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CHAPTER ONE
His mouth.
Not quite full, not quite thin. Just the right shape for an easy smile. It hitched up at the corner when he got that look—the one that said he was thinking of doing something reckless.
I’d move closer, and he’d part his lips. His eyes would drift to my—
“Acari Drew. ”
The stern voice brought me back to myself. Crap. I was doing it again. Thinking about him. The vampire. My vampire. Carden McCloud.
“Are you paying attention?” my teacher asked. Thankfully, it was just Tracer Judge and not one of the vamps. Daydreaming in class when a vampire was your teacher was high on the list of Stupid and Possibly Deadly Things to Do.
Just after bonding with a vampire.
Like I’d bonded with Carden McCloud.
His mouth. A glimpse of fang, shimmering. I’d felt that fang, an accidental slip, a hot kiss. …
“Acari Drew?”
“Yes, Tracer Judge,” I said automatically. I gave a quick shake to my head to clear it.
Focus. I was in class. Combat Medicine. It was actually kind of cool. I wanted to focus.
I wouldn’t call myself a teacher’s pet, but I was the smartest thing they had going around here. My brains were what made me stand out. But it’d been my abusive, deadbeat dad who’d hardened me, landed me here on the Isle of Night.
Generally, every girl here had been an outcast in her former life. There were girls who’d called juvie home. Druggies and gang girls. Bad seeds. We were the sorts of girls who’d never be missed.
Only the most elite eventually became Watchers, and so vampires recruited only the strongest, the most ruthless. The best among society’s bad girls. But training was lethal, and survival demanded more. Something extra. Something special.
In the normal world, my genius IQ had made me a loser. A social reject. But here? Here it made me an object of fascination. Someone with possibilities. In a place that valued secrecy and cunning, smarts meant potential.
We all had talents, but all too often these were things like a proclivity for knife play or an inability to feel pain. (My pyromaniac, maybe-dead/maybe-not former roomie-slash-nemesis, Lilac, came to mind. )
Roommate. Now, there was a topic to consider.
As in where was mine? Fall classes had begun and there was still no sign of Lilac’s replacement.
Rather than seeing the empty bed in my room as a good sign, it freaked me out. There was no way the vampires were letting me have a double room all to myself, and it didn’t bode well that something was holding up whomever this new roomie was.
Had she already been selected? What would her gifts be? And would she view me as a freak, as Lilac had?
But, most important, would I be able to hide my relationship with Carden from her? Because this blood bond was proving to be…immersive.
I couldn’t get him out of my mind. And believe me, I tried. But I was drawn to him—his touch, his eyes. That mouth.
Kissing that mouth, I’d tasted the vampire blood I’d been drinking since my arrival on the island. The difference was, from Carden, it hadn’t been some refrigerated dose in a shot glass. It was hot and pulsing from the source, ringing with his life essence.
A tug of desire pulsed through my core, as though he were summoning me.
I scrubbed my hands through my hair. Must focus. I would not think about Carden’s blood. His blood had done something to me, altered me in a way I didn’t understand.
Things I didn’t understand made me intensely uncomfortable. And this was one thing I couldn’t ask anyone about. Carden’s warning echoed loudly in my head. Nobody could know about our bond.
“Answer my question,” Tracer Judge said with a peculiar note in his voice. He sounded annoyed, testy. “Preferably sometime today. ”
I gritted my teeth and brightened my smile. A whoops-sorry-I-zoned-out sort of smile. “It’s a compelling question, Tracer Judge. Perhaps you’ll rephrase it for me. ”
