Hunter Trials (The Vampire Legacy Book 2)

by Rita Stradling

  I grunted and turned back to my mom. “Do you know of any extended family or friends?”

  She looked between Mitch and me for a second before saying. “No, honey. His family died when he was in his early twenties, but he had a lot of friends. They rarely came by the house, though. The only person who did was his best friend Jamie, and he died in the crash along with your father.”

  That was a big fat dead end.

  My mother reached across the table and patted my hand. “No one so much as called after he died. It was just us. Don’t waste a moment of thought on people who never wasted a moment of thought on us. If you want, just make up some bullshit. You could say that some celebrity is secretly your father. Who cares?”

  I cared.

  There was a sinking feeling in me, and I wanted to leave and head back to school so I could start following trails that could actually lead to Justin. “Thanks, Mom.”

  I started to stand when Mitch threw down his bone and asked, “Where did he work?”

  “Hmm?” My mother’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling like she was remembering. “Why can’t I think of their name? He worked for them straight out of college.”

  “Was it the Hawthorn Group in downtown Brightside?” Mitch asked.

  My mother pointed at him and sighed. “Yes. Thank you. It was right beyond my reach. He worked in computers or programming or whatever you call it. How did you know?”

  “His name sounded familiar when January mentioned it earlier,” Mitch said. “My father used to work there.”

  I plopped back into my chair and gripped the table, sure that the floor was literally falling out from under me. What the hell?

  It immediately made sense to me why Mitch would make that jump. Everyone at Blackburn was certain that I was an Elite bastard. But in the times that Mr. Roberts and the staff of Blackburn Academy discussed my father, they never came close to telling me that my father worked for their organization before he became a vampire. Chances were, he was turned into a vampire because he worked for them.

  “Did the company ever send you any money after Dad died?” I demanded.

  Mom’s hand rubbed up her arm. “They paid for the funeral and sent me a bouquet of tulips. Then they sent me a bunch of forms that showed why we didn’t qualify for his life insurance policy.” She shook her head. “I’ve mostly suppressed the whole thing. Corporations are evil, honey, every single one of them.”

  I was so angry; I couldn’t even process the full implications of everything that this could mean. The thought that the Hawthorn Group could have been behind my father’s death and played a big part in my mother’s destitution made me feel physically ill.

  Suddenly, the cafeteria grew too loud around me, the clattering and scraping of metal echoing in my ears.

  “I am going to be right back,” my mother said as she scooted out of her chair.

  I stared at the posters on the wall, filled with colorful fruits, and I ran through everything I knew about my father from this new lens. He was part of the company, turned, and then took over leadership of the vampires and organized them against the Hawthorn Group. Dante Mortus knew them from the inside out, and now, he was working against them with Justin’s help.

  “January?” Mitch growled.

  My head shot up, and I focused on Mitch’s scowl.

  “Are you awake?”

  “What do you want?” I grumbled. “You interrupted me thinking.”

  His mouth opened, and I thought he was going to shoot some barb at me when he said, “No time. Do you know where Justin is?”

  I shook my head.

  “You know something,” he said.

  “As do you, clearly.” I gestured at his bruised face. “At least your brother thinks you do.”

  He chuckled, but the sound held no mirth. “This …” he gestured down his face, “This is for not figuring out that Justin was a traitor while he was right under my nose. If my brother thought I knew something, and I was holding out …”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, and I didn’t want him to.

  “What do you know?” he demanded.

  “I know that your brother has soldiers here.” I glanced around the cafeteria at the crowd of nurses and patients eat, talking, and carrying trays loaded down with food. “I know that I can’t trust you.”

  “That blows for you. As of Monday, the news breaks that Justin betrayed half the school to the vampire king, and I’m going to be the only other person in Blackburn Academy who’s trying to find Justin alive.”

  I wasn’t completely sure of that. The first ally that came to mind for me was Zack. They’d once been best friends. And Zack’s first impulse when he saw the soldiers was to hide the evidence. But Justin gave up the Baldwin family’s personal records. Zack could be feeling a very different emotion toward Justin this morning.

