Lead Heart (Seraph Black Book 3) (26 page)

Noah rolled his eyes, pulling me out of the elevator and into the limousine. Hans and Andrei were already inside and waiting.

Hans cleared his throat.

“Good morning to you too,” I said, wiggling my fingers at him.

Andrei’s mouth twitched into an almost-smile, and they both turned to stare stoically out of their respective windows.

I spotted Tariq running toward the limo as though we might drive off without him, and I jumped out and met him in a hug.

“I’m so happy to see you,” he told me, patting my hair.

“I saw you yesterday morning,” I countered, trying to make light of the situation. “I’m sorry I was so out of it last night. I don’t even remember the drive back.”

“It’s okay.” He pulled the door open and motioned for me to get in, flashing a smile that sparked in his eyes. “I mostly chatted with Dre and Hamburger.”

“Dre and Hamburger?”

“Yeah,” Tariq replied, settling himself between the silent giants and punching each of them on the arm. “Those are their hood names. Dre,” he pointed to Andrei, “and Hamburger.” He pointed to Hans.

“Um.” I was at a complete loss for words as Hans and Andrei turned to do some kind of a handshake with my brother, both of them
smiling
. I looked to Noah, but his face was completely stoic. Cabe was smiling, but when I silently widened my eyes at him, asking for an explanation, he only shook his head.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Noah said, pulling my phone out of his pocket and dropping it into my lap. “You probably want this back.”

“Thanks,” I said, switching it on and quickly sending off a message to Poison and Clarin.

Poison’s reply came through first, reading:
Find me as soon as you get here
.

Clarin’s was next, and I laughed quietly as I read his reply. It was exactly the same as Poison’s.

Cabe, who had been reading over my shoulder, also laughed. “If science would have allowed it, those two would have found a way to become your pair by now.”

“Poison isn’t gay, and Clarin is. That makes the whole pairing thing a little difficult, doesn’t it?”

“Poison might not be gay, but she talks about your boobs enough to be toting a line, and Clarin could just kiss you to form the bond and then never touch you again.”

“Really? You think? I’ll keep that strategy in mind for my own bond. Thanks for the tip.”

Cabe fell silent, and Noah shifted uncomfortably on my other side, but neither of them dared to voice a protest or make any further jokes about the situation with the silent giants—and Tariq—listening in. We all retreated into contemplative silence for the rest of the drive and didn’t seem to rouse until the limousine stopped moving. I slid out after Cabe and texted Poison and Clarin to ask where they were.

“See you!” Tariq called out after us.

I turned to wave at him as Hans and Andrei fist-bumped him in goodbye and the limousine pulled away to take him to the high school. There was only a bare scattering of students around the parking lot, but they still covertly watched as we made our way toward one of the faculty buildings. I spotted Amber surrounded by a small group of girls and I immediately started to look for Noah—before pulling up short, because of course… Noah was standing right beside me.

And I had kissed him.

Obviously seeing the same thing that I had seen, Noah stopped in much the same fashion.

“Crap,” he mumbled.

“What?” Cabe asked, following the direction of our eyes until he spotted Amber. “Oh, crap.”

Amber chose that moment to notice us, and I could see very clearly as the awareness slowly filled her expression, followed by disbelief, and then devastation. She set her jaw, pushing away from her friends to stride toward us. For a full minute, I considered simply turning around and running for my life, but some kind of sick fascination held me in check, and I knew that I was curious to hear what she would say to Noah.

Or what Noah would say to her.

Groaning, I fell back a step, but Noah grabbed a hold of my arm, preventing me from going anywhere.

“Stay,” he said quietly. “Save us having this conversation later. You might as well hear it now.”

I suddenly decided that I didn’t want to hear it, but Amber had arrived, and she was staring at Noah with tears tracking down her cheeks.

“You said you’d give it a chance,” she flung at him—halfway between a plea and an accusation. “You promised me that it wasn’t because of
her
, and yet here you are. You came here together, after ditching me last night.”

“I also told you that I’d be pissed if you started a fight with her, and what did you do?”

“If that’s what this is about, I’m sorry, Noah.” She moved closer, peering up at him as the tears continued to fall. “I saw her and I just snapped. I’m sorry. Please, let’s just talk about it, okay?”

“You can’t talk us into a relationship, Amber.” Noah scrubbed a hand down his face, tension lining his shoulders and carrying thickly in his voice.

“You said you would—”

“I said I would
think
about it. I told you I was confused and I needed to sort some things out. Well, they’re sorted now. It’s not going to work, and you need to leave Seraph alone.”

Amber fell back a step, her tears drying up as quickly as they had appeared. Her face twisted into that expression of hatred that she seemed to wear whenever she looked at me, and she took a menacing step forward. I could tell that Noah was about to jump in front of me, so I put a hand on his arm to stop him. Amber glared at my hand, and started to tremble with the repressed need to explode. She whipped a folded bit of paper out of her pocket and jumped forward, punching it into the center of my chest.

“
Here
,” she sneered. “He told me to give this to you when you got back together with Noah. He said it would be today, but I didn’t believe him. Congratulations, bitch. You just dug your own grave.”

With those words, she turned on her heel and hurried away, leaving me clutching the note with frozen fingers. Cabe eased it out of my hands and I frowned as he opened it to reveal a route traced onto a campus map.

“Should we leave?” Noah asked, staring at the map.

“No,” I replied, stuffing the map into my pocket. “It could be another bomb. We need to make sure nobody gets hurt.”

