Kings of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #1) - Caroline Peckham ,Susanne Valenti Page 0,223

sight of the flames licking their way out of the window of the room, reaching toward the red Ford Mustang parked in front of the building. Holy shit.

Kyan veered towards the Unspeakables who were carrying armfuls of supplies away from the fight.

“Hey!” he snapped and they all turned around at the single word. “I need hand sanitiser – now!”

One of them hurried toward him with a box in his arms, bowing low as he laid it at his feet. Kyan took out a bottle of the hand sanitiser, squirting it all over his hands before turning to me and rubbing it all over me, smothering my face, my neck, arms, even rubbing it into my hair.

“Kyan, it’s too late,” I breathed as his brow pinched and he continued to rub it all over my body.

When he was done, he clenched his jaw, fixing me with a fierce stare. “You won’t get sick, baby,” he commanded like I could really obey that order. But I could see the desperation in him, the need for me to assure him that I wouldn’t.

I nodded, trying to fight back the cloying fear taking hold of me and making an oath I could only pray that I could keep. “I won’t get sick.”

The air echoed and hummed with the cries of the students who backed us and the screams of the fuckers who’d come to try and take what was ours.

Everywhere I looked there were more and more kids and staff running to help us, grouping together as they followed our lead and fought to defend our school.

We might have been a bunch of entitled rich kids, but that entitlement came from a position of power. And every single student here knew that power was a fleeting and fragile thing if you didn’t nurture it. If we wanted to keep hold of it, we had to reinforce it, make sure that those who had come to test it ran from here with their hands empty and their pride shattered.

They needed to fear us. To flee from here with nothing at all but the knowledge that coming against us would only earn them pain and failure.

Miss Pontus was wielding an umbrella like a fucking javelin and the Geography teacher Mr Hilex was smacking the outsiders with a heavy book on volcanoes.

The Night Keepers and Monroe held the front line with me, the footballers and more of the inner circle with a few of the faculty taking up position at our backs. The rest of the student body created a solid wall of flesh beyond that which ensured none of our attackers could head back onto campus.

My knuckles were torn and bloody, my flesh bruised and aching and my corrupted soul singing with an endless kind of energy that set me alight from the inside out. I was surrounded by chaos and carnage, havoc spilling forth all around me and shattering any false sense of security that could have been claimed by my usual routines. But instead of burning in the flames of the chaos, I was blossoming, free falling into the oblivion of the carnage which surrounded us and letting my inner demon do its worst.

I gripped a huge guy by the back of his neck, tearing the packet of toilet paper from his hands before forcing him out through the gate with a cry of rage and a kick to his spine. He fell sprawling in the gravel and as I swung back to look for another opponent, I suddenly found myself face to face with the wrong end of a shotgun.

Everything seemed to fade away from me apart from the view down that barrel and the curled lip of the asshole holding it.

His finger twitched on the trigger and my cold heart leapt as I saw my death coming for me.

A roar of defiance caught my ear just as he pulled the trigger and before death could find me, the gun was knocked aside.

The blast of the gunshot cut through the air with a finality which should have ended me, but it didn’t.

Monroe bellowed like a Viking warrior as he tore the shotgun from the asshole’s grip and turned it on him like a bat, slamming it into his face and breaking bones with every strike he delivered.

A savage smile tore at my lips as I moved forward to help him drag the guy through the gate.

Monroe caught my eye for a moment and I didn’t see a teacher looking back at me. I