by Alex Lidell
Two steps later, a body slams into me fast and hard, driving me into the ground.
Breath leaves me as I hit the uneven dirt and buck, twisting about like a worm trying to escape the earth beneath my attacker. Turning my head to get a gasp of breath, I find a thick, callused palm clapping over my mouth.
“Stay quiet if you want to live,” Ellis purrs into my ear. My blood goes cold at the sound. “We aren’t alone.”
The instant I stop struggling, he lifts off me, jerking me to my feet by the back of my jacket with a strength far from human.
“What—”
Ellis claps his hand over my mouth again. “Quiet,” he whispers into my ear, his words taking on a battlefield calm that is both soothing and terrifying. Gripping my upper arm, he half pulls, half drags me the base of a large oak, throwing me into dark brush at its base before spinning around. In the moonlight, I see a sword—a real-life gleaming sword—flashing in the male’s hands just as someone pounces onto the patch of earth we stood on moments ago.
The man—no, not a man—a deformed kind of thing with a man’s body and beast-like legs that bend in the wrong direction snarls as it twists around in a circle. Bright yellow eyes lock on me, saliva dripping from the thing’s mouth onto his hairy chest. A were—a half-turned demi—it has to be.
Ellis’s lithe body coils and strikes, smooth and fast as a whip. I’ve never seen him, never seen anyone, move like that before. So fast, it’s slow. Smooth. Utterly controlled as he puts the creature down in a single blow that has me clamping my hands over my mouth to keep in bile.
The thing falls with a thud, but Ellis stays crouched, his sword out as he surveys the night and listens to those phantom sounds that mean nothing to me. Stopping with his attention on a pair of dark trees that look like any other lumps of shadow to me, Ellis lets out a low soft growl that sounds more animal than human.
“Didn’t anyone tell you not to bring a knife to a gun fight?” A rough voice precedes a heavily armed man stepping out from the tree cluster. The laser sights of his handgun—pointed right at Ellis’s chest—glow a florescent green. Though I can’t work out the details of the man’s appearance, his silhouette suggests he is not only armed for the apocalypse but is wearing body armor to boot.
What in the holy fucking hell?
“Where is the witch?” the man asks, his gun steady. At this range, he can’t possibly miss.
“At the Academy,” Ellis answers conversationally. “You should go ask after her.”
“Cute,” says the man and squeezes the trigger.
18
Sam
I gasp as a gun flashes, the discharge booming through the forest as a figure falls to his knees. A man’s scream fills the night, and, despite myself, I rush toward the sound.
“Ellis!” I call, the name echoing through the woods.
Ellis. Ellis.
A hard hand grips the back of my jacket, jerking me around. Ellis’s familiar golden eyes flash in the starlight.
“Goddamn it, Devinee,” he snaps, but keeps hold on my jacket until my breath steadies. “I told you to stay back.”
“But…” I blink. I saw the gun fire. Saw a man fall. Why—my racing thoughts come to a screeching halt as I take in the reality before me. A man on his knees, still in his Kevlar body armor, clutching a bleeding arm, his gun lying on the ground beside him…with his hand still attached to the weapon.
Holy. Fucking. Shit. Ellis sliced the man’s hand clean off.
I clamp my hands over my mouth and back away to steady myself against a tree trunk while Ellis strips the man of his remaining weapons. Snatching something floppy looking off the man’s vest, Ellis throws it into his lap. “I hope you know how to use your own tourniquet.”
The man claws for the device, somehow managing to wrap it around his bleeding stump.
“Word of advice, hunter. Don’t bring a gun to a sword fight,” Ellis calls over his shoulder, his sights now set on me. Stopping a short step away, he weighs me with a kind of gaze that misses nothing, from my weak knees to the way my fingers dig into the bark. “I did tell you to stay to the streets until the final road.”
I stare blankly. What difference would it have made? Not to mention that I just strolled through these woods to get to the town to begin with. As Ellis made sure I would do.
