It wasn’t fast enough.

I sensed Lilac’s approach. Felt her hovering. Heard the tittering girls who already orbited her like a bunch of dim-witted moons.

Shit. Of course I was naked, but for my bra and granny briefs. My cheeks flamed.

“Oh, Charity! How cute they were able to find a training bra for you.”

“How cute that they let a bunch of seventh graders in here,” I grumbled, not risking turning around to face her. Instead I pulled the plain navy T-shirt over my head as quickly as possible.

“As if,” she snapped. “Hey, they gave us razors, you know. You may want to shave before you make the rest of us vomit.”

“That’s the best you can do?” I stepped into the matching shorts. They were made of the same navy T-shirt material, and the whole outfit hung on me in the most unflattering way imaginable. I tucked in my shirt, hoping to give myself some shape. Plucking at the waist, I feared Lilac was right; if anyone needed a reminder of how small-chested I was, all they needed was to see me in this thing.

I sensed movement but was unable to flinch away in time. There was a quick whish-whish sound, and then Lilac’s towel rat-tailed the backs of my calves.

It stung, but not as much as the locker room full of laughing girls.

I turned. Lilac’s posse was staring me down, with her at the forefront. I wanted to show them all. “You’ll regret that.”

Lilac stood defiantly, her shoulders back in a way that showed off how well she filled out her uniform. With a flip of her maple hair, she lifted her chin. “Bring it, bitch.”

Then it hit me. As much as I wanted to escape, I wanted more to beat her. To show up Lilac and her stupid clique.

“Sure thing, von Slutling.” This time, I was the one to let my shoulder bump hers as I stormed out.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A few weeks passed. Twenty-three days, to be precise. More than five hundred hours in which to get used to the image of Ronan in swim trunks.

And yet there I was, headed to the natatorium (the vamps couldn’t just call a pool a pool), girding myself for yet another one of our private studies.

I had no choice, of course. Lilac was out for blood, and I’d do whatever it took to beat her. Which meant learning to swim.

I’d thought nothing could be worse than the sensation of water whooshing into my ears, but that’d been before I’d withstood the indignity of dog-paddling to Ronan with only my faded yellow noodle to support me. Serious humiliation time.

But, oddly, after a few weeks of lessons, the sharp spear of panic I knew at the smell of chlorine began to blunt. I still hated to swim, still couldn’t swim, still couldn’t ever imagine myself a swimmer, but neither did I think each dip would result in my certain and instant death.

I think it was the blood that did it. Drinking vampire lifeblood was gradually eroding my inhibitions.

It was making me stronger.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t making me any more social. I still kept mostly to myself, not branching out from my friendship with Yasuo, whom I hung with between classes and in our rare free time before curfew. And there was always Ronan.

Always it came back to Ronan. And those damned swim trunks. They had a dangerous way of making me forget he wasn’t to be trusted.

I reached the natatorium, slamming my hip as I always did against the long metal bar that opened the door. “Ow!” The door hadn’t budged. Rubbing my side, I tried again, this time pushing with my hands, but no luck. Someone had locked it. “What the . . . ?”

I ran my hand over my neck, trying to maintain calm. I had to meet Ronan at the specified time . . . or what? Somehow I doubted they had detention on this island. But how could I make class when the door was locked? I groaned. For all I knew, this was some bizarre new test.

I leaned in to try once more when a burst of voices alerted me. I ducked aside just as the door swung in and a crowd of Initiates bustled out. Immediately I felt their jangly, nervous energy, hearing tension in the subdued murmurs of the usually cocky older girls.

Two steely-eyed Tracers followed, whisking an awkward, canvas-wrapped object from the building. Unless it was some sort of rug—a large, lumpy, heavy rug—I knew it was a body they were disposing of.

I made myself as inconspicuous as possible, watching as a few more Initiates spilled out behind them. One stood out at once, stumbling along, holding another girl for balance. Her white terry-cloth robe hung open, revealing our standard black Speedo one-piece underneath. Something bad had to have happened for an Initiate to appear outside the pool in anything less than her full catsuited glory.

They swept past, and I saw she had a stunned, blank look in her eyes. Specks of pink foam clung at the corners of her blue lips. And I supposed she was the lucky one. Goose bumps crawled along my skin.

Ronan trailed the group, speaking in hushed tones to a Tracer in a wet suit, and I caught his eye. He said some last thing to the guy and came toward me.

“What was that about?” I asked at once.

