Reckless

Reckless - Chapter Thirty-Seven

R E C K L E S S . . .

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The first week of exams went past in an endless rush of question papers, revising and sitting in what seemed like everlasting periods of excruciating silence.

Without fail, every time I stepped out of the exam hall a teacher would be waiting for me so that I could be escorted back to the office and then into the car for the dreary ride back home. It was as if I was never at the school – all my time there was spent in exams, never giving me the chance to talk to anyone or go anywhere except for the hall.

I never got the opportunity to speak to Sam and Claire face to face that first week apart from a quick ‘hello’ in the corridor before being swept away into isolation. The only way that I could actually talk to them was to phone them up, and since I had no mobile phone I was stuck to the constrictions of the home phone.

The same went for Blake, though I could see him leaving the exam hall almost every day. Every time he disappeared before I could catch up to him through the surge of people leaving the hall. I had expected him to wait for me, but it didn’t seem like he wanted to talk and I couldn’t do anything about it.

There were too many unanswered questions bouncing around my mind that only Blake or another vampire hunter could answer. What was happening with the hunters? Was Jev still under their watch? Was there any trouble from the supernaturals or had they calmed down after Dan’s death? Mort hadn’t called me once, despite Sam and Claire giving him my number, and I was desperate for information that seemed to be completely unobtainable.

There was only one good thing about my seclusion from the rest of the school, and that was the fact that Chris hadn’t been able to so much as say hello to me since the night that Dan had died. It didn’t mean that he’d become any less of a threat, though – most days I could see him a few rows across from me in the hall. He would only spend a few minutes answering the questions in front of him, preferring to spend the time staring at me. Each time that his dark eyes found mine my gaze would fly straight back down to the desk, but not before I saw his lips twitch up in a smirk. There was nothing friendly in that smile, the threat in his eyes told me as much. I could constantly feel those eyes on me; watching, waiting, boring a hole into me.

I could see the others too. Though the amount of supernaturals had lessened with the capture of Jev and the death of Dan, their presence was still achingly obvious to me. We’d caught the two least threatening ones, but three vampires and a werewolf still remained – each hungry for revenge after the defeat.

Alexis didn’t turn up to any of the exams, something which made me smile. I tried to imagine peoples’ faces if she turned up sporting the stump where her arm had been before I’d chopped it off. That, along with my lack of contact with Chris, was a definite perk of the whole situation.

Everything changed after the English Literature exam, though.

“How was it?” whispered Clementine as we filed out of the room together. “Did you pick the question about how Golding uses death or the one about the setting?”

We weren’t strictly aloud to talk, but since this was the first time in days that I was engaged in a conversation with someone that I actually liked I decided to ignore that rule.

“Death,” I whispered back. It had only seemed suitable after the sheer amount of it that I’d been through recently – I’d become more acquainted with the topic than I cared to be. “You?”

“Same,” she said, her whisper graduating into a low voice as we finally reached the end of the corridor where we were officially aloud to start talking. The sounds of people breaking into conversation swelled up around us as people began to anxiously compare answers or resume their conversations from earlier.