The Hunt

10

Zane

ARIANE BAILED OUT OF MY mom’s car like she did it every day.

I watched in amazement from the driver’s seat of the van as the door popped open and Ariane slipped out. She kept low as she closed the door and crossed to the sidewalk. Then she straightened up and started walking at an easy pace, as though she were just any normal person out for an early-morning stroll.

And it worked, as far as I could tell. The Laughlin surveillance SUV had been forced back a car or two by traffic. So no one noticed a thing, except maybe whoever was in the car directly behind my mom’s.

I shook my head in disbelief, then accelerated to meet up with Ariane. Per the plan, I’d left my mom’s place and hustled back to the abandoned house where Ariane and I had stayed to gather our belongings and get the van.

“Follow at a discreet distance” had been her direction, which I’d interpreted as about a block and half. It hadn’t been difficult to find them and catch up, thankfully. My mom had been proceeding well under the speed limit, a combination of early-morning rush hour traffic and probably being distracted by the conversation with her stowaway.

Ariane pulled open the passenger-side door of the van and boosted herself inside in a smooth movement. I didn’t even have to come to a complete stop.

She was like a female version of freaking Jason Bourne.

“That was unreal,” I said, unable to disguise the admiration in my voice, even as it made me cringe a little. I was like some kind of slack-jawed yokel, amazed by electricity or something.

“Thanks,” Ariane said, sounding distracted as she yanked the door shut.

“Did she say—”

“Linwood High School,” Ariane said abruptly, her gaze fixed on some unknown point in the distance. “Lake Forest, Illinois. If I remember the map correctly, it’s about twenty minutes from here, southeast. So head back to the highway.”

Okay. I frowned. She sounded almost as mechanical as the GPS we didn’t have (and could have used). Something wasn’t right here. I could almost feel her pulling into herself, retreating somewhere I couldn’t reach.

“Is everything—” I began, and then cut myself off, a hot flush of embarrassment flooding my face. Of course everything wasn’t okay. Yesterday, I’d gone and dropped a bomb on the delicate balance that existed between us.

I love you. I winced. Zane, what were you thinking? I’d never before said that to a girl, but I knew too well the destructive power of an ill-timed declaration like that. Quinn, my brother, had dumped girls for lesser infractions. Even if I had meant it more as, I love you for saying that, which—let’s be honest—wasn’t what I’d meant at all, it was still too much, too soon. Obviously.

I never should have said anything. I had to do something to fix this. I might have felt what I felt, but announcing it? Bad idea. I felt sorry suddenly for all the girls who’d opened up to Quinn only to find themselves deleted from his phone. It was humiliating.

“Listen, Ariane, I just wanted to say…” I struggled to find the words that would erase the ones from before, words that would bridge the distance I’d stupidly created. “About yesterday. That was dumb. I never should have said that.”

“What?” Ariane looked over at me, genuinely confused, as if she’d been somewhere else entirely for the beginning of the conversation.

“The thing I said?” I shied away from repeating it. Once was bad enough. “I’m sorry for laying that on you. Especially right now, in the middle of everything that’s going on,” I said, forcing a shrug. “So let’s just forget it, okay? I take it back.” I tried for a casual smile, but it felt more like a grimace.

She stared at me for a long moment, her forehead furrowed, as if trying to decide something.

I shifted uneasily in my seat. “Look, I didn’t mean—”

“No,” she said finally.

I gaped at her. It wasn’t a yes-or-no question. In fact, it wasn’t a question at all. “Uh, no what?” I asked.

“No, you can’t take it back,” she said, a hint of color rising in her pale face and her chin tipped up in defiance. Then she hesitated, vulnerability flashing across her features. “Unless you’ve changed your mind.”

Then it was my turn to hesitate, confused. She didn’t seem upset about my blurt, but something was clearly wrong. But even bewildered, I knew better than to lie to someone who could hear me doing so. “No,” I said cautiously. “It’s not that. I just shouldn’t have—”

“Then you can’t have it back,” she said, raising her eyebrows in challenge. “It’s mine.”

The sheer ferocity in her tone startled a laugh out of me. “Okay, okay.” I held my hands up in surrender for a quick second before returning them to the steering wheel. It was flattering, at least, and made me feel a little better. Though I couldn’t help noticing that she hadn’t said anything about returning those feelings.

Let it go, Zane.

“I do, you know,” she said quietly. She drew her knees up to her chest, folding herself in the seat. “I have, since before we left Wingate.” She gave me a shy smile. “Pretty much since the activities fair, I think.”

“Really?” I had to stop myself from grinning like an idiot. That had been our first night out. It had ended with Rachel Jacobs, Ariane’s mortal enemy at the time, screeching in outrage and covered in shaving cream. Never let it be said I don’t know how to show a girl a good time, I guess.

