My attempts to keep Sebastian here have been thwarted. I know that nothing I can do or say is going to change his mind.

Rachel steps in front of me and props her hands on her hips. “I say you stay,” she demands.

Alex and I pass each other a look, both with a raised brow.

Sebastian smiles, shaking his head. “Thanks, but…I’ve gotta go.”

He raises two fingers and waves at us as he moves down the hall.

“Don’t even think about it,” Rachel hisses pointing at Alex with a warning look on her face. “That hot piece of ass is totally mine.”

Alex and I barely hold in our laughter and we slip back inside Rachel’s room behind her. I shut the door.

“What?” Rachel says all cock-eyed.

She plops back down on her bed, crossing her bare feet at the ankles below. Her toenails are painted red and she wears a gold ring on each pinky toe.

We can’t wipe the smiles off our faces. “Oh, nothing,” we say melodiously at the same time.

An hour passes in which we spend talking about more human things and I sort of feel a little bit human again. It almost feels like the time Alex and I hung out with her friend, Liz, one night when Brandon was out of town. We gossiped and laughed and did all the normal things teenage girls do. But things are different now. We’re not so much teenagers anymore. And our gossip consists of stuff about how certain girls in the house are still delusional about being with the Alpha—yeah, ummm, he’s taken, thank-you-very-much.

There’s a rhythmic knock on the door and since I’m closest to it, I look to Rachel first since it’s her room.

“What?!” she shouts.

“Are you nak*d?!” Xavier says on the other side.

Rachel rolls her eyes.

Xavier lets himself in, peeking his blond head around the door. “Not like I haven’t seen it before,” he says grinning and steps the rest of the way inside.

Alex recoils from his presence with aversion and intolerance. I’m proud of her for that. I just want to slap that grin off his face. He is gorgeous; I’ll give him that, but he’s way too much of a slutty douche bag to be talking to my sister. I sneer at him, but he doesn’t even notice me. He walks right over next to Alex and sits down on Rachel’s vanity chair, leaning his back against the wall and splaying his legs out into the floor.

“Shouldn’t you be in mourning?” Rachel says with a sneer and goes back to inspecting her fingernails.

Xavier, for a brief second, looks crestfallen, but he quickly wipes away how he’s really feeling and smiles. “So,” he says, folding his hands casually on his lap, “when are you going to go out with me?”

Alex’s head snaps around. “Umm. Never?”

Xavier smiles a crooked smile. “How about tomorrow night?”

Alex’s mouth falls open and cavernous creases take shape in her forehead around her eyebrows. I’m as revolted as she is.

“How about never?” she says.

Xavier glances over at Rachel and nods his head toward Alex. “Tell her I’m not so bad—not what she thinks I am, anyway.”

Rachel puts up her hands. “Don’t drag me into this.”

“No, I’m sure you’re exactly what I think you are,” Alex interjects. “An uncompassionate sex junkie who uses people and is full of himself.”

Go Alex!

Xavier blinks back the stun. Strangely enough, he looks totally taken aback by her opinion of him.

“A sex junkie, maybe. Full of myself—it’s just my way of hiding my insecurities,” he says, “but baby, I’ve never used anyone in my life.”

What kind of tactics is he using? Sounds like he’s playing the misunderstood bad-boy card openly. But Alex won’t fall for it.

I hope not. Surely not….

Alex rolls her eyes and starts inspecting her long fingernails, too, but it’s an obvious distraction so she doesn’t have to look at him.

“I haven’t! Tell her, Rach!” His whole face is one big smile and the more I look at him the more I see how much he and Daisy really do look alike.

Rachel sighs and drops her hands on the bed. “Xavier is a jackass, yes,” she says and Xavier just keeps smiling, “but he’s telling the truth as far as I know; he’s up front, I’ll give him that.”

“I don’t care, really,” Alex says. She reaches over to Rachel’s nightstand and takes up a bottle of electric blue nail polish and twists off the top. “You have no chance in hell with me.”

Xavier’s mouth lifts into a sly, sexy grin.

“You’re up front, alright,” I say to him. “Telling a girl she’ll be in your bed by the end of the week is not only up front, but extraordinarily pathetic.”

Xavier makes a face. “Pathetic?” He shakes his head, still smiling. “That’s a low blow, girl.”

“It’s the truth.”

Xavier laughs.

“So what do you say?” He turns back to Alex. “How about something simple, cliché and old fashioned like dinner and a movie?” He leans forward and props his elbows on his knees, letting his hands hang freely between them. “You’d be the first. I promise.”

Alex laughs. “Yeah, ummm, something tells me with you I wouldn’t be the first anything.”

Xavier’s chin draws back in a stunned motion. “I’m serious. I’ve never taken a girl to dinner and a movie. Ever.”

