“Hey!” I called again, louder this time. “I’m still here!”

“That’s the problem.” There was another click, and light flickered behind me. Not the overhead light, but a small bare bulb in the custodial closet.

“What?” I spun, looking for who’d spoken.

He was illuminated from above. In the darkness, the effect was freaky, like holding a flashlight under your chin only flipped the other way. “You’re still here, and that’s a problem.”

“What?” I squinted to see better. “Is that you, Yasuo? What are you talking about?”

“You’re here. She’s not. And now it’s time to eradicate the problem.” He flew at me, grabbing my neck before I had a chance to act. His fingers curled and tightened until I felt the delicate bones of my throat begin to give. He was going to kill me.

I grabbed his wrists and struggled backward. He squeezed tighter, and my body spasmed, fighting for air. I opened my mouth to shout, but couldn’t get a breath in or out.

The rubber soles of my boots skittered on the wet tile of the pool deck and my feet slid from under me. I had to hold on to his arms to avoid breaking my own neck. Finally, my boots got purchase. I got my feet back under me and tried to speak. Stop, I tried to say, but nothing came out. My mouth just opened and closed like a gasping fish.

I stared into his eyes, trying to communicate that way. His were bloodshot, giving him an insane, unhinged look. I wanted to connect. Tried to telegraph something with my pleading expression. Maybe he’d remember how I wasn’t so bad. How we used to be. But he wasn’t there. I stared into those eyes, and he wasn’t home. His gaze was flat and dead. Cold. He’d become something different. Whoever this creature was, it wasn’t my friend Yasuo anymore.

His fingers curled tighter, and I felt my eyes bug. Black spots popped into my vision. I was dead if I didn’t act.

Alarm, terror, grief…My emotions were so haywire, I expected Carden to appear any minute. But he didn’t.

Had Yas chained the door? Either way, it looked like I was on my own. Which meant I needed to stop the magical thinking. Strength, I told myself. I’d be strong, not terrified. I was strong.

I uncurled the fingers of my right hand and forced myself to release his arm. Hitching up my leg, I reached down. My fingers splayed, flapped, grasped toward the stars in my boot. But the farther I stretched, the deeper his fingers dug into me.

The black spots in my vision melded together. Became a black veil. My chest was spasming now, my throat making disturbing little croaking noises. But I sensed it as though from the end of a tunnel. I was passing out.

This was it.

I sensed movement. Carden. He’d come at last.

There was a slamming door, a rush of fresh air and light. But Yasuo didn’t take his eyes from me, so surely it was only my fantasy. This was my brain shutting down, me going into the light.

But suddenly Yasuo’s fingers were gone. His spine shot straight and his arms sprang from his sides like he might flap away. His back arched, and he bucked, then bucked again, eyes shut like he was having a seizure.

It was the last thing I saw before my own body took over, and I doubled over, dropping to my knees, coughs racking me. My chest shuddered to pull in oxygen, the moist air burning as it passed my throat.

Finally, my vision cleared and I looked up, expecting to find Carden. But my savior hadn’t been a vampire. It took me a moment to make sense of what I was seeing.

Yasuo was on his belly, and Kenzie sat straddled over him. She’d plunged her sai knives hilt-deep in his back.

She calmly met my eyes and said, “I forgot my goggles.” She glanced from me to Yas. “Just in time, apparently.” She stood and dusted off her knees, giving me a smile. “I hate missing a pool party.”

“Oh my God.” My voice was ragged, barely a rasp. “You killed him.”

She gave me an impatient look. “I’m better than that.”

“You did.” I pointed at the twin hilts, sticking out of him like an X. “His heart. You staked him.”

“Anatomy 101, Acari Drew. I’m a Guidon—I know exactly where his heart is.” Looking almost bored, she drew her finger down to a point just below his left shoulder, between her knives. “His heart is exactly between these two blades. The kid will be fine.”

She pulled out those blades, and Yasuo’s body shivered. So he was really alive?

Oh crap. He was really alive.

And he’d be really pissed when he came to. I wavered to standing. “We should get out of here.”

“He’s out for a while.” Seeing my questioning look, she grinned. “Not my first rodeo, girlie.”

She was cleaning her blades on the hem of his uniform sweater, her posture so cool, it ratcheted her several notches up in my estimation.

“Whose side are you on anyway?” she asked.

My eyes shot to hers. “What?”

