Page 5 of Just One Bite
“I knew you’d find it and inhale it in a breath. I worry your stomach will burst.”
I focus back on the crowd, eating my burrito, and Zant watches in disgusted horror as I devour it in four bites. Just when I’m about to get an earful, my spine straightens. Like a beacon, her steps call to me. There’s no real reason for it—all the girls are permitted to wear the same shoes, but I still find her.
The girl from across the hall. I’d been such a dumbstruck asshole I didn’t say a word to her then. I was afraid I’d scare her. A few of my packmates jump from the bushes, and she doesn’t flinch but holds one of the girls while another one clings to her back. She looks tired and a little annoyed by the way she’s shushing them every five seconds. Probably her sisters, if I had to guess. That type of annoyance is reserved for siblings.
Her dark hair frames her face, and her eyes stand out even in the dark. One golden and the other violet. I noticed them in the hall when her eyes widened, and my heart pounded at the sight of her.
“Who is that?” I ask.
Zant is on the council, which means he knows everything about everyone, and not just because they get the full list of incoming students.
“You haven’t heard? Mighty Alpha didn’t debrief you today?” Zant teases. Vampires don’t understand pack dynamics. Just like they’d never understand the sensation of shifting under a full moon. There is nothing for them to compare it to. If you’re not in a pack, you’re a lone wolf, and that’s for a selectfew. Being a lone wolf is the last thing I want to be. It’s a lonely life, and if I’m packless, then as an alpha myself, it becomes nearly impossible to hide. All the ones I’ve known never had any family to begin with or were estranged from their pack for other reasons. It’s all fucking depressing.
“I was in practice all day,” I say, still staring.
“Uh-huh, is that why you’re hiding here with me and not your precious packmates?”
I’m not hiding. My pack leader, Gavin, is on the council too, which means he and the other students on the council lead the orientation along with the dean.
“You’re one to talk, shouldn’t you be on your way to orientation right now?”
“I’m killing time. Someone’s gotta keep you company. I can’t believe none of them asked you to go scare with them.”
I didn’t expect them to. Being a stray alpha in Gavin’s pack doesn’t get me any fuzzy feelings from the rest of the pack. Still, it’s better than the alternative. But none of that matters if I don’t pick a mate this year. I sigh at the familiar twist of tension in my chest.
When I don’t answer, Zant says, “The whole campus has been buzzing about them. Take a whiff.”
They smell like a collection of floral perfume, spice, and baked goods, but it’s not anything abnormal. “They smell human.”
“You gotta tune into it. Pure vampire instinct. Focus on one of them. Think about her blood and the wetness of it on your tongue. Her heartbeat. The surge of blood when you drink directly from the vein.”
Being a hybrid has its perks but also drawbacks. It makes everything fucking hard. Tuning into the werewolf instinct versus the vampire is different, and I have to concentrate real hard to do either.
Trying to humor him, I focus on the dark-haired girl I can’t seem to stop watching anyway. I imagine standing in front of her, her eyes widening as I sweep the hair from her collarbone and run my lips over the warmth of her neck. Her blood pumping below the surface of her porcelain skin when I sink my teeth into the pulsing vein in her neck. The euphoria and the harmonious flutter of her blood as it surges into my mouth.
I take another long breath, and the hairs on my arm rise with the scent filling my head, and the rush carries heat from my skull to my toes.So sweet.
I almost never think about blood, but I’m thinking of her blood a lot nowand how to get to it.
“Shit. That’s different,” I say. The burning in my chest is more intense, and now it’s in my throat too.
“They’ve got something special. Those three sisters are all anyone is talking about, including the council.”
Mention of the council snaps me out of my daze.
“I take it your stance hasn’t changed this year?”
“I don’t want a council seat.”
He nudges me. “We need more people like you. We’ve got too many assholes and not enough golden boys like the great Parker Owens.”
Zant has been asking me to join the council since before I went to Doxlothia. He called me the first year he got in and said,“Dude, you gotta do this.”
He loves the politics of it all, the power, but more importantly, the gossip.
“Don’t fucking call me that.” I try to wrestle him off the branch, and the bark snaps and cracks with our weight threatening to buckle it.
“You’d be an instant vote-in. All the girls screaming your name and holding up your posters. ‘Oh, Parker. Mark me. Please!’”
