Blood Prophecy

CHAPTER 7



Lucy


Monday


The only reason I didn’t miss my first class was because Sarita stood over me after lunch and cleared her throat annoyingly until I groaned.

“You’re going to be late,” she informed me disapprovingly.

“I don’t care.”

“Attendance is mandatory.”

I rolled over, scowling at her through one eye. “Did you really just say that? Are you, like, fifty? We need to get you pierced or tattooed or something.”

“Lucy.” She sounded anxious. I knew being late and breaking the rules made her sweaty. We were like the worst pairing of personalities ever. She’d probably have a breakdown because of me before the Christmas holidays.

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” I swung my feet over the bed. Mud crumbled off my boots onto the carpet. This time, Sarita sighed. I had to laugh. “Poor Sarita. Think Theo will diagnose you with PTSD for having to deal with me?”

“If you think it will help,” she muttered.

I laughed again. More mud fell off my clothes. “I’d better hop in the shower.”

“Okay, but hurry.”

I grabbed my shower caddy and my bathrobe. “Don’t wait for me. You’ll just give yourself an ulcer.” I was tempted to skip classes altogether but I couldn’t afford to lose the access I had to Helios-Ra information. Not to mention that no one was going to let me stay at the Drakes’ now and if I went back home, my parents would enforce their 5:00 p.m. curfew. No thanks. So I had to go to class and stick to my routine and pretend I wasn’t plotting.

Sarita left, shaking her head and looking as if I’d just kicked a puppy in front of her. Honestly, the school administration was diabolical. I kind of felt bad for her. Especially when I saw how red her cheeks were when I rushed into class ten minutes late. The teacher looked unimpressed, Sarita looked downright nauseated. Jody smirked. I resisted the urge to throw a pencil at her. But only barely.

I spent most of my waking moments going through the books. I wrote in the margins on one, detention be damned. It was just so blatantly wrong. The Drakes didn’t lure drunk college students out of the bars and compel them to forget being fed on. Well, maybe Quinn used to, but I could guarantee none of those girls needed to be compelled.

At 2:00 a.m., I snuck out of my room and met Hunter and Chloe in the hall outside the ground floor guys’ bathroom.

“It’s the only one we can fit through,” Hunter explained as we stepped into the flickering lights. White and blue tiles covered the walls, just like the girls’ bathroom. “And I already shoved a pine branch over the camera outside, so we should be good.” She blinked at me. “What happened to your face?”

“Jody,” I said, explaining the bruises. “Apparently, I bug her as much as she bugs me.”

“Why are you in your pajamas?” Chloe asked me.

I looked down at my striped flannel bottoms. “Because my roommate is a tattletale,” I replied drily. She’d gotten worse since I freaked out after Nicholas disappeared and the headmistress asked her to keep an eye on me. “This way if Sarita catches me sneaking back in, I can convince her I was just in the bathroom or watching the common room TV or something.”

“Good plan,” Chloe agreed. “She’s a pain.”

“You have no idea,” I said. “She keeps trying to get me to organize my desk and iron my school cargos. Who does that?”

“Hunter does.” Chloe grinned.

“I don’t iron my cargos, give me a break,” she returned.

“But you do organize your stakes by size and weight.”

“Well, that just makes sense.” She raised her eyebrows at us. “Ready?” She stepped up onto the side of the urinal and wiggled out, making it look easy and graceful.

Chloe caught my eye. “That’s why we hate her just a little bit.”

“If my ass gets stuck give me a push.” I grinned back, trying not to slip and fall right into the urinal. The windowsill wedged uncomfortably in my belly as I wriggled out, feeling like a giant worm. Chloe followed, pushing her laptop case ahead of her.

It was snowing lightly, not enough to be really cold, just enough to make everything pretty. We darted from tree to tree, keeping to the shadows. Hunter used hand signals to warn us of cameras. We ducked into the bushes, climbed over a wooden farm fence and crossed the fields to the forest. The trail was narrow and barely noticeable, but both Hunter and I knew exactly where it led. I’d had my last date with Nicholas in the meadow at the end of the path. I didn’t want to think about what Hunter and Quinn did there.

This time, it was Spencer who waited for us on the other side of the cedars, perched up in a tree. “I thought you turned into a vampire,” Chloe teased, looking up at him. “Not a monkey.”

“Up a tree is about the only place I can hide from school patrols and Huntsmen,” he smiled, his blond dreadlocks and turquoise beads at odds with the flash of his eyes. “You guys are keeping bad company.”

“Not since you left.”

He climbed down, hopping nimbly from branch to branch. “Show off,” Chloe muttered. But she hugged him just as fiercely as Hunter did; the same way I’d hug Logan or Quinn. He stepped back, trying to hide his fangs under his top lips. Poor guy, up until recently he’d been a student at the academy and now he was one of the “enemy.”

“Use your school-issue nose plugs,” I suggested. “It helps.”

He blinked. “I never thought of that.”

“Here.” Hunter fished out a pair from the pocket of her cargos and tossed them to him. Something moved on the other side of the cedars. Everyone except Hunter froze. “It’s Kieran,” she explained, just before he came out of the shadows. “I called him.”

“I thought vampire hunters were supposed to be stealthy.” I tossed him a smile. He wore his usual black cargos and a painfully serious expression. He was going to have to learn that when you hung out with the Drakes, you had to keep your sense of humor. Sometimes it was the only shield you had.

