Chapter 2 – Handle It

Laz

Campus security sends three cars for one dead warlock and parks every one of them on the back lawn. My father pays a man to cut that grass with what I’m pretty sure are nail scissors. Somebody’s getting a very polite email.

The blue lights roll across the side of the house, over and over. Half the party’s hanging out of the upstairs windows, filming. I’d tell them to stop, but then I’d be the guy yelling at people to stop filming, and that clip would do better than the body.

I wipe my mouth with my pocket square. It’s silk, it was a birthday present from my grandmother, and now it’s ruined, which is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to it.

The blood isn’t the kid’s. It’s from a very nice junior on the house donor list, who signed the consent form two minutes before all this and then asked if I’d sign her forearm too. The form’s folded in my inside pocket. Dated, timed, initialed in two places.

I could walk across this lawn, hand it to Hallowell, and watch him choke on every word he threw at me by those bins.

I’m not going to. He looked at me over that kid like he’d been waiting three years for me to finally do something unforgivable. If he wants to believe I did, he can have it. A Hallowell who’s scared of me is a Hallowell who stays away from this house, and away from whoever did that to the kid.

We’ve met before. Once, years ago.

I barely remember it.

He’s on the far side of the lawn, sitting on the bumper of a security car with a foil blanket around his shoulders that he obviously hates.

Black hair hanging in his eyes. A ring through his septum, two more in his bottom lip, ink across his knuckles that I can almost read from here, which is annoying, because now I’m trying. Green eyes, so green they look fake under the blue lights.

Hallowell’s a liability.

My phone buzzes in my hand. FATHER. Not Dad. He typed himself into my contacts like that when he bought me my first phone at twelve, and I’ve never changed it, because changing it would mean a conversation about why.

I let it ring out. If I pick up, he’ll ask one question, which is whether I was seen. And the answer is yes, Father, by a warlock named Hallowell, of all the people on this entire campus, with his wrist in my hand and a dead kid between us.

It buzzes again. I turn it face down on my knee.

“Mr. Kron?”

The security guy has a clipboard, a mustache he’s very committed to, and the look of a man who’s just worked out whose frat this is. He’s been working up to me for ten minutes. I watched him do it.

He looks at my jacket pocket first. Two black ears are sticking out of it, flat against the pinstripe.

Rory shifted the second he heard sirens and went straight up my leg, which is how I learned rabbits have claws. Now he’s pressed against my ribs with his heart rattling like a sewing machine, which is normal for a rabbit, and for Rory.

“That’s Rory Byrne,” I tell the guy. “Sophomore. He lives here. He’s not usually a rabbit. He just gets like this when there are sirens.”

He writes something down. I’d bet my car it’s just the word rabbit.

“We’ll need a statement from him when he’s... uh.”

“When he’s a person. Sure.”

Rory’s ears go even flatter. I put my hand over the pocket. This kid apologizes to chairs when he bumps into them. Actual police questions would finish him off.

“And you, Mr. Kron. You were upstairs?”

“Top floor. I came down when I smelled it.”

He nods, and his eyes drop to my mouth. There’s still blood in the corner of my lip. I can taste it. He stares at it for a long second, then up at the house, at the Kappa Rho Nu letters he can’t even see from back here but definitely knows are there.

He doesn’t ask.

I wait for him to ask. The form’s right here. I’d show him. Instead he writes down came down when he smelled it. Then he asks what time it was and who else was on the stairs, like the blood on my face is a dress code thing.

That’s my father’s money, doing its job without him even being here. I should feel a lot worse about how easy that was.

I feel fine.

“So you, uh.” He clears his throat. “Fed. Tonight.”

He says fed like he learned it from Twilight. In Twilight they called it hunting and ate mountain lions. I’ve never forgiven a single one of them.

“Licensed donor,” I tell him. “I’ll have the paperwork sent to your office.”

“No rush,” he says, and he means it.

Across the lawn, a woman officer’s taking Hallowell’s statement. I’m not trying to listen. I just can’t turn my ears off, and he isn’t exactly whispering.

“He had blood all over his face,” Hallowell’s telling her. “Ask him whose it is. Go ask him. He won’t tell you.”

“We’ll speak to Mr. Kron.”

“Yeah, I bet. You probably won’t even push him. He barely reacted to-”

The floodlight over the garage blows.

It doesn’t flicker first. It just bangs, and glass rains down on the roof of the nearest security car. Every head on the lawn turns to him. The vampires out here can hear his heart jump, too.

He drags the foil blanket tighter and glares at the grass like the grass started it.

I know exactly what that was. Magic leaks out of a warlock when he’s feeling something too big to hold in, and the feeling it leaks for most, the one the whole campus makes jokes about, isn’t anger.

But he’s furious now. He’s in shock, and somebody he knew just went into a body bag. That’s all it is.

It’s not me.

My thumb still remembers his pulse. I had it for maybe ten seconds, right on top of that scar, thumping so hard I could feel it through my rings. Warlock blood, under one thin layer of skin. Every vampire’s raised knowing what that’s worth on the Strip, and exactly how far to stay away from it.

My thumb was on it, and I didn’t want to let go.

Somebody should give me some credit for doing it anyway.

The only reason I grabbed him is they’re going to print that kid. A broke warlock’s prints all over a dead warlock who smells like Sugar is a story that writes itself, and it’s set behind my house. My father would never let me hear the end of it.

The whole yard still reeks of it. Sugar’s what the Strip calls warlock blood once somebody’s selling it. It’s illegal to buy and it’s everywhere anyway. The old houses talk about it like it’s meth, and mine’s the loudest.

They bring the kid out on a stretcher, zipped up. Rory makes a tiny noise in my pocket, and I keep my hand where it is until the van doors shut.

Whenever something goes wrong, I check on my brother. His thread’s at the top of my texts, because I keep putting it there.

Peregrine. Per. Our parents named us Lazarus and Peregrine. It’s the one thing he and I have always agreed on: somebody should’ve stopped them.

I type where are you and delete it. I type it again and send it before I can talk myself out of it. Delivered. Not read.

The phone buzzes in my hand, and for one stupid second I think it’s him.

FATHER: Handle it.

Headlights swing into the lot behind the security cars. A black Mercedes. I know that car. It’s been parked outside every bad night my family’s ever had.

My father’s lawyer gets out and buttons his coat. He doesn’t look at the porch, or at me. He walks straight across the wet grass, in shoes that cost more than Hallowell’s rent, to the bumper where Hallowell’s sitting.

Hallowell looks up at him, and then right past him, at me, like I sent him.