Page 40 of Deadly Alliances

“Damn, that is alotof cameras,” Shea commented.

And she wasn’t wrong. There had to be at least fifty feeds filling three of the four screens in front of us. And they kept changing scenes. I suspected the cameras were motion sensitive, and there were moving bodies in every single feed—Heritage Prep obviously came alive at night.

“It’s going to take me some time to map out where each of these cameras are on the blueprint, but once I do, I’ll be able to track you everywhere you go,” Kai said, looking over his shoulder at Shea.

She nodded without looking away from the screens, squinting as if she was looking for something.

“Can you find Julian, or Arya?” I asked, scanning the various faces and rooms myself.

Kai leaned closer to the row of screens. “Well, I’m not sure what Julian looks like—all vampires look the same to me.”

I frowned, unsure if that was meant to be a joke or not. Then he looked up at me briefly and winked. Yep. Trust Kai to keep his albeit quirky sense of humor in the darkest of times.

“Oh, I think I found Arya!” Kai suddenly said, tapping on one of the keyboards and enlarging one of the feeds.

We all leaned in, studying the raven-haired girl sitting at the end of a long table next to a young boy—wait, boy? Why the hell wasthere such a young child at a vampire school? I disregarded that for the moment and tried to distinguish the face hiding beneath the familiar curtain of waves.

As we watched, she threw her head back in a laugh, fully exposing every detail of her face to the camera.

“Omigod, that’s her!” Shea gasped. “Why does she look…happy?”

My stomach knotted as I pondered the same thing. “I’m just glad she’s being treated well. Apparently being Hadrian’s daughter counts for something, after all.”

She nodded, though her brow didn’t unwrinkle. “Okay, what about Julian?”

Kai minimized the feed once more and leaned back to give Shea and I room to search. As frequently as the scenes changed, it was hard to find anything recognizable. It was a miracle we’d found Arya, at all.

“Wait, what’s that?” I pointed to a feed that looked particularly dim and ominous.

Kai enlarged it, revealing it to be a dungeon of sorts, just as I suspected. But the cells were empty. I let out a long breath of relief. Wherever Julian was being kept, it wasn’t the dungeons. That gave me some small measure of hope—which was repeatedly quashed by the terrible fear that they might have already discarded him.

We studied the screens for hours until our eyes stung; all the while, Kai was making notes and changing screens as he coordinated the exact location of each camera. It was disheartening that we never spotted Julian, and I could feel Shea’s dread as potently as my own.

After a bland dinner of canned chili—we only brought foods that would be easy to prepare and eat—we all eventually settled in for the night. Kai curled up in front of his screens, seemingly pleased as a clam to have Janette spooning him from behind.

Shea and I snuggled under a pair of connected sleeping bags on the other side of the tent. But I couldn’t sleep. My mind wouldn’t turn off. My pulse wouldn’t slow, my insides wouldn’t untangle, and the doomsday scenarios wouldn’t stop playing on repeat in my mind.

What if there was a reason we couldn’t spot Julian? Shea had talked to him only yesterday, but anything could happen in the span of twenty-four hours, especially for creatures who don’t need to sleep. What if our mission had been rendered pointless?

No. Arya was still there. She still needed us, even if Julian…

I felt Shea’s weight shift in my arms, and I opened my eyes to see her climbing gingerly out of the sleeping bag and quietly unzipping the tent to let herself out. I hesitated a moment, wondering if she just needed to use the bathroom. Ultimately, I couldn’t not follow her. Even with the protection spell in place, I needed to know—always—that she was safe.

I quietly slipped out of the bag and slunk out of the tent, looking around in the darkness. When my eyes finally adjusted to the lack of computer light, I spotted Shea sitting on a log just beside the tent, her head turned in my direction.

“Hey,” she whispered.

I stepped softly toward her, noticing that the heat of her climate control spell had successfully melted the thin layer of frost that had covered the ground before. I sat beside her, putting my arm around her shoulders.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she replied. “I just needed some air.”

I nodded, knowing full well that wasn’t the issue. Her lack of sleep was caused by the same thing as mine—our fear for Julian.

She looked up. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Confused, I turned my gaze to the sky as well. To my surprise, white flakes were slowly descending above us, disappearing completely a few feet above our heads where they came in contact with the heat contained by our magical protective barrier. It was truly a sight to witness.

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