Authors: Elisa Elliot
ROMANCE: Mason (Bad Boy Alpha Male Stepbrother Romance Boxset) (New Adult Contemporary Stepbrother Romance Collection) (251 page)
I thought of Christian, of the odd times that there were rays of normalcy piercing the upper-class life I was leading.
“I think I’ll be okay,” I said, smiling.
We finished the biscuits and our conversation. Boris looked at his wristwatch and sighed.
“Well, back to work of both of us, then. Busy schedule.”
WE got up, and I hugged him. Boris stiffened, and patted my back. He’d never been great with intimacy, which was ironic for a warm leader like him.
We said our goodbyes.
I turned to walk back to class, but something stopped me. They didn’t know Boris was leaving. Cole hadn’t come back to the office yet. If I took this opportunity to slip away…
I turned and kept to the shadows, heading for the door. I poked my head around the corner, and noticed that Ms. Donovan wasn’t at her station. That would be a first. It was because school was in session.
I darted across the wide reception and through the glass door.
The night air was cold, stinging my lungs when I breathed in, but I ignored it. My feet were quick, taking the same path I always ran when I was late. It brought me back to my building, and I circled to the side of it where Christian and I had seen the walker.
I walked quickly to the wall. The guards would be focused on the outside, they were, after all, trying to keep enemies out. Still, I hurried so they wouldn’t see me. I didn’t need anyone to report me skipping class.
When I reached the walls, I stepped into the bushes and flattened myself against the wall. It was pitch dark here, the lights of the campus not reaching past the wall of growth. I moved along the wall, eyes searching.
About twenty yards further, behind the residence, I found the door.
It was an old, arched door, with wood so old it had silvered with the passing of time. It had a big brass handle with black spots on it because it hadn’t been polished in years.
It was the servant’s entrance. When I tried the handle, the door creaked, and then swung open. It hadn’t been locked.
Strange.
The wood was thick and moving it took some wrestling, but I managed to swing it half-open. I peered into the night, looking for what may lie beyond the school.
Tall trees stretched into a forest, leading away from the school. This was the city – with a forest in the middle. I wondered why it was so hard to believe walkers were among us, then. This was a new era, where everything was made easier with travel and technology.
I shouldered the door closed again, and fingered the key hole.
I managed to get back to class without being spotted. It was math, and Harris looked irritated when I opened the door. Why did I always have to be late when I had his class?
“Miss Frost. Nice of you to join us.”
I apologized and took my seat near the window. The glass was cold, and I leaned my cheek against it. I settled into drone-mode, only half-listening to the lesson. Across class Christian’s stare finally caught my eye, and he winked at me. I smiled at him.
I settled back in my chair, folding my arms over my chest.
A movement in the corner of my eye caught my attention, and I looked out the window. Against the night sky I could make a small shape making its way across the top of the wall. It paused, as if listening, long-haired ears shifting against the backdrop of the night sky. It reached the tree, climbed onto one of the branches, and made the jump to the ground.
I stilled. A lynx?
As I watched, it turned its head to me, and red as flashed in the night. It planted a seed of fear that accompanied a spark of something deeper and darker. Then it jumped back up against the tree, climbing the last couple of feet, and jumped back onto the wall. It crouched, shoulders rolling, and then it disappeared down the other side of the wall.
Two seconds later a guard walked past, patrolling. He had a casual walk, looking around.
My guess was he hadn’t even seen the lynx. And if that was the case, it had been another walker.
A cold finger dragged down my shoulder and arm closest to the window, and I shivered.
We weren’t safe, as we’d thought. I couldn’t relax and just be a student. And Boris had been on campus just before that thing had appeared. I doubted it was a coincidence. His life was still in danger. Our lives were still in danger.
And as long as walkers kept coming onto school grounds, this was far from over.
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Vampire athletics were a thing to behold. With our sharp senses and our quick feet, relay and sprints became a challenge. I was an athlete. It was one of my passions and possibly the only thing I was never late for. Also, I was pretty good at it, which was an added bonus.
But tonight I wasn’t on the track, with the floodlights on the field so bright it might as well have been day. I’d called in sick. And it wasn’t because I was coming down with something. Other than Christian. We stood behind the bleachers, his arms around my waist, my hands in his hair, and with our mouths we were aiming for a new record.
Behind us, the crowd was going wild. Worthington Elite Academy in New York was competing against a small upper class institute called Witmark Nobility from Maryland. Like that wasn’t blowing their own horn. And the Academy was putting them on their asses. They didn’t need my help tonight, and I could focus on Christian.
Christian was still fairly new at school. He’d only been here a couple of months, but already it was normal that he was seen with me. Beth, my best friend, had also accepted that she wouldn’t get my undivided attention anymore.
