Chapter 10
Chapter ten
Kyren
As my car pulled up to the iron gates the Durand Supernatural Academy, I stared hard at the crow emblem and felt nothing.
Normally, just seeing the emblem was enough to rile my blood and put me in a foul mood.
Except, somewhere between now and the first time I laid eyes on Jack, that smoldering flame of hatred for them had flickered out.
I didn’t want to be angry anymore. Didn’t want to mourn Kleon for the rest of my immortal life. Not when there was so much more waiting for me in return.
I had Tate by my side. My loyal goofball of a wolf who’d never leave me or betray me, even when we are in a disagreement. He’d proved that ten times over with everything that had happened with me and Jack, putting him smack dab in the middle of our issues.
Then there was Jack.
It felt unnatural not to be at her side. Not to be watching her from the shadows. And yet I’d let someone that was long dead to this world come between us.
Before I’d known she was a Durand, I thought I’d found the one to complete Tate and me. She was perfect. Strong. Brave. Feisty. And, best of all, she accepted both Tate and me together without question.
I’d killed for her more than once. I didn’t think there was anything I wouldn’t have done for her. She was ours.
Now, even knowing who she was and how she played a part in my sire’s death, I still found myself tracking her every movement.
Even killing those who would talk badly about or threaten her.
So, even if my brain told me that I shouldn’t be with her for vengeance’s sake, my heart and body had not gotten the message.
They craved her and urged me to be with her on their own.
Yes, I was too far gone. Jack owned me completely, inside and out. It was the only explanation I had as to why I would risk the possibility of being seen by humans to get rid of that annoying vampire bitch.
“You okay?” Tate squeezed my hand in the passenger seat.
I nodded stiffly, not answering.
Tate knew I was reluctant to come back here, not after everything that had happened. But, if I wanted to nip this group who have their sights on Jack in the bud, then I needed to be at the academy.
That loudmouth, Gavin, who approached me weeks ago was the only hint I had into figuring out who was in this little group of rebels and how to get rid of them before they tried to touch my woman again.
Parking the car, I sat there for a moment letting it idle, staring out the front wind shield.
“You know,” Tate began, shifting in his seat to face me, “you don’t have to do this. I can ask around and find out who’s got their eyes set on our girl. You can just watch from the shadows. No one would be the wiser.”
“I would,” I snipped, my fingers tightening on the steering wheel. “They’ve threatened Jack for the last time, and I will be damned if I let them have the chance to hurt her again.”
Turning the car off, I shoved out the door. The memory of Jack bleeding, barely breathing on my doorstep, infiltrated my mind like a nightmare on repeat. I never wanted to see her like that again. Weak. Dying.
A part of me was thrilled that she had come to me as her refuge.
It told me that I still held a place in her heart, even after I’d shunned her.
How she could still want me after how I treated her?
How she didn’t see my sire’s face every time she looked at me?
I didn’t know and probably would never know.
It was an uncertainty I would have to live with for the rest of my immortal life. And I would gladly do it to just be near her again. To breathe in her scent. Even if she never allowed me to touch her, taste her again, just being by her side would be enough for me.
Tate caught up to me, his fingers looping through mine. “So where do you want to start?”
“The vampire woman. Marianne. If she knows Gavin, then she must be a student here. I bet we can find her room here.”
“So we find her room and then what?” Tate asked, directing us toward the vampire dorms.
“Then we—” I stopped, sniffing the air. It was faint but I would recognize that scent anywhere. “She was here.”
“Who? Marianne?” Tate lifted his nose up and sniffed the air as well. “Jack? Why would she be on campus?” Then he cursed and rubbed his face, letting out a hard laugh. “Of course. Of course, this had to be why she ended our date early.”
I surveyed the quad, searching for the answer to why Jack had been here. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, I turned back to Tate. “I don’t understand.”
“Come on.” Tate tugged me toward the dorms. “I bet she went to see Xinyi.”
Unsure what was on Tate’s mind but feeling the determination coming down our bond, I followed him into the Vampire’s Crypt. I sent my shadows a head of us, searching the corridors for any signs of Jack.
Much to my disappointment, there were no signs of our rule breaking human. Only annoying vampires and their human servants watching us like the nosy cabrones they were.
Tate stopped us at what I knew was Iris’s room. It was just after dusk so they shouldn’t be in class just yet. Though, after knocking on the door for several minutes, Tate frowned and turned from it with a shrug.
“Maybe they went to breakfast?”
“Don’t you have the human, Xinyi’s, number?” I had no desire to run around the campus searching for the two females when I had other matters to attend to. Besides, there was no guarantee they would be able to help us with our cause, let alone if Jack actually came to see them.
Pulling his phone out, he scratched the back of his head and scrolled through his contacts before tapping the screen and putting the phone to his ear.
I listened to the phone ring and then heard the chipper voice of the little dark-haired woman telling Tate to leave a message.
“Well, that was a bust.” Tate ended the call without leaving a message. “Split up? I’ll go check the cafeteria, you go… do what you do best.”
“And what’s that?”
Chuckling, he leaned down and kissed me on the lips. “Lurk.”
I sniffed, not bothering to give him a response to that. My eyes trailed after him as Tate headed toward the cafeteria. I rubbed a finger between my brows, contemplating where to search for answers next.
Marianne hadn’t been very forthcoming with who her friends were besides Gavin, not that I gave her a chance to tell me more than she had, but the thought of seeking out Gavin made me want to pull my fangs out.
