Hunter Trials (The Vampire Legacy Book 2)

by Rita Stradling

My heart raced as none other than fifth-floor Amber climbed up and sat on Mitch’s lap. Her knees collided straight into my wrist, pinning my arm to the backboard, and a pulse of pain spread up my arm. My fingers immediately started to tingle while they clutched the passports. Her knee dug further into my arm, and I hissed in pain, but thankfully, Amber only had eyes for Mitch.

  Mitch leaned back into the couch as if he was attempting to escape straight through it. “I’m getting really tired of this climbing all over me if I’m even talking to a girl. We’re over. Move on and get the hell off of my lap.”

  She leaned in and whispered into Mitch’s ear, and he kept saying, “Not interested.”

  Amber clearly wasn’t going anywhere. He said no, and yet she locked onto him like an octopus. It was almost to the point where I wanted to shove Amber off Mitch’s lap for being a creep, but I was pinned to the couch with my hand gripping incriminating evidence.

  As if Mitch read my thoughts, his hand wrapped around Amber’s knee, and he moved her just enough so I could slip my hand out.

  I pushed the passports and papers into my back pockets and pulled my hands forward into my lap.

  “Fine.” Mitch leaned in closer to Amber. “If you meet me outside, I’ll order a ride. Dirtbag can find her own ride home.”

  The hell?

  They stood abruptly and left me alone on the couch, sitting in the middle of the raging party. Five minutes later, Mitch reappeared with three beers in each hand. He fell back into his seat, which no one had tried to occupy in his absence.

  “Amber’s waiting outside for me. I don’t think she has the guts to come back in after what she whispered.”

  “What’d she whisper?”

  “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to, Dirtbag.” He cracked two bottles and double fisted them. “I have a feeling that there’s not enough beer in the world to get through whatever you’re about to tell me. So, Justin knew what you were? Go.”

  There was no going back now, so I told Mitch about being a dhampir without ever saying the word. I explained how Justin kept it from the Academy and the Hawthorn Group when he realized that they were killing my kind. "I've been going off the assumption that my father is bad, but before I got spirited off to school, my father handed me an old photograph. He didn't show up in the photo, he was just a blank space, and I was floating in the air. They told me that vampires forget who they are, but he clearly never did. Then I find out Justin is working with him."

  "Justin was never doing this for your father. This is my mission. I brought Justin in two years ago, and your dad isn't any part of it. He was supposed to get that information for us. I was the one who planned it. You're already getting close to the truth, so I might as well just let you in. But, if you repeat this, you're actually seeing consequences." The look he shot at me told me he wasn't kidding. It wasn’t lost on me that he pretty much admitted to me that his tally was worth shit.

  "Okay."

  "My sister was something called an Alphastrain. She's not the only Alphastrain we found records of in the Hawthorn Group. But Alphastrains all have one thing in common—really short lifespans."

  "I saw that word all over the records. It was on Mia’s and Justin’s and the Baldwin brothers. Do you think that maybe they’re the same thing as I am? Maybe they haven’t died yet.”

  If that were true, Marisa could still be alive. She would have healed from the sword wound and risen undead. Maybe that’s why Sebastian killed her, in order to bring her to her next stage of life.

  I could see the moment when the same realization occurred to Mitch. His eyes widened and lips parted, but a moment later, the expression fell away and he shook his head. “No. I know Marisa’s mom. She’s worked for our family since I was born. She was without a doubt her mom, and she’s definitely not a vampire.”

  “Wait—Marisa’s mom still works for your family even after Sebastian killed Marisa?” The very idea made me feel physically ill.

  Mitch took a big swig of beer, swallowed hard, and then whispered over the rim of his bottle, “I haven’t found a way around the oath to tell her, and I’m not going to make her watch it on video. Everyone else in the house decided not to.”

  Bitter loathing laced his voice. Mitch hated his family. And holy shit. No wonder Mitch reviled them so much. “Do you want me to tell her mom? There’s no oath on me.”

