“No, thank you.”

He stepped over to me and someone made a strange whimpering sound. Oddly enough, I felt certain it had originated from Jase’s throat instead of my own. The other guy was less than a foot away from me, and I had to crane my neck to meet his steel colored eyes. Being in such a close proximity caused the hair on my arms to stand on end.

He leaned in so close I could feel his warm breath on my neck. I thought he was going to whisper something in my ear, but instead he quickly inhaled twice through his nose.

Well, I certainly had never been sniffed before.

“What is she?”

The question was aimed at Jase, but I took the liberty of answering. “What she is, is offended and quickly becoming angry.”

“Leave my sister out of it,” Jase said, sounding like a kid telling the bully to give his lunch money back.

Our new friend’s eyes flickered quizzically between Jase and me. “Do they know about her?”

Jase didn’t say anything, which apparently qualified as an answer. He finally backed away, giving me room to breathe.

“I’m staying,” he told Jase is a quiet, controlled voice. “I suggest your people stay out of my way. I’ll take out anyone who crosses me.” He shot a pointed glance in my direction. “Even her.”

Once he was out of earshot, Jase wheeled on me. “Why couldn’t you have stayed out of this? What am I supposed to do now?” He yelled out a stream of profanities and kicked a nearby tree hard enough to dislodge some bark and possibly a toe.

“Who was that? What’s going on?” My anger matched, if not surpassed, his. “Were you seriously going to fight that guy? He’s like three times bigger than you!”

“He’s not that big.”

“It would have been like The Rock versus Seth Green. Now, tell me who he is.”

“I don’t know.”

Liar.

We glared at each other for a long moment. Finally, Jase stalked off, whipping out his cell phone along the way. I waited until he finished his call to strike again.

“Are you in a gang?” It was the most logical conclusion I could reach. I overheard just enough of his conversation to know he had called Toby, a cop. Convincing his naive young cousin to infiltrate a local gang sounded like the kind of idiotic plan Toby would have.

“Does this look like inner-city Chicago to you?” Jase gestured at the tiny town nestled in the forest. “Do you think the Bloods are doing drive-bys in pick-ups and mini-vans?”

“I think that something very weird just happened. Something about ‘territory’. Something that ended with Jean-Claude van Crazy threatening to snuff me out and sent you running to Toby. Did your idiot cousin put you up to something?”

“Can’t you just drop it?”

“Not likely.”

Jase growled in agitation. “Please, Scout? Just this once? I promise, I won’t let him hurt you.”

“Can you promise that you won’t get hurt?”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” he said, assuming what must have passed as a tough guy expression in Jase’s mind. “I’m made of 100% awesome, totally untouchable.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Then I’ll drop it,” I said as I began plotting ways to uncover the truth.

Chapter 2

Just five days before school resumed Ms. Northington resigned her position at Lake County High. Apparently, she met a nice Finnish man on a cruise over the summer, fell madly in love, and was moving half-way around the world. Of this I had been informed. What no one bothered to tell me was that crotchety old Mr. Beck had come out of retirement to fill her position. If someone had mentioned it, I would have changed my schedule. AP Calculus was going to be bad enough without having Satan’s right-hand man as a teacher.

One of Mr. Beck’s many faults was believing high school seniors should still be forced to sit in alphabetical order, which left me stuck behind the aromatic John Davis. I knew that between Mr. Beck’s soporific voice and my brain’s insistence on trying to solve the mystery of John’s unique scent, I was going to have a hard time keeping focused.

“Scout, do you understand anything Mr. Beck is talking about?” came a frantic whisper from my left.

“It’s the first day. He’s just going over the class rules and stuff,” I explained as quietly as possible.

The tiny girl in the chair next to me nervously gnawed on her nonexistent fingernails while simultaneously bouncing her left leg up and down at about a million miles an hour. Joi Fitzgerald was sweet, but she could make a Tibetan monk anxious. “How on earth did I end up in AP Calc? I’ll never be able to keep up.”

“You’re in AP Calc because you scored 98% on the placement test. You’re going to do fine. Stop worrying.”

A shadow fell across my desk. “Harper, is there something that you want to share with the rest of the class?”

“It’s Scout,” I snapped in response to hearing my given name before remembering who I was snapping at. “I mean, my name. It’s Scout. You can call me Scout. Please.”

“I think we are a little old to be going by nicknames in class.” Mr. Beck sneered, which did nothing to help his personal appearance. Of course, there wasn’t much that actually would help the man’s personal appearance other than a hairpiece and some clothes bought more recently than 1978.

“Th-th-then you can call me Miss Donovan.”

“Very well, Miss Donovan. Now, if you and Miss Fitzgerald are done with your conversation, we can all go back to discussing the grading scale for this course.” Mr. Beck turned and began to drone on about how he did not grade on a curve, nor did he give any extra credit or extended deadlines.

I looked forward, waiting for my embarrassment to subside and my heart rate to return to normal. Could I be any more of a dork? One brief exchange with an antagonizing teacher had me shaking like a leaf.

That’s when I noticed a pair of familiar grey eyes staring at me. I was so shocked I didn’t immediately realize that the face they were peering out of wasn’t the same one I had been fastidiously scouring the Internet for over the past three days. The slope of the nose and curve of the jaw were the same, but this face lacked the malice and anger that was so evident on the other.

Jean-Claude’s little brother.