Covet (28 page)

“Not this kind. They came over hundreds of years ago with the Irish and Scottish settlers.”

Okay, now I flat-out knew he was joking. “And why would the settlers have great big exotic cats for pets?”

“Not for pets. For protection. Originally, Scottish and Irish lords relied on them to guard their castles from attack and to battle at their side against the English and other enemies. By the time they came to America to settle the new land, it was only natural to bring those protectors with them for defense against bears and other predators in this area.”

“And now they run around wild in the woods.” I didn’t bother trying to hide my lingering skepticism in my voice.

He nodded, returning my stare. “Over the last century, those settlers turned to technology and weapons for protection instead.”

After a long moment of silence, I shook my head. “I’ve lived here my whole life and never heard about these so-called monster cats. Why didn’t we ever talk about them in history class?” Growing up, we’d had to take Texas history not once but twice in elementary school. The teachers had covered the Alamo, Davy Crockett and Sam Houston, bluebonnets, mockingbirds and the yellow rose. We’d even had to learn how to sing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and recite the pledge of allegiance to the Texas flag. But not once were any legendary black cats mentioned.

Nope, Mom’s right
, he thought.
She doesn’t know.

I wanted to growl in frustration.
What
didn’t I know?

“Not everyone knows about them. The cats prefer to stay deep in the woods out of sight. But some people have seen them while out hunting. Including me.”

“Seriously?”

He grinned. “Yep. In broad daylight, not twenty yards away from me. It was huge, at least six feet from head to butt, and massive.”

I leaned forward. “What did you do?”

“Nothing. It didn’t come after me or anything. It seemed kind of nice, actually.”

“Were you deer hunting at the time?”

“Yeah, why?”

“If you used that deer pee hunters around here like to use, you probably stunk too bad to eat.”

Ron threw his head back and laughed. “How do you know about deer pee? You go hunting, too?” His eyebrows rose in obvious doubt as his gaze slid down to check out the heels Dad had finally talked me into wearing today.

“No. Anne mentioned it. She goes hunting with her Uncle Danny every year….”

He winced, and I could have bitten off my tongue.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

He looked down at the table. “We should get to work. Lunch break’s almost over.”

“Right.” Clearing my throat, I reached for my bag.

Someone walked over to our table. It was the librarian. Crap.

Ron reacted first. “Oh hey, Mom.”

The librarian was Ron’s mother? No wonder he could get away with being in here every day without a teacher’s pass.

“Hi, son. Getting your homework done?” Her eyebrows rose, and I could see the family resemblance between them. Ron had her eyes and hair color.

“Yeah,” he replied, cheeks turning red. “Oh, sorry, this is—”

“Savannah Colbert. Yes, I know,” Mrs. Abernathy finished for him. Her tone was solemn.

I searched her face, still surprised she knew who I was. But I couldn’t pick up her thoughts for some reason. All I could hear was her humming an unrecognizable tune in her head.

Had the Clann been talking about me around town or something? Maybe she’d heard the rumors about me and Tristan that were still spreading throughout the school like trash blowing on the wind?

“It’s nice to finally meet you,” she said. “You’re welcome to come here on your lunch breaks any time you need to.” Smiling, she reached out to ruffle Ron’s hair before walking away.

After she was out of hearing range, I leaned forward and whispered, “How does she know who I am?”

“Mom’s the head of the local genealogical society. She knows who all the descendants are.”

Heart racing, I froze in my seat, the wooden edge digging into the back of my thighs.
Descendants
. He’d said that word before, back in the hall by my locker today. At the time, I’d been too freaked out over the blood to pay attention.

“How do you know they’re called descendants? Is your family in the Clann?” Only descendants knew to call themselves that. If Ron was a descendant, the Clann could consider my being alone with him as possibly breaking the rules.

“No. But my family’s heard a lot about them.”

Why hasn’t her family told her about the Keepers?
he thought.

I yearned to ask him what the Keepers were. But then that would reveal that I could read his mind sometimes. And I couldn’t think of any other way to bring them up casually.

