by Eva Muñoz
“Jeez!” I said, dusting off my blazer. I sneezed a couple more times. The corners of the eyes watching me crinkled.
“I apologize for startling you. It was never my intention,” a sexy, familiar voice said.
I looked up. Goose bumps rose along my arms. The one person I didn’t expect to see again electrified my senses.
“Camron?”
“What are you doing here, Zaire?” I whispered, afraid someone might overhear us. “It’s daytime.”
A soft chuckle. “We didn’t get a chance to talk last night.”
“But, but….” I paused. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I’m not?”
“No!” I insisted. “You’re… one of them. Won’t being out during the day…?” I stopped.
“I can go out during the day, Camron. It’s just frowned upon. That’s all.”
“That’s all? That’s all?” The angry mob of frustration rose up my throat. “I almost got expelled because of you!”
“Me?”
“Well, not you directly.” I glanced around, checking for other students. “I mean I almost got expelled because I found out about you… I mean all of you. I admit, it’s kind of weird for the headmaster and whoever else is involved in this to be keeping it a secret. But I’m not curious anymore,” I rambled on. A golden eyebrow rose. “Okay, that’s a lie. But I really don’t want to get expelled. And you being here can get me kicked out!”
“You’re not getting expelled.”
“Right. Like that wouldn’t happen.”
I picked up the books I dropped and moved away. I heard his footfalls at the other side. I stopped. He stopped. At the end of the row of shelves, a guy wearing an orthodontic headgear passed by, nose stuck in a book.
I turned to where I thought Zaire stood and said, “You have to leave!”
“Not until we talk,” he insisted.
A searing blush crept across my face. “What do you want to talk to me about?”
“I’m curious about you.”
I stared dumbfounded at the books blocking Zaire from view. “I didn’t expect that answer.”
“The truth is always unexpected.”
My own curiosity hummed in response to his. Would he actually answer my questions? Temptation made my hands sweat. The books I clutched to my chest seemed to weigh nothing in the split second I made my decision.
“This way,” I whispered.
I hurried to a secluded corner near the archives section no one ever used. Too much paperwork involved. Plus, the books in circulation rivaled most national libraries, so students pretty much stayed in the main room. I figured we’d be far enough from anyone to be safe from being overheard.
I whirled around so quickly when I reached the corner that Zaire almost slammed into me. I hadn’t heard him approaching. He stopped abruptly, and with ninja reflexes, he stepped back without losing his balance.
“Nice trick,” I said, impressed and a little disturbed.
“I beg your pardon?” Zaire cocked his head.
The late-afternoon light made his curls look like a halo of golden flames. A hint of uncertainty entered those too-blue eyes. I swallowed hard.
“Camron?”
I clutched the books like a security blanket until my arms ached. “You came all this way just to say you’re curious about me?”
“I wanted to get a glimpse of the boy reckless enough to break curfew,” he said. “And I wanted to see the boy who was ready to confront such a strong opponent even when he had no hope of winning. I wanted to know more about that person. Plus, I must admit, I had nothing better to do.”
I felt my blush spread from my face to the roots of my hair. “Forget that guy. He’s currently on disciplinary probation. And you being here can make things worse for him.”
His lips twitched downward. “I apologize. I didn’t intend to cause you undue stress.”
“Well, leaving me asleep in the library for the whole school to find can be considered a stressful situation.”
“I had nothing to do with that.” Zaire’s stare turned serious. “I would have taken you back to the dorms had I known.”
“Bull,” I said.
“Believe what you will. But I had nothing to do with what happened to you.”
The sincerity in Zaire’s tone became difficult to ignore. Yet a nagging feeling in my stomach said I shouldn’t trust him—them.
“I asked Troyan this already, but he didn’t answer me. Well, he did, but he didn’t give me enough of an explanation. So, I’ll ask you: what are you exactly? I’m done fooling myself into thinking you guys are human. All the secrecy is just insane for nothing out of the ordinary to be happening here at Braylin.”
Zaire smiled the kind of smile that melted hearts and brought peace to the world. It drew me in with the promise of comfort. I lost my train of thought in a snap.
“What did you say?” I asked. Apparently, that smile made me deaf too.
He shook his head, a rueful grin replacing his gates-of-heaven smile. “To know what we are is to believe in the myth.”
“Oo-kay. I’m not getting a straight answer from you either. Great.” Impatience punched my chest. “Can you be even more vague and cryptic?”
“Simply put, you already know what we are.” His brows twisted. “So many books, so much misleading information.”
A familiar chill ran down my spine. Not because of Zaire’s words, but because of the way he said them—with such certainty. With such confidence. Memories surfaced of Troyan confirming his people were dangerous. Zaire stepped forward, but I didn’t step back. He traced a finger up my arm, the coolness of his touch melting me.
“You’re colder than Troyan,” I blurted out.
“I beg to differ.”
“No.” I gathered my thoughts. “I mean your temperature. You’re cooler.”
He shrugged as if what I’d said had no consequence. “He and I are of different… families.”
“I don’t get it.” I shifted the books in my arms to ease some of the growing strain. Zaire took them from me as if they weighed nothing more than autumn leaves. I shook my arms in relief. “Thanks.”