I took off at a run before the words were even out of my mouth and I could hear the others following behind me. I had completely forgotten about Hans and Andrei, but I could hear one of them talking into a phone several paces back. I tore through the nearest faculty building to one of the raised courtyards outside the library, where the route drawn into the map had suddenly ended. There was already a large crowd of people gathered in the middle of the courtyard and I pushed through them, trying to get to the center. Soon enough they started to part for me, and I slowed as their stares weighed down on me, too anxious to shake them off as I usually would have.

When I finally saw it, I buckled. My knees collided with the dewy grass, and my shoulders slumped as I faced the messenger’s latest surprise.

It was a tombstone.

RIP

Seraph Black

It’s like a stick across your back,

And when your back begins to smart,

It’s like a pen-knife in your heart,

And when your heart begins to bleed,

You’re dead, and dead, and dead indeed.

“Alright, that’s enough everyone!” Hans boomed, knocking me out of the stupor that had taken a hold of me.

Andrei grabbed my sleeve and hauled me to my feet. “We’re going to your first class. Hans will take care of this.”

Without waiting to hear my opinion, he started to march me away from the scattering crowd. Noah and Cabe followed, of course, and we soon spilled into the lecture hall, where Quillan was waiting. He took one look at my face and folded his arms tightly, his expression growing strained.

“What the hell happened now?”

“I just saved a bunch of money on my own tombstone,” I said, disentangling myself from Andrei.

“What she means is that her stalker planted a tombstone with her name on it in the courtyard,” Andrei corrected me, folding his arms to match Quillan’s stance—like it was grown-up time now or something.

Quillan growled out a curse, and then another, and then he seemed to pull himself together. “Andrei, we need a minute.”

“I can’t leave her side right now.”

“Andrei.” Quillan strode up the stairs, standing before the giant and giving him a stare that even made me want to shrink back into myself. His dark eyes were lit from within by something heavy and unrestrained. He was very close to freaking out again. “I might spend most of my day sitting behind a desk, but I’m just as damned capable of snapping the neck of anyone who might want to hurt that girl—and twice as motived—as you. So, I’m going to say it again, and then you’re going to leave the room.
We. Need. A. Moment
.”

Andrei grumbled something beneath his breath and shot me a look, but eventually nodded and turned to stomp back up the stairs. “I’ll go and help Hans,” he informed us, letting the door snap closed behind him.

Quillan deflated almost immediately, sinking into one of the chairs and rubbing his hands nervously over his thighs, his eyes fixed to the front of the lecture hall.

“Does the messenger know that you formed the bond with Noah and Cabe? Is that why he did it?”

“He doesn’t know,” I quickly replied. “He couldn’t. Not yet. This was a precautionary thing. He knew that Noah didn’t go to see Amber last night, and he told Amber to give me a map to the grave if it looked like me and Noah were together. Or maybe she was supposed to give it to me anyway and she made up the other part.”

“Now Amber is working with him?”

“He’s worked with people before,” Noah said. “The people who kidnapped me and Cabe. Plus, there was no way he could have surrounded the entire high school with barrels of explosives last year all on his own.” He moved to sit beside Quillan.

Cabe followed him, falling into the chair on his other side. “He can’t find out about this. We need to find out about him first. It won’t be hard. Not now that Amber knows.”

“She won’t tell us anything,” Noah scoffed. “Not after this morning.”

“Are you sure you guys don’t remember anything?” Quillan questioned them, not for the first time, apparently.

“Nothing,” Noah confirmed. “The false memories didn’t name him, or show his face. He was just
the boyfriend
, and somehow that made sense to us.”

“Other people know,” I mused quietly. “The entire Klovoda knows who my twin is. Weston knows who he is. Jayden knows who he is, but he isn’t going to tell me. It didn’t turn out so well for me when I questioned him the other day, which is why I didn’t bring it up again to the Klovoda.”

“If Jayden knows…” Quillan began, trailing off.

Cabe and Noah turned to stare at Quillan, and Cabe shook his head, his expression drawing tight with pain and distress.

“No,” Cabe said, still shaking his head. “It’s impossible. Silas can’t know who the messenger is.”

“If Jayden knows, Silas knows,” Quillan countered, sounding resigned.

“
What
?” I demanded, rounding on all three of them. “What are you even talking about? How could you say that?”

“Easily.” Quillan rolled his eyes. “I haven’t seen Silas since you healed him. He checked out of the hospital and cleared a bunch of his stuff from the mountain house. This isn’t the first time he’s kept a secret from you to try and protect you. He obviously found out who the messenger is, and now he’s going after him. It kind of makes sense… to catch an invisible person, you have to become invisible yourself. At first I thought he was just hiding from the Klovoda or Weston, but this… this makes more sense.”

“But… he was with me last night,” I managed to declare, my words escaping on a strangled exhalation. “He can’t disappear. He can’t… he can’t…”

I was on the floor beside Quillan’s chair, my head falling onto his knee as his hand settled gently on my head.

“He’s going to get himself killed,” Noah groaned, sounding as helpless as I felt.

“We all know he can’t kill himself without hurting us as well,” Quillan countered, trying to be the voice of reason. “He won’t let it get that far.”

“He can’t,” I repeated. Maybe it was the only thing I could say, but it suddenly seemed very important.

“He’s not answering,” Cabe announced, indicating that he had tried to call Silas. “What time did he leave you last night, Seph?”

“I don’t know. I was asleep.”

“Do you think he’ll come back tonight?” Quillan asked, his fingers stilling in their calming tugs against my hair.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and fiddled with the buttons instead of answering Quillan. I didn’t like that Silas was pulling away from everyone, but what could we really expect after he had spent so many months being tortured by Weston? He probably
wanted
to be invisible.