Blood Fever: The watchers (15 page)

“I’ll bite.” I crossed my arms, bracing for it. “What’s sad, Guidon Masha?”

“I hoped maybe it was
you
who died.”

I looked at Emma. “Don’t the Initiates have their own dorm to go to?”

Maybe it was a dumb thing to say, but I was getting more and more fearless with girls like her. Stupid, maybe, but a big part of me thought maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t. This island had a lot of posturing, and I’d come to the conclusion it was a good idea to set yourself up as someone to be reckoned with.

Emma wasn’t dumb, though, and she gave me a warning look.

“I take any excuse to keep my eye on you,” Masha told me in her Russian-accented snarl. “One day very soon you will go down. It would be a shame to miss it.”

I gave her a grim smile. “I’m not out of the game yet.”

She took her whip from its little holster and began to slide it through her hands over and over. She peered around us to look at Mei-Ling. “Acari Mei,” she said slowly. “How do you like your new friend?”

“I just arrived. I have no friends.”

A naive person might think Mei-Ling was selling me out. I was not a naive person. That was the smartest thing my roomie could’ve said.

Masha gave her a sly smile. “Pretty answer, Acari. But you will need someone to watch your back if you are to live through the month.”

I pressed my thigh against my roommate’s in a silent show of solidarity, and though Mei didn’t so much as shrug, she nudged her leg firmly against mine.

In that moment, I decided my roommate’s stoicism was the awesomest thing in the world. Her face was utterly emotionless, and the nonresponse was aggravating Masha. The Guidon loved nothing more than terrifying her peers—what would she do if she were no longer scary?

Masha cut her eyes at me, then back to Mei. “Who is your combat instructor now that Angel was killed?” She was digging for something, I was sure of it. She thought I had something to do with the murders.

“Watcher Clara,” Mei said evenly.

Masha snorted a laugh. “Good luck to you. Clara trained Trinity, and she’s eager to see her killer found. She will be
very
interested to hear that you spend so much time with this.” She stabbed a thumb my way.

“Watcher Clara’s trained a lot of girls,” Emma pointed out.

“I’ve heard much about my roommate’s feats,” Mei said. “Are you suggesting she’s under suspicion for this as well?”

Masha gave a little shrug, a little innocent tilt to her head. “She had the motive and maybe the friend to help her.”

Was she implying Carden? Did she suspect something was going on between me and the Scottish vampire? Either way, it sounded to me like Master Alcántara’s words coming out of her mouth.

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Dangerous words, Guidon Masha.”

Emma bristled, and her arms flexed, practically vibrating with tension beside me. “Are you saying
Drew
had something to do with the murders? You’re nuts. It’s impossible.”

“I thought Guidons were stronger than the younger girls,” Mei-Ling said, her tone innocent and matter-of-fact. “Are they so easy to overpower after all?”

Masha’s face hardened. Even with Emma sitting between us, I could feel waves of anger wafting off her.

“Quiet,” Kenzie said, and her timing was impeccable. I suspected I was one comment away from a thrashing.

“This isn’t over,” Masha growled under her breath.

“So you’ve said.”

Kenzie banged on the window. “I said, listen up. I’ll make this brief. Another body was found. A
human
. He was drained.”

The room exploded with questions. This was
huge
. There was a small human community on the island, and though they sometimes worked for the vampires, driving cars, operating boats, or farming I don’t know how many bushels of those godforsaken
turnips the vamps were always feeding us, there was an unspoken pact. They didn’t bug us and we didn’t bug them.

We certainly didn’t
exsanguinate
them.

She raised a hand to silence us. “The Directorate is investigating. They are actively searching for the killer. The punishment will be death.”

Mei looked at me. “Vampires can die?” In her surprise, she hadn’t lowered her voice.

Kenzie heard and answered for me. “In a staking, they can.”

I sank low on the couch. Wow. The vampires must be pretty pissed if that was the message they were communicating to the masses.

