“Hang on,” I said. Because Hunter was right. Something was seriously off.
For one thing, why would a bunch of hunters care one way or another about Solange?
Too late.
The Huntsman yanked me inside. I heard a distant yell through the window and saw Mr. York sprinting across the snow. I struggled and tried to yell back. I managed to kick one of the hunters in the kidney but the Huntsman was stronger than me and didn’t loosen his hold even for a second. A cloth soaked in some kind of sickly sweet liquid covered my mouth and nose. I held my breath for as long as I could, which wasn’t nearly long enough. Eventually, I had to inhale.
The inside of the van spun and went black.
When I opened my eyes again, I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. I only knew it was still dark out and I was in the forest with my hands tied together. My vision was blurry and I was disoriented, trying to get my thoughts to make sense. I could see Helios-Ra hunters, Huntsmen, even a vampire in the brown leather tunic of Montmartre’s Host. I shrunk back, making myself smaller. And then the camp lantern above my head swung in a sudden gust of wind, casting a wider pool of light.
“But—” I blurted out. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
Chapter 31
Solange
As it turned out, being a revolutionary was actually quite boring.
Until the assassin returned, that was.
Before that, I mostly had to sit quietly and restrain myself from rolling my eyes when vampires ten times my age acted like toddlers in need of a nap. There was a lot of shouting and slamming of fists on the council table. Dad said the pressure had built up so long it needed a healthy outlet before we got down to the real work. If they didn’t start being more productive by the end of the night, I felt sure everyone was going to be treated to one of the famous Liam lectures.
In the meantime, I just had to survive.
I’d been wandering through the field of dirt bikes and motorcycles, now covered in a thin dusting of snow. Duncan was puttering with one of the antique Triumphs, mostly to get away from the crowds. Marcus sat on a bench with a pile of books. The immunity powers of my blood, the magic in the copper collars, and the way Viola survived, had all posed more questions than they’d answered. And there was nothing he loved so much as a riddle.
I was on the edge of the field, wondering if I’d finally have a chance to spend an hour at my pottery wheel when we got home, when the first body dropped from the treetop.
The girl landed in front of me with a thud that scattered icicles and dead leaves. Three slender silver spikes stuck out of her chest, all surrounding her heart and the Chandramaa crest stitched in her vest. She wheezed, blood spattering her lips. I crouched down to pull the stakes out and her eyes tracked me, wide and terrified.
Whatever could scare the Blood Moon guard was not something I wanted to tangle with. She rolled over, coughing more blood into the snow. The next body turned to ash before it hit the ground. A quiver of red-tipped arrows and a set of leather armor caught in the tree branches. I leaped back, after snagging one of the bloody-tipped stakes I’d pulled from the first guard. No arrows rained down to stop me. They were clearly too busy.
The silver spike that whistled toward me wasn’t Chandramaa. It bit into my hand before I could dodge, pain making me yelp. I’d seen a spike like it before, had plucked one out of my own arm. I knew who was taking out the Chandramaa.
Seki.
And I knew why she was doing it.
I’d managed to forget about her in all of the chaos, assuming she’d forgotten about me too since I wasn’t Viola anymore. I briefly considered running from the camp, to draw her away from my family but Duncan and Marcus were already dashing toward me. So I did the next best thing.
“Mom!”
Someone else screamed from the treetops. Duncan and Marcus grabbed the other two spikes and stood beside me as a cloud of bats swarmed in, called by my fear. They flung themselves about, screeching and being generally unhelpful. I tried to marshal them into fanged, winged missiles but I didn’t even know where Seki was. She could be behind us, above us, anywhere.
“What the hell?” Duncan asked, scanning the branches.
“It’s Seki,” I replied. It wasn’t technically her name but close enough. “Vampire assassin.”
Marcus frowned. “I thought they were a myth.”
“Not so much,” I replied as another guard toppled from one of the tree bridges.
