I sat with Emma on the sand, contemplating my situation, but my uncharacteristically optimistic outlook was squashed as I realized my butt was getting wet. I shifted, peeling the cotton shorts away from my skin. “Dammit. Are you sure he said the beach?”

Today’s gym class was to be held outside, and my friend and I had shown up early—partly because we took every chance we could to hang out, and partly because the new gym teacher totally freaked us out. Ronan had been our instructor last term, but he’d gone away to God knew where, so some guy named Otto was his replacement for the summer semester. He was a Tracer like Ronan, meaning one of the guys responsible for tracking and bringing girls like us to this sorry island—only this particular guy didn’t strike us as someone to mess around with.

“He said the beach.” Emma gave me one of her signature flat stares, and I rolled my eyes. I knew the saying went “still waters run deep,” but did she have to be so damned still all the time? Sometimes a little expression was called for.

Sadly, I often had expression enough for both of us. Like, just the thought of which bizarre oceanfront punishments might await us that morning was causing me to get surlier by the minute. Not to mention I was hyperaware of the damp sand now—it stank like dead sea creatures and was lumpy with pebbles and jagged bits of shells that were digging into my skin.

“I hate beach days,” I grumbled, not ashamed that I probably sounded like a four-year-old. But Tracer Otto had a thing for doing sit-ups while being thrashed by the freezing surf, and I wasn’t the biggest fan of swimming. I’d recently learned how, but I doubted I’d ever get used to the sensation of water whooshing into my nose and ears.

I thought of our new teacher’s sharp, austere features and wellcombed blond hair. “Or maybe it’s just that I hate Otto. Him and that German accent. It’s like he’s auditioning for the role of Evil Nazi Number One in a remake of The Sound of Music.”

Emma looked nervously over her shoulder. “You should hush.”

“Yeah, yeah, Farm Girl. I’m hushing.” I straightened my legs in the sand—even with the vampire blood to speed my healing, they were looking ugly, my knees mottled yellow and pale green with fading bruises. I scraped a shell from where it’d stuck to my calf and began snapping it into tiny shards.

Other girls began to drift in, wandering along the sand, waiting for class to start. Our numbers were fewer now—fighting your peers to the death had a way of trimming the student body—and I noted some were doing their best to conceal limps and other injuries, some fresh, some still lingering from the recent Directorate challenge. It may have been summer term, but the vampires weren’t about to let up on our physical trials to give us a chance to heal. Only the strongest and the fiercest survived.

Emma sidled closer in the sand, reading my thoughts. She pitched her voice low, knowing as well as I that none of the other girls could be trusted. “Not many of us left.”

“And we’ll lose more this summer.” My words were a harsh whisper, but they were true. Our numbers would dwindle each semester, until only a handful of our original group remained. I thought of the girls who’d died already and tried not to consider what it might mean that I’d forgotten so many of their names.

“I imagine more will arrive in the fall.”

I gave Emma a sour look. “More of these people?”

“Well, now that Lilac’s gone, they’ll need to give you a new roommate.”

I shuddered. “Is that your way of putting a bright spin on things?”

It chilled me, but Emma was right, and I studied the other Acari, which was the creepy name they had for us girls. It was clear the vampires had a penchant for good-looking teenagers—everyone here was pretty in some way, if not outright gorgeous. It was annoying and sexist and gross, though thinking about it, if you were training an army of Watchers—which, as far as I could guess, meant female agents/assassins/guardians—they might as well be easy on the eyes.

Other than that, we were a mixed bunch. Farm Girl Emma, accustomed to hard work and solitude, was fairly unique on the island. Lilac had also been a rare breed—of the rich-bitches-gone-bad variety. We all had our individual talents, too. Mine was being a girl genius who knew how to take a punch (thank you, drunken, no-good dad). And Lilac had been a pyro—witness, for example, my shaggy, burned-off hair.