“I just…” She took a deep breath. “You have to understand this is all new to me, and I’ve been working my whole life to avoid giving up control to someone else.”

“I don’t want to control you,” I said.

She shook her head violently, sending her hair, already a chaotic mess, flying around her face. “No, I know that, but the feelings are huge and they make things so complicated.…” She blew out a frustrated breath. And I thought about the miracle that we were able to understand each other, coming from such ridiculously disparate backgrounds.

She took a deep breath and tried again. “You know how you said sometimes it seems as if I’m two different people?”

I nodded.

“Sometimes, it feels that way to me, too.” She lifted her thin shoulders in a shrug. “I have years of training and instincts that come from this place deep inside me. And then I have these feelings and needs.” Her gaze flicked to me, and she blushed. I guessed she was thinking about our hookup in the van yesterday.

“I don’t know what to trust. I mean, I’m human and other,” she said carefully. “So, I’m both, but neither one. And that was hard enough before, but now…I don’t know how to do this.” She gestured to the space between us. “Or if I even should do this.” She bit her lip, as if there was more she would say but had stopped herself.

I had no idea what that was like for her, but I knew what it felt like to be caught between conflicting loyalties. “All right,” I said, thinking furiously. “How about this? We’ll just keep talking about it, when, you know, we’re not breaking into houses or sneaking out of cars. Do our best to make sure all of us are on the same page.”

She flashed me a weak smile, uncertainty flickering in her eyes. “Yeah, I guess.”

I smirked. “Awesome. A threesome.”

And when she rolled her eyes and shoved at my shoulder, I felt better, lighter than I had in days. I wondered how long that would last.

“That’s their school?” I stared at the sight before us.

“Apparently, Mara left out a few details,” Ariane said, sounding less than pleased.

Like it wasn’t Linwood High School, but Linwood Academy High School. The difference being one word and probably $25,000 a year.

Above us on a slight hill, the expansive building was situated on a sprawling green lawn, an oasis in the otherwise drought-ravaged suburbs. The walls angled out with unnecessary metal flourishes at the roofline, in that modern we-hired-an-expensive-architect kind of way. I could just make out a secondary building behind and to the right that, from the size, was probably a gym or a natatorium. It was also probably a safe bet that there were tennis courts up there somewhere too. Maybe even a putting green or two for the golf team.

I rolled my eyes.

Students in perfectly pressed school uniforms were all over the place: swarming toward a covered entrance at the side of the building (which was supported by three columns that appeared to be oversize statues of men, their raised hands supporting the roof), lounging under the perfectly coiffed weeping willow tree near what had to be a man-made pond, or hanging out on benches on white patches of gravel in the pristine grass.

Evidently, we’d arrived just before the first bell.

I shook my head. “It looks like—”

“—a museum,” Ariane said, with the smallest note of envy.

I shrugged. “I was going to go with fancy rehab facility. But that works too.”

She eyed me questioningly.

“Everyone’s dressed the same, they have white blobby meditation sculptures, and the grass is so green and even it looks like a rug.” I ticked each item off on my fingers. “This place practically screams, ‘No sharp objects allowed.’”

She frowned at me. “How do you know that?”

“Rachel once showed me the Web site of the place where her mom stays. It looked a lot like this.” I frowned. “Fewer people in plaid, though.”

“Plaid is probably déclassé in California,” Ariane said with a small smile. “All the cool recovering addicts are wearing white.”

I snorted. “Yeah.”

Someone honked behind us, just a polite tap on the horn. No one here was ill-bred enough to really lay into it. I found myself wanting to hold our position, blocking traffic, just to see how long it would take them to break form.

But keeping a low profile—well, relatively low—was more important. “Our van is not nearly expensive enough to be parking in this neighborhood,” I pointed out as I let up on the brake and turned the corner, heading up the incline toward the school. “We’re not going to have much time before someone is out here trying to get us to water the grass or reporting us to the police as creepers.”

“I know.” Ariane kept her gaze trained out the window, watching for what, I wasn’t sure. We didn’t even really know what Laughlin’s hybrids looked like, except one of them must resemble Ariane at least a little. Enough for my mom’s paranoid brain to confuse them, anyway.

But there were a lot of blue-blazer, plaid-skirt, and khaki-pants people wandering around out there. It was dizzying, like trying to focus on a single grain of sand on a whole beach.

I found a parking spot near the rear of the smooth, blemish-free asphalt lot that still gave us a decent view of what appeared to be the main entrance—the one with the three dudes raising the roof—and parked nose out.

“So what, exactly, is the plan?” I asked, cutting the engine.