It hadn’t always been this way, though. It wasn’t love at first sight with him. Well, it was something at first sight, with a weird tingling sensation that’d creep up my spine whenever he was near. I still felt it when I was around him, but I pushed it away. The love bit had happened after we’d fought a walker – one of our enemies – together and saved a political leader of our race. It seemed like we fit together.
And judging by our bodies now, that fact couldn’t be truer.
It was almost time for summer break, where the nights would be shortest and we couldn’t fit in full school days. I wanted to spend every last second with him.
“You’re going to get in trouble for this,” he murmured.
“If it’s not this it will be something else.”
He sighed and took my hand. Together we walked away from the bleachers. What I had said was true. I was always in trouble. For a while my ‘trouble’ had been a walker sighting on campus, and saving Boris Kirilov, our school’s benefactor and a very influential political leader from an attack. I’d though that something else would happen after that, because I’d spotted what I thought was another walker just after the first one was caught.
But since then nothing has happened. It’s been months, and I’d been a regular teenager.
“It will be nice to have some time off,” Christian said after we’d walked in silence for a while.
“I don’t know, I won’t get to see you,” I said. “Where is your family going for the summer?”
Christian shrugged. “Somewhere cold and dark where my dad can afford to work very long hours. Believe me, it won’t be as much fun as yours.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. I didn’t have much family to speak of. My parents had died when I was very young, and Boris Kirilov had taken me in because my parents had worked for him. He was the one that paid for me to attend a school for nobility, even though I was just a civilian. I stayed in the school residence as long as it was open, but it closed for the summer.
Even though I saw Boris as a father figure, he was always away on some political trip. His son, Graham, who also attended the academy, regarded me as on the same level as the servants. It wasn’t fair, but he was just a kid, and he’d grown up spoilt and without his father's attention his whole life. In a way I guess we were very much the same. No, summer had weeks of long days spent inside in store for me. Beth was also leaving with her family, so there would be no one.
“I don’t see how you can complain about living at the Kirilov house,” Christina said. “Living in the lap of luxury, you could just snap your fingers and Kirilov will give you what you want.”
I punched Christian lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t make it sound like I’m spoilt,” I said. Christian smiled at me but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“I just don’t see how you can be comfortable around a man that lives to destroy others.”
I stopped dead. Boris may not have been my real father, but he was as close to family as I would ever have. And no one had the right to bad mouth him in front of me. Not even Christian.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at Christian.
“Boris Kirilov voted in favor of the decree to ban shifters from the community.”
“They were dangerous! The rebellion movement was getting to big, innocent civilian suffered under the violence of the shifters.” My blood boiled almost immediately. It was in a riot that my parents had been killed. Shifters used to live in the vampire community, and even though it wasn’t always peaceful, it worked. It was before they took on shapes to deceive, and only used their powers for good. We were all under the rule of our aristocrats, but they had people in power of their own. The old shifter had died, and a new leader had risen to the shifter throne, and everything had changed. Suddenly vampires were the enemy. The shifters in council turned on the vampire members. It was said that we sought to oppress shifters, making life difficult for them, seeing them as a lesser species. If it had been true then, I didn’t know. It was true now.
A rebellion started, with the shifters in anarchy against the nobility. Violence in the streets grew by the day, and civilians started dying, even though the mark was on nobility. When things had gone too far, the vampires sent the shifters away. They weren’t allowed to live among us anymore, although they were still allowed in the cities to work.
A bloody fight ensued, a civil war of sorts, and finally it was voted by the politician in power that the shifters were to be exiled from the community altogether. Boris Kirilov had just taken a seat on the council.
Shifters were our enemies. If they were seen, they would be sentenced to death. If they fought, they would be executed on the spot.
Christian suggesting that Boris Kirilov was a bad man, somehow using blood money, was not only outrageous. It was offensive.
“Do I need to remind you how much innocent blood was spilled? The shifters were the ones that started it.”
Christian snorted. He looked over my head at something in the distance. His eyes grew even darker still. With his dark hair and intense blue eyes, traits unseen in the vampire world where the rest of us had green eyes and any shade of blond hair, Christian was an outsider. Listening to his views, I was starting to wonder if his physical appearance was really the reason for that.
“War is inevitable. How you deal with it is what makes you merciful or tyrannical.”
“And you’re saying Boris is a tyrant?” My hands were clenched into fists at my side, and my lips curled back in an animalistic snarl. Christian, on the other hand, was calm.
“He’s to blame for many deaths. And he smiles and waves because his political move brought him riches and fame. He’s the leader everyone looks up to?”
I hissed. “You better be very careful, Christian,” I said. “What you’re saying sounds very much like treason to me.”
Christian chuckled even though his face showed now warm expression, his eyes held now laughter. “And what are they going to do? Execute me? I’ll just be another body that needs to be buried. Another grave stone somewhere, my body covered up with sand just like the deeds of the council.”
