He’d probably just been disturbed by the glimpse of my dark side, perceiving the secret, savage pleasure I’d taken in beating my rival. Because even I had trouble considering that. “Maybe the whole fight-to-the-death thing weirded him out more than he let on.”

Emma solemnly shook her head. “He’s more used to that than we are. You two are friends. He wanted you to win.”

“Friends?” I inhaled sharply. Friends was a dangerous word. Alcántara had warned me about friends. And besides, it wasn’t very friendly how Ronan had gotten me here in the first place.

I scraped my sandy fingers through my hair, cursing the jumble of thoughts in my head. I finger-combed some more, this time cursing my hair—such a hassle since Lilac burnt off my braid, leaving me with a shaggy, shoulder-length do. “Stupid hair.”

What I really wanted to say was stupid Ronan.

Although he and I had forged a sort of alliance, the memory of his initial betrayal made me surly. When we first met, he’d touched me, and I still felt his fingers hot on my skin. And yet the reason he’d touched me wasn’t because he’d wanted to—not because he was a guy and I was a girl—but because it’d been his job to touch me. It’d been his job to make me so warm and gullible and dopey that I’d found myself on an airplane bound for nowhere.

I thought of the new girls Ronan was out there gathering. And touching. Every one of them a total teen hottie, no doubt.

“Great,” I said. “Either way, he’s out there, finding new friends for us to spar with, snipe at, stab in the back, and eventually kill.”

Emma stared at me. If it weren’t for her blinking, I swear she could’ve been mistaken for a sphinx.

“Spit it out,” I told her.

“I still think it has to do with Master Alcántara.”

This time I was the one glancing around nervously. “Please stop saying his name. I’m scared you might summon him or something, like Voldemort.”

But I worried she was right. It did seem Alcántara had taken a liking to me. Whenever I caught the vampire looking at me—and I seemed to catch him a lot—it was as if he was plumbing the depths of my soul, puzzling through some sort of master plan written there.

It was hard not to feel disturbed by the whole thing, and not in an entirely unpleasant way. I mean, Alcántara was young and he was hot…or at least he had been several hundred years ago. But he was a bit like a panther—darkly seductive, and yet a predator nonetheless. To be feared and, according to Ronan at least, avoided.

“Yes,” Emma agreed, “best not to call attention to yourself.”

“I’ll say. But there’ll be no avoiding him when the time comes for our mission.”

“Do you know yet what you’ll be doing?”

“I don’t know where we’re going, I don’t know what we’ll be doing, and I don’t know why we’ll be doing it. All I know is I have to wait till the end of summer term to do it. Alcántara insists I need more training.”

What I didn’t tell Emma was that if all went according to plan, I wouldn’t get too much of a chance to consider our mission anyway, since I’d be too busy getting the hell off this rock.

That’s right: escape. It was all I thought about now. I’d begun considering it pretty much the moment I arrived, but then I got lulled into a sense of security, of family. I had smart teachers, was learning cool things, and making a couple of the closest friends I’d ever had in my life. I’d begun to believe that being a part of something—being a Watcher—might give me a sense of belonging, like finding the family I’d never had.

Until the Challenge, when I’d seen what the Isle of Night was really about, which was kill or be killed. I’d triumphed, and sure, partly it was because I was smart, but I wasn’t as strong as some of the other girls, and I suspected it was only Alcántara’s help that’d pushed me over the top. I’d triumphed over Lilac, and she’d disappeared, and now I’d begun to worry that maybe I should cut my losses and find a way out of here before the vampires changed their minds and decided I should be dead, too.

I tried to think proactively about it all, but my mind kept wondering what might’ve happened to Lilac’s body after I beat her, and how mine might suffer the same fate if any escape attempt were to fail.

There was movement around us, and we followed everyone’s eyes up the beach. Tracer Otto was approaching, carrying burlap bags.

My shoulders sagged. “Crap. Adolph brought the sandbags.” Sandbags were a pleasant little pastime wherein we scooped handfuls of sand into bags, and proceeded to run around in circles, carrying them over our heads. “Arduous and pointless.”

A half smile quirked Emma’s lips—the equivalent of a belly laugh from my redheaded friend. But then Otto turned our way, and she bristled. “Shh. Here he comes.”

I tucked my head toward hers, quietly singing, “‘The hills are aliiiiive…’”

She shot me a panicked glare. “You, hush!”