“Underwater training.” He kept walking, headed away from the pool, and I followed.

Did that mean our private study was canceled?

My initial burst of excitement paled, though, when I registered his words. Learning to swim was one thing, but I’d eventually be expected to do stuff underwater?

“Wait.” I stopped in my tracks. I’d thought the noodle float was degrading, but the idea that I might someday face Ronan with my big lips and bug eyes distorted by scuba gear? I almost dreaded that as much as the terrifying prospect of swimming in deep water. “We have to do underwater training? Like scuba diving?”

My heart began to hammer just thinking about having to breathe through some hideous metal apparatus. No way. There was no way I was ever going to fling myself from a boat, or do one of those backward somersaults off the side, or whatever Navy SEAL nonsense they had in mind for us.

The girl who’d just hobbled out of there looked like death warmed over. Pink foam burbling from one’s mouth struck me as a definite red flag. My mind flashed to a morbid vision of me with blue lips, looking half drowned.

“No oxygen tanks. You learn to hold your breath.” He didn’t break his stride, and I had to jog to catch up. “Some free divers are able to stay underwater for nearly twenty minutes.”

“Hold my breath?” It came out almost as a shriek, and I tempered my voice. I hoped he’d said such a ridiculous thing for shock value only. “You’re joking me, right?”

He shot me that flinty, quit-your-nonsense look, and I knew if Ronan were there with those hypnotic green eyes and that manly-man confident touch, I’d probably find myself jumping into a school of sharks if he asked it of me.

I spied Lilac and her cronies from across the quad. What was I thinking? Ronan’s green eyes already had coaxed me into a school of sharks.

“It’s all about overcoming the instinct of your body with the strength of your mind,” he was saying, clueless to the direction my thoughts had taken.

I adjusted my gym bag on my shoulder. Overcoming, instincts, strength . . . I was momentarily sick of all of it and decided a change of subject was called for. “I take it swim class is canceled. How’d I get so lucky?”

“There’s gore in the pool. We’ll meet tomorrow.”

“Jeez-usss.” My stomach flip-flopped. Gore? He’d said it so simply, so baldly, like, Hey, Drew, no pool time today—the pH balance is off, and, oh, there are some bits of small intestine floating about, too. What could possibly have happened in the pool for there to be gore? And would I eventually be expected to face it? “You don’t pull any punches.”

He gave me another look, but this time the set of his jaw had eased, softening his expression ever so much. “Aye, I don’t pull my punches, Annelise. It’s best you learn right away that this island plays for keeps. It’d be a shame to lose you so early in the program.”

I stopped in my tracks. “A shame? It’d be a shame to lose me? It’d be a total, freaking, catastrophically shattering tragedy is what it’d be.”

He looked at me for a slow moment, then with the slightest of smiles, gave me a wink. “Aye.”

Then I knew. I’d heard it in that husky accent of his. He would feel the loss. If something happened to me, it would affect him. A warm shiver rippled through my belly.

Perhaps I could learn to trust him after all.

Though the realization made things a little easier, nothing could erase that horrific word echoing in the back of my mind. Gore. Ugh.

We went our separate ways, and I headed back to the dorm with much to think about.

But then my ears perked at the sound of shouting. If I hadn’t seen the source of the noise in the distance, I’d have thought some sort of vampire apocalypse had begun. But it was just them. The boys. And they were in the middle of the quad, tossing a football.

Apparently, not even discovering an island ruled by vampires could stop a bunch of guys from wanting an excuse to run around, grunt, and swat one another on the butts. I slowed my pace, glaring at the lot of them. I guess they were allowed to stray from the damned path.

I felt a spinning in my head like vertigo, so much did the sight of them disturb me. A bunch of boys tossing around a football was so innocent, so all-American. And yet I’d just seen an Initiate’s dead body being toted away. For all I knew, these guys were being trained to do whatever the hell it was that’d happened to her today.

I considered walking right by, but the closer I got, the more fascinated I became. We hadn’t been on the island long, but already the vampire Trainees had begun to change. We’d been told it took years to progress through the vampiric process, but it was obvious in the strength of their throws, the ferocity of their tackles, and their surprising speed that these weren’t the same guys of just a few weeks before.

The blood was affecting them already. And who knew what other rituals or . . . foodstuffs these boys included in their routine? Shudder.

But of course, I thought. Of course the blood was changing them. I’d felt its effects myself. Did I seem this different already? I made a mental note to study myself in the mirror the next time Lilac left me alone in the room.