Fated, Tome 1

‘Her name is Evie Tremain. She’s seventeen years old. She lives in Riverview, California. Now go and kill her.’

The stillness in the room erupted as chairs scraped the floor. There were a few hushed whispers, a stifled laugh and then the door slammed shut cutting the noise off like a guillotine.

Lucas stood slowly, taking his time. He didn’t notice that the others had left the room, nor that Tristan was standing by the window watching him. All his attention was focused on the photograph he held in his hand.

It showed a girl – dark-haired, blue-eyed – looking straight at the camera. It was a close-up. He could make out the shadows her lashes were making down her cheeks. A strand of hair was caught like a web over one eye and in the corner of the shot he could see her hand, reaching up to brush it away. Her lips were slightly parted, like she’d been sighing just at the moment the lens snapped shut. Her expression was . . . Lucas paused. He wasn’t sure what her expression was. She looked unhappy, or maybe just pissed off.

She was a Hunter, though, so what did he expect? And this one had a history that would make anyone unhappy. Or pissed off.

‘Is something wrong?’ Tristan asked.

Lucas looked up from the photograph, then glanced over towards the door, realising that he was the only one left in the room. He looked back at the older man.

‘No, nothing’s wrong,’ he answered quietly.

‘Well, you’d best get going then,’ Tristan said, his eyes not leaving Lucas’s face. ‘You don’t want to miss out on all the fun.’

Lucas looked down once more at the picture of Evie Tremain, feeling momentarily ambivalent towards her. Then he scrunched the photograph up into a ball and dropped it on the floor. It didn’t matter what lay behind that expression because soon nothing would. She was just another Hunter to be dealt with. Next week or next month there would be another. And then another. And dealing with Hunters was what the Brotherhood did.

Lucas didn’t look back at Tristan but he could sense his eyes burning into his back as he left the room.

Moving away fast down the corridor, Lucas realised he could no longer hear the others. He was faster than any human - he knew because he’d had to outrun them many times – so it didn’t take him long to reach the basement garage.

There was just one ride waiting for him. Caleb and Shula were sitting in the front seats, the engine revving, the back door flung open.

‘Come on!’ Shula yelled. ‘What’s keeping you? There’s a Hunter to kill and the others are going to beat us to it!’

Lucas smiled and shook his head, ducking into the back seat and slamming the door shut.

He let his head relax back against the seat and watched the speedometer climb as Caleb slammed the Mercedes out of the underground garage and onto the highway. Lucas stared out of the window. This stretch of highway was always quiet, but at night it was even more so – there were only a few factories and gas stations for at least twenty miles in each direction. The Mission was a good base for the moment. Tristan had chosen well.

‘She’s pretty.’

Lucas turned his head. Shula was leaning across from the front seat, waving the photograph of Evie in his face. He grunted and went back to looking out the window.

‘Think she’ll put up a fight?’

Lucas looked back at Shula. She was studying the photo intently, as though she could will it to life. Her raven-black hair was spilling over her shoulders, her skin glowing freakishly in the green dashboard lights. He almost smirked. Shula tried so hard to fit in and yet here she was looking as unhuman as a Shapeshifter midshift.

He smiled softly. ‘Let’s hope so.’

Shula grinned back, then kicked her legs up onto the dash and spun the volume button on the radio to high.

* * *

Evie Tremain turned the lock in the café door. Main Street was dead. All the stores were dark – only the yellow street-lights were eclipsing the darkness now. Two cars were parked up in the shadows out front. Someone climbed out of the passenger seat of one and walked in her direction. She flipped the Closed sign quickly. There was no way she was serving another customer tonight. Not even for the chance of a twenty dollar tip.

She backed away from the door and flipped the light switch, collapsing the whole place into blackness, then headed behind the counter to gather up the trash bags. The sound of someone trying the door made her jump. She spun around, irritated. Couldn’t they read? They were closed.