A rush of heat enveloped my body, and I saw white light. My rage was complete. I turned and stormed away, because if I didn’t I would have done something I would regret. I could imagine biting Christian, drawing blood, leaving marks on his skin. Not only was he bad-mouthing the man I looked up to as a dad, he was also questioning our government. He was going against his roots.
I stomped back to the bleachers. My hands were sore from clenching my fists so hard, my palms red where the nails had bitten into the skin. When I ran my tongue over the tips of my fangs, electricity shot through my body, and bloodlust, but not the kind that hunger brought on. An angry vampire wanted blood for completely different reasons.
“What’s wrong with you?” Beth asked when I sank down on the stands next to her. I gripped the edge of my seat so hard my knuckles turned white.
“Nothing,” I snapped. She raised her eyebrows at me. The wind blew my short hair into my face, and I shook my head irritable to get the blond hair out of my eyes again.
“Sorry,” I said a moment later. Beth didn’t deserve me snapping at her.
“Nothing new,” she said, shrugging. It was true. I had my moods and I was never scared of saying what I thought. “I just had a bit of an argument with Christian.”
Beth whistled and turned her eyes back on the relay that was happening in front of us. Our home team, the Blood Warriors, was in the lead, and the crowd was going wild. Graham Kirilov, Boris’s son and the Academy’s star athlete, waited on the final leg of the relay. He would bring the cup home for the school.
“It didn’t look like ‘a bit’ of an argument. You were ready to take someone’s head off.”
When a vampire talks about ‘taking someone’s head off’, they don’t mean it as a figure of speech. We’re pretty literal about things like that.
“It had involved Kirilov. And my parents.”
Beth looked at me from the corner of her eyes. Even she was careful when I got like this. I hardly spoke about my real parents.
“What did he say?”
I sighed. “He says the money I live off when I’m home for the summer is money Boris made because of all the shifters he’d helped kill off.”
Beth gasped. “He’s a vampire!” she cried out.
“I know.”
“He doesn’t know about your parents, Adelaide,” she said after a moment. “If he had he might not have said it.”
“It’s not whether or not he said it. If he knew what had happened to my parents he just would have kept quiet. The problem is that he thinks it. That wouldn’t have changed, no matter what he does or doesn’t know about me.”
Beth nodded.
“Well, the important thing you need to remember is that you don’t believe it. And neither does anyone else in this school for that matter. It’s just Christian.”
She glanced at me. She knew how I felt about him, that I really liked him. But she was right, and there was no way I was going to defend him.
“I just can’t believe he would say something that. First it was the attacks in the beginning of the year, and now he’s saying things like that? After he helped me save Boris?”
We hadn’t really saved Boris in the full sense of the word. But I had helped in stopping him from getting crushed by a metal beam, and Christian and I had fought together to stop the walker that had been responsible for the attack on Boris’s life.
“At least everyone is safe now,” Beth said. She had a way with words, she could calm me down.
“That’s true.”
The words were hardly out of my mouth when a javelin flew from the other end of the field. It sung as it sliced through the air, a thin whistle that pierced the night air.
It struck Graham Kirilov in the chest and drove through his body, the tip coming out of his back.
The young athlete fell to the ground, body twisted. Everyone in the stands jumped up. Some girls screamed, hands clapped to mouths. For a moment time froze. The presenter was deathly quiet over the speaker system.
Graham’s blood gushed out around the javelin that was lodged firmly in his chest. It pooled around him in a puddle of thick red, and the metallic stench permeated the air. A red ribbon was tied around the middle of the spear, its edges flapping in the breeze.
The smell of blood snapped the crowds out of the stupor. Vampires streamed out of their seats. Most crowded around the edge of the field – they wanted to see but they were scared.
As we came closer I could feel the magic radiating from the ribbon. The first vampires that reached Graham bounced back, influenced by the pulsating waves that streamed from it.
This was no accident. The javelin had been sent by someone, and that ribbon had made sure it hit home.
2
Graham wasn’t dead, but he was critical. There were only so many vampires that could wield magic. The academy made the use of the same guards that other royal institution and some of the wealthiest family homes used. A specialized group of vampires could do magic, and they were trained to become guardians. They could detect shifters and walkers better than we could, and there magic helped them. They were lightning fast, their senses were superhuman, even super-vampire.
All the guards that had been on duty the day of the attack had been questioned. And no one was any closer than they were before to what happened. They found Boris Kirilov in Russia, but bad weather meant all flights were grounded and he couldn’t get back until it let up. We all prayed Graham could hold on for that long.
“I don’t think it’s a vampire that did it,” I said to Beth. We sat at our usual table at lunch. Classes had resumed, or tried to, but no one’s mind was on working.
“Then what could it be?”
“I think it’s another attack, a walker maybe.”
Beth looked around the cafeteria. It was empty. A lot of the students were staying home out of fear, and probably would until they’d found a lead.
“The walker in March was already strange,” Beth said. “I don’t see how another walker can get in here. After everything that went down?”