I grabbed Kates.
“Hey! Watch the beer!” I saw the brimming pitcher and felt the cool liquid splash on my arm, but I was infuriated. I could give a damn about beer and I don’t normally think blasphemous thoughts like that.
Beer was holy.
“I have to talk to you. Alone.”
Kates saw my fury. I realized that she’d known the whole time.
“What’s going on?” Emily spoke up.
“Nothing. I just… I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Oh. I have to go too,” Emily gushed out, relieved.
“No!” I barked. I saw that Emily was taken aback so I gentled my tone, “I meant… alone.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“We’ll be back,” I hurried out and yanked Kates behind me.
“But… alone…?”
Storming off and dragging Kates with me, I roughly pushed our way through the crowd. I felt each of them when my arms or shoulders made contact, but I just gritted my teeth against the pain. Vampires felt too much hatred for me. I should’ve been able to automatically block them, but I was angry. Plus, I hadn’t been prepared.
An entire bar of vampires was not my night of fun.
When I pushed into the bathroom, I saw two vamp girls at the mirror. “Get out! Now.”
They turned, annoyed, and stopped short. One of them gasped, but the other looked like she was going to argue before the other dragged her outside. I knew that I should’ve cared about what I’d just seen since vamps don’t follow orders unless there was a reason, but I didn’t.
Flipping the lock, I rounded on Kates. “How could you?!”
She rolled her eyes and approached the mirror. As she primped her hair, she shrugged. “You have to get over this hang-up with vamps, Davy.”
“Hey,” I pointed a finger at her. “You should have just as much of a hang-up with them. I mean—”
Kates rounded and stared at me. I saw the warning, but I didn’t heed it. “Your mother used to kill vampires. We all know what they did to her.”
“You don’t talk about that. Ever!” Kates seethed.
“They branded you—”
“Shut up!”
“I know your mom was a slayer, but they slaughtered her, Kates. How can you be okay coming here?”
Kates slapped me. I fell against the wall and tasted blood on the inside of my cheek, but I rounded back and exclaimed, “You had no right bringing me here. You really had no right bringing Emily.”
Oh god. I gulped. Emily had been left alone. Throwing open the door, I hurled myself through the crowd. I know that I jarred a bunch of them, but I didn’t care. I just needed to find my roommate and get out of there. We were like sitting ducks in Dodge.
Then I stopped in my tracks and my mouth fell to the floor. Emily sat, squashed in a booth, with three vampires around her and at the end sat her Luke Roane vampire. He looked relaxed, lounging back in the booth, but I saw the way his eyes darted over his men and Emily. He didn’t share in the conversation, but he was in control of it. They glanced at him occasionally, like they were waiting for a signal from him to change the subject.
He didn’t. He looked content and yet, he still looked like the predator he was even though he dressed like a normal college student with tight-fitting shirts and trendy blue jeans. He wore a black shirt that molded to his lean form.
I could tell Emily was miffed that she didn’t sit beside him, but she was still all smiles. Vomit came up in the back of my throat, but I swallowed it back down. He didn’t deserve her gushy fuzzies.
“That’s why I brought you here.” Kates paused behind me. “He’s a Hunter, Davy. You know what they do. You want to know why all those vampires are on campus, ask him.”