He half smiled. “If I’m too stealthy with this bunch I’m likely to get staked.”

“True,” Hunter agreed, searching his face.

He nudged her shoulder. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah, right.” She snorted.

He turned to Spencer. “How are things at the camp?”

“Messy,” he said. “I prefer the Bower. Less mind control.”

I froze. “Has everyone else figured out Solange’s new little gift too?”

“Hard to miss.”

Kieran and I exchanged a grim glance. “And Nicholas?” I asked, even though fear made the words feel like needles in my throat. “Is he okay?”

“He’s in one piece,” Spencer answered carefully. I let out a shaky breath. “But he doesn’t say much, so I really don’t know. He sticks close to Solange or he takes off alone.”

“Is she . . .” Kieran paused, clenched his jaw. “The same?”

“Worse.”

“Newspapers are calling it the Dracula Killer,” Spencer said.

“That’s not her,” Kieran and I both said in unison. I hoped I sounded more confident than he did. He just sounded desperate.

“That’s why we need to talk to you,” Hunter said. “Lucy has a theory.”

“Can vampires be possessed?” I asked.

Spencer looked briefly intrigued. “I never really thought about it, but I guess so. I mean, I don’t see why not. It would probably be pretty volatile. Vampires and magic tend to clash. It’s a delicate balance at the best of times.”

“Believe me, I know,” I said. “But I think Solange is possessed. It’s more than bloodlust that’s making her like this.”

“She has three sets of fangs,” Spencer pointed out. “That’s . . . unique. Outside of the Hel-Blar, anyway.”

“I know I’m right about this.”

Chloe bit her lip. “Don’t be mad, Lucy. But don’t you think you could be reading into things? Seeing things you want to see?” I shook my head stubbornly.

“Possession could explain the change in her,” Spencer agreed slowly, as he considered what I’d said. His brow furrowed. “I only met her once in the Bower with Constantine but she seemed nice. Quiet.”

“She was with Constantine?” I frowned as Kieran swore under his breath. “What’s with that guy, anyway? Who is he?” I added him to my list of things to research.

“I don’t know,” Spencer said with a ghost of a smile. “I’m new to the whole vampire thing, remember?”

“Can you find out?” Kieran asked quietly.

“I can try, but I don’t go into the camp much anymore.” Spencer looked thoughtful. “There was a hell of a magic punch when she put the crown on. Knocked us all off our feet.”

“Did you write an essay on it yet?” Hunter asked.

Spencer grinned. “Just some rough notes.”

Chloe groaned. “I hate you both.”

“I didn’t hang around long enough to get real data,” Spencer added, serious again. “Not after Lucy told me about Jenna in the woods. And I can’t get back in, not if I don’t want to be brainwashed.”

“Could the Hounds get in?” I asked, crossing my arms against the cold. Spencer was in a T-shirt and ripped jeans and he looked perfectly comfortable. “They must have some sort of shielding spell or something, right?”

“Maybe. But even if you got in, what could you do?”

“I could punch her in the nose,” I muttered. “I owe her.”

“I’ll e-mail you and Kieran a list of books,” Spencer promised. “There’s reception in a few spots near the Bower, if you search hard enough for them. It’s just far enough away from the Blood Moon signal blocks.”

“Connor probably did that once they were exiled,” I said.

“The magic blast could have opened the door to spirits,” Spencer continued. “It’s not impossible, anyway.”

“It’s a place to start,” I said, feeling more hopeful than I had since before Nicholas went missing, since even before I’d found Solange with Kieran’s blood on her lips. “Thanks.”

Hunter, Spencer, and Chloe caught up for a few minutes, referencing inside jokes and chatting about people I didn’t know. Kieran just stood there, hands in his pockets, practically vibrating with suppressed frustration. Worse yet, he looked sad.

“Are you okay?” I asked him. I knew how he felt, how it was like being swallowed by winter, so that even your insides were too stark and too cold.

“Hart’s good at what he does,” he said bleakly. “But I don’t know how long he can hold the League back, especially with Huntsmen in town. It’s getting ugly, Lucy.”

“Which is why the Drakes are so lucky they have us to clean up their mess.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I’m always right,” I teased him.

“We should get back,” Hunter cut in, glancing at her watch. “Chloe’s got the next security patrol clocked. We have ten minutes.” Spencer faded soundlessly into the forest after Hunter and Chloe both hugged him good-bye. As we headed back through the bushes, Hunter shot Kieran a speaking glance. “Call me.”

Kieran nodded and hopped the fence, cutting through the lawns toward the road. We followed the path back to the dorms, mulling over the events of the night. Hunter gave the swan a wide berth as Chloe snickered. Her snickers cut off abruptly as we came around the side of the dorms, toward the guys’ bathroom.

Headmistress Bellwood was waiting for us just outside the open window, her arms folded. Even her black winter coat looked stern and disapproving.

“Good evening,” she said frostily. “It seems you’ll be joining Jody and her friends in bathroom duty for the rest of the month. Plus two demerits.”

Chloe opened her mouth to protest, thought better of it, and snapped it shut again.

“A wise decision.” The headmistress approved. “I’m not interested in your excuses. You know the rules and you must know how foolhardy it is to sneak off campus now of all times. Get to bed, all of you.”

“Damn vampires,” Hunter muttered crossly as we went around to the front door. “They just cost me my perfect school record.”

“What are you complaining about?” I sighed. “My mom’s going to make me meditate.”