“What happened?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “What the hell?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing. What brought on your hunger like that? Was it the spike of adrenaline?” He narrowed his eyes, looking at me like a strange specimen in a petri dish. He waited expectantly, crouching down in the middle of his living room. We were kneeling on the floor in between his glass coffee table and his massive television, and the normalness of the room felt disconcerting.
“Your guess is as good as mine. I thought we were going to die.” I shouldered off the heavily padded jacket and set it down on his wood floor between us.
Sebastian leaned in, and a spark of menace lit his eyes. “Are you keeping anything from me?”
“No.” I glared. “But obviously you are. You knew that we were going to be attacked and decided to walk me right into it. Was this some sort of test?”
“A test of what? How loud you can scream two feet from my ears?” He glared. “You were completely fine. I took more security precautions with your safety than I did my own. There’s not a scratch on either of us.”
I shoved my empty blood bag at him, but he completely ignored it. “Then what was the point, Sebastian? Why did you bring us into that mess, and why didn’t you tell me?”
“The point was that the Hawthorn Group uncovered an organized plot to kidnap or kill you at Blackburn Academy. So, we set a trap for them outside of the school grounds instead. We led them on an obvious path for three days in a row. We hid our presence until they made their move. The car we used is armored; there was no way they could get through the glass. You were wearing a bulletproof suit and helmet. No Academy students were in danger of being collateral damage. Our agents are rounding up the assailants, and we also uncovered at least one leak in the Hawthorn Group. It was a successful mission.”
I wiped the blood off my chin with the back of my hand. “Maybe we can take tonight off, seeing as we almost died and all?”
“You didn’t almost die.” Sebastian stood and called over, “Let’s head into the gym. We’re going to test your reflexes next. Unfortunately, we can’t test you without blood, but we can do that part tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I stood.
“And from now on, you’re keeping an emergency stash of blood in your room in case you have an adrenaline spike again. Blackburn Academy is a very dangerous place. Students die there every year.”
“You’re full of shit,” I said as I left my blood bags and trailed after him toward the gym.
He paused to peer over his shoulder. “I’m not. Blackburn Academy trains kids to kill gods. It trains us to be monsters, but you were born a monster waiting to emerge.”
I pointed at his back. “That is an inspirational t-shirt ready slogan there. I think you missed your true calling.”
“Keep talking. I’ll make you pay for it in the gym.”
I flipped Sebastian the bird with both of my middle fingers, and even though he didn’t turn around, he immediately said, “I’ll make you pay for those, too.”
CHAPTER TEN
The Blackburn Academy Athletics building was startlingly modern compared to the rest of the school. The building looked like a metal box sitting smack dab in the middle of the fields surrounding an ivy-covered, baroque palace. On the far side of the gym was what I at first thought might be an oddly placed playground, but upon closer inspection, I realized that it was an elaborate ropes course.
While shading my eyes against the sun as it hovered over the eastern Sierra Range, I strolled down the path that led from Gregory Hall. Inexplicably, I woke this morning feeling amazing. After taking Bailey to the kennels, I’d dressed quickly and rushed down the elevator only to find that Justin wasn’t on the first floor waiting for me. A twinge of disappointment had gripped me, but I quickly squashed it. If I was going to find my own place at this school, I needed to spend time away from my boyfriend. I knew that consciously, but another part of me wanted to call him right now just to hear his voice.
I was officially hopeless.
As soon as I stepped into the gym building, two familiar faces smiled up at me. Richard and Mia sat along one wall as thirty students gathered on the mats around them.
They both looked a little surprised to see me and waved me over.
“What are you doing here?” Mia asked with a smile.
Mia had a gold ring glinting on her nose and carried herself like she was ready to take on the world at any moment. Richard was more laid-back in the way he regarded the room, but his full sleeves of beautiful ink gave the guy a serious bad boy vibe. It was impossible to mistake their kicking ass and taking names vibe. Tough as they appeared on the outside, Richard and Mia had been among the first people to embrace me in their circle of friends warmly, and Mia even defended me fiercely from snide comments made by her secret maybe-boyfriend.
