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As was the case for 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.
So was he out there right now, looking at some other girl with those mysterious green eyes and touching her with that melting, hypnotic touch? I scowled.
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. His complete hotness aside, he was one of the few people on the 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 also remembering how he’d duped me. 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 næturinnar, 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, just as h
e 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 forest-colored 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, 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 guessed I was planning to make a break for it, but the prospect of never seeing him again made my chest feel as if my internal organs had somehow drifted out of place?
She’d be right on all 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. I’d won the competition, beating Lilac and winning a trip off-island and a shot at escape. But afterward, 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 Alcántara and me. 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 fight-to-the-death thing weirded him out more than he let on. ”
Emma solemnly shook her head. “He’s more used to that than we are. You two are friends. He wanted you to win. ”
“Friends?” I inhaled sharply. Friends was a dangerous word. Alcántara had warned me about friends. And besides, it wasn’t very friendly how Ronan had gotten me here in the first place.
I scraped my sandy fingers through my hair, cursing the jumble of thoughts in my head. I finger-combed some more, this time cursing my hair—such a hassle since Lilac burnt off my braid, leaving me with a shaggy, shoulder-length do. “Stupid hair. ”
What I really wanted to say was stupid Ronan.
Although he and I had forged a sort of alliance, the memory of his initial betrayal made me surly. When we first met, he’d touched me, and I still felt his fingers hot on my skin. And yet the reason he’d touched me wasn’t because he’d wanted to—not because he was a guy and I was a girl—but because it’d been his job to touch me. It’d been his job to make me so warm and gullible and dopey that I’d found myself on an airplane bound for nowhere.
I thought of the new girls Ronan was out there gathering. And touching. Every one of them a total teen hottie, no doubt.
“Great,” I said. “Either way, he’s out there, finding new friends for us to spar with, snipe at, stab in the back, and eventually kill. ”
Emma stared at me. If it weren’t for her blinking, I swear she could’ve been mistaken for a sphinx.
“Spit it out,” I told her.