He seems to follow my train of thought, because he shakes his head. “I followed you on your way out, Devinee. Watched every step you took from my wolf form.” His hand extends, taking hold of my chin before I can turn away, the steady power of his touch gripping me like a lifeline. “I wouldn’t have let you go into the woods if I hadn’t been certain I could protect you.”
I swallow numbly, his words forcing their way through my thick cotton-swaddled mind. The way he said let me go, as if my actions are in any way his choice. The cocky assumptions of his own abilities. And yet—yet he did win the fight without so much as breathing harder. How can words that I want to punch him for give me a measure of comfort all at the same time?
“Look at me, Devinee.” Crouching in front of me, Ellis touches my cheek with a gentleness that makes the breath freeze in my lungs. His tone softens, the stunning change sending a flood of warmth through me no matter how hard I fight against it. I didn’t know he was capable of softness. “Are you hurt?”
Me? “I wasn’t the one who was shot at.” I swallow. The hunter had been so damn close. “How did he miss?”
“He didn’t. The bullet grazed me a bit.” Ellis shrugs one shoulder, his controlled expression showing no sign of the pain that I know must grip him. “I’m not human. I’ll heal.”
“But…” My words falter, and I fight down the instinct to reach out to the male. Hardened and deadly as he is, I don’t think he’d let me touch him even if we liked each other. Which we don’t.
Despite his own admonishment, Ellis picks up the discarded handgun and gives it to me grip first. “I’m going to drop this scum into one of the were cages.” His voice is calm and steady, an anchor amidst chaos. A trained voice. “I want you to wait here. Can you do that?”
I feel the male’s absence the moment he dissolves silently into the forest, my mind immediately replaying the night’s events. The were. The hunter. How easily, how efficiently, Ellis killed. What would have happened if he hadn’t been here.
Night sounds move in, each one of them terrifying now instead of soothing. Every rustle in the undergrowth, every snapping twig and soft hoot, something dark moving closer and closer and closer…
I’m still exactly where Ellis left me when he returns, my muscles so tight, they’ve started to ache. Plucking the weapon gently out of my shaking hands, he gives it a condescending look before tucking it into his waistband. “The problem with guns is that they make you think you’re invincible. There are no shortcuts to training.” He touches my shoulder. “Come, Devinee. I’ll need to report the hunter to Asher so he can have the woods swept clean. It should have been done before liberty, as everyone knows how cadets get.”
I have nothing to say. That distant owl hoots again, and the storm inside my mind howls in answer. Without thinking of what I’m doing, I step away from Ellis. From the Academy. From this place where dead bodies and severed limbs are just a nuisance to be dealt with, where vampires sip my blood to learn my secrets. Where Ellis tries to kill me and save me at even intervals, punctuated by periods of cool torment. “I want out,” I say quietly. Then louder: “I don’t have magic, and I’m done. I want out.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Samantha,” Ellis says, wiping his sword with a handful of dried leaves before sheathing it down his back. “You don’t leave Talonswood until Talonswood says you do.”
“Yes, I’ve watched enough prison movies to know the rules. Been in a few as well.”
“This isn’t some human prison,” Ellis snaps at me in a thick brogue, his patience cracking with a force I haven’t seen before. “You have to have figured that out by now. You would never make it out of these woods
alive today. And if you did—let’s say by some miracle of hell itself you ran away from me now and found a way off the island—you would be hunted until the end of your life. By the Council and by the hunters. Trapped on both sides.”
“And if I finish your little charade?” I demand. “You want to tell me that things are going to be rosy and happy? Or you think I’m too smart to have missed all the problems, but just dumb enough to believe they would go away the moment I left?”
“When—if—you finish Talonswood, you will at least be sanctioned by the Council.” He stops, the sculpted lines of his face tight as he weighs his words with a miser’s scale. “You aren’t human. There are some consequences that come with having magic course through your veins.”