She saw a guy standing in front of the door looking in, staring directly at her. His hand was still on the door handle. He was about six feet tall and wearing a floor-length black leather coat. Evie took in the whole of him in one glance and felt something similar to a rock settle on her stomach. Something wasn’t right about him. In fact, something was most definitely off. Then she realised he was wearing sunglasses. Ray bans. In the middle of the night.

‘We’re closed,’ she mouthed, wondering whether he could even see her, shrouded in the shadows behind the counter.

The boy didn’t respond or smile or act in any way as if he’d seen her, though his hand did drop from the door handle. He turned on his heel and strode back towards his car, coat flapping like a windsock behind him.

Evie stood there a full minute, trash bags clutched in her hand, waiting for the sound of a car engine turning over and accelerating away. Nothing. The street stayed fathomlessly silent. She edged towards the door and peered through the glass. The cars were both still sitting there, empty as far as she could tell. The guy in the long trench coat was nowhere to be seen.

A feeling of unease crept through her but she couldn’t stand there all night like a total wuss, hovering in the gloom. So she took the bags and walked to the back door and opened it, annoyed with herself for getting so freaked out over a boy who looked like he’d gotten lost on the way back from Comic Con.

The back lot was empty except for the giant metal dumpster just to her right and her dusty old Ford parked a few metres to her left. There was a single light blazing above her head illuminating the door and the concrete step she was standing on. She headed straight towards the dumpster with the bags in one hand and a tin of coffee grinds in the other and that’s when she saw him, on the periphery of the shadow line, his coat splayed out behind him.

The hairs on the back of her neck bristled. She drew in a breath and did a quick calculation of the distance between her, the boy and the door.

But before she could figure out where to run to, the boy in the sunglasses stepped forward into the zone of light. She saw that he was a little bit older than her, maybe twenty or twenty-one. He was wearing black jeans and leather biker boots, and a black wrinkled t-shirt with some kind of slogan on it. A part of her brain registered that he looked ridiculous, like an extra from the Matrix, but the other part warned her not to tell him so.

At least not yet.

He stopped just in front of her.

‘Evie Tremain?’ he asked.

She froze, her mouth falling open. How did he know her name? Who the hell was this guy? As she studied him she suddenly heard a voice in her head start screaming at her to run. She could hear her own heartbeat - it sounded like a horse smashing its hooves against a stable door. Her eyes darted instantly over the lot, looking for exits.

‘Evie Tremain?’ the boy asked again, impatient now.

‘Who wants to know?’ Evie asked, buying time. The back door was about ten metres behind her or she could try to get around him and head down the side alley and out onto Main Street. She took a small step backwards. The diner was closer.

‘The Brotherhood,’ the boy replied tonelessly, closing the distance between them in a single stride.

Evie couldn’t reign in the laughter that erupted out of her. ‘The Brotherhood?’ she snorted. ‘Seriously? What is that? The name of your Death Metal band? Because, you know, it sounds kind of lame.’

The boy – whose face had been expressionless until then -suddenly frowned in confusion, as though he didn’t know how to answer her. The sound of crunching gravel broke the silence. Evie’s eyes flew to the far end of the lot, which was sunk in darkness. Was someone else there? The boy followed her gaze and looked over his shoulder too. Adrenaline pumped through Evie’s body in one giant surge. She dropped the trash bags and took a step back, twisting her body as she moved. She brought her arm up like her dad had taught her, fingers curled into a tight fist, and in the second that the boy turned back to face her, she smashed it into the side of his head.

The boy’s head spun with the force of the punch, his sunglasses flying across the lot.

Hit first, ask questions later, she murmured to herself. Her dad had always said it was better to be safe than sorry.

She turned to run back towards the door but the boy lunged for her, shrieking. She raised her arm instinctively, ready to smash it into his face again, but then stumbled backwards letting out a cry. The boy’s eyes were inches from her own, his pupils fixed and dilated. And the thing that had stopped her, and made her stomach scrape the floor, was the colour of them. They were bright, carnation-red and totally unseeing.