The word brought on a fresh bout of coughing, and she waited till I was done to say, “If I’m not mistaken, this Trainee just tried to kill you.”

I gazed at Yasuo’s face. His features were slack, but his chest rose and fell evenly now. Alive, just as she’d said. He looked so peaceful—more peaceful than I’d seen him since Emma’s death. “He’s confused.”

“Confused?” She nudged his leg with her foot. “These guys aren’t worth the trouble, if you ask me.”

I thought of Josh, my Australian pal. “Some of them are okay.”

She rolled her eyes at me as though I’d lost my mind. “If you’re into that sort of thing.”

Kenzie had obviously not bonded with a vampire. Lately, I’d thought a lot about strength versus power, but she didn’t mess with thoughts of who controlled whom. She fought. She survived. She was pure strength. A warrior.

I vowed to be more like her.

I hopped into step, catching the door before it swung shut. “Right behind you.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

This thing with Yasuo had to stop.

Maybe if I could definitively prove that Emma was alive when she left the ring, he’d finally understand that her death wasn’t really my fault. In fact, Alcántara had probably targeted her way back in our first semester, when she’d pulled out of the original Directorate Challenge.

I needed to get closer to the truth, which meant getting closer to Alcántara. It all came back to him.

And, I just realized, he was currently eyeing me again. I shifted in my seat, pretending to write something in my notebook. Every time he looked at me, I felt it, like a warm breeze blowing over my skin or a little shiver of relaxation at the base of my spine.

I girded myself. Sat tall. I’d lost my best friend. My other best friend was doing his best to kill me. And it was all the fault of this vampire.

He was lecturing on assassination techniques. Historical examples. Issues of distance. Questions of proximity, of position. And I wasn’t hearing a word he was saying. I was plotting.

I dared not confide my plans to Carden…and where was he, anyway? I hadn’t seen him since that intense night we’d spent together.

Had I done something to make him keep his distance? I replayed our final conversation in my mind. I hadn’t said anything too strange about Ronan, right? I would’ve known at the time if he were upset.

He was probably just busy.

So why hadn’t he come when I needed him? I’d gotten used to my vampire coming when he sensed me upset, and when your supposedly good friend tries to kill you, it definitely falls under the Upset column. Surely Carden had felt my alarm. My anguish.

Maybe since Kenzie had come to my aid so quickly, he’d felt he hadn’t been needed. Maybe Carden even purposely stayed away to avoid discovery of our bond. Both were good excuses, but neither completely erased the pang of hurt.

I was telling myself to grow up when I heard Alcántara pause and clear his throat. Crap. I looked up, and those fathomless eyes were waiting for me.

A smile curved the corner of his mouth. An I’m-watching-you smile.

Pay. Attention.

It was no secret that Alcántara was one of the main baddies in this place, but how could I get more insight than that? I pretended to take notes, writing down random phrases from his lecture—secrecy…motives…Shakespeare’s Macbeth?—embellishing the words with squiggles and curlicues, considering Alcántara’s secrecy. Alcántara’s motives.

Lissa asked a question, and as I turned to look at her, only then it struck me. There were empty seats—like, a bunch of empty seats. The realization shot me back into the present. If Emma were alive, she’d want me focusing on guarding my own hide and less on what’d happened to hers.

I wish I’d done a head count that first day. Just how many girls were missing from class? Did those empty seats represent girls who’d tried—and failed—to execute Alcántara’s assignment? (Pun intended.)

Rather than listen to Lissa’s question, I was mesmerized by the look of her. She was pale and drawn. I realized her pert-nosed friend was conspicuously absent. When Alcántara had given our assignment, he’d told us the cost of failure would be our life. So I guess Lissa’s friend was a fail.

My roommate, Frost, rose from her seat.

What the—?

My attention snapped completely back into class. Frost was about to report on her project.

Already. She’d already killed her assigned Trainee.

Jeez…these people. I was still trying to wrap my mind around what this whole business entailed, and yet there was my roomie, going to the front of the class so calmly you’d have thought she was about to give an oral report on Jane Eyre instead of detailing for us the finer points of her first successful assassination.

Bloodthirsty much?

“Acari Frost.” Alcántara purred the name—and how annoying was it that even the vampires no longer called her Audra? “Tell us, did you successfully complete your assignment?”

“Yes, I did,” she said proudly.