“Excellent, Salma,” says the instructor. “Spoiler alert: The colonists won, and that’s what led to the founding of a little country known as the United States of America. Now, turn to page nineteen in the textbook, and let’s examine the Constitution, which remains to this day one of the most powerful governing documents in the world.”
William finds himself glued to the woman’s words. This is all new information to him.
Lore stiffens suddenly. As if she can sense his presence, her gaze snaps to the door—
Yet William is already climbing down the stairs. He returns to the basement, where he yanks books off shelves and flips through their pages. Only they are all blank.
In a fit of frustration, he knocks a whole shelf over, spilling its contents across the floor. Then he stalks off in search of more texts, leading him to a multistory library on the third level of the manor.
There must be hundreds of thousands of books here. Maybe even a million.
He locates the section labeledHISTORYand chooses a text with atimeline that predates him. He skims chapters about the conquests of Viking warriors, the rise and fall of the Roman empire, the devastation of Native American cultures—yet he comes across no mention of vampires.
How could that be?
Immortals have witnessed every epoch of man. For a while, they ran rampant on this planet, killing so many humans that by the mid-1300s, they had eaten their way through half the European population. And yet, the book William is reading blames those deaths on something called thebubonic plague.
More and more hearts beat in his ears as the library fills with students. William zigzags through the stacks, pinpointing people’s locations by their pulse and carefully avoiding them. Once he is back in the basement, after righting the bookshelf he knocked over and replacing the texts, he looks at the portraits on the wall. He only glanced at them earlier, but now he stares hard.
The first is of Grandsire. He is said to be the most ancient creature in the world. Some claim he was born in a time when witches still roamed the Earth. He is the closest thing the vampires have to a leader.
The next portrait is of Leonardo the Bloody—the second-most immortal being and the Legion’s most hunted vampire. He never agreed with Grandsire on the Treaty, believing immortals should go back to eating humans, not living among them.
The third face is…William’s. Only he does not remember ever sitting for that portrait.
He removes all three frames from the wall, just in case those students come back—or, worse, Legion hunters.
He still does not understand why no one came for him overnight. As soon as the girl escaped, he was certain the Legion of Fire would storm the basement. Given that he was too weak to run or hide, he was forced to await his inevitable doom.
Yet she sent no one after him. She even attended lectures as if she had nothing to fear.Why would she keep his existence to herself?
Footsteps interrupt his thoughts.
As the sounds grow closer, William identifies multiple people. The girl must have contacted the Legion after all. Unfortunately for them, they have miscalculated their timing.
Last night, he was weak.
Now he will kill them all.
CHAPTER 7lorena
I sit bolt upright.
One hour has passed. It’s the dead of night, and a silver veil frosts the room. I must have fallen asleep waiting.
I scan the bed by the window for Tiffany’s bright pink bonnet to make sure she’s asleep—but I don’t see it. In fact, there’s no sign of a body on her mattress at all.
“Salma?” I whisper. I get to my feet and look up. The sheets of the top bunk are tussled, but the bed is empty.
And the truth hits me like a punch to the gut:
They played me.
While I was waiting for them to pass out, they were waiting for me. Salma went to that basement with the others behind my back.
I don’t have the luxury of getting angry because they might already be dead. Panic snakes through my insides as I pull on my pants and slide into my sneakers. They must have made the plan to go in secret after I left dinner early.
As I zip up my hoodie, a shadow falls over the room, like a cloud drifting across the moon. When the darkness doesn’t lift, I look out the window.