The boy flailed his head from left to right as though someone had thrown acid in his face, his outstretched hand groping blindly in her direction.

He’s blind, Evie realised, her thoughts assuming some sense. He can’t see me.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a dark shape wavering behind the boy. It seemed to extend and stretch out, like a time-lapse sequence of a shadow lengthening. And then it coiled like a whip and lashed towards her.

Evie dived. She threw herself hard to the left, out of the boy’s grip and out of the way of whatever was coming towards her. She heard a crack as it smashed into the tarmac and another frustrated shriek from the boy.

She staggered backwards, her eyes on the space that had opened up between her and the guy in the coat. The whip or a rope or whatever it was was lashing rapidly back and forth between them. Evie’s brain refused to process the possibility that what her eyes were actually looking at was neither a rope nor a whip but a tail. There were scales on it and it moved like a rattlesnake. Ropes didn’t look like that.

The boy dropped to the floor now, and started scrabbling around on the ground for something. His glasses, Evie thought, spying them lying cracked in half on the asphalt by her car.

‘Need some help, Caleb?’ A girl’s voice called out from the edge of the darkness.

The boy with blood-red eyes swore at her in reply.

‘If you want help you need to put your tail away and ask nicely,’ the girl added.

The word punctured Evie’s brain like a poison dart. Tail. She tripped backwards, trying to feel for the door behind her. She stumbled on the step, and felt herself bump up against something solid. It wasn’t the door.

She spun around and found herself stepping on the toes of a white-faced boy. A girl in a neon pink mini-dress stood next to him, smiling surrrrprise.

Evie skittered backwards, letting out a yelp. How many of these freaks were there?

These two weren’t wearing sunglasses and their eyes weren’t red. The boy was dressed in scruffy jeans, bashed-up Converse and a Nix cap. The girl was tall with long black hair and the bright pink of her dress clashed with the green tinge of her skin.

‘We’ve got this, Caleb,’ the girl in the pink dress called out to the one with the tail, not taking her eyes off Evie.

‘Well, hurry up, would you, I don’t want to be here all night,’ another boy’s voice answered from the darkness.

So there were more of them over there, Evie thought, panic starting to weave its tentacles around her limbs. How many did that make? Four or five at least. What the hell were they all doing looking for her?

‘What do you want?’ Evie asked desperately, spinning around to face the girl and boy blocking the back door.

‘We want you, Evie Tremain,’ the girl in pink said, striding forward. She put her hand on Evie’s arm and Evie looked down, as her skin began to burn intensely.

She screamed and, with a final injection of adrenaline and anger, swung the tin of coffee grinds she was still holding at the girl’s head. It wasn’t a powerful swing but the girl let go of her instantly and started yelling.

Evie skittered back out of her way, skidding towards her car, dodging around the boy on the ground with the tail.

With a tail! Her brain screamed at her as though it wanted her to pause and figure it out. But her arm was still burning as though the bone itself had caught alight and the skin was blistering and it was all she could do not to faint right there and then. She started fumbling with her one good hand for her car key, buried in the pocket of her jeans, and felt the sob start to crescendo in her chest.

The boy in the Nix cap was bent double, pointing and laughing at the girl Evie had hit. And the sound of it, the childish hysteria of it, was like a shucking knife opening Evie up. She glanced upwards even as she scrambled for her keys. The girl was holding the side of her head, screaming and trying to scrape wet coffee grinds off her face, she spat a gloop of saliva and glared furiously at Evie.

At last Evie’s fingers closed on her keys. She yanked them from her pocket, watching as the girl and boy moved in on her. She was just prey, she realised. She was completely cornered. There was no way out.

(Extraits proposés dans l'édition anglaise du premier livre de l'auteur : Hunting Lila)