“There is no magic coursing through anything!” I snap back at him. “Tell me why. Why Talonswood is so insistent on—”
“You know why. Talonswood Reform exists because while fae mating with fae produces nice little fae pups, and vampires turn adults, we can’t stop cocks from going into pussies all over the world. Hence, demis. Mostly human, but partly not. So we’ve a whole crop of these hybrids who are all faster, or heal quickly, or can influence others to do their bidding with their gaze—and they don’t even know it. They think they’re that great, that powerful all by themselves. And given the nature of most of these couplings, they don’t usually have a great family life. So this is the solution. The reform school and jail that not everyone comes out of alive. Because we can’t afford to have a few idiots start a new war.”
“I’m not a fucking demi.”
“You may as well be,” Ellis snaps. “Did you listen to what I just said? Beside your actual DNA, I just described you, Devinee. A creature who doesn’t know what her own magic is capable of. Doesn’t even know when she’s using it. How is it that you can’t run two miles without tripping over your own feet, but somehow climbing into windows to steal was never an issue? How did you go so long without ever getting caught? You. Don’t. Know. Wars have been started over lesser things than witch magic. So yes, no one is letting you go any time soon.”
Talonswood would rather see me dead than see me run. And no one would so much as lift a hand to care. My back hits a tree trunk, and I realize with a start that I’ve been moving all this time, Ellis keeping pace with me.
“The things in the woods?” I ask, already knowing the answer, but needing Ellis to confirm it anyway.
“Demis gone wrong. Some are not human enough to exist in society, so they live here. They don’t usually come this close to civilization, but I have a feeling our hunter friend drove it out this way to flush out anyone he might take down. There’s always an idiot now and then who wants to try his hand against a creature. Given how many idiots try to climb Everest, I guess I should be surprised there aren’t more of these loners… Devinee. Samantha!”
I’ve stopped listening, my body starting to shake as I sink to the ground.
After a pause and then a muffled curse, Ellis pulls me against him. The warmth of his large body wraps around mine. “I have you,” he says softly, his concern-laden voice nearly comical after all the ways he’s tormented me the past weeks. Before I can answer, he slides one hand beneath my knees and lifts me easily against his chest, his hands tightening around me when I start to protest. “Enough adventure for one night, witch,” he informs me flatly, his breath rustling my hair. “I’m taking over for the rest of it. You can be back to your spitfire self first thing in the morning.”
19
Sam
Ellis somehow gets us back to campus unnoticed and then deposits me in his room while he changes and goes out to speak with Asher. I wait for the cadre’s wrath to descend upon me for all of a quarter hour before falling asleep in the male’s twin bed. When I wake again, Ellis is back in the room, sleeping on the floor—an arrangement that should make me uncomfortable given that he’s blocking the exit, but finds me too exhausted to care.
By the time I finally wake up for the day—having slept through half of my second liberty day—the sun is high up in the sky and the room is empty once more. I take a moment to notice what I didn’t last night—the bone-spare neatness of the small white-walled space, no clothes or books on any surface, one neatly folded towel on the corner of the desk. Either Ellis came here expecting not to stay long, or he simply has no personal items. Part of me suspects the latter.
By the following morning, however, my life at Talonswood Reform somehow falls back into its normal cadence, as if the night out in the club and woods had never happened. If anything, in fact, Ellis comes at me with even less mercy during morning training and speaks to me equally little at all other times.
What Ellis lacks in words, however, the rest of the Academy makes up for in a buzz of conversation. Someone named Count Victor is coming to inspect the Academy, and apparently, there’s nothing more fitting with which to welcome a member of the Council than a full-on ball. The occasion is grand enough that even Bernadette condescends to talk to me, needing to know which of the three dresses she ordered best showcases her perfect body.
“Why is everyone so wound up around Victor anyway?” I ask, watching the dress unboxing, with slinky green, red, and silver garments spilling like flower vomit over Bernadette’s bed.
“Seriously?” She gives me a look designed to grind cockroaches into the floor. “Victor is one of the most powerful vampires alive. His clan rules Romania and beyond. This little visit might officially be to inspect the Academy, but all the vamps know Victor is looking for fresh strong blood to join his clan.”