With no other ideas, I forced myself to reach out with my shadows. They slipped under the doors of each room, searching and seeking out the vampire I needed. Until finally, they found him.
In a room four doors down, Gavin sat on the edge of his bed naked, face fucking a female I didn’t know or care to. Grimacing, I called my other shadows back to me and stalked down the hallway until I reached Gavin’s room.
If Tate had been there, he’d tell me to wait. Be polite. Knock on the door. Wait for him to finish. But I was done being polite. Done waiting for these fuckers to finally get their hands on Jack and then it would be too late.
Shadows grew behind me, blotting out the lights lining the ceiling of the hallway. I gathered them to me and, with a push, I shoved them at the door.
The wood, though thick, stood no chance against the force of my shadows.
It slammed the door open, knocking it off its hinges and filling the room with a darkness that was darker than dark.
The kind of dark that you couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face and there was no adjusting your eyes to it. Except for me.
The woman screamed.
Gavin shouted.
For a moment, I watched them both scramble in the dark. The female crab-walked backward as if the shadows were coming from Gavin himself until she bumped into my calves just outside of the darkness.
Head tilted back, her eyes moved up my body and then widened when they landed on me.
“Leave,” I ordered, only giving her a cursory glance before focusing back on the shadows corralling my prey on the bed.
Gavin flinched at my voice, then started to bob his head around as if he could see through the dark to me. “Kyren? Is that you? What’s with all the shadows?”
Step by step, I walked into the dark, the shadows parting around me like water, caressing and wrapping around my body where they belonged until I reached the end of the bed. I sent the shadows to the side so that he could see me, but not much else.
“Do you know a Marianne?” I asked, not bothering to beat around the bush.
Gavin blinked rapidly and swallowed. “Marianne?” he stuttered. “No, I don’t know any Marianne.” He shook his head back and forth so aggressively, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had fallen right off.
“Are you sure?” I put one foot up on the end of the bed, leaning on my knee with my elbow, my shadows creeping back in around him. “Because she knows you. At least, that’s what she said before I ripped her limb from limb.”
Gavin’s whole body shook, his chin wobbling before he swallowed. A human habit he was too young to have gotten rid of yet. “Oh, that Marianne. Yeah, I know her.”
“She’s part of the little group you wanted me to join, is she not?”
“Uh…” he began.
I allowed my shadows to send tendrils toward his naked body, in case he decided that he wanted to lie to me again. Satisfaction filled me every time he flinched away from them as if they were bugs crawling up his body.
“Yes, yes, okay.” he practically screeched, trying to push the shadows off of him. “She’s part of our group. Please stop.”
“Why?” My lips twitched at his fear. “I haven’t finished asking all my questions yet.”
Hissing, Gavin flashed his fangs at me. “I don’t answer to you.” Without warning, he flew at me.
My shadows were faster. With barely any effort at all they pinned him to the bed, one wrapped around each limb and one around his neck.
Sighing, I stepped onto the bed and knelt above him.
“Get the fuck away from me. I don’t fuck guys.”
My nose crinkled up in disgust. “I have no interest in your body or anything else of yours. All I want are answers.”
His muscles bulged in his arms where he tried to resist the strength of my shadows. I had no reason to fear he’d be able to break loose. I had more than a hundred years on him, and he was nothing more than a baby vampire with visions of grandeur.
“Fine, fuck!” he spat, his chest heaving though I knew he had no need to breathe. “What do you want to know?”
“Did you attack Jack a few weeks ago?”
“No?” Gavin’s brow furrowed, then he let out a hard laugh. Or tried to with the shadow squeezing his throat. “Someone got a piece of that Durand bitch? Did they kill her?”
A low growl vibrated through my chest. My hand replaced the shadow, the need to dig my fingers into his flesh and rip him apart the way I had Marianne was too close to the surface. “Watch your mouth.”
Gavin struggled against my hold, quickly scrambling to tell me whatever he could get out. “It wasn’t us. We aren’t that stupid. That bitch and her mom is a hunter.”
I yanked on his neck.
“Sorry! Sorry. I promise. It wasn’t us. We want to take the whole council down, but from the inside, not some random attack on one of their kids. That’ll just piss them off.”
“Who else wants the Durands dead?”
Gavin barked a laugh. “Have you looked in a mirror, dip shit?”
My jaw tightened, my hold on my shadow tenuous at best. I was seconds away from ripping the head off him. “Who else is in—?”
The click of a gun being cocked stopped me from finishing my question. My head turned slightly listening to the steady heartbeat of the new person. I sniffed the air and then said dryly, “Professor Fawley.”
If not for Jack’s fondness of the professor, I’d have already disarmed and ripped the hunter’s head from his body. Even though it would make things a hundred percent easier for me and Tate, I knew that Jack would be completely devastated if I hurt the annoying man before me.
Gavin’s eyes widened. “Professor, help me! He’s a psycho. He broke my door down and — ugh — mmmghfmmgg.” Shadows tunneled down his throat, muffling anything else he had to say.
“Get off the bed,” Professor Fawley ordered.
For a millisecond, I contemplated not doing as he asked. Would he really shoot me?
Not wanting to take that chance, I moved to follow his instructions.
“Slowly.”
Holding my hands up, a small smirk on my lips, I climbed off the bed and faced the hunter and then paused, a low growl coming from me as I caught the faint smell of Jack.
Fangs bared, all pretenses of being polite gone, I snarled at the hunter, “Where is she?”