Renegade (Heven and Hell #4)(53)
Author: Cambria Hebert

At least, I really hoped it wouldn’t.

Chapter Eighteen

Heven

The school parking lot was half empty when Sam pulled my car into the lot.

“Are we early?” I wondered as he put the car in park and gazed out the windshield.

Kimber snorted. “Us? Early? Uh, no. But we aren’t late.”

“Well, it looks like most of the school will be getting late slips today.”

“Not me,” Kimber said, opening up the back door to get out. “After spending half the weekend lying to the police, convincing them we weren’t involved with the crap that went down at the party, and then spending the other half cleaning it up, I don’t have the energy to put on a performance for Mrs. Schuster.”

She closed the back door and I leaned back in my seat, not feeling too eager to go inside. This weekend left me feeling drained as well. “Ready?” Sam asked, pulling on one of my pigtail braids falling over my shoulder from beneath a knit purple hat with a yellow butterfly on the side.

“Not really,” I said and gave him a small smile. “How about we ditch Kimber and school and go wherever the road takes us?”

“We’d have to come back eventually.”

I sighed heavily, releasing all the air from my lungs, making me hunch forward slightly. “I know.”

“We can’t put this off forever, Hev.” Sam reminded me gently.

“Well, not with graduation this spring.”

“I’m not talking about school and you know it.” He smirked.

“I just… Is it awful I felt relieved when Beelzebub ran off before we could catch him?”

The smirk he wore faded away and he turned in the seat so he faced me more fully. “No, Hev. It’s not awful. A lot has happened in the past year—longer if you count the night China attacked you and left you for dead.”

“The night you saved me and took me to the hospital,” I said, remembering the night my mind had refused to share with me for so long.

“Yeah, that night,” he murmured and ran his fingers down my cheek. “No one blames you for needing a break. We all needed one.”

“But now break’s over.”

He nodded, looking solemn. But even his solemn expression couldn’t quell the warm honey color of his eyes. “It’s time to finish this. We need to move on.”

I knew he was right. I knew I couldn’t put off what I was coming to think of as my final facedown with Beelzebub. My mother deserved peace in death and we deserved peace in life. If only we knew what he was up to, because I knew he was up to something.

It won’t matter what he’s up to when you release the souls and take away his power, I told myself.

I just prayed no one else died along the way.

Sam and I climbed out of the car and started through the parking lot, the whole place seeming eerie and silent. I was just about to ask Sam if he was thinking the same thing when Kimber came running down the sidewalk toward us.

Sam and I jogged to meet her halfway and when she stopped, her eyes were wide and her aura was all over the place.

“What is it?” I demanded.

“Inside. Now. You have to see this.”

The three of us rushed inside, the door banging behind us and echoing in the hall. “Where is everyone?” I asked, my voice hushed.

“Come on,” Kimber said, grabbing my arm and pulling me around the corner and into another where students were loitering in the halls and digging through their lockers before the bell rang.

“What are we looking for?” Sam asked.

Just then a locker door slammed shut and the person behind it shuffled their way down the hall toward us.

A sound hissed between my lips.

The guy, his name was Jeremy, looked completely out of it. Not only that, his skin had this green cast to it and his eyes were surprisingly vacant. He walked stiffly, like his legs forgot how to bend, and his shoulders were hunched like his bones forgot how to support his frame.

“He looks like a zombie,” I murmured. Then I glanced at Kimber. “Is he a zombie?”

“He isn’t trying to eat our brains so I would think not.”

As if to prove her statement, he continued by like we weren’t even there. When he bumped into Sam with his shoulder, he stopped, turned, and raised his empty, red-rimmed eyes to Sam’s face.

“Jeremy, man… you okay?” Sam asked him cautiously.

He made a sound between a grunt and a groan and then shuffled off down the hallway.

“Okay, so maybe we should tell the nurse he isn’t looking so hot,” I said.

“It isn’t just him, Heven. It’s everyone,” Kimber said, gesturing to the rest of the people in the hallway.

She was right.

They all had that green cast to their skin, they all moved like stiff zombies, and barely anyone said two words. The girl on the far end of the hall kept coughing, deep whooping coughs she didn’t cover with her hand.

My chemistry lab partner walked by and I hesitantly tapped her on the shoulder, calling out her name. “Alexis?” The girl swung around. Her usually glossy brown locks were tangled and dull. “What happened to you?”

Her eyes didn’t seem as vacant, but she stared at me for long minutes like she didn’t understand what she said. Finally, she spoke. “Not feeling… too… hot.” Then she glanced at Kimber. “Great party.”

Kimber smiled as Alexis moved off down the hallway. “You know it was a good party when even a half-zombie says so.”

Kimber and I gasped at the same time. “The party!”

Sam’s face drew grim. “The fog.”

We all nodded.

“It somehow made everyone sick.”

“Almost the entire school was at your house,” I told Kimber.

“That would explain why half the school isn’t here.” The girl down the hall began coughing once more. “And the rest are here to spread their disease.”

“Do you think it’s contagious?” I worried.

“Ew.” Kimber whined.

“I don’t think sticking around here and finding out is a very good idea,” Sam said.

We ran toward the door, but I stopped when I heard the drone of a TV just a few doors down, inside the office. Instead of going out the door, I went to listen.

“Heven!” Kimber hissed as she and Sam ran to catch me.

There was a medium-sized flat screen hanging on the wall inside the school office, and I stopped just inside the door to hear the local news report.