ROMANCE: Mason (Bad Boy Alpha Male Stepbrother Romance Boxset) (New Adult Contemporary Stepbrother Romance Collection) (254 page)
Authors: Elisa Elliot
“Besides,” I said after a moment’s silence. “It’s senior year. It’s not like I’m going to marry him.”
Beth laughed and shook her head.
When it was time for everyone to leave, I hugged my best friend. I would see her over the holidays; we promised we would make plans. But it was still going to be a long break, with none of the usual fun and danger school held for me lately.
I kissed Christian goodbye, too, after Beth left.
“Don’t forget about me, okay?” I said, hugging him.
“I don’t think I’d be able to,” he said. Unlike Beth, he was going somewhere far away for the summer break. Of course he couldn’t tell me, he hardly knew himself if plans were definite. They changed all the time, apparently, with his father’s job.
“Just come back in one piece.”
“Sweetheart, if someone’s going to be falling apart while we’re not with each other, it’ll be you.” He gave me a lopsided grin that never failed to make me feel unbalanced and blushing. His cell phone bleeped in his pocket, and he sighed, pressing his forehead against mine.
“That’s my ride,” he said. “I have to go.”
I watched him saunter away like he didn’t have a care in the world.
I greeted a few more friends before I headed over to the residence to pack my own bags. Morris the Butler was coming to pick me up early morning, just before dawn. Boris had promised he would be home when I arrived. He needed to check on Graham, and we would kick summer off with a feast. I was looking forward to seeing my family again, even if they weren’t my blood.
When I left the residence I sighed, looking back at the red bricks that had stood for ages. It always felt like I was leaving a part of me behind when I left the school. And soon, it would be over for good. The idea made me melancholic.
Something rustled in the bushes to the side, pulling me away from my wallow in self-pity. A shadow moved quickly from the small trees and bushes towards the residence, and disappeared behind the residence. I frowned and dropped my bags, setting off after it.
Was this never going to end?
When I rounded the corner of the residence, the garden was quiet and empty. I looked around, strained my ears for a sound, but I found nothing. I turned to go back, and as I did, my eye caught the servant’s door I’d used before to escape the school grounds. It was ajar.
I crept closer, and when I reached it, I carefully peeked around, looking out into the dark forest.
Among the trees, two dark shadows stood close to each other, like they were talking. The one was hunched over, with a big bulge on its back like a hunchback. A tail swished and I k new it wasn’t human or vampire. Another walker?
The other figure was tall and upright. Confident. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It was clouded in darkness. It shifted from one leg to the other, swaying gently. Then it hooked its hands onto its hips, and a jolt of shock shot through me like I’d just been electrocuted.
Christian had a habit of hooking his thumbs in his belt loops like that.
What was he doing talking to a walker? Carefully I crept through the door, and closer. I knew I was looking for trouble. Out here, outside school boundaries, I was free game. It didn’t matter who or what those shadows were. It mattered that they weren’t on the property. But that shadow drew me.
I stepped on a branch and it cracked, the sound like a gunshot in the night. The small hunched over shadow jumped up into a tree and scurried away, jumping from one branch to another until it was out of sight. The other had turned to me.
My throat was tight and I couldn’t breathe. If this was Christian… I didn’t want to think about it. I’d just forgiven him. I liked him. I wouldn’t say love… but I was definitely in love with him.
The shadow took one step closer to me, and stepped out of the trees and into the moonlight. I was frozen on the spot and my heart thundered so loudly I was sure it could hear me all the way to where it stood.
When the clouds moved and the bright light fell on it, I saw pale skin, almost-green in color, and short hair, buzzed almost down to the scalp. The body was long and wiry, arms legs and torso thinner than that of a vampire. It was definitely male, and it was definitely not Christian.
It bared it’s fangs at me, neat rows of pointed teeth, all the way round top and bottom. Then it was gone in the blink of an eye. Almost like it had dematerialized.
I gasped for breath. It was almost like I’d been under spell of some kind. And what I’d seen hit me in the gut.
That had been a shifter, in its natural form.
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I thanked the heavens summer was over as I lugged my bag from the black car into the senior residence. Night had fallen, the sun set earlier again than when I was stuck at the Kirilov Estate, and the nights were crisp. I dumped my bags on the linoleum floor and the Matron scowled at me.
“It’s so good to be back,” I breathed. The matron rolled her eyes and went back to scribbling on her clipboard. I waved at Morris, our ever-loyal butler who’d driven me back to Worthington Elite Academy. He waved back at me, and the car drove off with an expensive purr, the headlights cutting two shafts of light through the darkness.
Sure, the summer had been great fun. It had been amazing to spend some time with Boris Kirilov, my foster father, even though he’d had to go back to whatever it was he’d needed to do in the political world. Living with a great political leader had its downsides, but I think Boris’s absence bothered Graham, his real son, more than it bothered me. I relished independence. And here in the school residence I had more than enough of that.
I took a deep breath, taking in the smells of campus. A waft of Jasmine blew from somewhere, and there were other flowers that painted the night with fragrances too. Vampires liked to keep flowers that bloomed at night. It was our only shot at the beauty the rest of the world saw in daylight.