There’s so much eye-rolling going on in here right now I think we might all severely damage our eyesight. Alex gets up from the foot of the bed and marches over to the door, placing her hand on the knob. She smirks across the room at Xavier and says, “No. Now if you don’t mind, we were getting ready to compare our boob sizes and massage each other’s backs after such a stressful event and you shouldn’t be in here when we take off our clothes.” She opens the door and gestures toward the hallway with an artful smile.

Xavier’s face just sort of freezes until a grin warms it back to life. He gets up from the vanity chair. “Oh, you are so cruel.”

Alex smirks and waits patiently for him to walk out.

“You have no idea,” she says as he passes her.

“So tomorrow night then?” he says right outside the door.

Alex shuts the door in his face.

Rachel and I look right at each other and then burst into a fit of laughter.

“You know you just made it worse for yourself,” Rachel says filing her thumb nail down with a hot pink nail file. She rocks her crossed feet side to side on the end of the bed.

Alex goes back to her spot next to Rachel’s feet and plops down. “Whatever. The guy’s delusional.”

I spend about an hour more with my sister in Rachel’s room, which apparently is now also Alex’s room, too. At first I wanted her to myself so that we could catch up and be together like we always were when we were growing up, but I found myself enjoying Rachel’s company and didn’t mind so much that she was with us. She and Alex are so much alike, especially considering Ashe, and it just makes me happy to see Alex fitting in so fast. But I never felt left out in that time I spent with them. So strange how things turn out. My worst enemy became my sister’s best friend and one of my best friends became my worst enemy.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget Zia and the girl she was before I knew the real her. And despite everything that she did, I can’t help but feel sorry for her. Maybe I could’ve turned out like her if I thought my sister’s death was caused by someone. Zia became Dark because of a traumatic event in her life and while that is never a justifiable excuse to kill someone, deep down I know too that we are all capable of it.

I had set out to find Isaac, but in passing Zia’s bedroom door on the way to his, I just have to stop. I push the door the rest of the way open with the palm of my hand and step inside. Everything looks the same. The strategically placed pyramid of empty soda cans by her bedside clock, the sloppy stack of CD’s and the pile of paperback books piled against the wall and the black and red mosaic lamp beside her bed. The room had always smelled strongly of incense and tonight is no different.

I fold one arm across my stomach and rest my forehead in the other hand and just sigh deeply, feeling my stomach harden as I try to force down the tears.

And then I walk out, slamming the door behind me.

Isaac is lying across his bed when I go inside, his hands propped behind his head against the headboard and his feet crossed below.

I don’t say anything when I sit down next to him. I feel like asking him if he’s okay when I know he’s not is just stupid. And without looking at me, he reaches out one arm and pulls me toward him. I lay my head on his stomach and he brushes his fingers through my hair as he stares off at the wall, his free hand still propped behind his head.

“Remember when we first met on that gravel road?” he says.

“Of course I do.” It’s one of the top five things I’ll never forget for as long as I live.

“Shortly before that,” he says, “when we were watching out for you in the parking lot at the skate park, Zia said something to me that always struck me as strange, but I never really understood it until now.”

“What did she say?”

He continues to comb his fingers through my hair.

“She said, ‘you’ll just kill her, too’, because I said we should follow you to make sure you got home safely.”

I lean my head back a little to see him. “Come on, baby, don’t do that blaming yourself stuff.”

“I’m not,” he says, finally looking down at me, “I know I couldn’t have known what or who she was; it’s just that now that I know, all kinds of things she said and did over time makes complete sense.”

“Well, you did put her on the list,” I say, “right before we left for Providence. You had a feeling all along.”

He nods absently and stares out in front of him again; the motion of his fingers on my scalp is causing my eyes to tingle.

“I want this all to be over with,” he says. “I’m tired of…well, I’m tired of everything.”

“But it is over. Zia’s gone. Everybody’s safe.”

“No…it’s far from over,” he says though he appears lost in some deep, dark reflection. “This thing with Aramei and my father—I fear this situation is far worse than the one with Zia ever was.”

I lift my head from his stomach and hold up my weight over his lap with my elbow pressed into the mattress. “What makes you say that?”

He doesn’t speak for a moment and he still rarely looks back at me. And then just like his reason for putting Zia on The List, he says quietly, “Just another gut feeling,” and slowly I lay my head back on his stomach without saying another word.

Because the truth is that I feel it, too. And I no longer believe in coincidence.

Chapter 24

Balkan Mountains – Eastern Serbia – Summer 1762

THE CRACKLING AND POPPING of flames licking the hay-covered roof wake Aramei from her sleep. In a split second, the haze from her semi-conscious mind pulls away, allowing her to see that this is not a dream. The tiny cottage is engulfed in flames. Aramei flies out of bed, tossing her worn cotton blanket onto the floor on her way across the smoke-filled room. She bursts through the bedroom door and out into the short hallway to see the flames spreading fast in the front room, crawling and licking their way up along the walls and consuming the four wooden beams holding the roof overhead.