Christabel sat on a recliner in one corner, near a small television and a wooden chest filled with DVDs. She was staring at a box of pizza on her lap, frowning.
“What’s with you?” I asked.
She glanced up, blinking. “I used to love pizza.” She sounded bewildered.
“And now you don’t?”
She shook her head. “It tastes like cardboard.” She sniffed deeply. “I can smell it but I can barely taste it.”
Marcus nodded sadly. “I still mourn coffee.”
“But it’s weird.” She stuck out her tongue and went cross-eyed looking at it. “I still have taste buds. I should be able to taste it.”
Marcus smiled sympathetically. “It’s because your brain can’t handle the thought of drinking blood,” he explained. “But your body’s smarter. It makes it so that nothing else is as tasty as blood. Because you need it to survive. That’s Uncle Geoffrey’s current theory anyway. And I’m inclined to agree.” He raised an eyebrow at my pants as Christabel pushed the pizza away with a sigh. “So, what’s with you?”
I looked down at my ripped jeans streaked with mud and bristling with burrs. “Date with Lucy.”
“Is she mad at you?”
I snorted. “No. I’m still standing, aren’t I? We ran into Huntsmen.”
Marcus whistled. “As bad as they say?”
“Ask London.”
“Is she okay?”
“Uncle Geoffrey seems to think she’ll be fine.” I leaned against the wall, exhausted. “Solange offered her blood, seeing as she drank from Madame Veronique once, and it helped.”
Marcus looked interested. “Really?”
I couldn’t help but grin. “Yeah, Uncle G. wanted to run some tests, but Sol wouldn’t let him.”
“It’s all right, we still have a few tubes of her blood left,” he said, motioning to the tray in front of him. “I’ll keep working on it.”
“Have you found anything?”
“No,” he answered, disgusted. “It’s blood. It’s Drake DNA. It reacts curiously to different additives and stimuli, but never consistently.” He gritted his back teeth. “It’s damned annoying.”
“Is she sick? Is it dangerous?”
“She’s not sick.”
“But it’s dangerous?” I pressed.
Marcus sighed. “I wish I knew.”
Chapter 10
Lucy
Sunday night, later still
I pushed open Hunter’s door without knocking.
“There are vampire hunters outside!” I announced. “Did you know that?”
Chloe didn’t even look up from her laptop. “She keeps forgetting she’s at a vampire hunter high school,” she said to Hunter. Soda cans littered the ground around her chair.
Hunter was sitting on her bed, reading a novel. “Why are you covered in burrs?” she asked, unconcerned.
“Vampire hunters,” I explained impatiently. “Like I said.”
She put the book down, her blond ponytail swinging behind her. “Students attacked you?”
“No. Well yes, but I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about old guys wearing fangs as jewelry. Huntsmen.” I brushed burrs and leaves off my sweater. The knees of my jeans were stained with mud.
Chloe finally looked over, interested. Her hair was a mass of dark curls springing every which way, as usual. “Really?”
“Yes,” I said, rereading my texts just to remind myself that Nicholas was safely the hell away from this weird-ass school. “And they did not like my boyfriend.”
Hunter frowned. “Huntsmen? Here? Are you sure?”
“Hello?” I spread my arms out, twigs and leaves drifting to the carpet. “I’m sure. And I have the bruises to prove it.”
Chloe’s fingers flew over her keyboard. I raised an eyebrow at Hunter. “Is she Googling hunter-assholes? I doubt they have their own Web page.”
Chloe snorted. “You’d be surprised.”
“She’s hacking the school files,” Hunter said. “She does it all the time.”
“Don’t they have security for that kind of thing?”
Chloe snorted again. “Please.” I knew that tone. Connor used it whenever someone called his computer mojo into question.
I sat on Hunter’s bed, rubbing my elbow. It was sore now that the adrenaline was diluted in my system. I must have landed on it harder than I thought. “Ouch.”
“I can’t believe you saw a Huntsman.”
“That’s a stupid name,” I grumbled.
