Hotbloods (Hotbloods #1)(29)

My heart was in my throat.

Betray Navan?

Two Queens?

A blood sample taken from one of us, on its way to Vysanthe?!

Nausea rippled through me, and I looked in alarm at my two friends. All of us began frantically checking our bodies for any signs of pricked skin. I checked my arms, legs, stomach, but found nothing, then asked Angie to check the parts I couldn’t see without a mirror, while I did the same for her.

“Your neck!” she suddenly gasped, running a finger along the skin near the base of my throat, just above my collarbone. “You see that, Lauren,” she said, pulling Lauren closer to me. “Two tiny pricks—they look so small they could be mosquito bites. I guess they must be from his fangs.”

My stomach plummeted, and I suddenly felt imaginary pinpricks all over. That guy… he had bitten me while I’d been asleep. I felt utterly violated. But that was the least of my worries.

“He took my blood and—” I stopped abruptly as their conversation resumed.

“Navan and Bashrik leave in less than an hour for town, to procure more basic provisions for Ronad after his transformation,” Jethro said. “We have to leave with the ship then. It’ll be painless, I promise. Ronad still can’t walk. You won’t even have to look any of the brothers in the eye.”

There was another pause in which every part of me prayed that Ianthan would resume his moral ground and refuse to be swayed by his father’s words.

But instead he replied, in a low, resigned voice, “All right. Let’s get this over with.”

How can you say that?! I screamed at him in my mind. You said Navan is your best friend!

The two coldbloods shifted on the branch, spreading their wings to take flight. We scrambled backward to conceal ourselves behind the bush. We froze, listening to the sound of their rustling wings transporting them back to their base.

And then we stared at each other, wide-eyed and panicked.





Chapter Eleven





We had less than an hour to try to do something—if anything could even be done. Jethro already said that the pod was on its way to Vysanthe. Even if we somehow managed to warn Navan and Bashrik before they left for town, and they thwarted Jethro and Ianthan leaving with Navan’s ship, wouldn’t it still be too late?

“Maybe Navan could go after the pod in his ship and catch it before it reached Vysanthe and… whoever ‘Queen Brisha’ is,” Angie said. “His ship might be faster than the pod.”

“Right,” I said, trying to steady my racing mind, and tamp down the nausea that kept rising in my throat. “Yes, th-that’s possible. So… what do we do?”

The thing was, we weren’t supposed to remember anything about the coldbloods. Even if we managed to reach Navan, and got a word with him in private, who was to say he wouldn’t slit our throats before we could warn him? I had broken my promise, and that might be what he’d focus on. I couldn’t shake the vision of him bearing his fangs and claws at us, soon after we’d arrived at the house. He had looked downright ferocious, like he could tear us to shreds in a matter of seconds. Who knew how he would react?

But there was simply too much at stake not to try.

Angie cast a glance toward the Churnleys’ house, and I followed her gaze. It was bizarre to look across the pretty garden surrounding the couple’s home, flowers strewn and buzzing with honeybees—so at odds with the turbulent world within my brain.

“We could take some guns with us,” Angie said, her voice coming out as a croak.

“Guns,” Lauren murmured. “How will they help, exactly?”

“Well, obviously we’ve got to go back to that house and warn Navan and Bashrik,” Angie said, running her tongue over her lower lip. “And with guns, at least we won’t be as helpless as we were last time, against… whatever obstacles we might face.”

“Do you know how to use a gun, Lauren?” I asked, putting my hand on her shoulder, trying to comfort her.

“My uncle showed me how to use one, but…”

She didn’t need to finish her sentence. Angie knew how to work a gun, and so did I, though I wouldn’t say either of us were experts. “We have no choice but to do our best,” I whispered.

We rose from behind the blackberry bush, checking the sky briefly to be sure that the coldbloods were truly gone, and then raced toward the house. Luckily, the Churnleys weren’t downstairs, so we hurried over to the wall opposite the kitchen counter, where Mr. Churnley kept a collection of rifles. We each grabbed one, and then stocked up on ammunition, which Angie found in one of the kitchen drawers.

I did worry what would happen when Mr. Churnley came downstairs, if he noticed that three of his guns were gone—but I couldn’t think about that now.

We left the kitchen as quietly as we could, keeping the guns positioned in front of us, in case one of the Churnleys looked through a window and spotted us. As soon as we were out of direct view from the house, we broke into a sprint toward the coldbloods’ fence.

This time, at least we had the advantage of knowing how the enclosure was laid out. I knew approximately where the house was situated, in relation to the fence, as well as where the backyard was. Instead of breaching the fence at the same point we had the night before, we traveled along the length of it, keeping our heads low, trying not to pant too loudly, until I sensed we had made it far enough to be approaching the backyard.