“We’d better get to work,” he muttered, pulling his chemistry book over and opening it to today’s lesson. When I didn’t move, he glanced up at me. “Do you want help with this stuff or not?”

He didn’t seem angry, and his thoughts were entirely focused on the homework now. But he was definitely acting different.

Sighing, I gave in for the moment and reached for my chemistry book.

The next day, I thought I might find a way to somehow bring up the Keepers during study time. But while on my way to second period English lit, I ran into Michelle in the main hall as she was leaving the office.

“Hey, we missed you at lunch yesterday,” she said. “You’ll be there today, right?”

“Um, sure. Of course.” Maybe I should try to eat in the cafeteria again, face my growing fear of crowded places and see if I could learn how to control the ESP. I sure hadn’t mastered it in any of my classes yet. If it weren’t for the occasional lecture notes displayed on the overhead projector in each class plus textbooks and Ron’s help in chemistry class, I would be in serious trouble already. Hearing the teachers’ oral lectures was going to remain impossible until I found a way to turn down the noise of everyone’s thoughts in the room with me.

“Good! We’ll see you then.” Grinning, Michelle waved before turning down a side hall toward her second period class.

With a sigh, I went to English class.

It was hard not to fidget and sneak peeks at Tristan while the teacher’s lecture droned on and on. Tristan stayed slouched down in his desk, legs stretched out before him and crossed at the ankles, his arms crossed over his broad chest. A lovely frown completed the look.

He hadn’t moved from that position since I’d first entered the class, as if he couldn’t care less that I was there.

Unlike me. The more I thought about him, the louder everyone’s thoughts became inside my head. I needed to calm down, think about something else. So I closed my eyes and imagined I was on a sunny hillside somewhere doing tai chi, a cool breeze caressing my skin…

“Miss Colbert.”

My eyes snapped open. Mrs. Knowles was staring at me from where she stood at the dry-erase board.

“Could you kindly try to stay awake while you are in my class?”

Someone giggled at the back of the room. But at least the ESP had finally turned down enough for me to actually hear the teacher for a change.

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry,” I mumbled.

“Thank you. Now as I was saying…” Mrs. Knowles returned to her lecture and writing notes on the board.

Unfortunately, turning down the noise of everyone’s thoughts only seemed to increase my ability to sense Tristan’s emotions. And the emotions pouring off him now were anything but sunshine and rainbows.

The anger and hurt were nearly overwhelming, rolling from him in dark waves that I could practically see if I had dared to look at him.

Maybe his wounded pride hadn’t gotten over us quite as fully as everyone thought.

I was surprised when the bell rang for lunch. Tristan was slow to leave, so I hurried to gather my books and escape first so we wouldn’t have to walk near each other out of class.

“Hey.” A male voice near my left ear made me jump just outside the classroom door.

I froze and looked up. It was Ron.

“Oh. Hi, Ron.” We left the alcove that the two English classrooms emptied into, merging with the traffic already flowing through the main hall.

“Are we meeting for lunch again?” he asked.

“Oh, um, actually I promised Michelle this morning that I’d eat with the girls today. Can we meet tomorrow instead?”

A low level of disappointment flashed from Ron, along with the chorus from Celine Dion’s “All By Myself” in his thoughts, which nearly made me laugh out loud. I only managed to hold it in by biting my lower lip.

He gave a lopsided smile and a half shrug anyway. “Sure, no problem. See you then.”

With a wave he strolled toward the library.

Giving in to the urge to smile now, I watched him head for the library alone. If not Ron, then somebody in his family sure was a Celine Dion fan. His thoughts were harder to hear under the crowded hall’s collection of brain waves. But I could still just barely make out him humming the rest of the tune in his mind.

He seemed like such a nice guy. Why didn’t he have any friends? Shouldn’t he at least eat with the other football jocks at lunch?

Needle pricks of pain stabbed over my arms and the back of my neck as Tristan walked past, his long legs helping him put distance between us faster than some shorter people could manage at a jog.

The sensation on my skin faded, taking my good mood with it. But the knowledge of its meaning refused to go away as quickly. Tristan was furious. At me? At the Clann and the council?