Mom and Dad broke through the trees behind us. “What’s going on?” Mom demanded. She stared at the silver spikes. “Where did you get those?”
Seki dropped down in a cloud of ashes before I could answer. She wore the same white leather, with the same white braids and eyes like abalone shells.
“Get Madame Veronique,” Dad said. Marcus was fastest, gone before Duncan and I had time to react, leaving Mom his spike.
That was all the time we had before silver spikes flung through the air like birds. A bat flying too low caught one in the wing and spiraled to the ground. Mom kicked the second one out of its trajectory as Dad knocked me to the ground. He caught the spike Mom had knocked aside before it slammed into a tree behind us. He and Duncan stood over me, side to side. They wouldn’t let me back up. I crawled away between their feet.
Mom attacked Seki, heedless of the danger. If the Chandramaa were no match for Seki, I wasn’t sure my mother would fare much better. Seki wasn’t like the rest of us. Even with the nose plugs blocking my pheromones, she could track my location. I had to do something. Fast. More bats were falling, dropping like black rain.
I may as well make it easy for her.
“I’m over here!” I called out after Seki’s spike pierced Mom’s shoulder. I jumped to my feet, waving my arms even though I knew she couldn’t see me in the usual sense.
“Solange, no,” Mom said between clenched teeth as she yanked the spike out of her flesh. Blood oozed. She flung the spike back, grazing Seki’s hand as she lifted it to stab my father. Dad dodged during that brief moment of distraction and slammed his foot into her knees, knocking her back. She fell backward, still flinging spikes. One of them sliced a long gouge in Duncan’s cheek.
We’d barely begun and already we couldn’t hold her off much longer.
“Cease,” Madame Veronique said calmly, as if her family weren’t being beaten to a bloody pulp around her. She used a tiny pearl-encrusted dagger to cut her finger, and flung her own blood into the snow as she approached us.
Seki stopped, standing preternaturally still. She only moved her head, turning it to pin Madame Veronique with her ghostly moonlight eyes.
“You did this!” Mom spat at Madame Veronique.
“Yes, and only my blood will call her off,” Madame Veronique said. She flicked a cold glance at my dad. “Really, Liam, you might try to control your wife.”
“Hey,” I snapped, fully aware of the lengths to which Madame Veronique went to restrain the wife of one of her twin sons. “You leave my mother out of this.”
“Solange,” Dad said quietly.
“She’s the reason London died!” I exclaimed. “And she knew about the prophecy from the beginning.”
“Hush,” he murmured. Marcus put a restraining hand on my arm. Duncan’s eye was already mottled and bruised. One of the tree bridges above us appeared to be on fire, throwing flickering light and embers. Dad helped Mom to her feet as Madame Veronique gestured at me imperiously. I just narrowed my eyes at her.
“If you wish this assassin to leave you and yours alone, you will come here, little girl.”
Walking calmly toward her was harder than dodging Seki’s spikes. Still, I gave her a wide berth as well. Madame Veronique’s handmaidens stood in a half-circle behind her, expressions unreadable. She pinched her finger so that more blood welled to the surface and then smeared it on my forehead. What was it with everyone painting their blood all over me? Even for a vampire it was getting kind of gross.
Seki bowed in our
direction and then stalked away, her white leather blending into the snow.
Relief had me exhaling even though I hadn’t taken a breath. Madame Veronique sheathed her dagger on her jeweled belt.
“Thank you,” Dad said, as bits of fiery rope smoldered and drifted down around us. “And I don’t think,” he continued in a silky, menacing voice I’d never heard before, “that we’ll be taking orders from you anymore.”
She sniffed. “I am the eldest of your lineage, boy.”
“Consider our branch of the family tree severed,” he said calmly.
“And if you come near our daughter again, it won’t be all that’s severed,” Mom promised.
They stared at each other for a long deadly moment before I flicked my hand, casually bringing a curtain of bats between them.
“We’ll discuss this later,” Madame Veronique said before moving away.
