Isle of Night (36 page)

Why did it seem like those would be his last words to me? It was impossible to swallow around the ache. I tried to breathe, but the pain was sharp.

I would go on a mission with Alcántara and I'd escape. Which meant I wouldn't see Ronan again. I knew this. I'd wanted this. So why did my heart feel like a sliver of glass lodged in my chest?

I looked back at the vampire holding me.

“Cariño,”
he whispered. “I, too, knew you could do it.”

His face broke into a smile. And not just any smile, but a smile worthy of sonnets. His mouth was just a little bit crooked, his expression wickedness and humor and hunger, all alight in eyes that were black like coals burning with an inner heat.

It was a smile just for me. I knew I'd never be the same.

“And now answer me,
querida
. Are you ready?” He stroked a slow finger down my cheek. “For it has begun.”

Read on for an excerpt from the next
novel in the Watchers series by Veronica Wolff,

VAMPIRE'S KISS

Coming soon from
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

 

 

 

 

 

A
s my friend Yasuo the vampire Trainee would say,
Headlines.
As in, here they are:

I sat with Emma on the sand, contemplating my situation, but my uncharacteristically optimistic outlook was squashed as I realized my butt was getting wet. I shifted, peeling the cotton shorts away from my skin. “Dammit. Are you
sure
he said the beach?”

Today's gym class was to be held outside, and my friend and I had shown up early—partly because we took every chance we could to hang out, and partly because the new gym teacher totally freaked us out. Ronan had been our instructor last term, but he'd gone away to God knew where, so some guy named Otto was his replacement for the summer semester. He was a Tracer like Ronan, meaning one of the guys responsible for tracking and bringing girls like us to this sorry island—only this particular guy didn't strike us as someone to mess around with.

“He said the beach.” Emma gave me one of her signature flat stares, and I rolled my eyes. I knew the saying went “still waters run deep,” but did she have to be so damned still
all
the time? Sometimes a little expression was called for.

Sadly, I often had expression enough for both of us. Like, just the thought of which bizarre oceanfront punishments might await us that morning was causing me to get surlier by the minute. Not to mention I was hyperaware of the damp sand now—it stank like dead sea creatures and was lumpy with pebbles and jagged bits of shells that were digging into my skin.

“I hate beach days,” I grumbled, not ashamed that I probably sounded like a four-year-old. But Tracer Otto had a thing for doing sit-ups while being thrashed by the freezing surf, and I wasn't the biggest fan of swimming. I'd recently learned how, but I doubted I'd ever get used to the sensation of water whooshing into my nose and ears.

I thought of our new teacher's sharp, austere features and wellcombed blond hair. “Or maybe it's just that I hate
Otto.
Him and that German accent. It's like he's auditioning for the role of Evil Nazi Number One in a remake of
The Sound of Music.
”

Emma looked nervously over her shoulder. “You should hush.”

“Yeah, yeah, Farm Girl. I'm hushing.” I straightened my legs in the sand—even with the vampire blood to speed my healing, they were looking ugly, my knees mottled yellow and pale green with fading bruises. I scraped a shell from where it'd stuck to my calf and began snapping it into tiny shards.

Other girls began to drift in, wandering along the sand, waiting for class to start. Our numbers were fewer now—fighting your peers to the death had a way of trimming the student body—and I noted some were doing their best to conceal limps and other injuries, some fresh, some still lingering from the recent Directorate challenge. It may have been summer term, but the vampires weren't about to let up on our physical trials to give us a chance to heal. Only the strongest and the fiercest survived.

Emma sidled closer in the sand, reading my thoughts. She pitched her voice low, knowing as well as I that none of the other girls could be trusted. “Not many of us left.”

“And we'll lose more this summer.” My words were a harsh whisper, but they were true. Our numbers would dwindle each semester, until only a handful of our original group remained. I thought of the girls who'd died already and tried not to consider what it might mean that I'd forgotten so many of their names.

“I imagine more will arrive in the fall.”

I gave Emma a sour look. “More of
these
people?”

“Well, now that Lilac's gone, they'll need to give you a new roommate.”

I shuddered. “Is that your way of putting a bright spin on things?”

It chilled me, but Emma was right, and I studied the other Acari, which was the creepy name they had for us girls. It was clear the vampires had a penchant for good-looking teenagers—everyone here was pretty in some way, if not outright gorgeous. It was annoying and sexist and gross, though thinking about it, if you were training an army of Watchers—which, as far as I could guess, meant female agents/assassins/guardians—they might as well be easy on the eyes.

