Stone Cold Touch

Holy granola bar!

I sat up straight as Stacey slapped her hands on our table. “Holy shit balls for Sunday dinner,” she whispered, gaping as the boy Dean had punched slumped to the left and hit the floor like a bag of potatoes.

I didn’t know Dean very well. Hell, I wasn’t sure if I’d spoken more than a handful of words to him during my four years in high school, but he was quiet and average, tall and slender, much like Sam.

Totally not the kind of kid who’d be voted most likely to knock another guy—a much bigger guy—into next week.

“Dean!” shouted Mrs. Cleo, her ample chest rising as she rushed to the wall, flipping the overhead lights on. “What are—?”

The other guy shot up like an arrow, hands clenching into meaty fists at his sides. “What the Hell is wrong with you?” He rounded the table, shrugging out of his zipped hoodie. “You want some of this?”

Stuff always got real when the clothes started to come off.

Dean snickered as he stalked to the aisle. Chairs screeched as students moved out of the way. “Oh, I’m about to get me some of that.”

“Boy fight!” Stacey exclaimed as she dug around in her bag, pulling out her cell phone. Several other students were doing the same thing. “I so have to get this on camera.”

“Boys! Stop it right now.” Mrs. Cleo smacked her hand against the wall, hitting the intercom wired directly to the front office. A beep sounded and she turned to it frantically. “I need the security guard in room two-oh-four immediately!”

Dean launched himself at his opponent, tackling him to the floor. Arms flew as they rolled into the legs of a nearby table. In the back of the classroom, we were safe, but Stacey and I stood up anyway. A shiver coursed over my skin as Bambi shifted without warning, flicking her tail across my stomach.

Stacey stretched up on the tips of her boots, apparently needing a better angle for her phone. “This is...”

“Bizarre?” I supplied, flinching as the boy got a good hit in, knocking Dean’s head back.

She arched a brow at me. “I was going to go with awesome.”

“But they’re—” I jumped as the classroom door swung open and banged into the wall.

Security officers swarmed the class, heading straight for the melee. One beefy guy wrapped his arms around Dean, dragging him off the other student as Mrs. Cleo buzzed around the room like a nervous hummingbird, clutching her tacky beaded necklace with both hands.

A middle-aged security guard knelt beside the boy Dean had punched. Only then did I realize the boy hadn’t stirred once since hitting the floor. A trickle of unease, having nothing to do with the way Bambi was moving again, formed in my belly as the guard leaned over the prone boy, placing his head near his chest.

The guard jerked back, reaching for the microphone on his shoulder. His face was white as the paper in my notebook. “I need an EMT immediately dispatched. I have a teenage male, approximately seventeen or eighteen years of age. Visible bruising along the skull. He’s not breathing.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered, clutching Stacey’s arm.

A hush descended over the room, quelling the excited chatter. Mrs. Cleo stopped by her desk, her jowls jiggling silently. Stacey sucked in a breath as she lowered her phone.

The silence following the urgent call was broken when Dean threw back his head and laughed as the other security guard dragged him from the classroom.

* * *

Stacey tucked her shoulder-length black hair back behind her ears. She hadn’t touched the slice of pizza on her plate or her can of soda. Neither had I. She was probably thinking along the same lines that I was. Principal Blunt and the guidance counselor I’d never really paid attention to had given all the students in the class the option to go home.

I didn’t have a ride. Morris, the clan’s chauffeur, handyman and all-around awesome guy, was still on the no-ride list with me since, the last time we’d been in a car together, a possessed cabdriver had tried to play chicken with our vehicles. And I didn’t want to wake up Zayne or Nicolai—for the most part, full-blooded Wardens slept deeply during the day, entombed in their hard shells. And Stacey didn’t want to be home with her baby brother. So here we were, in the cafeteria.

But neither of us had an appetite.

“I’m officially traumatized,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Seriously.”

