Dylan slid a hand around her waist and pulled her hard against him for another kiss. “That’s right, baby. But don’t be late for class because of me. See you after Charmers practice?” Bethany nodded, threw me one last smirk, then walked down the catwalk with an extra swing in her blond ponytail, her thoughts full of confidence now that she believed she had two guys fighting over her.
Savannah glared at her fellow Charmer’s back with one thought. Ugh.
Bethany stepped off the catwalk and headed down the sloping grounds’ cement steps. The second she disappeared into the math hall on the sports and arts building’s ground f loor, I got in Dylan’s face. “If you’re leading her on, all the Clann abilities in the world aren’t going to be enough to save you.”
“Oh, yeah? And if I was, what are you going to do about it?”
My hands ached to grab handfuls of his shirt. Instead I clenched them down at my sides. “You really don’t want to f ind out.”
“Maybe I do,” Dylan murmured. “Maybe that’s exactly what I want, to see what the big bad Tristan can do now that he’s turned. Why don’t you prove how badass you are now, Coleman?”
“There’s no audience around to save you now,” I reminded him. Why was he pushing me so hard?
Savannah was right. Something was off. Dylan was obviously trying to push every button I had.
It smelled like a trap.
I took a step back, and his eyes f lared then narrowed.
Something bitter, like lemons, waved off him like a cloud. I checked his thoughts.
He was…afraid?
Told you, Savannah thought. His dad’s probably demanding he push us over the edge at school where everyone will see us lose control so either the council or the Clann will come after us. It’s what he tried to do to me earlier this year.
Yeah, but why? The Clann already kicked me out. What’s the point of getting rid of me now? I’m not in his dad’s way anymore. “What’s the matter?” Dylan said through gritted teeth.
“Afraid to take me on now? I never knew you were a coward, Coleman. Did your daddy’s death destroy you?” Son of a… I breathed slowly, pushing the anger down again. “Shut up, Williams. You’re not getting what you want here. I’m not going to give your dad the ammunition he needs to force the Clann to take us out.”
Dylan’s breathing sped up. He closed the distance between us, and this time it was his turn to grab my shirt and get in my face. “My father has nothing to do with this. This is all about you two freaks being where you don’t belong….” He went on, spit f lying in my face. But I didn’t even hear him speaking anymore. It was all cover noise. The real truth was in his thoughts, in the memories of Mr. Williams’s hand raised palm-out in the air, in the sounds of sizzling as spell after spell slammed into Dylan.
“Do it!” Dylan screamed in my face. “You freaking bloodsucker, you know you want to kill me. Just do it already!” I grabbed his forearms, their bulging veins taunting me, calling to me. I pushed him away from me an inch at a time, watching as Dylan’s eyes rounded and the muscles in his neck corded with the effort to fight me. But the physical difference between us was too much for Dylan to even have a prayer. “What does he want, Dylan?” I asked. “He told you to tick us off, to push me over the edge. Why? I’m cast out. I can’t be the leader anymore. So what does he want this time? What’s the point of trying to get rid of me? Nothing I do will make my mother look bad now. She’s washed her hands of me.” He’ll kill me. The thought echoed over and over inside Dylan’s thoughts as his chest heaved. He tucked his chin down, and I recognized that look.
As he ran at me, I whirled to the side and avoided the tackle. Dylan had always sucked at tackling. It was why he’d been so much better in the quarterback position. Snarling, he turned around and came after me again. This time I grabbed the back of his neck as he missed me again. I pushed him against the metal railing, a bong vibrating down the entire length of the catwalk.
“Tristan,” Savannah said.
I shook my head at her. Still in control.
Out loud I said to Dylan, “You know I can hear every thought inside that peanut-sized brain of yours. Why don’t you just save us both time and tell me the truth?” “Or what? You’ll torture it out of me? Go on and try!”
He whirled around, his fists f lying through the air toward my face. I leaned to the left, then the right, neatly avoiding each blow.
“Tristan, the bell’s about to ring,” Savannah muttered. Time was up. I grabbed him where his left shoulder met his neck, driving him back into the nearest pole. “Don’t make me lose my patience.”
Dylan closed his eyes. “Just do it already.” If you don’t kill me, he will.
“Why would he kill his own son, Dylan?” Savannah asked. “Get out of my head, you b—” Dylan tried to scream. Shaking my head, I tapped his left cheek with my open palm. I’d meant to barely slap him, but his pupils dilated and he started to slump. Cursing, I held him upright. Turn me, Dylan thought as he fought to hold on to consciousness. Just turn me or kill me.
Whoa. Surprise almost made me let go of him. I regained my grip on his shoulder before he fell all the way to the cement. “What are you talking about?”
His eyes rolled as he blinked slowly. “I know she can do it. She pulled it off with you.”
“You don’t mean it,” Savannah muttered. “You can’t really want this.”
But he did. He blinked hard, trying to clear his vision enough to stare at her. “You don’t know him. I’m dead either way. At least if I were like you…”
Heat built in my chest, but this time the anger had a whole new target. Mr. Williams. “If your dad’s using magic on you, tell the Clann. They’ll put a stop to it—”
Dylan let his head drop back against the pole. “You don’t get it. They don’t care. Besides, it’d be my word against his.