“Finally,” I said on a sigh. “I was starting to think Blackburn purposely kept me from everyone in the BBC.” I headed up to the front and plopped down beside them. “So, you two are in this massive PE block?”
“Nope, and you shouldn’t be either,” Mia said as she stretched her arm across her chest. “This is freshman training. We’re teacher assistants for this class.”
“Oh.” I peered around the room again, this time actually paying attention, only to see that everyone else here was at least a couple of years younger than me. “Yeah … so, this class is definitely on my schedule.”
“Damn,” Mia said with a grimace, “that’s fucked.”
“And, that’s why you aren’t in any of our classes,” Richard put in. “All of us are in upper-level Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nightstalker mission training. You’re on the same schedule as the Elites and the students who elected to do specialized studies. They must have done that so you could train with the freshmen. Unfortunately, that also means you have a different lunch period than us.”
“Great,” I muttered as I slumped against the wall. “I wonder if I could test out and switch days or something.”
“I hope this doesn’t offend you, January,” Richard said from where he sat in his wheelchair. He gave me a slight grimace as if he knew what he was about to say would offend me. “But what we’re doing in training is really dangerous. You probably should be at this level or even a remedial level.”
“That’s harsh. You think she wants to hear that?” Mia gestured at me. From the note of tension in her tone, I think she was more criticizing his words than disagreeing with them.
Harsh as it sounded, one look at the muscular freshman sitting in groups on the mat, I knew Richard was right.
Richard sucked on a tooth. “I’m not saying that you won’t find a way to catch up and even test out, January, but it’s probably a good idea to start here.”
“Also, just ignore everything Professor Whitney says about you,” Mia added as she stretched out her other arm.
The name sent a pulse of heat into my chest as I remembered that Professor Whitney had been one of the teachers that held me down during the character interview. She knew what I was and had been a little rough with me. I had suspected that the two things correlated.
“All right!” The woman herself emerged from the other side of the gym. She stood at probably six three and was so muscular that her arms bulged from the sleeves of her purple collared shirt. “Sit down, Miss Moore.” She pointed at me as she crossed over to stand next to Mia. “Welcome to Blackburn Academy’s athletics program. This is where you’re going to learn how to kill vampires. It’s also where you’re going to learn how to survive a vampire attack. By the end of this year, you’ll be expected to be able to do both in your final by fighting a real vampire. If you don’t pass your final—”
“We’ll be dead,” a girl said in a low voice from the front. She had dyed black hair, piercings along her eyebrows and on her lip, heavy dark makeup around her eyes, and black lipstick. Under her uniform, she wore a black lace undershirt that stretched up her neck and down to her wrists.
�
�We take precautions against death, but accidents have happened in the past,” Professor Whitney said, sounding like she wasn’t whatsoever kidding. “More likely, if you fail, you will have to repeat Physical Education level one. Or, if you’re a senior, you won’t graduate.”
My stomach plummeted at her words, which were obviously aimed at me. If I didn’t kill a vampire at the end of this year, I wouldn’t graduate high school. The gray and white room spun around me.
Dante Mortus, the ruthless leader of the local vampires, had once been just a guy named Frank who was married to my mother. During his transition into a vampire, he came home to Mom and conceived me. He was supposed to have forgotten his human life within a year, but while I was a small child, he’d returned home to my mother and taken a photograph. That photo just showed a blank space where a person should be, and it looked like my body was floating. He’d kept that photo all these years, only to hand it to me with a note of warning scrawled across it.
You chose the wrong side, and I’m not powerful enough to protect you from what’s coming.
He could have killed me. Everyone said he didn’t remember me, and he wanted me dead for being a dhampir. A full-grown, trained dhampir was allegedly the single greatest vampire killer, and according to the Hawthorn Group, Dante couldn’t let me live to become that. But when he had the opportunity to kill me, he handed me a note with a warning instead.