  He didn’t answer for a long time. His gaze moved far away. “I wanted to be able to …” he paused to shake his head, “Maybe.”

  “Well, uh …” I swallowed down the bad taste in my mouth and picked up the conversation where we’d detoured from. “I’m pretty sure that it’d have to be Marisa’s father that was the vampire. It would happen during transition.”

  His gaze slid away from me and to the party. “Did you have Elite powers before you died?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Marisa had powers.”

  “Maybe she’d already died.”

  "No. She would have told me if she’d died.”

  “I never told anyone—”

  “We were close," he interrupted. There was a vulnerability in his voice that I'd never heard before. Mitch pushed off the couch abruptly like he was forcefully breaking away from cushions that were gripping onto his body. "I'm going to get another beer." He kicked the unopened bottle at his feet and sent it skittering into the party. Mitch ignored it and headed for the fridge.

  Mitch had probably told me the most vulnerable part of his life, and I had told him the most dangerous part of mine, and neither of us trusted the other. Mitch was my only ally now, and I was pretty sure that he didn’t care whether I lived or died.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Barking woke me. My heavy eyelids fought me as I tried to open my eyes. Bailey’s growling meant something bad, but what did it mean? I pushed myself to a sitting position, and immediately, a headache pounded against my skull, and my stomach turned over. I peeked at my phone; it was barely three.

  I had insisted on cleaning the pool house until it was spotless while Mitch snored loudly from the couch. We caught our taxi home at around 2 a.m. Only when I was under my covers did I pull out the contents of my back pocket. Under my phone screen’s illumination, I looked through three passports. One was for Justin, one for Mitch, and there was even one for me. According to the passport, I was twenty and named Jane Remy. All of the other details were more or less right, though Justin made me an inch shorter at five-five. The other papers in there were three birth certificates, temporary paper driver’s licenses with our new names, and a slip of paper with my old home address on King Street.

  I had taken the papers on instinct. I couldn’t go into hiding if it would put Mom and Nana in danger, but I hadn’t completely given up on the idea of running yet. I just needed time to think. Not knowing where to hide the contraband, I had stuffed the papers and fake IDs into my pockets again and tried to fall asleep, but I'd only been asleep for minutes, if that.

  Bailey barked again, a harsh sound that jarred me out of my thoughts. Realization slammed into me, and my eyes snapped open. The pitch-black room was empty of glowing figures, and when I crawled across my floor to the living room, phone in hand, it was also empty. Bailey's glowing form waited by the window. She had her paws on the windowsill as she continued to bark.

  When I went to stand beside her, the sight I saw out the window made my heart skip a beat. The grounds looked like a spider web of light as streetlamps illuminated along the perimeter and webbed through the grounds, connected by walkways. The area around the Academy and Gregory Hall shone out against the night along with the parking lot that connected where we were to the front gate. But between the paths, the grounds were pitch black, and that's where I saw the glowing white figures scuttling toward us. Just like the last time they surrounded me, they were scurrying over the ground like giant spiders. But unlike last time, there were hundreds of them, maybe more, and they crawled toward Gregory Hall.

  "Shit!" While running for
the door, I pulled up my phone and called Susie.

  The phone rang twice, and then a scratchy voice said, "Hello?"

  "There are vampires surrounding Gregory Hall. They're coming at us fast. I don't know what to do."

  "January," she sounded wide awake this time. "There should be a panic button in your room for your floor." She paused. "You're sure that you saw vampires? If I press my panic button and it's wrong, I'll be expelled."

  "Do it. You call everyone you can down there." I flicked up the plastic cover and slammed my hand down on the big red button by my door. “Done.”

  “Okay, wait five minutes, and then you should hear a loud click. That means every door on your hall is secured with iron bars.”

  Susie hung up to call Richard and Mia so they could secure their floors. My heart galloped in my chest, and every passing second felt like it took a year. At five minutes, Susie called me again. “The bars just moved into place on the second floor.”

  I checked my door. It was unlocked. “Nothing happened here.”