“Remember when the most exciting thing you did was make lopsided pots at your wheel?” Duncan asked, wiping blood off his face. “Good times.”
I smiled slightly. “I promise to make you a dozen lopsided pots for Christmas.”
He just groaned and moved his shoulder until it cracked back into place.
“Some sweet sixteen,” Mom said, sliding her silver spike into her boot, as the Chandramaa were too busy to stop her. “I don’t remember sixteen being quite so treacherous.”
“I was there,” Dad reminded her drily. “I’d say it’s a family trait.”
She just laughed, winding her arm through his. It was her first true laugh since my bloodchange. Duncan, Marcus, and I grinned sloppily at one another. Then Dad kissed her and we looked hastily away, grimacing.
“Haven’t we suffered enough?” Duncan muttered as we left them, still kissing. It didn’t seem to bother them that Chandramaa guards were now racing up and down rope ladders with buckets of water and refusing to let any other vampires out of the camp until they’d gotten the fire under control.
I followed Seki’s barely-there footsteps, just to reassure myself that she was truly gone. I felt better when her footsteps disappeared and no one tried to kill me for five whole minutes. The soft, quiet beauty of the woods in winter helped. They were cleansing, hopeful. I could finally hear myself think again.
And in that soft quiet moment, I couldn’t help but think of Kieran.
I wanted to call him but I was still out of signal range. I wrote a text and then decided to take a walk to the Bower to find a signal strong enough to send it. I wondered what he was doing right now. Had he thought of me at all, since our conversation at the tree? There’d been no mention of getting back together, no reunion kiss. But he’d told me I was worth it. Surely that meant something? Was it too soon to ask him on a date? Would we ever even be able to reclaim such a normal pastime after all we’d been through?
I wouldn’t find out by being a coward.
I hit “send” on my text before I’d even reached the Bower. The connection was weak, but it eventually went through. Now I could go back to concentrating on history, politics, and the traditions of tribeless vampires around the world.
I was turning around to head back when I spotted Nicholas moving furtively between the trees. He was holding the back of his neck.
“Nic,” I called out, hurrying to catch up to him. He didn’t hear me. He was stumbling, as if in pain.
“Nicholas!” I was running alongside him now and he still couldn’t hear me. He kept scratching at his neck, but there was nothing here. There were no wounds on him, no blood. But he was acting as if he didn’t even know I was there. “Hey,” I said. “Stop.”
Even my pheromones didn’t work. He kept staggering along, but he was also now clutching at his head, moaning. I dropped back, not wanting to cause him more pain.
Frowning, I hung back out of sight, tracking my brother as he went deeper and deeper into the forest.
Chapter 32
Lucy
“I thought she was dead too.”
I shifted awkwardly toward the familiar voice, the rope chafing my wrists. “Kieran? What are you doing here?” I frowned. “And what am I doing here? And, by the way? Where is here?”
We were inside the entrance to a damp series of caves lit with camping lanterns. I could see gleaming steel tables, manacles, and strange instruments whose purpose I had no desire to learn. A man in a stained leather apron was investigating the contents of a steel pan with a smile that made me shiver. There were stockpiles of weapons and opposite us, several barred openings in a row. Pale, fanged faces flitted briefly into view, then crawled back into the darkness. Humans were curled up behind the nearest gate, dirty and frightened. The sight of them soured my belly. Between us and them, and between us and the forest outside, were Huntsmen, agents in Helios-Ra gear, and Host vampires.
None of it made sense.
“We’re hostages,” Kieran explained, keeping his voice low. There were bruises on his face and jagged tears in his jacket. “They just brought me in. I was on my way to the Helios-Ra headquarters after my uncle sent a distress signal when they got me. I thought they were there to help.”
“We thought so too,” I said, thinking of the lockdown at the school. “And speaking of distress signals . . .”
“Don’t scream,” he interrupted hurriedly when I opened my mouth to do just that. “They’ll just chloroform you again.”