He’s got too many friends on his side. The Clann will never stand against him.”
“My mother would.” The words slipped out of me as quickly as I thought them. Then I realized it was true. For all her faults and fears against vamps, she would never knowingly allow any Clann kid to be abused.
“She’s not as powerful as she thinks,” Dylan whispered.
His pupils slowly contracted to their previous size. What did he mean by that?
At first, I thought he was still trying to tick me off. But his tone was wrong, f lat and unemotional now. Like he was just stating a fact.
“She’s the Clann leader,” I said. “Not even your dad would be stupid enough to mess with her.”
He looked me in the eye, uncaring whether he got gaze dazed in the process. “Want to bet?” Before I could react, he looked away again. “Now either kill me or let me go, man.” Noise as other students drifted out of the cafeteria and
headed in our direction.
“Tristan,” Savannah murmured, her tone a warning. I released Dylan and stepped back, lost in thought. He hesitated for a second then slunk off, shoulders hunched, hands shoved in his front pockets, his head hanging. He looked like a freshly beaten dog.
“Do you think he meant it?” Savannah asked just before the bell pealed, signaling the end of lunch. “About his dad threatening to kill him, I mean?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Can’t we do something to help him?”
I glanced at her in surprise. “Help the guy who’s been bullying you for years? Are you serious?”
Her nose scrunched. “Yeah, I know. He’s the world’s biggest jerk. But that doesn’t mean he deserves to have the crap magically kicked out of him all the time by his dad.” We slowly walked side by side toward the main building. I scowled at nothing, walking by sheer instinct, too lost in thought to notice the growing traffic around us as we neared the metal doors of the main building’s back entrance. Being furious at Dylan was a lot less complicated than whatever this new feeling was that was pushing around at my insides. If I didn’t know better, I’d call it…pity. Nah. Could
n’t be.
“Maybe I’ll shoot Em a text and see what she thinks.”
Dylan was never going to become a vamp, not if I had any say in it. But something about the whole situation didn’t feel right.
What had Dylan meant about our mother not having as much power as she believed?
Yeah, I’d definitely have to talk to Emily about this. I doubted the Williamses had as much pull within the Clann as Dylan seemed to think. But it was better to give Emily a heads-up just in case something was going on within the ranks that she didn’t know about. And while she was sniffing around, she could also tell our mother about Mr. Williams’s abuse of his son.
CHAPTER 7
SAVANNAH
By the time Charmers practice wrapped up late that evening and Tristan and I drove home, I was exhausted.
“Want some help with your homework?” Tristan called out from his bedroom as I headed upstairs.
I hesitated. Since getting his memory back, Tristan’s mind worked lightning-fast. He’d used the four-and-a-half-hour trip home from Arkansas yesterday to read all of our textbooks so he could get caught up on the five months’ worth of homework I’d done for both of us during our absence. And not only did he read fast, but he also seemed to photographically memorize everything he read, as well. Getting good grades definitely wasn’t going to be a problem for him from now on. Boredom while at school, on the other hand, was a real danger where he was concerned.
But it wasn’t the smarter version of Tristan that made me hesitate. It was the idea of being in a room alone with him. Every day since turning him last fall, we’d always had someone else around.
I was being ridiculous. I could handle the temptation. Besides, Dad would be right downstairs, listening to every sound we made.
“Sure,” I answered him. “Let me change and I’ll be right over.”
In my bedroom, I exchanged my school clothes for comfier pajama pants, thick wool socks and a hoodie. With no humans around, I could finally put on some extra layers to ward off the ever-present chill I felt in spite of the warm East Texas weather. The bank signs all said it was 78°F today, but to my frozen fingers and toes, it felt more like 28°F.
I padded over to Tristan’s bedroom, next door to mine, and knocked on the door.
“Come on in,” he said, setting aside a textbook he had been reading.
“Leave the door open, please,” Dad called out from the living room, making me roll my eyes.
We still weren’t sure I could even have children if I wanted to someday, since no female vampire ever had before. Their bodies saw baby embryos as foreign infections that had to be eradicated immediately. Then again, I wasn’t exactly your average female vamp, so…
Still, I left the door open to make Dad feel better, then slowly walked around Tristan’s bedroom.
Since returning to Jacksonville, we hadn’t had time for him to do much to his new room. So it was still mostly bare, no pictures or posters on the dark green walls Dad had painted, the old-fashioned rolltop desk’s surface clean except for Tristan’s laptop, the bedside table beside him holding only a brass lamp and his MP3 player, now plugged into the wall nearby and recharging. Then I spotted the photo of me taped to the wall above his carved oak headboard.
“Where’d you get that?” It looked like my school photo from last year, but I’d never given him one, at least not that I remembered. A closer look showed that it had been printed on thinner paper than photo stock.
Tristan continued to stare at me, watching me, his hands tucked behind his head. “There weren’t many messages to run from the office during first period, and I got bored. I realized I didn’t have any pictures of you. So I copied one from our yearbook. Too stalkerish?”