  “Okay, wait another thirty seconds, check, and if it’s not locked, then hit the button again.”

  I did.

  Susie texted me five minutes later: All of the lower floors are secure. What’s happening up there?

  I turned the knob of my door to find that it was still unlocked. Panic surged into me. I grabbed my room key and slammed my front door open. The moment it closed behind me, the sound of Bailey's barking cut off. Running across the hall, I pounded on Mitch's door. The seconds streamed away from me, and I kept knocking.

  “Mitch!”

  I heard the click of a lock, and my stomach squeezed into a painful knot. Did I just bar myself out into the open? But then a second later, Mitch’s door opened, and he ducked his head out. His eyes were closed, and he looked like he might topple over at any moment.

  "Press your panic button and give me your phone," I demanded. "I need to call your brother."

  Mitch rubbed down his face. "Go to hell, Dirtbag."

  "Now, Mitch."

  He gagged and covered his mouth with an arm. "Damnit." He stumbled two steps inside, swiped his phone from a table, unlocked the screen, and handed it over. “He’s not going to answer.”

  Sebastian didn't answer, so as calmly as I could, I left him a message telling him that we were surrounded by hundreds of vampires. I texted him the message too but got no response.

  "He thinks it's me," Mitch said as he slid down his door frame and collapsed in his doorway.

  “Press your panic button, Mitch.”

  Mitch just closed his eyes.

  I let out a cry of exasperation and stepped over his body to climb into Mitch’s dorm room. Flinging up the plastic cover to his panic button, I slammed my hand down.

  "Do you have the phone numbers for the other Elites in here?" I asked as I clambered back over Mitch. When he just stared at me, looking like he was fighting the urge to throw up, I snapped, "Damn it. I'm just texting everyone on your contact list."

  For someone who hated everyone, Mitch had hundreds of names in his contact list. I added them as quickly as I could and sent out the mother of all group texts. It simply said that Gregory Hall was under attack. Everyone should call for help. I left out the vampire details as I had no idea where these texts were going. Immediately, Mitch's phone started beeping. "Is this a joke?" I read before texts popped on the screen so fast that I couldn't read any of them.

  The elevator door at the end of the hall dinged open, and Dickhead Bernard stood framed in the metal box. Even though he was all the way down the hall, I could see that his expression was thunderous. "I told you not to press that button for anything but a real emergency."

  "The panic buttons aren’t working. There are vampires surrounding the building. They're everywhere. There're hundreds of them."

  "No, there aren't," he snapped. “I disabled all of the panic procedures. Do you think I don’t know what’s going on here? You and your boyfriend are working with the vampire king. Do you think we haven’t made the connection? You’re his daughter.”

  A scream lodged in my chest. "Screw you! I'll tell everyone here myself."

  The guard charged down the hall at me, but I slammed my fist on every door I could reach. A few doors cracked open, just as Dickhead’s thick hand collided with my waist, knocking the breath out of me. His arms wrapped around me, and he yanked me off my feet.

  Heat surged in my chest, boiling within me, and I shoved Dickhead's chest. His body ripped away from mine and went flying down the hall. He landed on his back.

  I stood there, staring at the man who was wheezing and struggling to sit up. Did I just do that? Was that me?

  I looked down to see that Mitch was fully asleep in the hallway, slumped against the other wall.

  Down the hall, Amber stuck her head out of her door and turned to glare blearily over at me. "I need to talk to you," she slurred as she stumbled down the hall toward me. "You are not a very nice person to me."

  Mark careened out of his room as well and into the hallway. "What's the deal with all the noise? Oh, hey January. I was hoping to see you around."

  This was my worst nightmare. Everyone in this hall was either drunk or purposely trying to stop me.

  "There are vampires surrounding Gregory Hall. Call your parents," I called over to the pair, but they couldn't call their parents. They'd all stumbled into the hall in their pajamas, and their doors had closed behind them.

  "There are no vampires on the grounds!" Dickhead Bernard bellowed. “And you’re going to be expelled to Alderwood Reformatory, where you should have been sent in the first place.” He stood and glared back at us. "If this is some plot to help the vampires, so help me ..."