And now I had to kill a vampire to graduate high school?
Over the next three hours, I realized I had nothing to worry about. I wasn’t going to be killing any vampires. I couldn’t even do the required number of pushups. The warm-up that Professor Whitney gave us was two hundred push-ups on the mats, fifty pull-ups on a long line of bars, and then lizard crawling around the room. She warned that this was going to be a lesser version of our usual workout.
The freshmen raced through the exercises, clapping after each push-up, and I was still on ten when most of them were finishing their pull-ups and starting to lizard crawl in a circle around me.
When the last freshman climbed back to their feet, Professor Whitney told me to meet them outside when I finished with my warm-ups.
Both Richard and Mia gave me a couple of encouraging words, and I continued to struggle alone. The moment the door was closed behind them, I put my knees on the mat. If someone saw me cheating, I’d just fucking live with it at this point. About the time that I was supposed to be lizard crawling, I collapsed, stared at the ceiling, and tried to remember how to breathe.
“Well, this is pathetic.” Mitch’s voice came from beside me.
My whole upper body and arms screamed with agony as I lifted my head to peer over at the asshat. “I give up. Let the vampires have me.”
“If only.” He nudged my side with his boot. “Hey, Dirtbag, Professor Sharp is calling you out of class.”
“Are you serious?” Relief washed through me, and I rolled over and slowly pushed up onto my feet. “Thanks. Where do I go?”
All I wanted to do was bolt for the door and run as fast as my aching body would take me.
He looked me over. “My brother would kill me if I let you go in front of all of the Elites like that. You look like hammered shit.”
“Well, don’t sugarcoat it or anything.” I wiped my arm across my forehead and smeared dirty sweat down my wrist. I glanced down at my gym clothes and realized hammered shit wasn’t that big of an exaggeration. “Do I have time to go home and change?”
He leaned in, and there was clear contempt in his smirk. “The professors work for us, Dirtbag.”
Maybe they worked for his illustrious family, but they sure as hell didn’t work for me. The only thing I was debating between was what would be more disrespectful to Professor Sharp, showing up looking like I smeared dirt all over myself or showing up late.
“The way I see it is if I go to class like this, your brother kills you, and then I don’t have to deal with you babysitting me anymore. Also, there’s the added advantage of showing the Elites I could give a fuck what they think of me. So, yeah, just take me to Professor Sharp’s classroom.”
“Careful how many Elites you piss off before you learn any useful powers. Most of us are years ahead of you in training. What happens when Justin dumps your ass? What happens when my brother loses interest in his little pet project, and you no longer have me watching your back? You’re walking around here like you’re untouchable hot shit when really, the protections around you are brittle at best.”
For just a moment, I had this image pop in my mind of the mats under me fissuring and a cavern waiting just beneath. I blinked hard, and the vision was gone. Was that what I was doing? Did I feel like Justin was this impenetrable wall around me? Susie told me that Justin had been just that for the members of the Bad Boys Club, and when he abandoned them, the Elites basically started torturing them.
I swallowed hard, but I knew that I needed to defend myself, or I’d be going over the conversation in the shower for weeks. “If Justin and the Hawthorn Group scholarship weren’t in the picture, I wouldn’t be acting any different. The only difference would be that you guys wouldn’t have noticed me then. If Justin dumps me, I won’t for a moment regret doing this.” I flipped him the bird. “Just add it to the tally.”
“Oh, I have.” He lifted his dark brows and walked to the door. “Well, at least your outsides match your insides, Dirtbag.”