But there was one distinctive characteristic each of us shared: We were all outcasts. Gang girls, runaways, you name it—we’d all fled our homes, and not one of us was missed.

Emma eyed the other Acari along with me. “I noticed some of the Tracers are gone. They must be out gathering new girls.”

Her comment got me thinking. Was that where Ronan went? He was rounding up new candidates for the next incoming class?

Like all good Tracers, his job was to identify, track, and retrieve fresh batches of Acari, doing whatever it took to convince girls that leaving life as they knew it for some distant rock in the middle of the North Sea—where they were either good enough to become Watchers for a bunch of vampires or they died—was a good idea. I didn’t know how other Tracers did it, but Ronan had special powers of persuasion at his disposal.

Emma guessed where my mind was. “That’s probably why you haven’t seen Ronan,” she said in a gentle, understanding tone that annoyed me.

“I wasn’t thinking of Ronan.” I frowned, because I was totally thinking of Ronan. He was one of the few people on this island—hell, he was one of the few people in my life—who’d ever shown concern for me. He’d managed to weasel his way into my consciousness—the dream of having a guy to look out for me like a thorn in my heart that wouldn’t leave me be.

And, of course, I was remembering how he’d duped me, too. When he’d approached me in a Florida parking lot, I’d thought he was just a hot college guy giving me some deeply soulful looks, but it turned out he’d been trying to hypnotize me. Hypnotize, for God’s sake.

But my mind wasn’t that easily swayed—being a kid genius had to be good for something, I guess—and he’d had to use both eyes and touch to persuade me to follow him onto the plane bound for this rock. Eyja nœturinnar, they called it. The Isle of Night. Which at the moment was a laugh, because summertime, or the dimming, as the vampires so annoyingly referred to it, meant zero hours of dark per day. Just unending gray, gray, gray sky pressing down on us.

Once, I’d been afraid of the dark, but Ronan had warned me I’d miss the black of night. He’d known. As he seemed to know and understand so many other things about me. Really, if I’d thought about it, I could’ve said he was one of my first friends.

So I tried not to think about it.

Instead, I stared out across the roiling gray sea, pretending I didn’t have any use for hot guys and soulful looks. And who was I kidding? I missed Ronan. Like, really missed him. Not just as a teacher, though I’d have traded just about any other Tracer for Otto. But something was, I don’t know, missing without him around.

Like Ronan’s steady green eyes, always so focused on me.

“Okay, so you’re not thinking about Ronan,” Emma said, and I heard the skepticism in her voice. She shifted, considering. Long speeches weren’t her way, and she spoke slowly, choosing her words with care. “It just seems like you’ve been . . . distracted since the Directorate challenge. I used to see you and Ronan talking a lot. But then there was the competition, and you won, and then I didn’t see you two together anymore, and I thought maybe—”

Emotion stabbed me, so sharp and sudden that I had to scrunch my face against it.

She thought maybe I might miss him? She thought I’d taken him for granted? She’d be right on both counts.

I cut her off, saying, “I just have some questions for him is all.”

Like, a bunch of questions. Questions I’d never ask, of course. After I’d won the competition, beating Lilac and winning a trip off-island and a shot at escape, I’d caught him watching me, and something about the look in his eyes—regret? grief? longing?—haunted me.

What had the look meant? Did he know I planned to escape?

“Do you think he’s jealous of Alcántara?” Emma’s voice was barely a whisper, which was the wisest course when discussing a vampire. Particularly Hugo de Rosas Alcántara, of the fourteenth-century Spanish royal court.

“Jealous?” It would imply there was something between me and Alcántara. Though I did suspect he’d had something to do with my winning. And then there was the way the vampire had scooped up my broken body to hold me close after my victory. But if Ronan was jealous, it’d mean he was interested in me. My belly churned. “No way. Ronan’s not jealous.”

He’d probably just been disturbed by the glimpse of my dark side, perceiving the secret, savage pleasure I’d taken in beating my rival. Because even I had trouble considering that. “Maybe the whole fightto-the-death thing weirded him out more than he let on.”