She just smiled. “I know, but you’ve seen the handbook. We’re big on old words and medieval oaths and secret symbols. Anyway, Huntsmen almost never come to Violet Hill. There’s no point with the academy here and everything.”
“How are they different from the other hunters? Besides their barbaric fashion sense?”
“They’re not Helios-Ra,” Hunter explained. “They do their own thing.”
“That’s pretty much what Nicholas said,” I admitted.
“Drives the teachers nuts,” Chloe said smugly. “Whenever they threaten to fail us, we threaten to become Huntsmen.”
“You threaten that,” Hunter said drily. “The rest of us just do our homework.”
“Ha. Also? I rock.” She sat back and smirked at her screen, then at us. “Just what I thought. A staff alert went out about Huntsmen in the area.” She scowled. “Wait a minute. They were invited.” Hunter straightened. “That’s really rare,” she explained, for my benefit. “Helios-Ra and Huntsmen get along better when we don’t share territory.”
“Like vampires,” I said.
“I want to see York’s face when you say something like that in class,” Hunter grinned. York was her least favorite teacher. She turned back to Chloe. “So I assume they were invited because of the Blood Moon?”
Chloe nodded. “Increased patrols to protect us and the town, I guess.”
“Figures,” I muttered, a knee-jerk reaction to what I considered rampant vampire racism.
“You can’t be telling me that you think all vampires are as hot as your boyfriend, Hamilton,” Chloe said incredulously, swiveling around. The wheels of her chair squeaked. “Or as hot as Hunter’s boyfriend. Which is not possible by the way,” she interrupted herself. “Anyway, some vampires do kill, you know.”
I thought of Lady Natasha and Montmartre. “Trust me, I know.”
Hunter’s phone interrupted us with a discreet trilling, like a baby bird. I just looked at her. “It’s stuck on that ring,” she admitted, reaching to grab it from her nightstand.
“It gave me nightmares right out of that Hitchcock movie The Birds last night when it went off at three in the morning.” Chloe raised her eyebrows at me. “Then she giggled.”
“I did not,” Hunter shot back, but she was blushing just a little.
I grinned. “Quinn Drake.”
She blushed harder. “Both of you shut up. Now.” She frowned at her phone. “Uh-oh.”
Chloe groaned. “No uh-ohs. I still have a paper to finish for tomorrow morning and it’s nearly 2:00 a.m. already.”
“Quinn?” I asked. “Is everyone okay?” I checked my phone again but there was no warning from Nicholas or Solange.
“Not Quinn.” She got to her feet. “Lia.”
“Who’s Lia?” I asked as Chloe and I followed her into the deserted hall. The lights were low.
“She’s a first year,” Hunter whispered. “I’m one of her floor monitors.”
“And?”
“And she’s sneakier than she looks.” Hunter paused on the bottom step. “Stay between Chloe and me, and only step where I step.”
I stared at her. “Why? Are there bombs?” You just never knew with this school.
“Just don’t want to get caught roaming after hours,” Hunter explained. She darted nimbly up the staircase, avoiding certain steps.
“School’s bugged,” Chloe whispered from behind me.
“Is that even legal?”
“Who would we tell?�
��
I flashed her a grin. “My mom. She could picket and protest this school into a mass of quivering fear.”
“Cool.”
Hunter ducked under a camera I never would have even guessed was there. I was impressed despite myself. We reached the top floor and went down the hall, past the bathrooms. Lia’s door was cracked open. Hunter slipped in with Chloe and me on her heels.
Two girls were crammed into the corner of an unmade bed, noses pressed to the window. They wore their pajamas and the lights were out. Only the moon showed their silhouettes. The one with glasses turned around. “You got my text,” the one I assumed was Lia said. “Come see, quick!”
The three of us hopped on the bed so suddenly Lia’s roommate was squashed in the corner. She squeaked, twisted, and fell right off the bed.
“Sorry, Savannah,” Hunter said, but she didn’t move and she didn’t look away from the view out the window. She was so close her ponytail tickled the side of my face.