I don’t bother pointing out that a powerful vampire seeking to expand his clan is unlikely to pick from a group of demi delinquents. If Bernadette and her cohort want to parade around like peacocks, that’s their prerogative. Me, I’m staying right here and sleeping.
“You can’t,” says Bernadette, making me realize that I said the last part out loud. “The ball is compulsory.” Her glossed lips quirk into a self-satisfied smile, green eyes sparkling with whatever insult she’s about to deliver. “Though being the only one to show up wearing a school uniform might not provide you with the same experience. Too bad there are no witches to fund your expenses, eh?”
Ah, yes. The trusts. I was wondering where my classmates were getting funds for everything from designer clothing to contraband alcohol for several weeks before discovering that both vampires and fae have trust funds set up to issue allowances to the demis of their species. Even a bad investment held for a few hundred years yields good results—so, given the immortals’ life span, neither species is exactly lacking for money.
A knock at the door saves me from having to answer. For a moment, I just frown at the large box on the floor with my name on it—right beneath an embossed Versace label. “What the hell?” I say, echoing Bernadette’s similar question as I open the lid to reveal a skintight off-the-shoulder red sheath, with matching satin stilettos and a diamond collar necklace. By the sudden darkening of Bernadette’s stare, the little sparkly things studding the shoes are as real as the larger ones in the jewelry.
I shake my head. There’s no note, but there is one male I know who likes the brand.
“Looks like I’ll be attending without a plaid skirt after all,” I tell her sweetly as she turns from me with a huff.
I walk across the lamplit green alone, shivering lightly in the cool pine-scented air, carrying the ridiculous studded heels in one hand. Better save my feet for when it counts. The west castle, which I’ve never been in before, is lit brilliantly from within, buzzing with the sounds of music and colliding voices. My stomach trembles with nerves, and I press a hand over it, feeling the rich red fabric slip under my fingers.
When I walk into the entrance hall, a somber stone affair with one iron chandelier overhead, a human waiter wearing white gloves bows immediately, giving me instructions on how to get myself from the front door all the way to another door about five steps away. I pause by a ten-foot gold-framed mirror to put on the heels,
taking a second to make sure there’s no lipstick on my chin or food in my teeth.
I look like a stranger. The red dress skims over my body, showing curves that I’ve only ever tried to hide. A long slit reaches up my right thigh—which I’ve left bare, in spite of the nude hose Cassis put in the box—and the dress’s bodice hugs my breasts tightly, making them swell from the top in a way that makes me feel incredibly exposed. My hair falls in loose waves to my shoulders, and together with the red lipstick and mascara I “borrowed” from Bernadette, I look nothing like Sam of Newark.
I take a deep breath. Then walk carefully through the arched doorway into the ballroom—and straight into a legit fairy tale. I swallow a gasp, feeling a silly smile spread across my face. A two-story-high vaulted ceiling painted into a gold-kissed sunset sky, shining marble columns, twinkling lights strung between them like stars, a polished hardwood floor that gleams nearly as much as the crystal champagne flutes in people’s hands.
On a dais to the right, a quartet of violins fills the space with the most soul-shattering sounds I’ve ever heard. I close my eyes for a moment, just listening, letting peace wash over me, calming the jumping nerves in my stomach.
Distantly, I notice voices beginning to fall away, notice a heavy weight falling over the room. I open my eyes in confusion. All around me, in a wave spreading through the ballroom, faces have turned toward me, dances paused midstep, conversations midsentence.
Some eyes are widened in surprise, some in confusion as they try to place who I am—but most of the cadets wear some version of the same expression. Hatred, mixed with jealousy, as they take in my outfit piece by piece. And my hips and breasts, as if they didn’t know I had them. I feel naked under their hot-eyed inspection, and I can tell immediately that I’ve crossed some line, done something I shouldn’t have. I feel a heavy gaze to my left and turn to find Ellis in a black tuxedo, golden eyes hard on my body, mouth twisted in disapproval. His pale hair is tucked neatly behind his ears tonight, brushing his collar.
