I jump back, try to turn around, but that little delay is all the dragon needs to get to me. Talons wrap around my upper arms, pricking my biceps, as he lifts me straight off my feet and starts flying back across the room.

I struggle against his hold, trying to get him to drop me before he gets too high. But his talons go from pricking my skin to piercing it. I gasp as new pain slams through me, but the dragon gets his wish—I stop struggling, too afraid that he’ll tear me to pieces to risk it.

At the same time, I’m too terrified that he’ll kill me to just do nothing, so I grab on to his feet and try to pry his talons out of and off of me. I know I’ll fall, but at this point it’s the best plan I can come up with. Especially considering the voice inside me that’s been telling me what to do for days now is suddenly, inconveniently absent.

Unfortunately, my prying fingers only make the dragon dig in deeper, and for a second, everything goes black. I take a few deep breaths, concentrate on beating back the pain. And wonder how the hell I got myself kidnapped by both a vampire and a dragon in one night.

San Diego has never seemed so far away.

All of a sudden, the dragon sweeps down, so low that my feet can practically touch the ground. We’re headed straight for the huge double doors on the other side of the room—looks like I was running in the wrong direction earlier—and that might not be a problem except for the fact that they are closed and the dragon’s…hands? paws? claws?…are currently filled with me.

I shrink down, brace for impact and what I’m pretty sure is my imminent death. But about a second before we fly into them, the doors burst open and we soar right through…and over a screaming, infuriated Lia.

The dragon doesn’t pause, just stretches out its wings and starts flying even faster, straight down the long hallway that I’m guessing leads toward the center portico with the huge bone chandelier.

Lia’s running along below us, and she’s fast enough to more than keep up. And at this point, I’m really close to losing it. Because trapped between a dragon and a vampire gives a whole new meaning to the old “rock and hard place” cliché, and that never works out well for the person in the middle.

Plus, I’m getting really sick of being dragged around by supernatural creatures. I mean, sure, I want to believe this dragon—whether it’s Flint or some other kid I go to school with—is trying to rescue me, but the talons currently ripping through my arm muscles tell a different story.

At this point, I’m pretty sure the best-case scenario involves me choosing between death by dragon or death by vampire. Too bad I have no idea which one would be least painful. And does it really matter considering I’ll be dead at the end, anyway?

We’re moving crazy fast, so we reach the center hub of the tunnels in seconds. The only problem? We’re flying straight toward the giant bone chandelier, with its hundreds of lit candles, and the dragon shows no sign of slowing down. Which, fine. He’s a dragon and, I assume, fireproof. Too bad that same adjective can’t be used to describe me or the cotton shift I’m wearing.

Suddenly, death by vampire bite doesn’t sound so bad. Not when the alternative is burning alive in midair.

But at the last second, the dragon pulls his arms up tight to his body, with me still clutched in his talons, and dives right under the chandelier. His goal is obviously to get past it while staying as high and fast as possible. But that drop in altitude is what Lia’s been waiting for, because now she’s leaping off the ground and grabbing hold of the dragon’s tail.

The dragon roars, tries to flick her off him, but she holds on. Seconds later, she’s got her arms wrapped completely around his tail and is slamming us toward the ground as hard as she can.

Which—for the record—is really freaking hard. Especially considering the dragon doesn’t let go of me while we fall.

We hit the ground with a crash. On the plus side, the dragon lets go of me on impact, and for the first time in several minutes, there are no talons digging into my arms. On the negative side, I hit the ground shoulder-first and am now seeing stars of the very not-good variety.

Plus, I can barely move my left arm. A problem that’s compounded by the fact that I am also still bleeding from my wrists, my ankles, my fingers, and now my arms where the dragon was holding me. And, oh yeah, I’m being stalked by a crazy-ass vampire with ritualistic murder in her eyes.

And here I thought Alaska would be boring.

Snarls and screams sound behind me, and I scramble to my knees, trying to ignore the pain in my sprained? broken? dislocated? shoulder as I spin around in time to see Lia and the dragon going at it full force.

The dragon lashes out with a claw and slices Lia’s cheek open before she jumps out of range. Seconds later, she responds by leaping onto his back and yanking his wing back so hard that he screams in agony even as he twists around and shoots fire straight at her.

