Chapter 1 – Sugar

Sol

Everybody calls Kappa Rho Nu “Kron house,” because Kron money bought it, Kron money keeps the lights on, and Lazarus Kron lives on the top floor like a gargoyle with a trust fund.

That’s why I’m out on the back porch with a warm beer I didn’t pay for, trying to work out if I can get over the side fence without ripping my only good jacket.

Kat dragged me here with the words “free drinks” and “one hour, tops.” She’s been upstairs for most of two.

My phone buzzes.

Kat: upstairs report. 3 vamps. a 4, a 6, and the Count

Kat: Count is an 8 face, 2 personality. would still let him bite me tbh

Kat: where tf did u go

An eight. I’ve held that girl’s hair over a toilet on her birthday, and she’s up there giving Laz Kron an eight.

I text back outside. dying and leave out the part where I’d rather eat this can than stand in the same room as him. It’s nothing personal.

It’s definitely not about one night three years ago, at a club I don’t name, in a booth I don’t think about. That door’s nailed shut and painted over, and there’s a couch in front of it.

Behind me, a sophomore in a mesh tank top shoves out of the kitchen, yanking his collar down.

“Look,” he says. “Look at it. He bit me.”

Two neat holes above his collarbone, ringed in purple and already scabbing. He’s going to post that before it heals. Vampires have been out for fifteen years, and humans still treat a bite like a blue check.

“Congrats,” I say. “Put some Neosporin on it.”

He grabs my arm. “You’re a warlock, right? Can you make it scar? Like, a little. Artistically.”

The porch light pops. Glass sprinkles down onto the boards.

He looks up at it, then at me, and his whole face goes soft. “Oh my God. Did I do that?”

Everybody knows what it means when a warlock blows a bulb. Half the campus thinks it’s the hottest thing a warlock can do, and the other half thinks it’s a diagnosis.

“You did,” I tell him. “It also does that when I want to throw somebody off a porch.”

He lets go so fast he nearly falls back inside, probably to tell the whole kitchen I’m obsessed with him. Let him. That’s the most action anybody’s getting out of me this year.

The side gate past the bins lets out onto the street, and I’d rather climb a fence than walk back through that kitchen. I take the steps down into the dark.

The bins line the side of the house, big green ones with KRN stenciled on the lids, because God forbid a Kron’s trash touches anybody else’s.

Somebody’s sitting against the last one.

Passed out, I figure. It’s welcome week. There’s always one guy who hits the jungle juice too hard and ends up napping with the recycling.

His shirt used to be white.

He’s slumped with his legs out straight and his hands open in his lap, like somebody set him there and walked off. His head’s tipped back against the lid. His throat’s a mess, dark and wet all the way down his chest. I can’t tell what did it, and I don’t want to know.

I know him. Not his name. He’s the freshman who sits in the front row in wardcraft with color-coded notes, asking all the questions I’m too proud to ask. Last week he lent me a pen and never asked for it back. It’s in my jacket pocket right now.

My mouth fills up with spit, the kind that comes right before you puke, and I swallow it down because I’m not throwing up on him.

My magic goes out to him before I tell it to. It does that with anything hurt, a pigeon, a drunk guy, me. There’s always something for it to grab, a heartbeat or a buzz, some sign the body’s still running.

He’s got nothing. It’s like plugging my phone into a socket somebody ripped out of the wall.

And there’s a smell back here. Sweet and burnt, like the bottom of a cotton candy machine, with pennies mixed in. The regulars at work have a name for sweet like that. I know the name, and I know where else I’ve smelled it, too.

No, this can’t be that. Somebody spilled a Long Island, that’s all. Vodka, gin, rum, tequila, triple sec, sour mix, splash of Coke. I make those all night at work. That’s all this is.

I get my phone out. My hands are so stupid that I open the camera twice before I find the keypad.

The kitchen door opens above me and light spills down the steps.

Laz Kron is standing in it.

He’s got that long platinum hair loose past his shoulders, and those pale green-grey eyes that make everybody at his parties forget their own names. He’s wearing a black pinstripe suit with a black shirt unbuttoned one lower than anybody with shame would go, and silver rings on both hands.

A suit. At a kegger. He looks like he showed up to foreclose on somebody’s grandma.

There’s blood on his mouth.

It’s smeared across his bottom lip, red enough to shine under the kitchen light, with a drop on his chin. His left fang’s chipped, and there’s blood on that too.

“Get away from him,” he says, perfectly calm.

“What the fuck did you do?”

He doesn’t answer. He comes down the steps with his phone already at his ear, eyes on me the whole way. “There’s a body behind Kappa Rho Nu,” he tells whoever picks up. “No. He’s dead.” He actually sounds bored. “I’ll wait.”

He hangs up. He beat me to calling it in, and somehow that’s the thing that makes me want to scream.

His family chewed my mom up and spat her out, and now here’s their golden boy with blood all over his face, standing over a dead warlock kid, telling the cops he’ll wait like he’s holding a table at a restaurant. I’m so angry I can’t feel my fingers.

“Whose blood is that on your face?”

He looks at me, not at the kid. “Not his.”

“Prove it.”

“I don’t owe you proof, Hallowell. Or anything else.”

Every Kron who ever lived would say exactly that, in exactly that voice.

The kid’s still propped up against the garbage. I’m not leaving him like that, not with Laz Kron standing there in a suit. His body may just disappear. And maybe my magic’s wrong. It’s been wrong before. I crouch down and reach for his hand to feel for a pulse the normal way.

“Don’t touch him.”

I ignore Laz. The guy’s hand is heavy, the way nothing alive ever is.

Laz grabs my wrist.

The left one. The one with the burn scar I got at fifteen, the one I had inked around so nobody would ask about it, the one nobody touches. His rings dig right into it. He pulls my hand off the kid and doesn’t let go.

“They’re going to print him,” he says in a low voice. “You want yours to be the first ones they find?”

I should yank free. I should tell him exactly where he can shove his advice. I’ve had years of practice at both.

Neither of us moves.

He’s right there, blood drying on his lip, and I should be thinking about the kid. About what happened. About anything that actually matters.

Instead, I notice his hands. The size of them. The way he holds himself. And I get so angry with myself I could scream.

I'm not attracted to him. I'm in shock, and I'm pissed off, and my brain is clearly no longer fit to make decisions. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

His thumb’s sitting right on my pulse. He can feel exactly how fast it’s going, and I can’t make it slow down.

Sirens start up somewhere past the quad.

He lets go of my wrist like he’s done with it. “Tell them whatever you want,” he says. “They’ll believe me.”