“Who do they think did it?” someone asked.

I shivered. I knew who they
thought
did it. Alcántara had seemed suspicious of Carden from the moment I’d sprung him from that prison cell, making me wonder more than once how much the Spanish vampire had really intended to rescue him in the first place.

Carden was Vampire; I’d seen it firsthand. But I’d also seen something else in him—those flickers of concern for me, shreds of his old humanity that told me that, although he might be physically capable of the killings, Carden wouldn’t murder for sport.

“They don’t know,” Kenzie replied, sounding exasperated. “That’s the point. They’re escalating security island-wide. Until then, classes today and tomorrow are canceled. You’re in lockdown until further notice.”

The questions exploded again—“What
lockdown
? Can we eat? We can’t leave at all? What if I want to go to the gym?”—but Kenzie ignored all of them. “No more questions,” she said brusquely. Then she wove her way through us and left the room.

E
mma and I plopped on my bed, and Mei-Ling on hers. I flopped backward, staring up at the ceiling. So much for my ill-fated investigation. How could I hunt for evidence if I wasn’t even allowed to leave my dorm? “I am so sick of these four walls.”

When we’d heard the news that we were basically being quarantined, my first thoughts had been,
When will I see Carden?
It was as if I’d already decided I’d feed from him again. It was pathetic.

Mei-Ling misunderstood the reasons for my misery and gave me a sympathetic look. “We could sit in the lounge.”

“Nonstarter,” I said. The common area was plagued with girls angling for a fight. “The lounge is crawling with people. This is our only option.”

Emma turned onto her side to face me. “Sorry we can’t hang in my room.”

“Does your roommate ever leave?” I asked. “I’m so sure she was transcribing our last conversation. It creeped me out.”

“She did seem suspicious,” Mei said.

“Oh, totally,” I agreed. “I think she probably assembles her notes into little reports for the vampires.” The girl was so into life on
Eyja næturinnar
, she’d changed her name from Audra to Frost, and spent all her free time studying Icelandic and brushing up on her Norse legends. I thought the new name made her sound like one of the X-Men.

“She’s just an eccentric, is all.” Ever-forgiving was our Emma.

“Eccentric?” I rolled my eyes. You’d have thought Frost’s study habits would make her prime friend material for me, but the slavering look she got in her eyes whenever she came near a vampire was enough to turn my stomach. “She’s Master Dagursson’s pet. ’Nuff said.”

I put my arm over my head, covering my eyes. Most normal teens got to spend their free time talking on the phone, texting, or downloading stuff to their iPods. Not us. For all we knew, a whole new iPod had been invented since we’d arrived. “Nope. We’re stuck here, and I’m dying of boredom.”

“We could play Gin Rummy,” Emma said.

With a moan, I rolled onto my stomach. I wriggled, trying to get comfortable around the permanent ache in my gut. “Not again. I’m sick of cards.” But then I laughed, hearing how ridiculous my tone of voice was. “Sorry, guys. I’m sounding like a brat. I’m just cranky.” Cranky and in pain.

Emma smiled. “You’re not the only one.”

She had no idea. She thought she did, but if she was cranky, then I was
raging
. It was only day two of lockdown, and my Carden detox was in full swing, worse now that we weren’t even having chance encounters. I felt like I was dying without him.

The vampires gave us supplements—lockdown didn’t mean
starvation—but the refrigerated blood they served wasn’t the same. It was a weak substitute, like craving coffee and getting something old and watered down instead.

With a sharp inhale, I sat up. My friend was trying, and so would I. I would have a good attitude.

Emma sat up, too, and patted my back. “It’s totally understandable. We’re cooped up in here while there’s some crazy murderer out there.”

That wasn’t my problem, but I nodded just the same. She had no idea what I was going through, but this was one misunderstanding I was happy to embrace. Anything to get my mind off Carden.

Mei stood and pulled down the window shades, looking creeped out, as if the killer might be standing just outside. “It is disturbing.”