“My pleasure.”
I crossed my arms, feeling my heart thud. “You’re messing with me, aren’t you?”
Zaire regarded me with chagrin. “I assure you, I have no interest in ‘messing with you.’ I’m simply having fun.”
“Fun? You think this is fun?” I stared at him skeptically. “Troyan said you eat—” I swallowed, a part of me still slightly skeptical. “—doesn’t being here with me make you hungry?”
What little humor Zaire had on him disappeared. “I’m on anima.”
It dawned on me. “Gaige gave Troyan one of those.”
“I procured one for myself.”
“Which makes you not want to eat me?” My hands shook and my mouth had gone dry. The urge to bolt got stronger by the second. This must be what being prey felt like.
“Anima staves my craving. It’s what allows me to be in your presence without the overwhelming need to… well, you understand.”
“Then why keep your existence a secret if you can just use anima and go to school during regular hours?”
“It doesn’t work when there’s too many of you. It’s like being in an all-you-can-eat buffet when you haven’t eaten for days.”
It made sense. In a roundabout way.
“How do I smell to you right now?” The question came from a morbid place in me.
He breathed in, then said, “To me, you smell like—”
The east tower bell interrupted him. We glanced toward the direction of the sound. I counted four peals. Panic bubbled up my neck from my chest.
“I have to go,” I said, backing away.
Zaire stood still and studied me, holding three heavy books in one hand. Something about his stance screamed silent predator. I matched his stare with one of my own, but the last bus left at four thirty. I looked down. When I looked up
again, the books were on the floor.
Zaire had disappeared like a dream that faded with the morning’s early light.
Chapter Six: Plea
ZAIRE’S CRYPTIC and confusing explanations haunted me all night and well into the next day. Thank goodness for multitasking, because I had to hand in my assignments, attend my classes, and figure out what Zaire had meant. Add trying to keep a low profile to that. Well, as low a profile as rumors about probation permitted. I’d become the first school delinquent Braylin had in its halls.
By the time my morning classes ended, my brain had staged a strike. The pounding felt like a thousand East Germans with sledgehammers tearing down the Berlin Wall. I needed coffee. Or food. Or both.
At The Roast, I ordered chicken soup. The server winced and wiped his hand against his apron when I sneezed just as he was setting the steaming bowl in front of me. I smiled in apology. His lips twisted ever so slightly before he turned and left. I sighed. I couldn’t even enjoy the smell. My nose had stopped working. As clogged as a drainpipe. I tried to sniff, but it magnified the pain in my head.
“You look terrible,” Riya said the second she saw me.
“Thanks for the reminder.” I lifted a spoon filled with chicken-y goodness and blew on it.
Riya set her books down and slid into her usual seat. “Well, it begs repeating.”
I let the heat of the soup burn its way down my throat. “I’m fine.”
“I don’t believe you.” She observed me like a cat watching fish in a bowl. “You’re a walking infection right now. What possessed you to come to school anyway? You should’ve stayed in bed.”
I dropped the spoon into the bowl and rested my burning forehead on the coolness of the table’s surface. I groaned. “I had to hand in my assignments today. I didn’t want to attract any more attention than I already have with my probation.”
“Camron, making yourself sick from the stress won’t help.”
I gnawed the inside of my cheek before I blurted out that stress had nothing to do with my cold. Fleeing blindly through the snow with a psychotic flesh-eating chick in hot pursuit, then being drugged and left to sleep it off in a cold library was enough to make anyone sick. I just groaned again in response.
“Okay, that’s it.” Riya slapped the table. “Finish your soup and I’m taking you to the nurse.”
“I don’t need to go.” I switched from my forehead to my cheek so I could see Riya’s livid expression. “I have classes this afternoon.”
“Like hell you do.”
I grinned. “You said ‘hell.’”
“You’re skipping all your afternoon classes,” she continued.
“Look at you, making me skip class. You’re a bad influence.”
“Camron?” She blinked at me.
“Yes?”
“Shut up.”
I bit my lower lip to keep from laughing. My head would explode if I did.
She sighed, then said, “We’ll get the nurse to give you something so you can sleep. Then I’ll come for you when my class is over.”
“I’ll just go home now. Why wait?”
“Because I don’t want to leave you alone in your condition.” She glared. “Now, quit whining and eat up.”
I sat up and stared at the bowl. I picked up the spoon and brought it to my lips. Riya stared at me the entire time, growling when I paused longer than ten seconds. She made sure I swallowed every bite.
In the minutes after leaving The Roast, the walk to the clinic became a harrowing experience. My stomach sloshed from the chicken soup Riya had forced down my gullet. I wanted to scream at her, but I felt too nauseated. It took all my strength not to puke my guts out.
My legs felt like rubber by the time Riya pulled me into the clinic. The nurse stood up from her desk and hurried to my other side. She put my arm over her shoulder and wrapped her arm around my waist, and then she and Riya moved me toward the beds.
“Sink,” I mumbled.
“What?” the nurse asked.
“I think he said ‘drink,’” Riya said.
“Sink!” I yelled.