Probably all of the above.

Tears sprang to my eyes, burning them and forcing me to blink fast before the tears could run down my cheeks. He knew I had only done what I’d had to for his protection. Did he think I actually
liked
to feel miserable without him all the time?

Besides, he had Bethany now to keep him happy.

He joined the crowd exiting the far end of the main hall, and I could move again. Still, I took my time in getting to the cafeteria.

As soon as I entered, the whole room morphed into some weird version of an audience at a tennis match, almost everyone’s heads turning to look from me to where Tristan was seated at the Charmers table beside Bethany.

My stomach lurched.

I sat down beside Anne and opened a book. Feeling my friends staring, I forced a smile and glanced at them over the top of the pages. “What?”

“Are you going to actually eat?” Carrie asked.

“Um, not right now, no. I’m not really hungry.”

“Told you so,” Carrie grumbled to no one in particular.
Eating disorder, plain as day
, her thoughts added.

Michelle leaned forward. “Savannah, is there anything you want to talk about with us? I mean, you know we’re here for you, right? We know things have been kind of tough for you lately, what with your grandma dying and moving into a haunted house with your dad, and the whole thing with Tris— I mean, other stuff. But none of that is because of you or how you look or whatever.”

I stared at her, completely lost. “Yes, I know you guys are here for me. Thanks.”

“Does your dad know that you’re anorexic?” Carrie blurted out, her hands clasped together on the table before her.

Oh wow. So that’s what this was. I sighed, propping my forehead in my hand. “You guys can stop the intervention. I’m not anorexic.”

“Told you so,” Anne said, her tone more than a little exasperated.

“He probably doesn’t care enough to notice,” Carrie said.

“Huh?” I said. “My dad cares about me.” A little too much at times, in fact, what with his constant warnings and less-than-subtle questions about how I was feeling every other minute I was home.

Carrie acted like I hadn’t said anything. “Even if your dad doesn’t notice or care that you’re slowly killing yourself, we do. And you need to get some help.”

I leaned back in my chair. This was going to be such a long lunch break. “I don’t have an eating disorder. I’m just on a new—”

“A new diet? Please, we’ve already heard that one,” Carrie snapped. “How stupid do you really think we are? It’s obvious you’ve got a problem. Why else would you bail on Anne’s birthday party? And you skipped lunch yesterday, and you didn’t eat anything the day before, either. And now you’re not eating again today.”

I didn’t know whether to be thrilled that they cared so much, irritated that they couldn’t just believe me, or worried that I had no plan for how to lessen their concerns. If I ate anything, it would just come right back up and worry them even more.

I tried one more time. “Guys, I swear I’m not trying to lose weight here. I’ve just been having trouble eating stuff like I used to.”

“Like I said.” Anne turned to face me. “I told them you were just having stomach problems. But Miss Future Doctor of the World over there’s convinced otherwise.”

Michelle’s head whipped from side to side like she was watching a tennis match. “I always thought you had a cast-iron stomach, Sav. Was it eating all those chili cheese French fries last year that hurt you?”

“Well, actually,” Carrie began, her tone more than a little reluctant now. “People
can
develop digestive problems after experiencing prolonged periods of stress. I guess she could be suffering from an ulcer, which would make it hard for her to eat much for a while until her stomach lining heals.”

“And she’s definitely been stressed out lately.” Michelle shot me a sympathetic smile.

“So why’d you miss lunch yesterday?” Anne asked.

“Um, about that,” I began. “I’ve been meaning to tell you…you’ll never guess who I have both chemistry and English lit with.”

“Ron Abernathy?” Anne asked drily.

“Yep. And he needs help in English, and I’m clueless in chem. So we agreed to help each other out with our homework during lunch sometimes in the library.”

Anne stared at me. “In the library, huh?”

“Because it’s quiet there,” I added. “And his mom’s the librarian, so she lets us work there without requiring a teacher’s pass.”

“Makes sense,” Anne muttered, as if it were no big deal.

However, the flashes of heat from her told a different story, almost as if…

She was jealous.