. I would have been proud of her for coming out of her shell and daring to stand up for her beliefs, if her new agenda wasn’t so dangerous. Deadly, even.
“I wish you’d see reason.” As soon as I say it, I know it’s too late.
“I have,” she insists.
“I can’t stand by your side and watch you destroy this town.” It’s my last plea for her to reconsider, though that only shows in my voice.
A tear rolls down her cheek, but she wipes it away on inhale. I think she’ll walk away, but her expression crumbles, and she steps so close to me that our faces are an inch apart.
“Please, Mason. Understand it was the only way. Please stand with us. We can still have peace with the hunters who don’t mean us harm.”
It breaks my heart not being able to give her the answer she needs from me. I lift her chin with one hand and, eyes squeezed shut, I draw us into a kiss goodbye. Her lips taste salty as we both press hard, a desperate last gesture.
She sniffs when we pull apart.
“I can’t,” I breathe.
New tears roll down her cheeks. The sight of it squeezes my insides, but I can’t go back on my decision. Just like she won’t be swayed from hers.
“I’m sorry,” I say, then jerk my gaze from her. I need to leave now or my resolve will crack.
“Mason!” Cami calls out in desperation, but I force myself to keep going. “Mason!”
Through blurry eyes, I find Zach, his face blanched in shock. “Let’s go.” He doesn’t offer a destination, and right now I don’t need one.
I go with him to the limo and slip into the backseat. Mrs. Hastings is already inside, sitting opposite us. As soon as the door clicks closed after Zach, she knocks on the separator between us and the driver.
The limo pulls out of the street, leaving The Ravenna and the chaos of tonight behind.
“Where are we going?” I dare to ask.
“Out of town, back to my family’s residence,” Zach replies in a mechanic tone.
Mrs. Hastings wipes her face clean and takes a deep breath. “Now,” she says to her son. “I think that went well.”
I turn back in my seat, though the hotel is out of sight. “Y-you?” I stutter.
She blinks and sighs, exhausted. “Don’t look so shocked, Mason. You know very well that Vaughn wasn’t a good person. This very evening, he would have had me shoot your friend, Charity, in cold blood. He’s the main threat to those like us. And you have no idea how dangerous and how hard it’s been to feign allegiance to him all these years.”
My eyes are about to pop out of their sockets.
“But, as I’ve taught Zach and as you yourself must have realized in the past few months, sometimes we have to let the enemy think they’re winning. We sacrifice pawns and bide our time, waiting for the right opportunity to strike.”
I tense as the limo gathers speed. I want to get out until I know what’s going on, but I doubt the Hastings will heed such a request.
Everything Father has told me about hunters like us mixes with memories of my conversations with Zach. “You’re both double agents?”
Zach shrugs with a little frown. “If that’s what you want to call it.”
“You have no idea what we are yet.” Mrs. Hastings seems to savor this moment. “And it wasn’t safe to enlighten you with Vaughn around. Not until we made sure.”
Zach reaches for my arm. When I resist his pull, he says, “Relax, mate. Show us the wolf bite.”
I take a beat, stalling, but it’s not like I can avoid the two of them now that I’m headed out of town with them. And toward all the answers I crave. Forcing myself to keep calm, I pull my sleeve up. Even the faint pink marks are gone now. Healed.
“Being like us comes with more perks than simply being drawn to the legacies and discovering them easier than any human ever could,” Zach says. “I tested your blood on the charm around Elmwick Academy. And the fact you’ve healed from a wolf bite is further proof.”
“Once we were sure,” Mrs. Hastings says. “We had to get you out of Vaughn’s grip. He suspected you since the very beginning. Once you tried to save Cami from the nicker nut grenade, it was over. He was never going to let you live after that.” She pauses, letting the heavy statement sink into me like a stone. “People like us are hard to find, Mason. I would have never allowed him to harm you. The dance between me and my husband had to come to an end then. I had to kiss him goodbye.”
She brings her fingers to her lips. As she blows an air kiss, wisps of fire unfurl from her breath in an amber swirl.
My stomach punches in as I stare, unsure if I should believe my eyes.
Her lips pull into a smooth, satisfied smile. “Stick with us, Mason. Stick with your legacy.”
Chapter 35. Cami
I DO MY BEST TO BLOCK my emotions for the next w
eeks. There’s plenty to do—from midterms at both Elmwick High and Elmwick Academy to spreading word of the new terms of peace to every legacy and hunter in town. A few families of hunters leave, but most stay. Whether they mean to adhere to the new rules or to stir trouble remains to be seen.
