Page 119 of Slayer

Harper and Luna grinned at me, and I tried to smile back, but it was flat.

Trust? I hadn’t told them anything. I was a fraud. I suddenly wanted to blurt everything out for everyone to hear, but it was too late for that. I had to focus.

I glanced at Asher to see him stone-faced. I wished he’d have let me explain more, but I understood his running off.

We waited patiently as the new units were assigned. Whoops and cheers rang out through the crowd except for Asher and I. We stood sullen, the other night going unsaid between us.

Greyson, Jasmine, Daphne, Clay, and Kurt were matched into a unit, and Asher’s gaze met mine. Did he want to be in a unit with her instead? Probably. I frowned, mentally pleading with him to forgive me, to trust me, but maybe I shouldn’t be trusted.

When we were all gathered into units, some having to pair up two trackers with two sentinels, we made our way back outside.

Harper and Luna squealed in excitement and linked arms with me, dragging me over to stand with Celia and her hunters along with Derek.

“Unit besties,” Luna said as she tugged on my arm.

“You nervous?” Harper asked, looking at my face.

I was having a hard time acting normal, and she knew me well enough now to read me.

“A little.” I smiled and she nodded. Nervous that Asher would never forgive me.

“Okay,” Celia called out to everyone as we grouped in front of the portal room. “Now you have to prove to yourself. To the conclave and to us that this is a good pairing. Go out there tonight and kick vampire butt, and then when you get home, you can take your oath and be sealed forever.”

Forever.

“Not really forever, just until death,” Luna stated, and Harper kicked her leg.

Luna vacillated between morbid and bottle of sunshine at any given moment. I loved that about her.

Celia walked over and handed us a hunting duffel bag. It had an emergency phone, a tracker of some sort that everyone had been trained on in high school and I had no idea how to work, a wafer tin, a med kit, and a map of all the portals in our city and the scheduled times for pickup tonight. Our unit and Daphne’s unit were going to Spokane tonight, which made me feel good. I knew my city well and at least felt confident in that. I overheard some of the other students were going to Boise, Idaho, Gilbert, Arizona, and other small to medium cities. Nothing big like Los Angeles or New York City. They were trying to train us, not kill us.

“Jax, how do you turn this one on again?” Harper called him over, and he clicked a button on the side to turn on the tracker. It looked like a smartphone but with an accompanying drone. Harper’s hands shook a little, and I knew she was probably nervous to have to be our tracker and find some vampires to kill.

Jax tossed the drone into the air while Harper practiced flying it around our group with the phone being the remote control.

“Is that heat-seeking?” I asked, peering at the phone-control module. It had arrows for up and down and left and right in the corner but otherwise was showing a bunch of red heat bodies. Our bodies.

“Yep. Ninety-eight point six degrees. Vampires show as blue. They run a temp of about sixty degrees.”

Fascinating.

Asher was talking strategy with Jax while Luna began to rifle through the wafer kit and take inventory. “Holy crap, they gave us everything.” She grinned, looking like a kid in a candy store.

I felt a little lost. Everyone had a part to play, and I was just standing here, ready to kill the bastards. There was no way I was a slayer. Just because I had the runes on my arms didn’t mean I was ready to lead a team and be the one with the highest kill count. But then I looked at Celia.

She stood tall and confident, hands loosely at her sides while she barked orders at her hunters to break up into groups. She was my idol, and I just needed to be more like her.

We then headed for the train portal in waves, five minutes apart. As our two units were walking to the train portal, I lagged back so that I could catch Asher alone for a minute.

“Hey, I have everything I can show you. My mom’s bank accounts. Her letter to me. I even have a picture of the day I was born in a storage unit here in Veil Haven,” I whispered.

He gave me a side glance, swallowing hard. “Let’s just focus on tonight,” he said and then sped up to catch up with Jax, completely shutting me down.

Pain sliced through my chest at his response, sharp and immediate, but I understood it. Or at least I told myself I did. I realized then what a two-faced liar I must have looked like. Hiding all this from people who were supposed to be my friends, people who were trusting me with their lives tonight. A depressive funk settled over me like a heavy blanket, thick and suffocating, because I had no idea how to fix any of this. And worse, I knew whatever fragile thing might have been starting between Asher and me was dead now.

Our unit and Daphne’s took the portal to Spokane and stepped out into Riverfront Park near the SkyRide. The city lights glowed against the river, deceptively peaceful, like nothing bad could possibly be lurking beneath them.

We clustered together automatically as a few skateboarders passed us, one of them slowing long enough to squint at our black leather gear. I overheard him ask his friend if there was a Comic-Con in town, and I almost laughed at the absurdity of it. They couldn’t see the weapons due to concealment runes, but over a dozen people wearing leather armor was odd.