I smiled. “No. It’s sweet. You know, you could even stick it in a frame if you want. Dad’s okay with you decorating however you want in here. We both want you to feel at home.”
When I glanced at him again, he caught and held my gaze. “Anywhere you are is my home, Savannah.” He dropped his hand to the mattress beside him palm-up in invitation.
I slowly crossed the room to him and sat on the edge of the bed at his hip. His arm rose to make room for me then rested across my thighs, his hand curving around my hip.
Because my nerve endings screamed for me to get closer to him, I forced my mind to focus on other things. “Maybe you should call your mom tonight. You know, to let her know how your first day back at school went?”
I’d already texted my mother on the way home from school while Tristan had fun driving us in my car.
His mouth tightened. His eyelids dropped halfway, concealing his eyes from me. The memory of his mother casting him out of the Clann and her life right after I turned him f lashed through his mind before he pushed it away. “Not a good idea.”
“I know she screwed up that night. But she’s still your mom, Tristan. And I know she’s worried about you. Any mother would be.”
“She’s not worried about me. I’m dead to her now.” His voice hitched on the word dead. He swallowed hard, the sound loud in the silence of the room.
“She can’t really feel that way. She was just freaked out. She’d just lost her husband—”
“What about me? I lost my dad. Now it’s like I’ve lost my mom, too. I feel like an orphan here, Savannah!”
I stared at him, shocked by the pain he was finally allowing himself to feel. I listened to his racing heart, waiting until it calmed down again. “Talk to her. Give her another chance. She just needed time to get used to all the changes.”
“Whatever.”
I blew out a long, slow breath through my lips. “Maybe the problem is you two are both being hardheaded. She made a mistake and said some things she shouldn’t have. But she’s your mother. You have to forgive her.”
“Her first.”
“What?
“Tell her to forgive me for becoming her worst nightmare. Then we can try to talk it out.”
I sighed. There was no point in pushing Tristan about this any further tonight. It had been a tough day for both of us. We had plenty of time to talk about this later. “I should go, let you get to your homework or whatever. I don’t really need help with mine.”
“No, don’t go yet. I already did my homework while you were at Charmers practice. Which I notice you were awfully careful not to tell me about. Was Mrs. Daniels and everybody else happy to have you back?”
His anger and hurt and resentment, directed solely at his mother, was immediately packed away somewhere deep inside him. Now all I saw and sensed from him was love and loneliness.
It couldn’t hurt to stay a little longer. “Yeah. Well, mostly.” I let him see my memory of overhearing their thoughts and the rumors currently swirling around us.
He cringed. “We should come up with a story. One that doesn’t involve eloping to Las Vegas or you getting knocked up.”
“Why bother telling them a lie? They won’t believe it anyway. You know how they are. They’ll believe whatever story they choose.”
I glanced at him, noticing the thick textbook at his other hip, still open and lying facedown. It must have been some pretty interesting reading. Even with his new speed-reading ability, he still wasn’t much of a reader by choice.
I reached for the book. He shocked me by quickly laying his free hand over the cover.
“Oh, now I really need to know what you’re reading.” I tried reaching over him for the book again, losing my balance and falling across him. He just as quickly grabbed the book and used the advantage of his long arm to hold it beyond my reach.
“It’s just a book from school,” he said.
“Then why don’t you want me to see what it is?”
Rolling his eyes, he sighed and turned the book so I could read the title on the front.
“Intro to Genetics?” I read aloud, my eyebrows as high as they would go. “Where did you get—”
“Mrs. Horne. Remember at lunch how I said I ran into her on the way to your chem
class? Well, her youngest daughter’s majoring in genetics at UT at Tyler and loaned this book to her. Mrs. Horne let me borrow it after I asked her about how to make that synthetic blood we all talked about.”
“Have you told Emily about it yet?” He had mentioned that maybe Emily would be interested in blood pharming since she was destined to take over BioMed someday.
He looked away. “Nah. It was just a stupid idea I was kicking around for fun.”
“Tristan, tell her.”
“What’s the point? It’ll be years before she graduates from college and is ready to take over BioMed. By then, plenty of other companies will probably start making and selling the stuff for anyone who wants it.”
“There doesn’t have to be years of delay. Why wait till she can use the idea herself? Your mother’s still on the board, right? Emily could pass it on to her, and then your mom could get BioMed to—”
At the mention of his mother, his eyes turned dark. “Get real, Sav. The BioMed board’s all Clann. They’re never going to take a vampire’s idea and run with it, not even if it could make them a ton of money and give them leverage over the vamps.”
Okay, now his hang-up with his mother was really starting to irritate me. He was making her out to be some kind of a radical anti-vamp racist. But she was still his mother. And from what I’d heard, she was also smart. Too smart to let a great idea like synthetic blood pass by the family company just because a vamp suggested it.
Before he could stop me, I grabbed his phone and took advantage of my vamp speed to shoot off a text to his sister.
He tried to grab the phone from me, but I managed to send it before he could stop me. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Making sure that fine mind of yours doesn’t go to waste.” Smiling smugly, I handed him back his phone.
Grumbling, he read my text message to Emily then huffed out a loud sigh. “All they’re going to do is laugh at her.”