“What are we looking at?” I asked. All I could see was the shadowy quad, a streetlight hitting the gym windows, and the outline of trees.
“There,” Lia pointed. “I saw a van pull up without its headlights on and Theo ran out of the infirmary.”
“Ask her what she was looking for,” Savannah snickered.
Lia flushed. “That’s not important.”
“Where’s your kit?” Hunter asked sharply. Lia grabbed it off the floor and practically threw it at her. Night-vision goggles, binoculars, stakes, and other contraptions spilled out over the blanket.
“Hey, I never got a kit,” I muttered. “I totally want night-vision goggles.” Hunter already had them in her hand so I reached for the binoculars.
We all bent our necks at an angle guaranteed to give us arthritis when we got old. Assuming we actually got a chance to get old, of course. If I crossed my left eye slightly I could just see the infirmary door. The path was easier once you knew what you were looking for. There was a flurry of movement behind the van door, but we couldn’t make out what they were doing.
“So what were you looking for that had you wedged back here?” Chloe asked Lia, while we waited impatiently for something to happen.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.” Savannah grinned. “She heard Kieran was in the infirmary and she wanted a look.”
Lia pinched her roommate. “You suck, Savannah.”
Savannah just shrugged, unrepentant.
Hunter smiled briefly. “Kieran’s already gone home,” she said gently.
“Oh.” Lia tried not to sound disappointed and failed miserably. She paused. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” Hunter replied. “Lucy’s the one that brought him in.”
Lia looked at me, eyes round. “You know Kieran?”
I didn’t tell her he was dating my best friend. Well, according to Nicholas he wasn’t dating Solange anymore anyway.
“Heads up,” Hunter said.
Down below, two Huntsmen emerged, carrying the limp body of a human woman to the infirmary.
“Those are the Huntsmen that came at us in the woods.” I recognized the fang necklaces as well as the man I’d pepper-egged.
“Damn it,” Hunter muttered. “I can’t figure out what they’re saying. I knew I should have learned to read lips.” It was probably the only thing in the world she didn’t know how to do yet.
The Huntsmen rushed the patient under a lamppost. Hunter and I both fumbled for a better angle. The woman had short hair, short enough that I could see the side of her neck.
And the puncture wounds, which could only have come from fangs, dripping blood.
I sucked in a breath. “Shit.”
The Huntsmen knew there was a vampire out near the school; Jody and her idiot friends knew Nicholas was with me. And now there was the body of a human woman very clearly suffering from a vampire attack. I knew for a fact Nicholas hadn’t done it. And I also knew no one was likely to believe me.
The binoculars dug into my cheekbones but try as I might, I couldn’t see anything else. They’d already rushed the woman inside.
“She wasn’t a Hunter,” Hunter said quietly, thoughtfully.
“How can you be sure?” I asked.
“For one thing they never bother sneaking wounded Hunters onto the campus. They’d just drive right over the lawns if they had to.”
“Which means?”
“Which means it was a mundane, a civilian.”
I sat back. “Do they do that a lot? Bring them here, I mean?”
She looked at me grimly. “Only if it was a vampire attack and they want to be sure the person wasn’t infected. Hospitals would be useless in that case.”
“Looks like we do need protection after all,” Chloe said quietly.
That seemed to be the consensus in the rest of the dorm as well. When we got back to Hunter’s room, there was a small pewter charm hanging on the doorknob. Hunter and Chloe exchanged a grim glance and opened the door. Hunter pocketed the charm and scooped up the folded note on the carpet. It was the number 113.
“Let’s go.” Hunter turned to leave again.
“Go where?” I asked. “Is that a secret code? Night-vision goggles and secret codes. Okay, this League doesn’t entirely suck.”
“Hunter runs a secret Black Lodge,” Chloe explained quietly. “Well, sort of secret. It’s authorized by Hart but no one else really knows about it.”
“Cool.”
“Yeah,” Chloe agreed, scooping her laptop up off the desk and slipping it under her arm. “It’s because of the whole teacher-vampire drug thing. Hunter is Hart’s secret eyes and ears at the school.”
