Alliance by Lacy Williams as Lacy Yager, Haley Yager Page A

gone?”
    “Yeah. Someone saw them leave the building.” Maggie lifts her head, but doesn’t look in my direction.
    “Who?”
    “Me.”
    Maggie’s friend Hannah storms in through one of the side doors to the gym. She rushes up to Maggie and kneels beside her, pointedly ignoring the vampire’s bodies.
    “I’m fine,” Maggie says, but her friend just ignores her and places her hand on Maggie’s injured shoulder. I wince in sympathy, but instead of pain, Maggie’s face shows relief. I look closer and it looks like—is Hannah healing Maggie’s burns?
    The taller girl looks over her shoulder and looks me up and down, then must decide I’m okay, because she goes back to staring intently at Maggie. Maggie shakes her head slightly.
    “What are you?” I ask, not able to believe my eyes. She seems to be… talking to Maggie nonverbally.
    Hannah sends me sends me a scathing look over her shoulder. What are you?
    Whoa. Her voice sounds in my head but her lips don’t move. Any why is Maggie the only one hurt ? Hannah’s mind-voice asks. Not very politely.
    “He’s a Chaser,” Maggie mumbles.
    She and Hannah look at each other and seem to exchange quite a bit of information without speaking aloud, and Hannah shrugs. “Cops are three minutes away,” she says.
    Sure enough, I hear distant sirens.
    “You’d better clear out,” Maggie says, and it’s obvious that from this moment on, we’re not friends anymore.
    I back toward the outside doors, the same way I came in.
    “Wait!”
    I pause at Maggie’s call. She stands straight and her eyes are on my face. “Why didn’t you kill me?”
    “I don’t know.”
    It’s the most honest thing I’ve ever said to her.
    I’m climbing into my truck two streets over when my cell vibrates in my pocket. It’s a miracle the thing didn’t get smashed in the altercation.
    It’s Rachel.
    “What?” I snap. I’m in no mood for any crap from her.
    “Chloe’s gone.” She sounds panicked.
    “Calm down,” I say. It’s all I can do to grit my teeth and keep my temper in check. “Start over.”
    “We got separated on our way to the rendezvous point. I don’t know what happened.”
    “How could you lose her?”
    “It was really busy in the mall and we got in this big crowd…” Rachel’s hysteria is making her blubber and that’s not going to help.
    “Rach. Focus. Where are you?” I force a calm tone when I feel anything but.
    “I came to the rendezvous point hoping she might be here.”
    “Stay there. I’m on my way.”
     

 
     
    14 - Maggie
    “You’re soaked in blood.” I can tell from Hannah’s voice that her nose is wrinkled in distaste, but I’m having trouble caring.
    She pushes me up the last flight of stairs to our floor and then down the hall to our dorm. The floor is eerily silent except for the noise we make. Everyone else is out on the lawn, where the cops have just arrived.
    “Change. Fast.” Hannah shoves a clean pair of jeans and a black t-shirt into my hands.
    I stare at my fingers curled around the material for a long moment. I killed with these fingers tonight.
    “Maggie.”
    I respond to Hannah’s reprimand, moving on autopilot.
    Everything inside me is numb.
    I pull off the ruined dress and throw it in the rubbish bin, then I laugh because it doesn’t really matter if my room is clean now. I pull on the clothes Hannah gives me and lace up my combat boots.
    “Let’s go downstairs,” Hannah says softly. “We can sneak into the crowd and no one will know we were involved.”
    Hannah’s a good friend. She says ‘we’ when it was just me that killed those people. Vampires. But they used to be people.
    My shock starts to fade. I shake my head and Hannah drops her hand from my arm. “I can’t, Han.”
    I go to the closet, past the normal emergency backpack, way down to the bottom. To the emergency emergency bag. The one that would never make it through airport security.
    I take two knives from the front pocket and stash them