“Where are you going?” Gen stood. “Are you leaving the academy?”
“I’m going to stay with my crew,” I said.
She blinked a few times. “Why are you trusting me?”
A good question. I glanced at her. I didn’t trust her, not the way she thought. But I was taking a gamble on her.
“Do I have a choice? You’re my roommate here. You could turn me in, or you can keep your mouth shut. Which one is going to keep you in my good books?” I raised a brow at her.
“I want in on your team,” she said suddenly, leaning forward. “When we get to the games, I want in.”
“Team is full,” I said.
“You can have six.” She folded her arms over her chest.
“We have six,” I pointed out, but she was already shaking her head.
“Five is traditional, but they’ll allow six. I lost my group too, you know. A few of the other girls made it in, but . . . they followed me through the trials. And they got through because of me. And I doubt very much if your sixth will come through for you. He’s a Helios. He won’t be allowed to grub in the dirt with you now.”
I kept my reaction to myself. Because I didn’t want to agree with her. Ethan was part of our crew.
I raised an eyebrow. “What about the teammate I saw you with in the main hall? She’s from the House of Wonder. Won’t she want to be in your group?”
“House of Wonder doesn’t share their wins. Not even with their friends—which, let me be clear, I was not friends with her, at least not in the way I’d thought. She’s the bastard kid of a man from a powerful family, and she’d been trying to get in good with them by doing well.” Gen paused. “Rory wasn’t kidding, it’s different here. It’s not about survival or just making it through. It’s all about being the top dog.”
A shiver of premonition rolled through me. Ethan had shown us again and again that he always put his own self-interest first. Maybe I needed to start believing what he showed me, instead of hoping for better with him.
“He won’t fight for you,” she said, startling me out of my thoughts. “I saw Ethan with you in the trials. That was one thing, a place where he could use all of you. But he won’t fight for you here. Emma—that’s the girl who was with me—knows him. She might be a total bitch, but she dished on him hard. He’s using you. She said his plan was always to latch onto the best team he could find to get through the trials and use his cheat sheet to win. She was trying to do the same—minus a cheat sheet, she didn’t have one. At least she was honest about it.” Gen looked thoughtful a minute, as though reliving her time in the trials.
Ethan hadn’t wanted to be with us in the beginning, but when he’d seen us winning, he’d jumped on board. Gen’s words had the solid ring of truth. Damn it.
I looked her over, taking in her size and the obvious muscle tone under her clothes. “If Ethan doesn’t show for the first games at the end of the month, you can be in our crew.”
She grinned. “Then I’ll cover for you until the first games. After that, we can renegotiate the terms of our agreement.” She held out her hand, and I took it in a quick shake before letting myself out of the room and into the main circular chamber. There were a few students there, including the behemoth Shaw I’d met so cordially on the bus. He looked up and growled something at me that rhymed with runt. I turned my back on him, growled something that might have sounded like mick, and headed down the long, dimly lit hallway, adjusting my bag on my shoulder.
The footsteps that followed me should have been quieter, considering we were a house of assassins in training, and I damn well knew who it would be. Knuckle-buster dummy was no doubt looking to make me admit he was big and strong and full of muscles that I should fear.
What a tool.
“Roach, you need to work on your ninja skills,” I said as a tickle of a warning prompted me to drop to one knee and spin to face him. His fist sailed through the air where my head had been. He was no quicker than he’d been earlier, but I felt . . . slow. I didn’t like it.
“I told you, I ain’t no roach!” he snarled. “And I’m going to teach you a lesson you won’t forget.”
I didn’t answer him except to drive a fist into the inside of one thigh, hard enough to make my knuckles pop. He howled and bent at the waist, grabbing for his leg, which I knew from experience would hurt like a mother trucker and feel broken. It was a bad place to get hit, in other words.
His face was just above mine.
“You are ugly, man,” I said as I cracked a second blow straight up into the soft underside of his chin, his head snapping back with a sharp click from his jaw. His eyes rolled and he tumbled sideways into the wall, where he bashed his head a second time. I stood and hurried away from him.
“I hate making friends,” I muttered and hitched my bag a little higher on my back.
He was groaning, waking up as I reached the main door and let myself through. I didn’t bother to check whether anyone was waiting for us in the main hall, and my mistake got me caught.
You’d think it would be the Sandman. Or Rory. Or even one of the triplets.
But I’d never seen the woman standing in the center of the room, her legs spread and her hands on her hips as she surveyed the opulent space. Her hair was fire engine red, so bright and vivid it had to be a dye job, and her skin was deeply tanned to a golden hue. Without looking at me, she pointed a finger my way.
“You. Name. Now.”
I wasn’t giving her anything. I wasn’t that big of a fool. “Molly of the House of Night.”
“Lies. You shouldn’t lie to a Shade. We know lies because we live and breathe them,” she said softly as she turned to me, finally looking at me. Her deep green eyes were so dark they were almost black. “If you’d been two minutes sooner passing through here, I would have missed your lovely, lying face.”
Damn Shaw for slowing me down!
She smiled. “You are the one who put my friend Frost behind bars, yes?” The front of her body was covered with knives of all sizes and shapes, each one in its own sheath attached to the leather vest she wore, the handles worn from use. She smiled, slow and predatory, her eyes glinting hard.
“Perfect. Just the girl I want to kill.”
7
The woman in the middle of the House of Wonder’s massive foyer took a step, and I dropped my bag so I could pull my knife out. “Yeah, I don’t think so, fire engine.”
Her smile didn’t falter as she pulled her own knives, one from each side of her vest. The blade of the first was solid black and the other was a bright copper. I didn’t even look down at the knife my dad had made. I knew it well, from the hammer marks on the blade to the wear on the bone handle that fit perfectly in my palm, and I trusted it.
I blinked and she was in my space, the blades in her hands an extension of her body. I bent backward at the waist, fell, and rolled. She’d missed me, but I had lost ground with that first move.
Shaw was a lumbering buffalo, slower now than he’d even been on the bus, but this woman was the exact opposite. Her speed was unreal, her limbs a blur—she was a bolt of lightning to Shaw’s molasses in February.