I dialed Eddie.
“Hey,” I said. “You want to run an errand with me?”
“The last time you asked that, we went and met with a bunch of rebel Alchemists.”
“Well, I hope you had fun because that’s what I’m doing tonight.” I’d known him long enough to know exactly how to win him over. “I have to go to some remote place in the middle of nowhere. Neil and Angeline will be here for Jill.”
A few seconds passed. “Okay. When are we going?”
“I’ll be right over.”
Eddie was relaxed and upbeat when I picked him up, so I knew that he must have gotten in touch with the other dhampirs in the short time it had taken me to come over. Eddie wasn’t with Jill twenty‑four hours a day, but he seemed to feel as though she were particularly vulnerable if he wasn’t on campus. Despite their differences, I knew he felt better having Neil as extra protection.
“Hard to believe everyone’s acting so laid‑back after last night,” I remarked, noting his good mood.
“Neil’s not,” said Eddie. “He seems overwhelmed. I mean, not down or anything. He’s happy about the outcome. I think it’s just a big thing to accept you hold the solution to a huge mystery. He was trying to explain it last night when we were out.”
“Sorry I missed it,” I said. I really wasn’t, not when I looked back upon that heated, urgent night with Adrian.
“Sydney . . .” Eddie’s light mood vanished, and even with my eyes on the road, his tone tipped me off that something serious was about to happen. “About that. About you going to Adrian’s . . .”
I felt a tightening of my throat and couldn’t answer immediately. “Don’t talk about that,” I said. “Please.”
“No, we need to.”
Eddie knew. Eddie knew, and if the subject wasn’t so dire, I would’ve laughed. He was oblivious to his own social affairs, but guardians were trained to watch and observe. Eddie did that, and no doubt he’d picked up all sorts of little things between Adrian and me. We tried so hard to hide from the Alchemists, but hiding from our friends, who knew us and loved us, was impossible.
“Are you going to lecture me?” I asked stiffly. “Tell me I’m breaking taboos that have been in place for centuries to preserve the purity of our races?”
“What?” He was aghast. “No, of course not.”
I dared a look. “What do you mean ‘of course not’?”
“Sydney, I’m your friend. I’m his friend. I’d never judge you, and I’d certainly never condemn you.”
“A lot of people think what we’re doing is wrong.” It felt strange and oddly relieving to acknowledge my relationship with Adrian to another person.
“Well, I’m not one of them. If you guys want it . . . that’s your business.”
“Everyone’s suddenly very liberal about this,” I said with wonder. “I just heard a similar thing from Trey and Angeline–about their own relationship, that is. Not about . . . other people’s.”
“I think my ill‑fated time with Angeline may be part of it,” he said, with more humor than I expected, considering she’d cheated on him. “She talked enough about her people that after a while, it didn’t seem that weird. And, well, my race exists because humans and Moroi got together and had kids way back when.”
I felt a smile start to grow on my lips. “Adrian says it wouldn’t be fair to the world if he and I had kids, what with the overwhelming power of our collective charm, brains, and good looks.”
Eddie laughed outright, not something I heard very often, and I found myself laughing too. “Yeah, I can see him saying something like that. And that’s the thing, I think . . . the real reason I’m not that weirded out by you two. It goes against all sound logic, but somehow, you two together . . . it just works.”
“‘Against all sound logic,’” I repeated. “Isn’t that the truth.”
A little of his amusement faded. “But that’s not what worries me. Or the morality of it. It’s your own people I’m worried about. How long are you going to be able to go on like this?”
I sighed as I took the exit for the meeting spot. “As long as the center holds.”
The dilapidated restaurant, uncreatively called Bob’s, was easily visible from the freeway in the daytime. Nighttime was a different matter. Large overhead lights had burned out long ago, and most of the gravel parking lot was buried in shadows. The only real light, once I turned off the car, came from a lightbulb near the back of the building. It was the kind of place serial killers, hobos, and Marcus Finch would hang around in, and those first two categories were the reason I had Eddie along.
Clarence’s Porsche wasn’t here yet, but there was a large gray van parked nearby. “Oh God,” I said. “I wonder how many recruits Marcus has with him.”
Eddie said nothing. All romantic musings were gone, and he’d snapped into guardian mode. This was the kind of place that triggered all his alarms, and I knew his training had seized hold and had him looking in every corner. He even walked ahead of me and tried the door first. The windows had been covered over for a while, but I thought I could see a hint of light within. The handle turned in Eddie’s hand, and he pushed the door open and stepped inside–
–into an ambush.
I couldn’t make out any identifying features. They were all in black and wore black ski masks. I think they were just expecting me because only one reached for Eddie, and the guy’s eyes went wide when Eddie not only eluded him but also grabbed and threw him across the room, into someone else.
“Sydney, run!” Eddie yelled.
My immediate instinct was that I couldn’t leave Eddie, but as he shoved me out the door, I realized he was coming with me. We tore out into the parking lot, only to see two more figures in black getting out of the van, cutting us off from my car. Eddie grabbed my hand and steered me in the opposite direction, behind the building and into a dark, sandy field that stretched as far as I could see.
I was a good runner, but I knew Eddie had to slow down for me. I also knew any attempts to tell him to go off without me would be foolish. The grass in the field was scraggly and scant, and there was only a handful of trees. For long moments, there was no sound except the thud of our feet and our heavy breathing. Then, from behind us, I heard shouts . . . and a gunshot.
Eddie managed to glance over his shoulder without breaking stride. “They’re coming,” he said. “About seven of them. With flashlights. And apparently guns.”
“Look,” I gasped out. In front of us, I could see two more flashlights approaching from the direction we were headed.
He said nothing and then suddenly jerked me to our right and down to the ground, into a ditch his superior eyes had seen. He threw me to my stomach and hovered protectively over me. The way the ditch was carved out offered partial coverage, and a thin, sad tree clinging to the side offered a little more. My heart was pounding, and I tried to calm down, lest my breathing give us away. Above me, Eddie was perfectly still, every muscle tense and ready to pounce if needed.
The shouts grew closer, mostly our attackers calling directions to one another and speculating over where Eddie and I were. As I lay there, hoping they’d walk by us, I wondered frantically who they were. Not Marcus and his Merry Men, obviously. But it was someone who cared enough about seizing us–or, well, me–to have set up a very organized trap, and there was only one group of people I could think of that fit that description.
The Alchemists.
It was what I’d lived in fear of so long; I just hadn’t expected it to go down like this. A million questions raced through my head. How long had the Alchemists been here? Had they caught Adrian and Marcus too?