Blood Moon (12 page)

Isabeau kept walking, looking the most comfortable I’d ever seen her, inside the quiet mountain with dogs crowding at her knees. She led us down rough-hewn steps into a deep crevice hung with beads. We had to squeeze into the damp darkness, rock scraping my shoulders and my hands until they bled. Then the crevice opened
abruptly into another cave, lit with a single candle burning in a tin lantern dangling from the ceiling.

A woman I assumed was Kala, the Hounds’ Shamanka, waited for us on a fur pelt, a painted drum in her lap. Her hair was long and braided, and hung with so many bone beads that she clacked and clattered when she moved. Blue spirals were tattooed on the left side of her face and all the way down her arm. It was the same color blue of the dog-and-knot-work tattoo Isabeau had on her arm and the fleur-de-lis, on the side of her neck.

“Finally,” Kala said. “You’ve come.”

I blinked, startled. “You were expecting me?”

Isabeau smiled gently. “It’s difficult to surprise Kala.”

“Sit!” Kala barked at me. I was sitting on furs before I’d even registered the command. Isabeau slipped away before I could ask her to stay. Kala bared her fangs at me in what I hoped was a smile. “You’ve come to see, have you, my girl?”

I nodded. “To see the prophecy.”

She cackled. There was no other word for it. “Hope for you yet, then.” She shook a seed rattle hung with dog teeth before I could ask her what she meant by that. The sound bounced off the walls and reverberated off my bones. Even my fangs felt as if they were vibrating inside my head. With her other hand she used a fan of cedar branches to waft smoke from a small fire set in a circle of white stones. I coughed and my eyes burned. The smoke was thick and green and tasted odd, coppery. She chanted in a language I didn’t recognize until I felt dizzy and disoriented. The smoke clung to my hair, to my eyelashes, inside my nostrils. The chanting
and the rattling stopped abruptly, and the silence was so sudden I flinched.

Kala reached over just as suddenly, and drilled the tip of her index finger very hard into the spot between my eyes. “See.”

Everything went black.

Chapter 9
N
ICHOLAS

“What happened to you?” Marcus asked when I ducked into the barn that doubled as Uncle Geoffrey’s laboratory. Acres of scrupulously clean tables gleamed under track lighting. There were microscopes, an ultrasound machine, even an X-ray machine, not to mention shelves of machinery whose purposes were unknown to me. Marcus stood in front of a row of test tubes filled with blood. He wore a white lab coat and his hair was disheveled, as if he’d been running his hand through it.

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.