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“Sure thing,” Layla says, snagging a small backpack from the chair in front of her desk and slipping Diana’s speech machine inside.
* * *
Half an hour later, we’re standing in front of the spookiest graveyard I’ve seen in a long time.
And I have the perfect excuse to come out to the woods tonight.
No one else here knows my real name, but Natalie does, and if I tell her I heard a rumor a Zion was buried on Lost Moon land and came to investigate, she’ll believe me. Especially since it’s true.
“Wow,” Layla says from a few crumbling tombstones over. “This one is from the 1800s. She was only seventeen. Clara Mason, born to the moon and gone too soon.”
“This one, too,” I say, studying what’s left of Tobias Zion’s once grand marker. The massive stone pedestal used to hold a statue of some kind, but all that remains are the legs and part of a wolf crouched beside them. “Seventeen.”
“They all are,” Diana taps out from the grass not far away where Layla set out her machine. “It’s so weird. That’s why I wanted to show you guys. And because it’s so pretty out here.”
“I was thinking creepy as hell, but okay,” Layla says, echoing my thoughts exactly.
Diana makes her warbling “laughing” sound. “I don’t know. I love old cemeteries. They’re so peaceful. And it reminds you to live big because it’s all fleeting.”
“It does.” I stand with a final nod to Tobias, hoping he was one of the good ones.
I don’t know much about my family tree before Hammer’s dad, who was allegedly the Alpha to end all Alphas. But maybe not all the men in my family were bad.
Ford isn’t.
But then Ford isn’t really a Zion. And thank God for that.
If we were actually related, I’d have no choice but to lock myself in a tower somewhere. I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I’d be able to stay away from him long-term. I wasn’t lying when I said I don’t feel whatever “fated mate” woo-woo thing he professes to be experiencing, but I want him. Badly. Way more than I’ve ever wanted a guy before.
That’s scary enough without throwing destiny into it.
“Do you think this is where the serial killing ghost comes from?” Layla asks, proving she’s done her digging on Lost Moon, too. She shudders. “Or what if they were all murdered by the serial killer ghost? What if he has a taste for young blood?”
“Well, we’re all older than seventeen, so we should be okay,” Diana says, proving herself even more pragmatic than I am.
“Girl, I’m only nineteen,” Layla says. “That still feels too close for comfort.”
“Valid. Want to see the old cabin I found?” Diana asks. “It’s a little deeper in, but not too far, and we should still be back in time for you to primp.”
Layla shivers again. “No, let’s go. Maybe I’m just scaring myself, but I’m starting to get bad vibes.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re somewhere you’re not supposed to be, Little Variant,” a silky voice rumbles from the tree line on the far side of the cemetery.
A beat later, a massive guy with closely shorn blond hair steps out of the woods. A second guy with thick brown hair pulled up into a loose ponytail is not far behind him.
“Didn’t your parents tell you not to go into the woods little girls?” the blond dude says, his lips curving in a diabolical smile. “You might run into a big bad wolf.”
“Or two,” the ponytail guy says, before adding in a chilling voice, “I want the curvy one. I like my Variant whore with a little meat on her bones.”
“Run, Juliet!” Layla sprints to the right, away from campus, clearly trying to draw them away so I can make it back to school, proving she’s as good a friend as my gut said she was.
But Diana has already exploded into the air and is flying hard toward the quad. I trust that she’ll find a way to get help, even without her voice box, and I can’t leave Layla alone.
The ponytail guy is already almost on top of her.
I’m not sure I’d be able to get away, anyway. Buzz cut is stalking me slowly now, but if I try to run, it wouldn’t be hard for him to catch up. I’m fast, but I’m still weaker than I should be, and my legs are half as long as his.
“A fight it is,” I murmur, tapping into the cold, rage-filled place inside of me, where the feral thing lives. I lift my fists and curve my lips into a smile, determined to fight so hard that this boy will have to kill me before he violates me.