Our parents question us deeper every chance they get, but so far there’s nothing to suggest I may have been wrong. My circle looks stable, and the hunters ambushed us time and time again, so all in all, I think some adults are even relieved at this turn of events, despite the uncertainty it brings.
Dad is definitely glad to see some hunters leave town and breathes a sigh of relief, knowing Vaughn can’t hurt us anymore. Taking Mom from us was more than enough.
So, slowly, I make my peace with it, too. With the compulsion going around, the police are questioning the hunters and, with some luck, will find their weapons or shady labs and make them suffer the consequences. Jean, Jester, and the rest of the cold ones can always tweak the public story so no legacy secrets get spilled.
The ambulance explosion is confirmed as an accident, although I still have the nagging feeling that there was more to the blast. My banshee intuition screams at me that it was revenge, but for what? It certainly wasn’t my doing, but knowing Vaughn’s business, he must have hunted down other legacies than just Mom.
Perhaps another distressed relative like me couldn’t find it in themselves to let him keep his life.
When my doubts grow too thick to ignore, I bring it up to the circle on a warm afternoon we spend together at the Elmwick Academy library.
“Could it have been a viper’s curse?” I eye Vanessa cautiously.
She doesn’t snap at me, to her credit. “The thing is, if he had been cursed before that night, nasty accidents like this one would have been following him for a while. It doesn’t seem like that was the case.”
“What about your circle of salt?” Charity leaves her snack, a sugary doughnut, on a napkin. Her eyes land on the net scars on her hands and she huffs.
“Only one hunter was impacted, remember?”
Charity looks up again. “Yes, but maybe when they sprayed the salt away, some bits were left?”
Vanessa frowns and shakes her head. “It wouldn’t work. The curse can’t take once the ssalt is ssprayed out of the circle.”
“Plus, knowing Vaughn, he may have been wearing a thistle at all times, just in case.” I rest my chin on my palms.
“Sounds like something he would do,” Jean offers.
These days, I think she’s the only one who truly understands me, no matter how much I trust each of the members of my circle. Both Jean and I are nursing broken hearts. Though she’s been receiving the occasional text from Bryar, the messages are few and far between. And there’s been no word at all from Mason.
My entire body prickles at the memory of him turning his back on me and getting into the limo with Zach, even though I was crying out his name. It stings even more when I know they headed straight out of town, giving us no chance to speak again the next day once we’d cooled off.
Out of stubbornness and hurt, I haven’t been able to bring myself to text him. It’s a good thing I have my circle around me. Otherwise, I think I’d fall apart.
“I’m telling you,” Vanessa says, bringing us back on topic. “I think it really was an accident.”
“Karma is real, you know. Maybe he got what was coming for him.” Charity finishes her doughnut in two large bites.
I move my gaze to Seff. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”
He rubs his eyebrow with the heel of his hand. “There’s something else.” His voice is barely above a whisper as he eyes the rest of the study groups.
Lucky for us, since midterms passed, many of the junior class legacies have skipped the self-paced reading period to enjoy the late-spring sun. I lean in—an invitation for him to continue.
“Okay, but you have to promise not to murder me,” Seff says.
I balk at him, but his expression remains serious and tense. “Come on, Seff. You can tell us anything. That’s what the circle means.”
“Believe me, it all happened so fast,” he speaks quickly, the words coming out clipped. “I didn’t mean to do it. It just happened in the fight.”
“What happened?” My breath slows in anticipation of the bad news.
“I bit him.” Seff’s admission sounds like a plea for mercy. “When Vaughn was coming for you and you focused your scream on him, Mason tried to get you to stop. I thought he needed to stay out of it, so I jumped on Mason, and in the struggle... I bit him.”
The scene swims up in front of my eyes. My scream, powerful enough to give Vaughn an aneurysm—a deadly weapon when targeted right. And Seff and Mason brawling on the ground.
“You bit him?” Panic flares through me in an explosion of heat. “But...”
My heart shrinks and twists as I make sense of this. It can’t be; Mason can’t be...
Suddenly, my stubborn refusal to reach out to Mason fills me with dread. The bite works fast. Since it wasn’t a full moon, there’s no chance he’s a wolf now, but the alternative... The alternative is too horrible.
My throat swells with every quickening beat of my heart until I’m sure I’ll start choking.
