Read Online Never to Sleep by Rachel Vincent - Free Book Online

the status quo.
    There were other sounds I couldn’t identify, and other things on the edge of my vision, but I didn’t dare turn and look. I just held the course and tried to keep my thoughts occupied so they couldn’t focus on things I was scared to think about.
    Addison had called me a fool and said I didn’t listen. Ha! I got myself out of the cage, didn’t I? What kind of fool could do that? And I’d listened when she called the creeper vines greedy and bloodthirsty. In fact, that’s what had given me the idea to…
    Ohh . She’d given me a hint. Were there any more of them buried in the nonsense she’d spouted?
    Addison had said I could go home. Of course, she’d also said I was dead, but unless my collision with the classroom door had actually killed me, and this really was hell, I wasn’t ready to jump to that conclusion. But her hint had gotten me out of the cage, so clearly some of what she’d said was relevant.
    I replayed everything I could remember from my strange conversation with the dead rock star. She’d said I could go home, but she couldn’t take me. She’d told me to go back the way I came. She’d said I didn’t need Luca, or anyone else, and that I didn’t know what I was or what I had.
    She was right about that last part. I was starting to think I didn’t know anything.
    About halfway to the school, I realized that the scent of my blood might be what was attracting the follower I had yet to actually look at. So I stopped just long enough to squat at the edge of the sidewalk and wipe my bloody palm on the creepy, off-color grass. That got rid of most of the fresh blood, but also reopened the wound—and restarted the pain. But a minute later, the footsteps at my back were replaced with a creepy slurping, crunching sound. My follower was eating the grass I’d bled on.
    I shuddered but resisted the urge to look.
    By the time I got to the front of the high school, I knew I was being watched by more than just the thing that had stopped to taste my blood. I could feel them all around me, some hidden behind or inside buildings, others in plain sight. I could have seen them, if I’d turned, but forcing a confrontation would be pointless, as long as they were letting me move around freely. So I decided to walk as long as they let me, and face any obstacles when they actually stepped into my path.
    My stomach churned with nerves as I passed the front entrance, trying not to see the cracked glass doors and windows or wonder what had hit them. I didn’t want to see the vines trailing over and around the front steps and scrolled concrete rails, and I didn’t want to hear the dry scratching sound as they slithered over one another.
    The sky was darker than ever, and that was a mercy, as well as a curse. With just the reddish light of the scarlet half-moon hanging on the horizon, I wouldn’t be able to clearly see whatever was coming for me until it actually popped out and said boo. If ignorance was bliss, I was prepared to be ecstatic here in the Netherworld until I could escape it entirely.
    At the edge of the building, I turned left and stepped off the sidewalk, headed for the quad entrance to the cafeteria. That was exactly where Luca and I had been caught by the hellion earlier, but all the other routes to the cafeteria involved going through the school and picking my way through nests of vines, in near darkness this time.
    I crossed the grass quickly, trying to ignore the sounds following me, as well as the fact that they weren’t well defined enough to truly be called footsteps. I didn’t want to think about what that might mean.
    As I neared the corner of the building, a new sound set my nerve endings on fire and raised hairs all over my body. More footsteps crunched through the grass, but this set was coming from the quad, ahead and to my left. The hellion? Running from him would do no good, because he could evidently appear wherever he wanted, and if he found out I’d escaped the