I didn’t know how I was going to survive being away from this place once we graduated. We were in the final stretch before the end of the year, and the end of my school career.
I shook of the dark cloud that settled around me when I thought about it. That was another day’s problems.
I unpacked my bag in my room, and arranged my books and stationary on my desk. It was a good idea to look like I intended to study, at least. Even if I never ended up getting around to my resolutions. Studying just took too much of my time. I didn’t do much more than the bare minimum to make sure I passed.
After everything was arranged, I sat down on my bed and looked around the room. What was I going to do now? It was the day before school officially started. Only the resident students were on campus to get settled, and even though I knew most of them, I wasn’t really friends with them. Not the way I was with Beth, my best friend since junior year, and Christian, my boyfriend since the beginning of this year.
And they would only be back tomorrow. They didn’t live on campus. Their parents weren’t too tied up for them to go home after the school day.
I decided to pass the time by wandering around on campus. Technically I wasn’t allowed to leave the residence gardens, not when school wasn’t in session. But this was the thing about rules – I hardly ever managed to obey them.
I walked around, following the brick paths that led through lawns and perfectly trimmed hedges and flower beds. When I reached the row of shrubs along the perimeter wall, my thoughts jumped back to the night Christian and I had attacked a Walker. We’d had an attack on Boris, an act of terrorism if you ask me, and I’d jumped on the creature responsible when I’d spotted his shadow. Of course that had been stupid. Walkers were vampires’ enemies. Not in the way that shifters were, with an agenda and an active war always brewing, but in a way that a predator was always an enemy to its prey because it was in its nature to attack. Walkers were like that, unorganized, but lethal. Luckily the Walker had tried to flee instead of attack that night, and I’d manage to wound it enough with my fangs so that it was caught by the guards.
That had been a hell of an adventure. It had also been the first night Christian at kissed me, the start of what lead to us dating.
I smiled, glad to see him again the next day. It had been a long three months. I’d seen Beth a couple of times during the holiday. But Christian’s family had left for the time school was out, and he’d been unreachable. Apart from a few messages and one phone call, we hadn’t been in touch at all.
I rounded the corner that led to the back of the residence I stayed in. The only path here was the one that led to the servants’ door, a large arched wooden door that was almost silvered by time. Servants used it to pass in and out of the academy without using the main gate. I wasn’t sure if the servants were the only people using this door.
Just before the summer, when I’d waited for Morris to come and pick me up from the residence, I’d come out here. I’d followed another hunch. The door had not only been unlocked, but open, and when I’d peeked through I’d seen a Shifter and a Walker doing business in the trees. My skin broke out in goose bumps again when I thought of it. Like I’d mentioned before, Shifters were our real enemies. They intended to kill us. They were upset about the law, which separated them from vampires. They’d brought it upon themselves through their violent protests, but they didn’t see it that way.
Being that close to a Shifter had almost sent me running for the hills, if it hadn’t been for that fact that there had been something very familiar about that Shifter. For a moment I’d thought it was Christian, before the horror of a creature had stepped into the light. Even now when I closed my eyes I could still see him, feel the tingling sensation that had covered my whole body like a blanket woven of live wire, when he’d looked at me with his dangerous eyes.
I shuddered, and turned away from the door. The one thing I did know, was that it couldn’t have been Christian. That was all that mattered.
The pending sunrise painted a thin line of silver on the horizon, and that was my cue to get indoors before the scorcher decided to toast me.
The moment the sun was under again, and the rickety dorm shutters slid up in their grooves, I was out the door headed towards the education buildings. Class wasn’t due to start for another half-hour, and the hallways were packed with students greeting each other and sharing stories about their summers. It was a cool night, and the smell of coffee hung in the air.
I found Beth at her locker, talking to Graham, of all people.
“It’s nice to see you back here,” she was saying to him. After spending the summer with him, I was used to his shock of white hair, the sign that he was almost Royal he was that noble, and his watery blue eyes that finished off his ghostly appearance. He’d been caught up in hospital for a couple of weeks when a stray javelin turned him into a kebab. He gave Beth a small smile, but when he saw me he turned away. He knew she would put all her focus on me.
“Adelaide!” she cried out, one of the few times she used my full name, and hugged me like she hadn’t just seen me last week.
“It’s so good to be back,” I said, hugging her fiercely. Her long blond hair was straight down her back and her gray eyes were full of stories and promises for the new term.
“I can’t wait until all this is over though. This is the last stretch before we head off to college!”
I wasn’t as enthusiastic about college as she was. We would go to the same one, of course. I couldn’t just leave my best friend. But it was strange to think that I would leave this place, another part of me.
I shrugged. “Let’s just enjoy what we have now, while we have it,” I said. She shook her head.
“I keep forgetting you literally grew up here. It’s going to be a heck of a change for you.”
I shrugged again. It was easier than showing my true emotions. “Another dorm. No biggy.”
“Have you seen Christian yet?” she asked. She knew I was suffering from Christian-withdrawal. I shook my head, but just as I did his dark tangle of hair stuck out above the other students’ heads and moved towards us. I felt a small flip inside my chest.
