It was the equivalent of a smorgasbord, and even better, none of them were people I knew or would have to encounter again. Unlike the drama buffet I regularly tried to ignore in the halls of my high school.
I could sip freely here and no one would notice or realize that every time they felt dizzy I was always in the vicinity.
I was giddy with the sense of freedom and took gulps everywhere I could, dropping back from the rest of my classmates or shifting position on the sidewalk to bring myself into proximity with another source.
It lasted about six minutes, give or take. Just long enough for the spawn Kevin Gresham to sense what I was doing and charge down from his office on the thirty-fourth floor of the high-rise building on the other side of the bridge.
I saw him charging toward me, just a dadlike guy, balding, ina pair of chunky New Balances, khakis, and a short-sleeved polo with an ID swinging around his neck on a lanyard. Honestly, it didn’t even occur that he was coming for me.
Until his hand closed over my throat. Not that hard. It didn’t have to be. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. I could feel my pulse in my throat speeding up, pumping all the moisture right out of me and into his waiting hand. The vampire legend exists for a reason, but the biting thing is bullshit—a creation from humans who need a method of feeding that makes sense to them and their limitations.Hello, we have magic.
“The Sanguine spawn, he took my presence and feeding as a challenge. He attacked me and I…” I grimace. “I defended myself.”
Panic rose in me, accompanied by a loud buzzing in my ears, and I thrashed trying to get free. But Kevin’s hold was firm, and it dawned on me—far too late—that this wasn’t just some rando attacker who had a thing for teenage girls.
He was likeme, but not. One of the other spawn, a child or descendant of another Old One. Just as my father had told me about. He’d warned me to feed only near home. I thought it was just another one of his control tactics, trying to get me to do what he wanted, the way he wanted.
“I would choose differently today, but back then, I just… reacted.” Acting on instinct and those long-ago lessons, I ripped life out of my attacker. I don’t even remember searching for the brightness of his life. I was in survival mode.
He hadn’t aged, just keeled over dead. And when his dead weight toppled toward me, I shoved him right over the bridge railing. And people started screaming.
“The police arrested you, but you got off because they didn’tknow, they didn’t understand how anyone could do something like that,” Chessa says, waving her phone. I catch a glimpse of a screen full of tiny words. “They thought he had a heart attack. All they got on camera was him grabbing you and you shoving him back.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s how it works.”
Chessa’s mouth works soundlessly in fury. “That’s not right. It’s notjust.” She sounds exactly like I did, when I learned how I would have to sustain myself for the rest of my life.
I try to keep the sympathy from showing on my face; it’ll only make her angrier. “You’re right. But this is not the world you think it is,” I say. “Human justice isn’t really a—”
“It should be!” She slaps her phone down on the breakfast bar and holds up her fistful of crumpled papers. “And what about these?”
“I don’t know what those are,” I say.
“All the people who’ve died since you started going to school here.” She shoves them closer to my face.
The first sparks of anger catch in me. “I told you, I feed but I don’t kill.”
“Not even Tara Laurie?” she demands.
Tara.It takes me a second to place the name. “The girl from freshman year?”
“She lived on your wing in Corey Hall, two doors down from your room.”
Chess and I weren’t roommates back then, not yet. But we were friends. For some reason, that makes it hurt more.
“Tara’s not dead. She transferred.” After a very public suicide attempt, so I understand Chessa’s mistake. But I had nothing to do with that.
Chessa consults her scraps of paper. “Freshman year. BryceMyer, Alyssa Hendrix, Jonathan Weiss, Aaliyah Cantu, Victor Garc—”
“Aaliyah died before we were even here,” I cut in. “Remember, she was the cautionary tale they kept circulating during orientation about not lying in the street when you’re drunk?”
She looks only momentarily deflated. “What about the rest of them?” she persists.
Jaw tense, I shake my head. “You know that Beecher has a reputation for—”
“If this is going to be an inquiry into every person who has died in Beecher, can I suggest that there are better ways to spend our time?” Devon says.
“No!” Chessa shouts, her hands shooting down to her sides, pages crumpling in her grasp.