  The elevator doors at the end of the hall dinged open, revealing a compartment full of men in the gear of HG soldiers. They looked like soldiers, but how could they have gotten here so fast? My gut screamed that there was something very wrong here.

  “Mitch!” I dove at him and shook his shoulder. “Get up!” I yelled into his face. “Everyone in my room! Now!” I tripped over my feet, and my fingers shook as I shoved my key in the lock and fought to get it open.

  “I’m the senior officer on duty here,” Dickhead said as he approached the soldiers, "This was a false alarm by a student who's associated with Justin Roberts." Dickhead held up his hands, and the frontmost soldier lunged. His face morphed, a row of fangs growing in his mouth. The vampire's teeth closed on the guard's neck, and blood splattered across the wall.

  The lock gave way and handle turned, and I fell in through my door. Bailey stood feet away, growling with her teeth bared. Something hit me in the back, and I went pitching forward, just as the door to my room slammed closed. Amber, Mitch, and Mark stood there panting, all three of them pressing their backs into my door.

  A pounding came at the door, and all three of the Elites jolted forward before pushing back.

  "What are you waiting for?” Amber growled. “Hit the emergency button!"

  I threw up the plastic case and slammed my hand on the button for the third time.

  There was an earsplitting crash, and wood exploded out from the front door. A fist slammed through the door directly between Mark’s and Mitch's heads. Both guys fell to the side. The fist yanked back, and glowing red eyes peeked through the hole, fixing directly on me.

  “She’s in here,” a whispery voice hissed. A clawed hand reached through the hole. Mark spun and kicked at the fingers. There was a hiss of pain, and the hand pulled away. A second later, there was another loud crash, and the door jumped in its tracks. We all pushed at the door, shoving our hands against the wood as it slammed back into our palms.

  “They’re going to kick it down!” Amber cried.

  The thumping stopped, and the vampire’s voice whispered over the sound of Bailey’s continuous barking. “Little pigs, little pigs, let us in.”

  “Fuck you!” I screamed as we continued to brace the door.

  CHAPTER TWEN
TY-TWO

  There was a loud clunk, and then a metal bar slammed through the hole on my door, blocking the vampire’s glowing red eyes from view. Bailey continued to bark and growl toward the front door of my room, and Mitch, Amber, and I all held rigid, bracing positions against the door as my dog’s growls ripped through the air. The moment her barks ceased, we slumped down and took a collective exhale.

  "Oh, my head," Amber whispered as she cradled her head in her hands. "I'm probably going to hear echoes of dog barks for the rest of my life."

  "Well, that barking dog is the reason you have a life. She woke me." I collapsed down on the floor beside Bailey. "I hit that panic button three times, and that guard overrode it every single time."

  “Well, he paid for it, and my silk pajamas will forever be ruined.” Amber gestured down her front where a spray of blood droplets had stained her pink top.

  Hopefully, that contemptuous guard was the only one who died from his own stupidity.

  "Good fucking riddance.” Mitch’s head landed in his hands. “My head is going to explode. Where are your pain pills, Dirtbag?”

  Everyone joined me on the floor, and after a few minutes, I brought waters, pain pills, and muffins for the hungover crowd. I’d promised myself that I’d never help ease a person’s hangover again, but this was going to be the exception. We lay by the door, waiting for the iron bars to fail and the vampires to spill into the room. Slowly, the adrenaline drained away, leaving me emptier and more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life. I carried over my blankets and pillows and handed them out. No one said a word. We all just lay there, waiting for our worlds to end.

  "Why does Justin hate you so much, January?" Mark asked as he leaned back against the wall. His focus was on the ceiling like it held the answers. "Those vampires said, ‘there she is.’"

  "It could have been me," Amber said. She stood and stumbled away, heading for my couch and lying down. "Justin’s hated me since we were kids. Maybe it's because the Elite gene passed him over. They’re not even bothering to try to train him. I always thought he was jealous."