Other than that, we were a mixed bunch. Farm Girl Emma, accustomed to hard work and solitude, was fairly unique on the island. Lilac had also been a rare breed—of the rich-bitches-gone-bad variety. We all had our individual talents, too. Mine was being a girl genius who knew how to take a punch (thank you, drunken, no-good dad). And Lilac had been a pyro—witness, for example, my shaggy, burned-off hair.

But there was one distinctive characteristic each of us shared: We were all outcasts. Gang girls, runaways, you name it—we'd all fled our homes, and not one of us was missed.

Emma eyed the other Acari along with me. “I noticed some of the Tracers are gone. They must be out gathering new girls.”

Her comment got me thinking. Was
that
where Ronan went? He was rounding up new candidates for the next incoming class?

Like all good Tracers, his job was to identify, track, and retrieve fresh batches of Acari, doing whatever it took to convince girls that leaving life as they knew it for some distant rock in the middle of the North Sea—where they were either good enough to become Watchers for a bunch of vampires or they
died
—was a good idea. I didn't know how other Tracers did it, but Ronan had special powers of persuasion at his disposal.

Emma guessed where my mind was. “
That's
probably why you haven't seen Ronan,” she said in a gentle, understanding tone that annoyed me.

“I wasn't thinking of Ronan.” I frowned, because I was
totally
thinking of Ronan. He was one of the few people on this island—hell, he was one of the few people in my
life
—who'd ever shown concern for me. He'd managed to weasel his way into my consciousness—the dream of having a guy to look out for me like a thorn in my heart that wouldn't leave me be.

And, of course, I was remembering how he'd duped me, too. When he'd approached me in a Florida parking lot, I'd thought he was just a hot college guy giving me some deeply soulful looks, but it turned out he'd been trying to hypnotize me.
Hypnotize
, for God's sake.

But my mind wasn't that easily swayed—being a kid genius had to be good for something, I guess—and he'd had to use both eyes and touch to persuade me to follow him onto the plane bound for
this
rock.
Eyja nœturinnar
, they called it. The Isle of Night. Which at the moment was a laugh, because summertime, or the dimming, as the vampires so annoyingly referred to it, meant zero hours of dark per day. Just unending gray, gray, gray sky pressing down on us.

Once, I'd been afraid of the dark, but Ronan had warned me I'd miss the black of night. He'd
known
. As he seemed to know and understand so many other things about me. Really, if I'd thought about it, I could've said he was one of my first friends.

So I tried not to think about it.

Instead, I stared out across the roiling gray sea, pretending I didn't have any use for hot guys and soulful looks. And who was I kidding? I missed Ronan. Like, really missed him. Not just as a teacher, though I'd have traded just about any other Tracer for Otto. But something was, I don't know, missing without him around.

Like Ronan's steady green eyes, always so focused on me.

“Okay, so you're
not
thinking about Ronan,” Emma said, and I heard the skepticism in her voice. She shifted, considering. Long speeches weren't her way, and she spoke slowly, choosing her words with care. “It just seems like you've been . . . distracted since the Directorate challenge. I used to see you and Ronan talking a lot. But then there was the competition, and you won, and then I didn't see you two together anymore, and I thought maybe—”

Emotion stabbed me, so sharp and sudden that I had to scrunch my face against it.

She thought maybe I might miss him? She thought I'd taken him for granted? She'd be right on both counts.

I cut her off, saying, “I just have some questions for him is all.”

Like, a
bunch
of questions. Questions I'd never ask, of course. After I'd won the competition, beating Lilac and winning a trip off-island and a shot at escape, I'd caught him watching me, and something about the look in his eyes—regret? grief? longing?—haunted me.

What had the look meant? Did he know I planned to escape?

“Do you think he's jealous of Alcántara?” Emma's voice was barely a whisper, which was the wisest course when discussing a vampire. Particularly Hugo de Rosas Alcántara, of the fourteenth-century Spanish royal court.

“Jealous?” It would imply there was something between me and Alcántara. Though I
did
suspect he'd had something to do with my winning. And then there was the way the vampire had scooped up my broken body to hold me close after my victory. But if Ronan was jealous, it'd mean he was interested in me. My belly churned. “No way. Ronan's not jealous.”

He'd probably just been disturbed by the glimpse of my dark side, perceiving the secret, savage pleasure I'd taken in beating my rival. Because even I had trouble considering
that
. “Maybe the whole fightto-the-death thing weirded him out more than he let on.”