  “Look,” Mitch leaned his elbows on the table on either side of his tray. “My phone is probably bugged to listen in all the time, and, yeah, there are agents here on the ground, but in a crowd like this, no one can hear us. I’m on a mission to find Justin, and so are you. We should work together.”

  I don’t know if it was his bruised face or the fact that Mitch seemed more worried about being overheard than I did, but I decided to confide just a little bit to him. “Justin learned a secret about the Hawthorn Group, I think it was in those files he’d copied,” I said carefully. “He wanted us to run away together this weekend.”

  Mitch took off his sunglasses, showing me his eyes. Veins had ruptured in his sclera, ringing his pupils in blood. “Then why’d Justin leave you behind?”

  “He probably had to escape right away.”

  “But you were with him while he got the call. If he told me that you two were fleeing the country, I would have said, ‘hell yeah, take me with you. Take my money.’ And he knows that.”

  My mother emerged from the bathroom, distracting me for a moment, but she immediately dived into a conversation with a woman by the soda line.

  “Maybe Justin isn’t finished with what he has to do,” I suggested.

  “He isn’t.” Mitch leaned further onto the table. "Listen up. We can't talk about any of this unless we're in a crowd like this, got it? It’s more than just phones. I've suspected that my brother bugged all of my stuff a long time ago, but I'm almost certain of it now. He's probably bugged yours, too. I wouldn't be surprised if there are cameras at your place."

  If that were true, it explained this morning. Sebastian set up a situation where I'd injure myself and need to expose my powers. He didn't even wait a couple of days. He wanted me to figure out that I had nowhere to hide from him.

  He already knew about my instant healing and desperate need for blood. He'd been all but telling me that he overheard. I'd just been in such a state of panic; I hadn't made the connection.

  "I hate your brother," I whispered. "I think Justin figured out one of his darkest secrets, and now there's a massive manhunt for Justin, and he's on the run." My heart raced, and I knew that saying anything to Mitch was taking a huge risk, but this was perhaps my only chance to get a straight answer from him. "I think this has to do with whatever crime your brother committed while he was at Blackburn, the one that the whole school took an oath of secrecy never to reveal."

  Mitch didn't respond; he only watched me with his bloody eyes.

  "Can you tell me anything about it without breaking your oath?"

  "I can tell you ..." he paused to swallow hard, "... I can tell you that two years ago, a competitor died in the Senior Hunt. My brother won that hunt." In the silence that followed, the words lingered in the air between us. "I can tell you that's not the only student that died in Blackburn while my brother attended the school. I can also tell you that the school has a full record of that hunt in their digital records—my brother ordered them to keep it there. He’s not ashamed of what he did—the academy is the one who covered it up."

  “Mitch, did your brother order you to let the vampire kill me in the
hunt?” I asked.

  “He didn’t get that far, but I’m guessing he will.”

  That was what I thought. Why else would Justin be so desperate to be the one to nominate me? I was no good to Sebastian Holter weak. He wanted my dhampir powers activated, or he’d wash his hands of my family and me. I blinked rapidly and swallowed hard, trying to rein in my emotions. At least I had the instant healing thing—if it didn’t turn me into a bloodthirsty monster who attacked her friends, maybe it would pull me through the competition.

  “Second question … can you force me to run bleachers when we get back?”

  His brow wrinkled, and he looked at me like I’d asked if we could go bash our heads against the wall together. “Sure …?”

  “I hid my phone in the bleachers there. Justin gave me the phone, and no one knows about it. I don’t think it’s bugged. I’m hoping Justin will try to contact me.”

  "Hey kids," my mother said as she slipped into her plastic seat. She slid a tray onto the table with three soft serve ice creams on it. My mother set the chocolate before me, a chocolate vanilla swirl, and vanilla before her. "You two are as thick as thieves. January always seems to have one close girlfriend and the rest guy friends," she mused before taking a bite of her ice cream. She wasn't wrong. But overall, I liked hanging out with girls; they just usually did things that I didn't have the funds to participate in.