“It’s not like the guy is dead,” Sam replied around a mouthful of pizza. His wire-frame glasses slipped to the tip of his nose. Curly brown hair flopped over his forehead. His soul, a faint mixture of yellow and blue, flickered just like everyone else’s had since this morning, winking in and out as if it was playing peekaboo with me. “I heard he was revived in the ambulance.”

“That still doesn’t change the fact that we saw someone get punched in the face so hard that they died right in front of us,” she insisted, eyes wide. “Or are you missing the point?”

Sam swallowed the bite of pizza. “How do you know he really died? Just because a wannabe police officer says that someone’s not breathing doesn’t mean that’s true.” He glanced over at my plate. “You gonna eat that?”

I shook my head at him, sort of dumbfounded. “It’s all yours.” A second later, he snatched the pizza with the little pepperoni cubes off my plate. His gaze flickered up to mine. “Are you okay?” I asked.

He nodded as he munched away. “Sorry. I know I don’t sound very sympathetic.”

“Ya think?” Stacey muttered drily.

A dull ache flared behind my eyes as I reached for my soda. I needed caffeine. I also needed to figure out what the Hell was up with everyone’s auras doing the wonky thing. The colorful shading around a human represented what kind of soul they were rocking: white for an utterly pure soul, pastels were the most common and usually indicated a good soul, and the darker the colors got, the more questionable the status of one’s soul became. And if a human didn’t have that telltale halo around him, that meant he was on Team No Soul.

I.e., he was a demon.

I wasn’t doing much tagging anymore—another nifty ability I had thanks to my mixed heritage. If I touched a demon, it was equivalent to sticking a neon sign on their body, which made it easier for Wardens to search them out.

Well, it didn’t work on Upper Level demons. Not much did.

I didn’t stop because of what had happened with Paimon and then being forbidden to tag. Abbot had ungrounded me for life after the night in the gymnasium, but it felt wrong to randomly tag demons, especially now that I knew many of them might be harmless. When I did tag, I went for the Posers, since they were dangerous and had a habit of biting people, and left the Fiends alone.

And truthfully, the change in my tagging routine was all thanks to Roth.

“It’s just that those two idiots were probably messing with Dean,” Sam continued as he finished off the pizza in a nanosecond. “People snap.”

“People usually don’t have fists that could be considered lethal weapons,” Stacey retorted.

My phone chirped, drawing my attention. Bending, I pulled it out of my bag. The corners of my lips tipped up when I saw it was from Zayne even though the pain behind my eyes steadily increased.

Nic is picking u up. Meet me in the training room when u get home.

Ah, training. My stomach did a funny little twist, a familiar reaction when it came to training with Zayne. Because at some point during the grappling and evasive techniques, he’d get sweaty, and inevitably his shirt would come off. And, well, even though I was hurting something fierce over the loss of Roth, seeing Zayne shirtless was something to look forward to.

And Zayne...he’d always meant the world and then some to me. That hadn’t changed. It never would. When I’d first been brought into the clan, I had been terrified and had promptly hidden in a closet. It had been Zayne who’d coaxed me out, holding in his hands a no-longer-pristine teddy bear that I had dubbed Mr. Snotty. I’d been attached to his hip since then. Well, until Roth had come along. Zayne had been my only ally—the only person who knew what I was, and...God, he’d been there for me, my rock these past couple of weeks.

“So...” Sam drew the word out as I sent Zayne a quick okay and dropped the phone back in my bag. “Did you know that when snakes are born with two heads, they fight each other for food?”

“What?” Stacey asked, brows furrowing together like two angry little lines.

He nodded, grinning a little. “Yep. Kind of like a death match...with yourself.”

For some reason, a bit of stiffness went out of my posture when Stacey choked out a laugh and said, “Your capacity for useless knowledge never ceases to amaze me.”

“It’s why you love me.”

Stacey blinked and heat infused her cheeks. She glanced over at me, as if I was somehow supposed to help her with her recently discovered crush on Sam. I was the last person on the face of the Earth to help when it came to the opposite sex.