Blood Moon
Page 28

“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.”