(REWRITING) The Skylar Experiment : Coveting

Chapter Eight - End of Detention

His jade eyes seared in the darkness. "That includes you, now. If anything, you need to be more careful because you've never dealt with them before. He would have found out about you tonight if I hadn't been there."

He held up the fist and opened it, revealing tiny, bright red welts, like his skin had been freshly burned. I brought his palm closer to examine it, to convince myself of what he was showing me. My finger ran around the burns, careful not to touch the spots. He flinched but didn't take it away.

"Holy crap..."

"The pen meant for you was spiked with mercury. It's painful to us, and people like Spencer can determine whether we are human or not by watching our reaction to it. If you scream and drop it, you're done for." He watched my face shift to fear and pure horror. "You wouldn't have known how to hide it."

I gazed back at his hand in mine. The skin was already healing, slowly but surely.

"Does it still hurt?" I asked. "God, you had that for almost three hours!"

He hadn't made a sound, and I couldn't imagine how bad that stung. If it's supposed to make you scream in pain...

"It's not too bad, now." He closed his palm. "We shouldn't stay. Come on, I'll drive you home." At that, a grin broke across his face. "Like the good old times."

His car was the only one in the parking area except for another that must belong to Spencer. He stopped halfway to tour around it, and it clicked all of a sudden that he was checking out the man's license plate. We took place in our seats and Luc peeled off.

He'd set me up. No normal, sane teacher would sacrifice three hours of his own time to discipline a student on a Friday. That guaranteed to corner me while the school was empty, and no one would have helped me. I shivered at the realization. What would have happened if I touched the pen and reacted? What would have Spencer done in that classroom?

My arms rested on my lap and I fiddled as it finally surfaced clearly. I wasn't human.  Not entirely. The accidents in the earlier weeks hadn't been an illusion, and hunters didn't seem to make mistakes often. It was hard to conceive, because I didn't feel different or changed. 

I wished this was a huge error and I'd return to my ordinary life, but a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach told me there was no turning back.

"I think he's already onto me," I said.

"Uhh, not to state the obvious, Sunshine, but if a hunter isolates you to pass you an object laced with mercury, it's because he already has you in sight. Inorganic mercury is a toxic substance for humans that they don't want to handle often, despite that the bigger danger is inhalation. In their line of work, they try to minimize their exposure before it gets too much. For us, the contact causes physical pain but no other damage."

I bit my lip. "No, I mean he's always trying to make me... furious. It worked yesterday. I did something with the lights."

He stared at the road, a muscle thumping in his jaw.

"That's bad, isn't it?"

"You probably gave yourself away then. I covered you tonight, but it only stopped him for now. He's going to try again until he succeeds."

We pulled up in front of my house, but I didn't reach for the door. Instead, I showed him my phone.

"I started getting texts from an unknown number recently," I explained as he scanned the texts. "Do you know who's sending me those?"

"I don't, actually," he said, puzzled. "If it were one of us, we would have told you directly or we wouldn't have bothered masking our number. It doesn't make sense."