Emma solemnly shook her head. “He’s more used to that than we are. You two are friends. He wanted you to win.”

“Friends?” I inhaled sharply. Friends was a dangerous word. Alcántara had warned me about friends. And besides, it wasn’t very friendly how Ronan had gotten me here in the first place.

I scraped my sandy fingers through my hair, cursing the jumble of thoughts in my head. I finger-combed some more, this time cursing my hair—such a hassle since Lilac burned off my braid, leaving me with a shaggy, shoulder-length do. “Stupid hair.”

What I really wanted to say was, Stupid Ronan.

Although he and I had forged a sort of alliance, the memory of his initial betrayal made me surly. When we first met, he’d touched me, and I still felt his fingers hot on my skin. And yet the reason he’d touched me wasn’t because he’d wanted to—not because he was a guy and I was a girl—but because it’d been his job to touch me. It’d been his job to make me so warm and gullible and dopey that I’d find myself on an airplane bound for nowhere.

I thought of the new girls Ronan was out there gathering. And touching. Every one of them a total teen hottie, no doubt.

“Great,” I snapped. “Either way, he’s out there, finding new friends for us to spar with, snipe at, stab in the back, and eventually kill.”

Emma stared at me. If it weren’t for her blinking, I swear she could’ve been mistaken for a sphinx. Sometimes it really annoyed me, and this was one of those times.

“What?” I demanded.

“I still think it has to do with Master Alcántara.”

This time I was the one glancing around nervously. “Would you please stop saying his name? I’m scared you might summon him or something, like Voldemort.”

But I worried she was right. It did seem that Alcántara had taken a liking to me. Whenever I caught him looking at me—and I seemed to catch him a lot—it was like he was plumbing the depths of my soul, puzzling through some sort of master plan written there.

It was hard not to feel disturbed by the whole thing, and not in an entirely unpleasant way. I mean, Alcántara was young and he was hot . . . or at least he had been several hundred years ago. But he was a bit like a panther—darkly seductive, yet a predator nonetheless. To be feared and—according to Ronan, at least—avoided.

“Yes,” Emma agreed. “Best not to call attention to yourself.” “Thanks, Sherlock. I’ll take that under advisement. Though I don’t know how I’ll avoid him when the time comes for our mission.”

“Do you know—”

“Nope. I don’t know where we’re going, I don’t know what we’ll be doing, and I don’t know why we’ll be doing it. All I know is that I have to wait till the end of summer term to do it. Alcántara insists I need more training.”

What I didn’t tell Emma was that, if all went according to plan, I wouldn’t get too much of a chance to consider our mission anyway, since I’d be too busy getting the hell off this rock.

That’s right: escape. It was all I thought about now. I’d begun considering it pretty much the moment I arrived, but then got lulled into a sense of security, of family. I had smart teachers, was learning cool things, and making a couple of the closest friends I’d ever had in my life. I’d begun to believe that being a part of something—being a Watcher—might give me a sense of belonging, like finding the family that I’d never had.

Until the challenge, when I’d seen what the Isle of Night was really about, which was to kill or be killed. I’d triumphed, and sure, partly it was because I was smart, but I wasn’t as strong as some of the other girls, and I suspected it was only Alcántara’s help that’d pushed me over the top. I’d triumphed over Lilac, and she’d disappeared, and now I’d started to worry that maybe I should cut my losses and find a way out of here before the vampires changed their minds and decided I should be dead, too.

I tried to think proactively about it all, but my mind kept wondering what might’ve happened to Lilac’s body after I beat her and how mine might suffer the same fate if any escape attempt was to fail.

There was movement around us, and we followed everyone’s eyes up the beach. Tracer Otto was approaching, carrying burlap bags.

My shoulders sagged. “Crap. Adolph brought the sandbags.” Sandbags were part of a pleasant little pastime in which we scooped handfuls of sand into bags and proceeded to run around like a bunch of morons, carrying them over our heads. “Arduous and pointless.”