She dodges but gets a little singed around the edges—which only seems to piss her off more. She plasters herself low across his back and punches a hole straight through his other wing.

The dragon screams again, then blurs into a rainbow array of colors for several seconds. When the blur of color passes, he’s a boy again—and not just any boy. Flint. And he’s bleeding. Not as much as I am, but the wing punch obviously hurt him if the way he hunches over as he scrambles awkwardly to his feet is any indication.

He’s dressed in the ripped-up version of the clothes he was wearing and has a lot more cuts and bruises on him now. Lia seems a little worse for wear from the fall, too, but she rushes him with a primal scream that has shivers running along every nerve ending that I’ve got. Flint meets her halfway, arm muscles bulging as he attempts to keep her flashing fangs out of his skin. Once he’s got a good grip on her, it’s his turn to send her flying to the ground. Then he grabs her head and starts pounding it over and over again into the stone floor.

She’s fighting him, bucking and snarling and doing everything in her power to get away from him. But he holds tight as he growls something indecipherable at her. I take their preoccupation with each other as my cue to get as far from them as I possibly can, as fast as I possibly can.

I stumble to my feet, ignoring the pain and the fact that my messed up shoulder makes it impossible for me to do anything but list to my left side. But forward movement is forward movement even in this world, and I can’t stay here watching Flint and Lia try to kill each other for one second longer.

Keeping one ear on the fight behind me, I start running/hobbling through the portico, looking for the tunnel that will take me back into the school’s main building. The tunnel that will bring me back to Katmere.

I make it across the center of the room to the tunnel that’s one to the side of being directly across from where Lia and Flint are fighting. But when I start to run down it, I’m torn between screaming for help and trying to go unnoticed a little while longer. And by a little while I mean long enough for me to stagger through the tunnel and into the school, where surely my Uncle Finn will put a stop to this madness.

Before the entire world explodes.

But I barely make it to the entrance to the tunnel that I think will lead me to the castle before Flint is on me. He grabs me by the hair and slams me face-first into the nearest wall.

“Flint, stop. Please,” I manage to gasp out through the pain tearing through me courtesy of my injured shoulder.

“I wish I could, Grace.” He sounds grim, defeated. “I thought I could get you out of here. But Lia’s not going to let me. And I can’t let the ticks get away with using you for what they want to do.”

“Using me for what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Lia’s had a plan all along. It’s why she brought you here.”

“She didn’t bring me here, Flint. My parents died—”

“Don’t you get it? She killed your parents to get you here. We knew it for sure as soon as you arrived and the wolves got close enough to smell you.

“We were sure we’d be able to finish this long before we got here, but taking you and Lia out is one thing. Taking Jaxon out when we realized he was involved in the plan was another thing entirely.”

I’m reeling, his words hitting me with the full force of a wrecking ball as I scramble to make sense of them. “What are you—my parents—Jaxon—how could…” I pause, take a breath. Try to breathe through the pain and confusion and horror his words stir up inside me.

“Look, I don’t have time to fill you in on everything. And it wouldn’t change anything if I could. I want to save you, Grace. I do. But we can’t let Lia do this. It’ll mean the end of the world. So you’ve got to die. It’s the only way we can stop this thing from happening.” He reaches forward, wraps his hand around my neck.

And then he starts to squeeze.

59

Carpe

Kill-Em

“Stop!” I gasp out, clawing frantically at his hand with my bloody fingertips. “Flint, please. You can’t do this.”

But Flint isn’t listening. He just stares at me with broken, tear-filled eyes as he squeezes tighter and tighter.

I’m panic-stricken by this point, terrified that he’s really going to do it. That he’s really going to kill me…and worse, he’s going do it before I know the truth behind what happened to my parents.

“Flint, stop!” I try to get more out, try to beg him to tell me what he’s talking about, but the pressure on my throat is too much. I can’t speak anymore, can’t breathe, can hardly think as the world starts going dark around me.

“I’m sorry, Grace.” He sounds tortured, devastated, but the squeeze of his fingers around my throat never falters. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this. I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted—”

He breaks off on a scream and suddenly the pressure around my neck is gone, his fingers bending back from my skin at an unnatural angle.

I gasp, try to suck air into my starving lungs via my abused throat. It hurts, a lot, but the pain doesn’t matter right now. Nothing does except being able to breathe again.