“Is that what that stuff was?” I asked, snapping my teeth together. “It was nasty.” I could still taste it in the back of my throat. I was so thirsty, it hurt to swallow. It made it hard to concentrate. I leaned my cheek against the damp stone for a moment. The cold helped clear the fogginess from my head.
“I don’t understand,” I said finally. “Is that really Hope?”
Because there she was, standing at a table, her blond hair swinging cheerfully behind her. She was just as tiny, just as cute . . . just as alive. “Hunter told me she killed herself last month while in League custody.”
“I guess she got better,” Kieran said darkly. Rage sent a dark red flush creeping up his neck. Hope was the one who’d murdered his father, after all.
“Kieran, don’t freak out yet,” I said, my teeth chattering from cold and adrenaline. “If you freak out, I’ll have to freak out too.”
His lip curled but he managed to get the homicidal gleam out of his eye. I felt only marginally better. Escape seemed impossible, not escaping, even worse.
“Get out of here,” someone moaned from a dark corner. “They’ll kill you.” The warning ended in a broken-sounding cough. Chains rattled somewhere down the line of caves. Kieran and I stared at each other helplessly. How long before someone missed us? Would Sarita tell someone I’d been taken away? Had she realized yet that the lockdown wasn’t school-sanctioned? Would York know what to do? And could they even find us? My head swam as I watched Hope speak into a walkie-talkie, then order two vampires out of the cave.
She’d thought Kieran’s father was too liberal and murdered him.
She’d tried to kill Solange.
She’d allied herself with Lady Natasha in order to take over the League completely.
She didn’t approve of treaties with vampires.
“She’s Dawn,” I said slowly. “She has to be.”
Which meant she was also the one who’d kidnapped Nicholas and had him tortured.
Now I was the one feeling the homicidal rage.
“And that’s Ms. Dailey beside her,” Kieran said, glaring at the woman next to her. They both looked our way. “I should have known.”
“The teacher who dosed Hunter with poison?”
“Yes.”
“I thought she was awaiting trial,” I said out of the corner of my mouth as they strode toward us.
“Apparently there are serious gaps in the Helios-Ra security system.”
“Apparently.” No wonder her alias worked so well. She’d been clear off any of our radars. “Hope has to be the one behind all of the disappearances too.”
“Clev
er girl,” Hope said, suddenly standing over me. She was thinner than she’d been before. “I’d hoped you’d join the League and our cause.”
“I didn’t join your cause,” I said. “You’re killing people.”
“Collateral damage.” She waved that aside. “We had to make everyone see the truth. A vampire gathering right here and the League looks the other way.” She shook her head sadly. “It’s not right. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.”
“You murdered people,” I repeated. “You’re keeping people locked up! And you framed Solange, didn’t you?”
“I had to show the League the worm in the rose.”
“You’re the worm in the rose,” I shot back.
She slapped me across the face. Kieran surged to his feet, getting in front of me as I staggered back against the stones. Hope looked down her nose at him. “Little Kieran Black,” she said. “You’ve always been more trouble than you’re worth. Better hope your uncle doesn’t think so.”
“Why?” he asked as I wiped blood from my lip.
“Because if he tries to break out of headquarters, you die. I couldn’t have him or his deluded agents interfering, now could I? Not tonight, not after all this careful planning.”
“What happens tonight?” I asked.
Hope and Ms. Dailey exchanged a significant glance. “I suppose we can tell you,” Hope conceded, pride lacing her words. “After all, it’s too late for you to get in my way.” The man in the apron started to slice long, fleshy lengths out of what looked like a half-calcified heart. Parts of it turned to ashes under his fingertips. I gagged and tried not to look. “Tonight, we finally take down the Blood Moon.”
Kieran and I gaped at her. “I don’t know how to get back there,” I said.
Hope just laughed, reading my sudden pause. “I don’t need you, silly girl. I finally have accurate GPS.”
“Where the hell did you get that?” Kieran asked.
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