Hunter shrugged, modestly. “It’s no big deal.”
Chloe just ignored her. “The Eye of Horus means someone’s got info. It calls a secret meeting.”
“In Jenna’s room, apparently,” Hunter said, shoving the note in her pocket. “That’s her room number.” She glanced at me. “Want to come?”
“Hell, yeah, I do.”
“I was going to see if you wanted to join. I think it would be good to have your perspective, just coming into the school and everything. You might see stuff we don’t even notice anymore.”
“You mean other than the fact that I’m surprised you guys don’t run around in black capes and call each other Van Helsing?”
“Yes.” She rolled her eyes. “Other than that.” She nodded to the door. “Let’s move.”
Jenna’s room was just down the hall, next to a window hung with a hideous lace curtain that was probably meant to be homey. It was just ugly. Hunter knocked once softly and then slipped inside. Jenna was at her desk, her red hair in a braid. There was one other girl and two guys with her, none of whom I recognized. Chloe went straight to the empty bed and stretched out on her stomach, flipping open her computer.
“Where’s your roommate?” Hunter asked Jenna.
“At the library, working on a paper,” Jenna replied. “She’ll be at least another hour.”
“This is Lucy,” Hunter introduced me. “You know Jenna, and that’s Kyla, Griffin, Drew, and Eric.”
Eric’s dark eyes snapped onto me. “Lucy Hamilton? You know Solange?”
“Yeah,” I said. At least he hadn’t called me Lucky. I’d probably let him live, despite the tone he was using, as if I’d personally kicked his puppy. “Why? Do you know Solange?”
“I know Kieran.”
“Oh.”
“She—”
“Stop right there.” I cut him off with a narrowed glare. “I might be pissed off at her but she’s still my best friend, and I’ll kick your ass if you say anything about her.”
He leaned back against the edge of the desk. “Yeah? Well, Kieran’s my best friend.”
“He’s my friend too,” I replied quietly.
Eric looked at me for a long moment before finally nodding his head once. “Okay.”
Hunter sat on the floor. “If you two are done with the macho pissing contest, can we get
on with it? Why are you here, Eric? You’re not Black Lodge.”
“No, but Kieran said you might need this info.” He reached over and flipped on Jenna’s radio. It was a trick I knew well. It masked conversations in cases of bugging devices or vampires, take your pick.
“Is it about the woman who was just brought in?” Chloe asked. “’Cause we know about that already.”
“What woman?” Jenna asked quizzically.
“A wounded civilian,” Hunter said. “Bite marks.”
Jenna let out a whistle through her teeth. Eric looked at me. I looked back at him.
“What?” I said. “I didn’t bite her.”
“But you’re friends with vampires.”
“Oh my God,” I exclaimed, disgusted. I flopped back onto Jenna’s bed so I wouldn’t throw something at his head. Like a chair. “You guys are making me nuts. Kieran’s friends with vampires. So’s Hunter. So get off my case or I swear I’m going to torch this whole stupid school.”
Eric grinned unexpectedly. “That I’d like to see. You’re okay, Hamilton.”
“Gee,” I replied sweetly, sarcastically. “Thanks.”
He just laughed. “Anyway, we didn’t know there’s a civ here, but she’s not the first to be bitten this week.” He went serious. “She’s the third.”
I sat up. “The third? Why isn’t it in the papers? By now at least one of them should be screaming about how this is all because of a government conspiracy or chupacabras or some other weird-ass thing.”
“It’ll be in the papers tomorrow,” he confirmed. “Something about an escaped snake.”
“A snake,” I said, nonplussed. “What, like an escaped pet cobra? How damned big would the snake have to be to leave marks like that?”
Chloe made a face. “Too damned big.” She scrolled down her screen. “Is it in the Violet Hill Gazette? Or the Journal? Doesn’t matter,” she added before he could answer. “I can crack either of their servers in my sleep. I could totally delete an article.”
Blood Moon (The Drake Chronicles) Page 9
