“Hello?” a guy’s voice said. My sensitive ears picked up music and what sounded like shouting in the background. He must have been back at The Depot.

“Talbot? This is Grace.”

“Hey, kid. What’s up?”

I sucked a deep breath in and blew it out and then said, before I could change my mind: “I want you to train me. I want to find my brother—and hopefully take down that gang that’s been terrorizing the city in the process.”

Talbot laughed. I could hear the smile in his voice when he said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Test

TUESDAY AFTERNOON

“You ready for this?” Talbot asked as I climbed into the van.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” I plopped my backpack on the seat between us and pulled out my running shoes from deep inside my bag. I kicked off my school flats and changed into the sneakers.

“So where’s your partner? Ditching out again?”

I smirked. “I arranged for him to find twenty dollars in quarters on his bus bench. That should keep him busy at the arcade for a few days.”

Talbot laughed. “I like the way you think.”

“So what’s in store for today? Are we going to have any time for, you know, training?”

“I actually took care of our assignment before I got here. Plus, we’ve got an extra hour before the bus returns, so we’ll have plenty of time for going over the basics.”

“What basics?”

“You’ll see,” he said.

We drove into an area called Glenmore on the outskirts of the city, a neighborhood that had probably been nice in the mid-twentieth century but now was a weird mix of low-income apartments, the original homes of elderly grandparents, and old houses that had been turned into stores. We were only a couple of blocks from the highway when Talbot pulled the van over near a pawnshop called Second Chances. The first thing I noticed about it was the X of police tape across the doorway, and another one over the shattered storefront window.

Talbot grabbed his large backpack from behind his seat and got out of the van. I followed. He walked right up to the storefront. Talbot looked back and forth along the street and then twisted hard on the door handle. I heard a pop as the door unlocked and opened. Talbot pulled the police tape aside and gestured for me to go inside the shop.

“Um, isn’t that kind of illegal?” I wasn’t exactly big on sneaking into places.

Talbot shrugged. “Sometimes you’ve got to bend the rules in this line of work.”

“What if we get caught?”

Talbot tapped beside his ear. “The place is empty. The security cameras are still disabled. And we’ll be in and out in a matter of minutes. I just want to test something.”

“What?”

“You.”

I looked into his green eyes and cocked my head, but I didn’t say anything.

“Come on, before we lose our chance,” he said.

I hesitated for only a second longer and then ducked under the tape and into the store. Broken glass crunched under my shoes as I did a little circle, inspecting the damage around me. All the display cases had been smashed in, and it looked like all the merchandise was missing.

“This place got hit last night,” Talbot said. “Whoever did it cleared out the entire inventory and walked off with a six-hundred-pound safe in less than the six minutes it took the police to respond to the silent alarm.”

“How do you know all this?”

“It helps to have an in with a detective.”

“Oh. So let me guess, no security camera footage?”

“Nope. I questioned my detective friend this morning about it, and he says it’s the same as all the other supposedly invisible bandit jobs. No fingerprints, no camera footage, everything gone in a matter of minutes.”

“So what are we going to do here?”

“Take a deep breath.”

I gave him a quizzical look.

“Go on. Do it.”

I sucked in a deep breath. Whatever it was that he wanted me to do must be interesting if he thought I needed to practice deep breathing before he told me. The air tasted sour, like too-old milk, and I let the breath out immediately. I looked around for a water fountain so I could rinse out the nasty taste it left in my mouth. When I couldn’t find one, I glanced back at Talbot. “Okay, so what’s up?” I asked tentatively. “Why are we here? What kind of test am I supposed to take?”

Talbot raised an eyebrow. “The deep breath was part of your test. You didn’t taste anything?”

“Well, yeah. It tastes like sour milk in here, but what does that have to do with anything?”

“Hmmm. We have more work to do than I originally thought. I’d assumed you’d have some hunting abilities.”

I felt a rush of embarrassment. “No. I get what you mean now.” I took in another deep breath and held it in the back of my throat. All I could taste was the sour milk, but I forced myself not to exhale the air. I didn’t want to fail in front of Talbot. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t up to training. I knew that I was probably getting a bit blue in the face by this point and that made me annoyed with myself. I finally exhaled the air through my nose, and as I did, I caught another scent that I hadn’t noticed before. “I taste sour milk, but I smell something else. Like bad meat, maybe? Something rotting.”

“Good,” Talbot said. “Or bad actually.”

“Well, if I didn’t do it right, then show me how to do it better. You’re supposed to be training me, remember?”

“No training yet. Not until after your test. You did just fine, though. It’s just that sour milk means we’ve got a couple of Gelals on our hands, but the rotting-meat smell means there was at least one Akhkharu here.”

“Akh … a … what?”

“Ahk-hay-roo,” he pronounced for me.

I scrunched my nose and didn’t even try wrapping my mouth around that word again.

“Yeah,” Talbot said. “Just call them Akhs—rhymes with socks. It’s much easier to say. Or some people call them vampires.”

I could feel my eyes go wide. “Seriously?”

“Except they’re not the same as the traditional, I-vant-to-suck-your-blood kind of vamp.” Talbot shrugged. “Let’s get moving before somebody comes back. We’ve got another stop to make as part of your test before I get you to your bus.”