Chapter 33
SADIE
Someone was watching me. I felt it in the prickle on the back of my neck, and all my instincts flared, lighting up like a fairground ride. Appropriate, since that was the only thing this ball was missing.
I threw a look over my shoulder as Elix and I walked past a vendor selling jars of orange jam and spiced pickle, the smells almost enough to entice me over.
Paige ditched us minutes ago when a tall, handsome slayer offered to buy her a drink.
Don’t worry, she said when Elix and I protested her leaving with the man, even in such a crowded space. I’ve got poison.
How the fuck she’d found that, I had no idea. I was kind of jealous.
The music coming from the lively band on the stage set a fun, upbeat atmosphere, but the feeling of being watched made me feel like I was in a horror film. That this fun, harmless festival was just a backdrop for something far more sinister.
The killer, I assumed, stalking us around the academy, from the booths to the tent where refreshments waited, to the stage where people already danced with reckless abandon, as if this wasn’t a school full of killers, as if these people were ordinary.
And for once, they didn’t look like murderers and wolf hunters.
I would never look at the scene and think most people had blood on their hands.
But I could never forget it. I could never forget that the historic halls I walked had been walked by generations of killers, that the room in which I slept sat upon a hallway full of active murderers who would butcher me the second they found out I was a wolf.
Or maybe they would anyway, if I fell behind in our sessions.
Cheer up, Elix wrote on her part. She’d found a way to attach straps to the red dress, which had improved her mood, and she hadn’t stopped smiling since we stepped outside the main doors and into the fair that had sprung up around our murder school.
To aid me in cheering up, she purchased two long skewers wrapped in deep fried cake, basted in a cinnamon syrup. She handed me one with a smile as sweet as the delicacy.
I knocked my shoulder into hers, and said, “Thanks. I’m just in my head about what happened with Lawrence. I didn’t mean to beat him up like that, I just wanted to humiliate him.”
Elix knocked her shoulder back into mine. With her cake shoved in her mouth so she could use both hands, she wrote, don’t feel bad about it, that’s what these lessons are for, right?
“Yeah,” I agreed, but my heart wasn’t in the reply. It was hard to explain why losing control was a bad thing when I could never tell her why. I could never explain that it wasn’t beating Lawrence up that was the problem but risking exposure.
“I’m just not used to it,” I added when she waited for me to elaborate. “Fighting people, hurting people like that.” Flippantly I added, “Selling shoes isn’t much of a contact sport, you know? I’m not used to…”
Liking it, she wrote, syrup dripping down her chin. Yeah, me too. Sometimes during training, it starts to feel too good.
“Exactly,” I agreed, relieved that she understood even if she could never understand why I feared how much I enjoyed sparring.
There were eyes on the back of my neck again. I squinted into the forest behind the refreshment tent. Movement flickered in the dark, just beyond the boundary. The killer.
Panic charged through my heart like a gunshot. Suddenly, the only thing that mattered was getting Elix away from this place. I had two people left that I could trust, maybe three if I counted Rogue. But I couldn’t fully trust the vampire when I didn’t know her motives.
“Is that Paige?” I asked, guilt gnawing at my stomach when Elix turned without question. “Shouting for us?”
The moment her back was turned, I took off running for that shadow I sensed watching me in the forest. There were full-blooded vampires in the academy, capable of taking down a killer; it would have been more sensible to raise the alarm.
But I was a wolf now, and it was time to find out what these claws and teeth could do.
I was angry enough for my rage to override common sense.
I’d never been much of a hero before, and I couldn’t say that I went after the killer out of selflessness.
All I was thinking was that I couldn’t lose the last people in any world that cared about me.
I had people who gave a shit whether I lived or died, and this killer was a threat to that.
How long before the next victim was Paige or Elix?
I wasn’t thinking straight, and I knew that, even though I couldn’t stop myself. As I went across the boundary, slipping into the shadow between trunks before anyone could spot me, I realised why my common sense had suddenly taken a knock to the head.
It wasn’t the killer watching me from the trees. It wasn’t even Leander, come to beg my understanding for him murdering Oona.
Cold blue eyes met mine in the darkness, as I snarled, “What the fuck are you doing here, Lainsz?”