I caught her eye and gave her a nod. “Disturbing is exactly the word for it.” The vampires employed a few humans to do menial tasks and there was Ronan who actually had family on the island, but otherwise everyone kept to themselves. “A regular human person, drained of blood? It’s an aberration.”

“Drained and then just left there.” Emma shuddered.

Her words were a revelation. The fact that the bodies were left behind was in some ways the most shocking thing of all. “This breaks every rule they’ve got,” I said, feeling good to be engaged in something other than my own problems. “Any normal vampire would make the dead body disappear. For the killer to leave the bodies in the open to rot…it’s like he’s bragging.”

“Or
she’s
,” Mei amended.

“It’s gotta be a guy.” I ticked the reasons off on my fingers. “A vampire did this. Vampires are guys. Ergo the killer is a guy.”

“The vampire could’ve had help from a woman,” Mei said, defending her point.

“True enough.” I thought of Masha and her preoccupation with Alcántara. It wasn’t hard to imagine her or many of the other girls doing anything to earn vampire brownie points. But did she want vampire attention badly enough that she’d help kill her friend to get it?

Emma shrugged. “It could be a Draug.” She knew Draugs as well as I did, having fought one with me.

“We can’t rule it out,” I said, though I had a hard time believing it was anything but a thinking, scheming vampire.

“From what you learned on your mission,” Emma began carefully, “it seems like…” She looked from me to Mei and back again. “There might be other stuff, on other islands, that we still don’t understand.” She gave me a pointed do-you-understand-my-hint look.

She was hedging around one of my least favorite topics: Lilac. Subtle, Em.

Mei shifted to the edge of her seat. “Would you like me to leave?”

“No,” Emma and I said at the same time.

“No,” I repeated, rubbing my temples. Thoughts of Lilac did nothing to help my killer headache. “You can hear this.” I needed to trust my new roommate. What would my life be if I never trusted anyone ever again? Besides, I had a good feeling about Mei-Ling, and one of us had to take the leap. Who knew? Maybe if I confided in her, she’d open up a little more to me. “Look, this isn’t for public consumption, but…”

I proceeded to give her the full download. Lilac, the crazy pyromaniac roommate. How I’d supposedly killed her in the
Directorate Challenge. The weird tension between me and Alcántara on our mission together. The mysterious sighting of someone who looked exactly like her.

“Wait.” Mei stopped me, confused. And of course she was—I was confused, and this was my story. “Didn’t you see Lilac’s body? How could she be alive?”

I remembered back to that day. By the time our fight was over, I was covered in bruises, slashes, and third-degree burns. Not a lot else registered. “I thought she was dead.”

Emma spoke for me. “They took away the injured girls. They always do. We don’t know what happens to them.”

“Maybe it wasn’t her you saw,” Mei said.

“I thought I was hallucinating, but then I mentioned it to Alcántara and he wigged out.”

She looked alarmed. “Wigged how?”

“Nothing crazy. You know, he got all…focused. Distant.”

“Strange,” she said, frowning.

All I could do was nod at that, the understatement of the year. How or why Lilac could be alive and living with a bunch of crazy Germanic vampire monks was a mystery. And rather than put it behind me, it loomed out there like something that might come and bite me in the butt while I slept.

We were all quiet then, considering what it could mean, when Kenzie startled us out of it. She was walking down the hall, banging on doors as she went. “Lights out.”

Mei-Ling glared at the door. “She’s like the warden in a prison movie.”

I felt Emma’s hand on my shoulder. She whispered, “You going to be okay?”

I considered her question. I had a new roommate, and not
only was she
not
a psycho, she might end up being a friend. I gave Emma a true smile. “Yeah, I think I just might.”

After Emma left, Mei flicked off the lights as I got into bed. I chuckled in the darkness. “Talk about overwhelming you with information on your first week, huh?”

But her response was somber. “We could investigate.”