Welcome to Everlake Preparatory School.
This series is set in the fictional U.S. state of Sequoia and centres around a pandemic similar, but more extreme than the coronavirus.
If you need a place to chat books and escape from the world, we’d love for you to come and join our reader group. It’s a great community who you can share your passion for books with as well as having a few laughs with!
We hope to see you there :)
Click the map to enlarge.
This book is dedicated to Lord Squidington who’s been in quarantine because of Co-squid 19.
We know it’s been a struggle, buddy, especially when your girl got squidnapped during the clamdemic. You went through so many em-oceans and had to really ink about how to save her. It was turtley stressful. Especially when you swam down to the seabed on a rescue mission, but when you saw the bottom of the ocean, you blushed. Life’s a beach like that. But you shore made it through anyway! You swam into that shark’s sea-cret hideaway and rescued your bay. It was inkredible.
Hopefully next year won’t be so cra-sea!
O f all the torturous moments I’d endured in this lab, nothing compared to when the earpiece died. Losing contact with the Night Keepers had driven fear into my heart and made me question for a few hopeless seconds whether I was ever going to be found.
But then I’d replayed all of their promises in my mind. They were spending every day hunting for me and they wouldn’t stop until I was free. The problem was, I’d been hidden by a monster as calculating as his son. And I knew in my heart that if Saint had wanted to keep me locked away forever, he could have pulled it off. So why should I expect any less from his father?
But Saint was still Saint. If anyone could find a way to the centre of his father’s labyrinth, it was him. I’d given him every scrap of information I could. Everything from the colour of the walls, to the details of each face I saw, even though they were always hidden behind masks and visors. They only wore name badges with their first names and the Night Keepers couldn’t track anyone down from that alone. So I had no substantial clues to my whereabouts. Nothing to go on at all. Just faith that my boys would somehow pull through for me.
A hacking cough tore at my throat and I grasped my neck, wincing against the pain. I brought my knees to my chest, my back to the wall in the glass box of an isolation room which I spent all of my time in. It was cold and bare and smelled like chemicals.
I may have been immune to the Hades Virus, but the amount of it that I was being exposed to regularly meant that I was sick all the same, my body being forced to create antibodies as fast and as much as possible just so that they could harvest them from my blood and create their own version of the vaccine.
I scrunched my eyes up and thought of my boys, missing them with all my heart. They were going to find me. I had complete faith in them. If anyone could track this place down, it was Saint Memphis. And if there was an army fit to break down the doors of hell and face what lay in the hottest part of the fire, it was the Night Keepers. But it was on me to survive until then. Which I damn well would. I’d faced demons bigger than the Hades Virus. I’d gone up against the most ruthless of beasts and had them purring in my arms by the end of it. I would not be destroyed by this monster, even when it clawed its way deep inside me and built a home in my body. I would drive it out and be strong for when the time came to run.
A shiver wracked through me and I clenched my jaw against the biting cold. Pills were waiting for me beside my bed. But the painkillers made me sleep, hours slipped by until I was disorientated and confused. That was when they took my blood, harvesting what they wanted from me. If they tried it when I wasn’t sedated, more than one of the nurses ended up injured from how hard I fought them. There were still scratches on one bitch’s arms that hadn’t healed yet, and I relished seeing them. It was a small blow to have struck against them, but I’d take each and every win I could get right now.
Eventually, I would have to give in and take my meds. I needed to keep my temperature down and ensure I had every chance of surviving this. But I only ever took half of what they left for me. If I took nothing, they’d just inject me with it anyway. They weren’t going to let me die unless there was nothing they could do to stop it. I was their little vaccine farm after all.
I pressed my face against my knees, picturing each of my Night Keepers as they hunted for me. Saint and his dark soul, plotting the cruellest of fates for my enemies; Kyan thirsting for blood with vengeance written into his flesh as if it were inked there alongside his tattoos; Blake preparing to fight for me with all the strength he’d built from his pain and suffering; Monroe waiting to charge in and save me like a dark knight with fury and justice in his heart.
So help everyone in this building when they came for me. The four horsemen were going to collect their queen. And when they arrived, there would be blood to pay.
I held out a while longer before I took half my pain meds and stuffed the rest under the mattress. I curled up beneath the blanket on the bed and shivered myself into sleep as the sedative dragged me away. It wasn’t all bad. In the darkness, I always seemed to return to one place. A time when life was simple and good and nothing bad ever happened. So at least there I could escape this agony, for a little while.
“What’s the point of this?” I huffed as I tried to climb up onto the lowest branch of a large tree. Jess was already high up in the canopy, her whoops of excitement occasionally carrying back to me.
“It’s to make you strong,” Dad called from the ground as I managed to heave myself up onto the next branch. Jess was thirteen and had stronger arms than me. I still had beanstalks that could barely hold my weight, let alone drag me up a stupid tree.
“Why do I have to be strong?” I groaned as my palm rubbed against a spiky knot and I gave up, dropping down to sit with my back to the trunk and pouting at my dad.
He pushed his glasses up his nose before folding his muscular arms. “Because you never know what life is going to throw at you, Tater-tot. You need to prepare for every outcome so you can weather anything. You have to be ready to fight, just in case you ever need to.”
“Well, if I didn’t climb trees then there wouldn’t be anything to weather. What if I fall?” I tossed at him. I was in a bad mood today. We were staying on a farm and there was a rooster who always made a horrible noise at stupid o’clock. I’d give him a cock-a-doodle-doo to remember if I got my hands on him.
“What’s the alternative, kiddo? Are you gonna stay at home hiding from life forever?”
“That’s the safest thing to do, isn’t it?” I insisted. Sometimes I got so tired of moving around the country, never staying anywhere too long, never having fun that didn’t involve being stuck in the middle of nowhere. I liked campfires and scavenger hunts, but I also liked sleeping ‘til noon and hanging out with Elle Tompkins.
Okay, so maybe I wasn’t just mad about the rooster. Dad had made us move again. I’d known it was coming. But I’d really, really liked the last place in Virginia. And Elle had been cool. She enjoyed dancing and singing and had promised to teach me a routine we could do together. I’d been dumb enough to think I could convince Dad to finally stay in one place. But he’d said no again and again. I just hadn’t wanted to hear it. Now I was up a tree on a drizzly day in nowheresville and I’d never see Elle again. It sucked.