When he reached us, my heart stopped. And not for the reason it should have.
He looked awful. His dark eyes were haunted, and they had blue circles underneath, the color a strong contrast against his complexion. His skin was even whiter than usual, with a light gray-green tint to it. His hair wasn’t the styled mess it always was. Instead it was just a mess.
“Are you okay?” I asked when he leaned down to kiss me on the cheek. When he pulled away a faint smell of something strange hung around him. It pinched my nose. It took me a moment before I could place it.
“Have you been smoking?” I asked. In school Christian was wholesome and honest. The model student. I realized I knew nothing of him outside of school. And suddenly I wondered what that meant.
“What do we have first?’ he asked. He didn’t ask about summer, or about how I was, and he didn’t even look at Beth. He looked like he had lost weight, his skeleton frame looking foreign.
“How has your summer been?” Beth asked, obviously noticing how distracted he was.
“Oh… uh… yeah. It was fine, I guess.” He looked around, drumming his fingers against his thighs. He shifted from one leg to the other, and his eyes darted from one student to the next in the hallway. He looked like he was a mental case.
“What’s going on, Christian?” I asked.
He looked at me, his eyes vacant before he managed to focus them on me. “I’m just going through a bit of a tough time,” he said. I held his stare, even when I knew he wanted to look away. I didn’t want him to pull his gaze away from me. In a way it felt like I would lose him again.
His shoulders sagged visibly. “It’s my sister’s birthday today,” he said quietly.
His sister? I opened my mouth to say something, but then I remembered. He’d told me the first time I’d met him that he’d had a sister, but that she’d died. He never spoke of her.
“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out to touch his arm. When my skin touched his, a sensation shot through me that sent shivers up my spine, and it lodged at the back of my skull in a flurry of tingles. I yanked my hand away from him. It had been like a physical surge of electricity. I hadn’t felt that tingle with him in a while, and it had never been that strong.
What the hell was going on?
I remembered the night I’d seen the shifter in the trees. How that had been a feeling similar to this, but about a thousand times more intense. Uncomfortably I tried to match the two, compare them.
Could it be?
I shook off the thought. I was being ridiculous. My sense of heroism was running away with me with all the saving I’d been doing at the school the past year. When I looked back at Christian his eyes were wild and his tongue darted out of his mouth, licking his lips in small little animal-like movements. He was nothing like the Christian I knew. His strange behavior, and the fact that his hair and eyes were so dark, such a deviation from general vampire traits, he looked he wasn’t a vampire at all.
I was just about to say something, when the intercom crackled and beeped to life, and Principal Cole’s voice crackled loud and clear through the corridors. All the students had to make their way to the assembly hall, where by tradition the term would be opened.
2
There wasn’t much time to focus on Christian after that. We were arranged in class order, and then alphabetically, which meant that Beth was somewhere in one of the front rows, being an Archibald, I was in the middle as Frost, and Christian was somewhere in between.
Beth turned in her seat when we were all where we belonged, and shot me a what-was-that-all-about look. I shrugged.
Principal Cole stepped up to the podium, and addressed the school. I didn’t pay much attention. It was all about welcomes and turning a new leaf and trying harder this time. It was the same speech every time, with few changes. I wondered if he thought we wouldn’t notice.
He addressed the seniors separately after that, telling us that it was our home stretch, that we’d made it that far, and what we did now would follow us around for the rest of our lives. I didn’t want to keep being reminded about the fact that high school was going to end. I didn’t want to be told how much I would enjoy moving on, when I wasn’t sure what I was moving on to. I knew who I was at the Academy. I knew where I fit in. In the real world, I wasn’t so sure. Was I a Kirilov? Or was I a Frost?
I had no idea where I would fit in, or where I would end up. The uncertainty made me despise the idea of leaving the comfort of this place.
“And now,” Cole’s voice pulled me out of my muddle of thoughts. “I have a surprise for you. It’s not every day we get to hear from the school’s benefactor and special friend.” I searched the stage. Boris Kirilov had been away on business last time I checked. “But today is a special day. With some generous donations, we’re installing a new security system, to ensure that none of this nonsense that’s been taking place this year can happen again. Please welcome Boris Kirilov!”
The students applauded wildly, and I was right along with them. It was about time Worthington made a plan to keep the bad guys out. The security was way too slack, and when students like Graham started paying for it, something had to be done.
I knew that Boris didn’t just do this because of Graham getting hurt. It was for all of us. We needed to be safe. We were the children of the aristocracy, after all, the future leaders. At least, the others were.
I glanced over at Christian. Where did he fit in? He had to be some sort of aristocrat or nobility, surely, but with his uncharacteristic features it was difficult to tell. Usually the more important they were, the lighter their hair and eyes. Even mine was a dark blond.
Christian fidgeted, his dark eyes big and lucid. What was up with him? I’d never seen him like this. His eyes kept flitting towards the sides of the stage. I tried to see what he was looking at, but I couldn’t see something. I was really starting to worry about him. Something was very, very off.