A half smile quirked Emma’s lips—the equivalent of a belly laugh from my redheaded friend. But then Otto turned our way, and she bristled. “Shh. Here he comes.”

I tucked my head toward hers, quietly singing, “The hills are aliiiiive . . .”

She shot me a panicked glare. “You hush!”

I smiled placidly as the other Acari joined us to sit in a row on the sand. I leaned over again, lowering my voice to the barest whisper. “. . . viss ze sound of muuuuziiic. . . .”

Tracer Otto stormed up the beach and proceeded to pace up and down the line, dropping the empty bags at our feet, instructing us in his best drill sergeant impression. “You will fill the bags,” he said, with a decidedly German accent—all he was missing was a little whistle around his neck—“without delay.”

He reached the end of the line, and as he turned, I couldn’t resist murmuring, “Vizout delayyy.”

“Acari Drew.” A mellow voice spoke from behind me.

Oh, God. Too late, I noticed the shadow that had fallen on me. My skin rippled with goose bumps, as if it were a chill breeze at my back instead of a vampire.

I looked over my shoulder and had to force myself not to startle when I saw how close Alcántara had managed to come behind me. Stupid. Things like that could get a girl killed in my world.

He stood there, tall but not towering, with bottomless dark eyes and smooth black hair that brushed the collar of his black leather jacket. He looked like a beautiful indie rocker . . . carved out of marble.

I hopped to my feet as reverently as one could when one was wearing damp, sand-encrusted gym shorts. It struck me that all the other Acari had grown quiet around me, and even Tracer Otto was standing in respectful silence. They knew as well as I did how the sudden appearance of a vampire could mean somebody’s imminent evisceration. I hoped only that it wouldn’t be mine.

I cleared my throat, speaking slowly enough to ensure avoiding any tongue twisting. “Master Alcántara.”

One side of his mouth crooked up in a wicked half smile, and I didn’t understand how it was possible to feel cold on my skin but so hot in my belly all at the same time. “Acari Drew,” he repeated, stretching my name out on his tongue. “You have no taste for sandbags?”

Crap, crap, crap. I racked my brain. What, exactly, might the correct answer be? No, sir, and I’m a troublemaker; Yes, sir, and I’m an intellectual dullard.

“So silent all of a sudden?” Though Alcántara addressed his next words to Otto, he held my gaze, speaking slowly as though imparting his message with significance. “Tracer Otto, it appears young Miss Drew doesn’t relish the gritty futility of your selected workout.” His smile grew broader. “I think perhaps Acari Drew craves more of an intellectual challenge.”

Alarms shrilled in my head. Had he read my thoughts? Or was it just a weird coincidence that he’d spoken my mind?

“I . . . Yes,” I stammered, second-guessing myself. What’s the right answer? “And no. The challenges I crave are of both the mental and physical variety.”

Alcántara barked out a satisfied laugh, and I felt a hot blush creep from my chest to my hairline. How was it his laughter made my words echo in such a naughtily suggestive way?

Eager to change the subject, I glanced to the limp sandbag at my feet. “Is it time for the . . . for these?” At that moment, I’d have definitely traded running up and down the beach with a sandbag over my head for being the object of Alcántara’s uncomfortable stare.

“Yes—”

“No,” Alcántara said, speaking over a visibly shaken Tracer Otto. “I am finding this exercise too . . . vulgar for Acari Drew.” The vampire’s voice was as smooth as brandy, with a faint sultry Spanish accent, his murmured vulgar managing to make sandbags sound like the crassest trailer-trash endeavor ever conceived by man.

I snuck Alcántara a tentative look, uncertain whether to feel thankful or terrified at just what other endeavor might be headed my way. The glint in those black eyes decided it, telling me the appropriate emotion was definitely terror.

“There is a different assignment in store for Acari Drew. Today Acari Drew begins an . . . independent study.”