  "Mitch seemed doubtful when I told him that we were going to be friends," I absently said as I spooned chocolate into my mouth.

  "I'm not big into people," Mitch said, surprising me with his diplomacy.

  "Me neither," my mother lied. Cynical might as well be my mother's middle name, and she might think she wasn't into people, but she was always friends with everyone, everywhere.

  "Well, I like people," I muttered as I took another bite. This whole situation seemed so eerily normal after what I just learned. Was Sebastian Holter a serial killer? It was almost too farfetched to believe. And yet ...

  If I could believe that anyone I knew was a serial killer, I'd immediately guess it was Sebastian.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Every moment that I spent with Sebastian Holter the next day, I was on edge. A chill ran through me each time his eyes landed on mine, and it had everything to do with the fact that last night, I came to a terrifying realization. Justin hadn't figured out that Sebastian had killed kids at Blackburn Academy. Justin already knew that. He'd figured out why Sebastian had killed them, and whatever reason there was behind that, had scared Justin into wanting to move up our escape plan from weeks to days, risking us being hunted down by hordes of vampires and their scions.

  Maybe I was taking this too far. I didn't know that Sebastian killed the students, and being in his presence, doubts kept creeping into my mind. All I knew was that high schoolers died, and it had something to do with him. Blackburn Academy was a school that trained vampire hunters. Vampires were deadly. It wasn't such a huge logic leap to believe that Sebastian could be innocent of something so heinous as murder. Twice, Sebastian commented on how quiet I was being, and I muttered excuses. I was tired, sore, and had a lot on my mind. My mother always told me that I'd talk back to the devil. It was a phrase handed down from my grandmother. So, I made sure to shoot a few snide comments his way so he wouldn't be too suspicious.

  Immense relief filled me as I climbed into Mitch's car, and we headed back to campus. He hadn't made a rude comment about my mother yet, but internally, I braced for it. It would probably come in the most painful way that Mitch could devise it. I spun all the way to face Mitch, immediately noticing how much he'd healed. He wasn't kidding when he said that he recovered fast. "Are you coming with me to the Baldwins’ house tonight to see my grandma? Because if you're planning on it, I should probably warn them."

  "No. I'm throwing a party tonight at Justin's pool house." Mitch smirked. "The first assignment of our training for the hunt is that you have to go with me and get your drink on."

  "First of all, I don't drink—can you guess why?" I gave him a straight-lipped smile. "Second ... seriously? You're taking advantage of your aunt and uncle while they're in the middle of a crisis. Even you aren't that cruel."

  "I sure as fuck am that cruel, Dirtbag. You don't have to drink, but you do have to go to the party. That's how this shit works."

  I turned in my seat and squeezed my eyes closed. "Fine. I'll go to your party if you'll agree to wait outside in your car or to patrol the yard, or whatever, while I have dinner with the Baldwin’s tonight. And ..." I said the word loudly because it looked like Mitch was going to interrupt me. “you have to come with me to the library so I can look up past Senior Hunts."

  "Library is closed, Dirtbag."

  "I thought that you could do whatever you want at Blackburn," I said.

  Mitch paused for a moment, working his bruised jaw back and forth. I could only guess that he was putting up a protest because any eavesdroppers would expect him to as he was the one who told me where and how to find the records. "Just stop talking. I can get a key."

  ****

  Walking into the Blackburn Academy library was like walking into a bibliophile's dream. There were books on every available space from the first-floor gallery and up to the dome above. A long ramp led in a spiral from the first floor all the way up to the third. Books piled on gleaming tables evenly spaced through the main dome. Dusty tomes lined up in a display case behind the vacant desk under lock and key. The room smelled like books, not that fresh crisp paper smell, but the worn down and a touch dusty book smell of libraries everywhere.