“Find them, talk to them,” she said, her words terse with her attention focused elsewhere.

“I think you forgot: ‘and hope they don’t kill us on sight,’” I muttered.

She tore her gaze away from the Linwood elite to regard me with something like amusement, which I didn’t particularly care for. “Even if they’re not hiding, as I was, they will still be under orders to be discreet. Laughlin will not be any more inclined toward a public spectacle than Dr. Jacobs was. They can’t afford the exposure. That’s why tracking them down at school, in front of witnesses, is our safest option.”

I’d kind of thought it was our only option, but whatever. “I thought the whole point was they might not be into following orders so much.”

“I think it’s more that they follow orders very specifically. They weren’t ordered not to stalk your mother, so they took advantage of that gap. Small rebellions. They didn’t actually hurt her. They’re limited.”

I wasn’t sure my mother’s condition qualified as unhurt, but that was neither here nor there at the moment.

“If they hate the humans and had the capacity to change their situation, they would have already. So there must be some limit to what they can do with their orders, boundaries that they know they cannot cross,” Ariane said.

It was a good point, but I had to wonder how in the hell this Laughlin guy managed to keep them walking such a fine line. There must be something big hanging over their heads. “Yeah, but you have no idea what their standing orders are in regard to you,” I said.

For the first time, she hesitated. “I’m kind of banking on the fact that nobody’s ever thought a meeting would occur outside the trials.”

My mouth fell open. “You’re kidding.”

She shook her head.

So, this truly was a desperate, go-all-in-and-gamble-with-your-life moment. Well, shit.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “But what’s your plan if—”

But before I could finish, two black SUVs with heavily tinted windows pulled past us and wound their way to the covered drop-off area.

Ariane sat up in her seat, her hands clutching at the armrest so tightly that her knuckles blanched.

Of course. They would have an entourage. Ariane had been forced to blend in and be average, but these hybrids seemed to be doing the exact opposite. This school, their freedom (albeit limited) to come and go from their home at the facility, their look-at-me arrival on campus.

Assuming this was actually them and not some washed-up rock star’s offspring.

I leaned forward to watch, barely breathing.

They, whoever they were, exited on the opposite side of the vehicle. I could see the motion, the SUV swaying slightly as its occupants climbed out.

“There,” I pointed, my heart thundering in my chest. It wasn’t much, a brief glimpse of the same white-blond hair Ariane possessed, as the first SUV pulled away and the second moved into its place, but it was enough.

Ariane nodded. “It’s them.”

We were both scrambling to release our seat belts when the second SUV pulled away, revealing two big, black-clad security guys tagging along after the presumed hybrids. I couldn’t really see them with the guards in the way, just flashes of that pale hair here and there. But watching how the other students scrambled out of the way and then stared after them removed any doubt I might have had.

“Crap.” Ariane bit her lip. “What are the odds that they’re just escorting them to the door?”

“Uh, guarding them from all the perils that could spring up in that extra ten feet or so?” I asked. “Doubtful.”

Which meant the guards were going into school with them, possibly even into their classes, an idea that was almost immediately confirmed when the guards disappeared inside the school seconds later, following their charges.

Ariane slumped in her seat.

“At least we know we’re in the right place,” I offered.

“Yes, but if their security protocol is the same after school, we won’t have a chance to speak with them then either. And the longer this takes, the more likely it is that word will spread that I’ve escaped. Laughlin might then start looking for me.…”

And whatever orders his hybrids might or might not be under now would change, probably to decidedly more specific ones when it came to Ariane. And we’d be back to no plan, no hope.

She was quiet, but I could sense the wheels turning in her brain.

I closed my eyes and sighed. “You want to go in, don’t you?” It was the only logical conclusion. And after the last few days with her, I was finally starting to get a grasp on how she thought.

“I’ll go by myself,” she said. “It’s safer for you to stay out here.”

I felt a quick pinch of frustration. “No, I said I was in. So I’m in. But…” I gestured to the students wearing the Ralph-Lauren-on-crack collection. “We don’t exactly blend in.” Preppy was one thing. These people looked as if they were seconds away from sailing away on a private yacht or playing polo. Or both.

“No, we don’t.” She frowned. “Not yet, anyway.”

Oh, I bet I was going to regret this. “What does that mean?” I asked warily.

She smiled. “How do you feel about khakis?” she asked.

I groaned. She was going to dress us up like pod people, and I bet that would include one of those stupid ties. I hated anything pressed against my neck. “Better than I do about plaid skirts?” I offered grudgingly.

“Good. Then we need to find a place to do a little shopping.”

And here I thought confronting potentially homicidal hybrids was going to be the worst part of my day.