Jean, Charity, and Vanessa stare in pure shock.
“It’s been two weeks...” Jean whispers in line with my panicked thoughts. “He couldn’t still be...” She stops herself from finishing that sentence.
“That’s the thing,” Seff argues heatedly. “The bite acts really quickly, but when the ambulance exploded, he came to you and he seemed to be all right.”
Vanessa clucks her tongue. “Oh, come on, no matter how quickly the bite takes effect, there wasn’t enough time for him to have felt it. No way.”
“And you’ve bitten how many humans with your poisonous canines?” Seff glares at her, shoulders hanging high.
Vanessa snorts. “You killed him and now you want to make it seem like he was magically unaffected somehow?”
I squirm at the word ’killed.’ This can’t be. Mason can’t be gone. It can’t be over between us. Not like this.
“Look, I know it sounds far-fetched, but there are tales in the wolf packs. Not everything is recorded in booklets readily available at the library.” Seff’s eyes stay on me, pleading. “The elders in the Valtyk pack tell stories of the bitten. A few were bitten on a full moon themselves. They’ve felt the effects of the bite.”
If there’s any truth to these stories, any hope that Mason hasn’t suffered the fate of a human bitten by a wolf, I have to hold on to it. “What do the elders say?”
“When a human is bitten, whether on a regular day or during a full moon, the first half hour after the bite is tough. The venom causes them to burn up with a high fever. They’re restless and in pain. Screaming and writhing. That wasn’t Mason. He didn’t even scream when I bit him. He just got up as if nothing had happened.”
Breathless, I wait for more, for any hint from the old stories that can confirm this and bring me hope that all is not lost.
“I think I know why that is,” a voice behind me says.
The five of us whirl on Awan. He ducks his head from between the aisles where he must have been hiding and eavesdropping. But if he can explain all this, I wouldn’t even care about that.
“What do you mean?” Charity asks in a soft voice. I don’t know if everyone else can hear the difference, but the effect his presence has on her is clear to me.
Awan comes closer and leans over the table so we can all hear his whispers. “The night you broke into The Ravenna, I followed Mason and Zach. They came here, to Elmwick Academy’s library, to get a booklet. It was hidden in Mrs. Hatchett’s desk. I’m not sure she even knew it was there.”
“And?” Jean pushes him to continue with a blank expression.
“Before I sneaked back into The Ravenna to help you guys out, Mason gave me the booklet they found. Zach wanted it, but Mason left it with me, instead. I th
ink he didn’t fully trust the hunters.”
“And for a good reason,” Charity pipes in.
“Well?” Jean’s temper swims up to the surface as her patience seems to run thin. “Aren’t you going to show it to us?”
Awan moves his gaze from face to face until he’s studied everyone in my circle. “If I show you, promise me you’ll help me find Mason and bring him back.”
My insides twist. I want to agree to those terms immediately, hanging on to the possibility that Mason is alive and well even after Seff’s bite, but my banshee intuition won’t let me skip a step.
“Why? What’s in that story that might make us not want to find Mason?”
Awan licks his lips for a long moment, then pulls an ancient booklet from his back pocket. “Just read it, okay?”
He flips the pages for us as we all huddle together to read.
Since the beginning of time, special individuals have walked among us. Some called them the powered, others the blessed, but to those afraid of the heritage, they were known as witches and beasts.
The powered could mate with humans, and if so, their progeny inherited the special abilities. This was the most common way for the powered to strengthen their numbers. Because the threats from vicious humans, uneducated in nature’s true balance, was always present.
The powered weren’t all the same. In fact, they lived in isolated clans and trusted those with the same affinity as themselves, only tolerating the rest of the powered they encountered. Inside their homogeneous groups, they formed bonds that ran deeper than friendship and fiercer than love.
And so it sometimes came to clashes between the different clans of powered ones. The war they all must remember started when one clan grew too strong, much stronger than the rest. Because each link magnified the abilities of the powered ones linked, the bigger the linked circle, the harder it was to beat it.
In a clash with the humans, that circle left bodies for miles. Burnt, speared through, bloodied, and torn.
It was then that a young banshee went from clan to clan to propose the unthinkable—a link between different kinds of powered ones, the creation of a circle that transcended the clans the powered ones usually clung to. She linked herself to the phantoms, to the howling beasts, to the creatures of the night, to the slithering sisters, and to the charming protectors.
Suspension (Elmwick Academy Book 2) Page 25