  Professor Mustache, or Professor Titus as my other, more polite, classmates were calling him, rushed between the tables in the main dome. He was even larger up close, managing to make everyone but the Baldwin twins seem small. No one was bigger than the Baldwin twins.

  "All of the records we have are digital," the archivist said with a wave deeper into the library.

  Lucas threw an arm over my shoulders. "Thanks for setting this up." When Mitch set this up, I’d insisted that Mia, Susie, Lucas, and Richard be invited too. Even though I wasn’t really here to learn more about the hunt, it didn’t sit right with me that I would get an advantage in the hunt that they wouldn’t because Mitch was on my team. In a lower voice, Lucas added, "You doing okay?"

  Susie flanked me on my other side, and I could feel her attention on me as well. "We knew that he'd changed, but none of us saw that coming yesterday, January. If we had, we would have tried a lot harder to warn you away from him."

  Both of their eyes were so full of compassion, and I knew that they thought that Justin had just broken my heart with his betrayal. According to what they saw, Justin had betrayed all of them, but no one so much as me. From what they’d been saying in the last hour, the Hawthorn Group had clearly edited their video to take out my death record and guardianship form, but they hadn't taken out any of my other paperwork. More information about me was leaked to the vampire king than anyone else, and the vampires’ scions were already trying to kill me.

  As my phone had been waiting under the bleachers where Zack stored it, I still had some hope that not everyone had turned against Justin. They’d all had their phones handed back yesterday, and no one had even seemed to notice that I told the soldiers my phone was missing, but I was texting them on it. There were no messages or calls from Justin, and I didn’t dare call his bugged phone.

  We headed into a room with a long oval table, and all fell into seats. The decor felt very old-fashioned for being the digital records room. The walls and vaulted ceiling were varnished wood with inlaid light wood lines creating a grid pattern.

  Professor Mustache busied himself on a computer at the corner and then pulled down a retractable screen. “I’ll start with three years ago as it was one of our shorter hunts, and I’m sure you guys want to get going on your Saturday plans. You all would have been freshmen if I’m calculating right, so you might see some familiar faces.”

  I raised my hand, causin
g Professor Mustache to blink at me. When he muttered my name, I asked, “Can we watch two years ago?”

  Dark splotches immediately blossomed on his cheeks, and everyone turned to me, their eyes wide. A palpable tension filled the air, crackling through the room.

  Well, I’d stepped in it this far. I might as well dive. “My mentor Sebastian Holter competed that year, didn’t he? He put me in this because he really wants me to learn to fight more like him—so, I just thought that it was what he’d want.” I felt everyone’s gaze boring into me; the only person who wasn’t aghast was Mitch, who’d stole the seat next to mine and was laying his head down on the table. “Why is everyone looking at me weird?”

  “Trust me, January, you don’t want to be anything like Sebastian,” Susie said, her brown eyes cautious.

  “Oh, I know that.”

  The whole room seemed to let out a collective sigh.

  “Sebastian said he wants me to participate in this hunt because he thinks going against a vampire will unlock Elite powers in me. He wants the vampire to do damage to me. He’s not going to let me hang back and let other hunters do all the work—which was one hundred percent my plan. I doubt I have powers, and I think that if that’s the case, Sebastian won’t care if this hunt kills me. I want to see how he fought the vampire and won.”

  Susie’s hand wrapped around my wrist in silent support, and I wished I could be up-front and honest with my friends, but this is as close to the truth as I could admit. No one showed any surprise when I mentioned that Sebastian thought I had Elite powers. It was probably common knowledge at this point that I was some Elite’s illegitimate child.

  “Honestly, it’s the most relevant hunt,” Richard said as he rolled back his shoulders. “Clearly, Sebastian meddled in that hunt, and he’s already meddling in this one.” He raised a hand, and his eyes met mine. “Not that I’m blaming you for anything he’s doing, January. But all of our chances of success are much higher if we study him as well as the hunt.”