I smiled placidly as the other Acari joined us to sit in a row on the sand. I leaned over again, pitching my voice to the barest whisper. “‘Viss ze sound of muuuuziiic…’”

Tracer Otto stormed up the beach and proceeded to pace up and down the line, dropping the empty bags at our feet and instructing us in his best drill sergeant impression. “You will fill the bags,” he said, in a decidedly German accent—all he was missing was a little whistle around his neck. “Without delay.”

He reached the end of the line, and as he turned, I couldn’t resist murmuring, “Vizout delayyy.”

“Acari Drew.” A mellow voice spoke from behind me.

Oh God. Too late, I noticed the shadow that had fallen on me. My skin rippled with goose bumps, as if a chill breeze were at my back instead of a vampire.

I looked over my shoulder and had to force myself not to startle when I saw how close Alcántara had managed to come behind me. Stupid. Things like that could get a girl killed in my world.

He stood there, tall but not towering, with bottomless dark eyes and smooth black hair that brushed the collar of his black leather jacket. He looked like a beautiful indie rocker…carved out of marble.

I hopped to my feet as reverently as one could when wearing damp, sand-encrusted gym shorts. It struck me that all the other Acari had grown quiet around me, and even Tracer Otto was standing in respectful silence. They knew as well as I did how the sudden appearance of a vampire could mean somebody’s imminent evisceration. I only hoped it wouldn’t be mine.

I cleared my throat, speaking slowly enough to ensure avoiding any tongue twisting. “Master Alcántara.”

One side of his mouth crooked up in a wicked half smile, and I didn’t understand how it was possible to feel cold on my skin but so hot in my belly, all at the same time. “Acari Drew,” he repeated, stretching my name out on his tongue. “You have no taste for sandbags?”

Crap crap crap. I racked my brain. What, exactly, might the correct answer be? No, sir, and I’d be a troublemaker; Yes, sir, and I’d be an intellectual dullard.

“So silent all of a sudden?” Though Alcántara addressed his next words to Otto, he held my gaze, speaking slowly as though imparting his message with significance. “Tracer Otto, it appears young Miss Drew doesn’t relish the gritty futility of your selected workout.” His smile grew broader. “I think perhaps Acari Drew craves more of an intellectual challenge.”

Alarms shrilled in my head. Had he read my thoughts? Or was it just a weird coincidence that he’d spoken my mind?

“I…Yes,” I stammered, second-guessing myself. What’s the right answer? It came to me, and I buried my nerves with a bravado delivery. “And no. The challenges I crave are of both the mental and physical variety.”

Alcántara barked out a satisfied laugh, and I felt a hot blush creep from my chest to my hairline. How was it his laughter made my words echo in such a naughtily suggestive way?

Eager to change the subject, I glanced to the limp sandbag at my feet. “Is it time for the…for these?” At that moment, I’d have traded running up and down the beach with a sandbag over my head for Alcántara’s uncomfortable stare any day.

“Yes—”

“No,” Alcántara said, speaking over a visibly shaken Tracer Otto. “I am finding this exercise too…vulgar for Acari Drew.” The vampire’s voice was smooth as brandy, with a faint, sultry Spanish accent, his murmured vulgar managing to make sandbags sound like the crassest endeavor ever conceived by man.

I snuck Alcántara a tentative look, uncertain whether to feel thankful or terrified at just what other activity might be in store for me. The glint in those black eyes decided it, telling me the appropriate emotion was definitely terror.

“There is a different assignment for Acari Drew. Today Acari Drew begins an…independent study.”

CHAPTER TWO

Breathe in, breathe out, foot up, foot down. We wound along the trail leading from the beach back to campus, and it was taking all my concentration not to make an ass out of myself.

Why vampires didn’t choose to drive was beyond me—instead they just seemed to appear, and usually at inopportune times. Or, as I was currently discovering with Alcántara, they simply glided from one place to another, as though navigating a dinner salon instead of a rocky, rugged, uneven isle.

Stumbling a little, I amped up the mantra looping in my head. You are not an ass. You are sophisticated, graceful, and bright. Watch the rock—

While my eyes were on one rock, I tripped on another, stubbing the toe of my sneaker hard and toppling to the ground, looking pretty much as unsophisticated and ungraceful as a girl could get.

“Shi—” I swallowed my curse, quickly correcting myself. Vampires were old-school in every sense of the word, and Ronan was constantly warning me about my swearing. “Sh-shoes. My feet are sandy in my shoes. That’s why I tripped.”