Magic class—or whatever it was called, was in a low-lit, amphitheater-style classroom with four rows. About twenty kids sat at the desks. They seemed to sit by ages, the youngest looking students took the first rows, and then it got progressively older to the fourth row. I recognized a few of the younger ones from the class I just escaped. The girl wearing black lipstick and lace from my PE class sat close to the front, looking as fresh as she did this morning. When I waved, she winced and held up a hand. Mark, Amber, and the other senior guys from the fifth floor sat in the back row. Every single one of them was looking at me like I was a booger they found on their designer shirt, and the smirk that twisted Mitch’s lips clearly screamed that he told me so.
Professor Sharp’s gaze flicked down my front, disapprovingly, and I realized that I probably made the wrong call on which one she would find more disrespectful. She sat at a large table at the base of the classroom. “Thank you for finding Miss Moore, Mitch.” Professor Sharp said in her rapid-fire pace. She was again chewing on gum or something while she talked. She pushed her purple hair behind one ear. “Well, Miss Moore. As you already revealed that you have at least one power in the trials, Blackburn has automatically enrolled you into the Mystical Arts studies elective. Would you like to share with the class what ability that is? I think that would be fine. I mean the specific ability.”
As in, she wanted me to share that I could see in the dark, not that I was a dhampir. I got it. But I wasn’t sharing anything with the Elites. The less these kids knew about my abilities, the better advantage I had when they all turned on me. I forced what I hoped looked like an apologetic grimace and lied through my teeth, “I’m sorry, Professor, but Sebastian Holter told me that I couldn’t reveal my abilities to anyone.”
She sat ramrod straight. “Of course. Yeah, that’s fine. It’s not a big deal. Why don’t you find a seat, and we’ll begin?”
Unfortunately, the only two open seats were in the very back and together. I trudged up there, feeling my muscles squeezing. My mouth was beginning to feel parchment dry, and I fished my water bottle out of my bag and drained it in one continuous gulp that was far from satisfying. I wiped my lips off with my arm, only to remember how filthy I was.
“You’re a seriously disgusting human being,” Mitch said as he fell into the seat beside me.
“I’m also a still-thirsty human being. You don’t have an unopened bottle of water on you by chance?”
He leaned away and looked at me. “Do I look like a fucking vending machine?”
“So, Mystical Arts,” Professor Sharp said as she hopped down from he
r chair. “As most of you know, this class is run a little differently than other classes. If it’s your first and second year here, you’ll move down to the front rows, and we’ll be going over the basics in each mystical discipline for the first half of the lesson. For third and fourth-year students, you’re going to be doing your private study for the first half of class then lecture for the second half. If you are talented in one area, you have capabilities in all; it just might not feel that way—”
The freshman with the black lace sleeves raised her hand.
“Yep, Cynthia.”
“I shouldn’t be here. The last person to have power in my family was like my grandmother, and she just sensed vampires.” The girl said. “My parents don’t have any powers. Well, they didn’t, anyway, before the vampires killed them. Can I just go?”
“Well, no.” Professor Sharp bounced her hip. “This is an issue that isn’t talked about openly much, but it’s important to know. There were two decades where everyone feared that Elite powers were dying out. Suddenly, Elites were born with only one or two powers. Most believe that it was a curse or a magical childhood disease that prevented the powers from manifesting. We don’t know what caused it or what reversed it, but in the late eighties, early nineties, powerful Elites were being born again. The good news is that ever since that scare, generations have been born stronger and stronger. Meaning, if you have Elites in your lineage, you’ll be trained as an Elite. Any other questions?”
Professor Sharp scanned the classroom. “Okay. We start zipping practice next Tuesday in the auditorium pit. That’s all I have to go over with you, so you can hang out here or go to lunch early. Dismissed.”
Amber leaned down the row to look at me, her wavy red hair bouncing past her face. “So, whose daddy headed down to the slums to make her? Was it another one from yours, Mitch?”
“Shut up, Amber,” Mitch growled.
Amber only rolled her eyes. “You have to wonder. It had to be one of the Elites, and it’s not like your father hasn’t made a bastard before. Oh, and your cousin is dating her, isn’t he? Your family really is sick—”
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