Hotbloods (Hotbloods #1)

I dropped to the floor and crawled to the bathroom, using the sink to prop myself up so I could rinse my mouth out. After a minute, I felt ready to try and stand again, and this time I did so successfully, without all the blood rushing from my head.

I stared at myself in the mirror. My blue eyes were bloodshot, and my brown hair looked like I had been dragged backward through a jungle. My clothes were torn, and my shins and knees were covered with cuts, scrapes, and bruises.

I returned to the bedroom, glancing at the window sill. The coldbloods couldn’t have known that we had been sleeping in the treehouse, and must have slipped us in here through the open window. I was surprised to see each of our flashlights resting atop the sill, along with the black waist bag Lauren had been wearing. It was thoughtful of them to return those, too.

“Hey,” Angie said from behind me, rubbing her eyes and holding her head like she had a hangover.

“Hey,” I replied as I sat back down on the bed and folded my legs beneath me. “How are you feeling?”

“I’ve felt better,” she croaked. “But I remember everything. And I don’t feel like I’m dying—yet.”

She leaned over to Lauren’s bed and shook her awake.

“No! Stop! Wha-What are you—” Lauren babbled, as she rose to consciousness. She bolted upright, her dark hair pointing every which way. She stared at us blearily before reaching for her glasses, which had been left on her bedside. Another thoughtful touch, I noted.

“Are you okay? Do you remember?” Angie asked.

Lauren groaned, closing her eyes again. Her brow furrowed, and then she nodded. “Yeah. I remember. And I… I think I feel okay. Just like I could sleep for another six hours.”

“Okay, good,” I said. At least we hadn’t gotten sick from whatever we had drunk—not yet, anyway.

“Girls? Are you awake?” Mrs. Churnley’s voice called from downstairs.

Guilt gripped my chest as I remembered what it had meant to her that we sleep outside in the treehouse—after all the trouble she had gone to show it to us, and Mr. Churnley bringing up special bedding. I felt awful.

I stumbled to the door and opened it, calling down, “Hi, Mrs. Churnley. Yeah, we’re awake. I’m-I’m sorry we—”

“Slept so long?” Mrs. Churnley asked, and I was sure there was a slight note of disappointment in her tone.

“Yeah, we, uh…” I looked back over my shoulder at Angie, struggling to come up with a reason why we had come back indoors.

She came to my rescue. “We got a bit chilly out there in the treehouse, surprisingly, once early morning kicked in. We would love to sleep there again tonight, with some heavier blankets. We didn’t get a great night’s sleep, which is probably why we slept in so late.”

“Ah, I see.” That seemed to placate Mrs. Churnley. “Well, lunch is almost ready.”

“Thank you so much,” I replied. “We’ll be down soon.”

We closed the door and backed into the bedroom, turning to look at Lauren. I stuck a hand in my pocket and pulled out the two silver vials. My friends retrieved theirs, and a long moment of silence passed between us. I was sure we were all realizing the same thing.

Pretending last night hadn’t happened was going to be hard.



My friends and I were so quiet during lunch it prompted Mrs. Churnley to ask us several times if we were okay. A part of me wished we could tell them the truth, but I felt bad enough about breaking my promise to Navan and not taking the Elysium, and it did seem that he and his companions had Earth’s best interests at heart—given their mostly gentle treatment of us, and the fact that they were keeping Earth a secret from their race. They could’ve been lying about that, I supposed, but they had seemed genuine. Otherwise, why would they have let us go, instead of abducting us back to their homeland for our valuable blood?

I shuddered as I recalled Navan’s description of his homeland; I felt sure he had good reasons for wanting coldbloods to remain a secret from humans. Besides, nobody would believe us anyway. The police would think we had lost our minds, and we didn’t even have the wing anymore for them to analyze. We had never even thought to take a picture of it.

We ate lunch quickly and then set about our chores for the day. We began with the garden, doing some general maintenance, and then swept and mopped around the patio where the dogs spent most of their time.

There wasn’t much we could talk about as we worked, since we were so close to the house. All the windows were open, and the Churnleys could hear us. But when Mrs. Churnley sent us to the overgrown blackberry bushes at the border of their land, near the woods, we eased up a little.

“A part of me still thinks it was a dream,” Angie said, bending down to pluck a cluster of plump blackberries by her knees.

“I’m past that,” I replied, dropping a handful of berries into my plastic bowl.

“Me too,” Lauren said. “It doesn’t feel any less weird though.”

I nodded, sighing. My head was still reeling, and the consequences of last night were beginning to hit me. We would have to spend the rest of our lives with this incident living in our brains. With our minds expanded and blown open, in a way nobody else’s on the planet was. It would almost feel like we were living in a different reality to the rest of Earth’s population, everything seeming suddenly so… terribly mundane.

You should have taken the Elysium, a small, nagging voice whispered in my head. Then you could have simply resumed your life, carefree and normal.

I couldn’t entirely dismiss the voice, because it held a note of truth. Sometimes ignorance was bliss. And yet, even now, in hindsight, I still couldn’t bring myself to regret our decision to throw the vials away. Yes, ignorance could be bliss, but sometimes the truth was simply too illuminating to let go of, in spite of the consequences.

At least I had Angie and Lauren for company. Without them, I probably would have been a lot more worried. Maybe a silver lining existed in all of this—maybe this incident would turn out to be the thing that kept us close in our adult years, even if physical distance tore us apart. That was the only comfort I could cling to as the aftermath of last night overwhelmed my brain.

We let ourselves fall into silence and focused on picking, and the steady, rhythmic activity helped to soothe me. Physical activity almost always did.

As I neared the edge of the bushes, however, I heard a noise coming from the woods. It sounded like voices—male voices.