They hurried me to the small washing area near the rear of the clinic just in time for the stainless-steel sink to catch the chicken soup that refused to stay eaten. I heaved and heaved until I had nothing left to heave, and then some. Riya rubbed circles on my back. My entire body convulsed. After the trembling stopped, I lifted the tap and washed out my mouth.
“When did I eat carrots?” I faced Riya, and she shrugged.
“Come on, Camron,” the nurse said. “You should lie down.”
I refused their offer to help me behind the privacy curtain. With one careful step after another, I made my way to the bed nearest the window. If I had to lie down for the rest of the afternoon, I at least wanted a view of the garden and the sky.
I passed out sometime after the nurse took my temperature and gave me something for my cold. When the oblivion of sleep chased away the incessant pounding in my head, I hardly cared about anything else.
Visions of Troyan hauling me around campus interspersed themselves with images of Zaire carrying my books in the library and sitting with Gaige in the solarium. The imagery sped past my line of sight so fast that my nausea returned. I saw myself running away. Overwhelming fear pushed me along a dark hallway. To stop meant death. I had to keep moving. I glanced over my shoulder. Nothing. Just endless darkness. When I faced forward again, I slammed into a marble wall.
I opened my eyes and gasped for air. Sweat slid down my temple to my cheek. The winter afternoon sun cast the room in gray light. In my periphery, I caught sight of a figure sitting beside my bed.
“Oh, jeez!” I squawked out and scrambled to the farthest corner of the bed, pulling the blanket with me. “What are you doing here?”
“Camron, you have to lie down,” Gaige urged. The grayness of the room made his pale skin look even more ashen than usual. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“Easy for you to say.” I rubbed my chest. “I thought I was about to have a heart attack.”
Gaige studied me. He gripped his fingers together on his lap, as if in prayer. A hint of desperation hid behind the relative calm he portrayed. I saw it in the urgency in his eyes and the tight line of his lips. A muscle on his cheek jumped. His stillness and a dizzy spell prompted me to take his advice and lie down. I stared at the ceiling for a while to keep the room from spinning.
“I can’t seem to get rid of you,” I said.
“I resent that.” The stool Gaige sat on creaked.
My eyes traced a hairline crack in the plaster above me. “The last time I was with you, you drugged me.”
“Troyan made me do it,” he said. “I wanted to keep you around, but he insisted you be returned.”
“Why leave me in the library?” I looked at him then.
Gaige stared at his entwined fingers. “He said you needed to be taught a lesson.”
“Some lesson. The most he did was get Kiev to put me on probation. If he really wanted to teach me a lesson, he should have had me expelled.”
“That was me.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You mean Troyan doesn’t know I’m still here?”
He nodded; then his fathomless black eyes pinned me down. “I requested that you remain a student here. Believe me, it took some convincing. Alek was definitely ready to expel you.”
My mouth opened, but no words came out. Even if my face felt hot from fever, my hands turned icy. The temperature in the clinic seemed to have dropped a few degrees in the last minute. I gulped away the tightness in my throat.
“The nurse,” I said. “Won’t she—”
“No,” Gaige said. “She’s currently being detained.”
“You didn’t—”
“No! Oh my, no!” He shook his hands at me. “She’s in Kiev’s office. I had a hard time locating you today.”
“Does Kiev know you’re here?”
“Yes. But he doesn’t know why, and I don’t care to exp
lain myself to him.”
“Friends in high places,” I joked.
“I beg your pardon?”
Fatigue sat like an elephant on my body. I needed rest. I needed to hurry Gaige along. He wouldn’t risk discovery for nothing. I smiled to myself; he wasn’t Zaire.
“What are you doing here, Gaige? Why don’t you want me expelled?”
“Maybe this isn’t a very good idea after all,” he whispered.
I threw an arm across my eyes. It eased some of the sting brought on by the gray light.
“Don’t back out now,” I said. “You seemed to have gone through all this trouble to keep me here at Braylin. What do you want from me?”
“I need your help.” A palpable pause. “We need your help.”
“Who are we?”
“My people.”
The desperation in his manner finally entered his voice. I lowered my arm and searched Gaige’s face. He betrayed nothing, returning my stare with a blank one. I felt sorry for him a little. I didn’t know why. I just did.
“I know this is going to sound cliché, but I have to ask it anyway: why me?”
A crack in his expression revealed sadness. It had fear and uncertainly mixed with it. I sighed, long and hard, prepared to listen to what he had to say. He’d come all this way. Plus, I felt too sick to leave.
“You already know about us. And it seems like you’re curious enough to want to know more. Don’t you want to find out what goes on at Braylin when the sun sets?”
“What about the headmaster?”
“Kiev doesn’t act without confirmation from any of us.”
“And Troyan? When he finds out, who knows what he’ll do.”
“After what I’m about to do to you?” Gaige’s brows inched up a notch. “He won’t have a choice but to keep you with us.”
My eyes narrowed. I sat up and a suspicious tingle climbed my spine. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Are you going to help us or not?”
“With that attitude, I don’t think so.”
“Stop this, Camron.” Gaige rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m being serious.”
The coming together of his dark eyebrows said as much. I was being serious as well.
