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fault.
    Abby grabbed my arm. “Kia, I mind. If it was self-defense, your headmaster should know that.”
    “The only other witnesses were Justine’s friends, and the headmaster has seen my school records. So what’s the point?”
    She looked startled. “The point is if you’re innocent, I’m not going to let you be a convenient scapegoat.” She marched to the phone. “I’m calling him back. If it’s her word against yours, then you both share the punishment or the forgiveness.”
    “Go ahead.” I shrugged. “But it won’t do any good,” I added quietly, before going upstairs to my room.
    There were new security cameras in the servant staircase, blinking at me. I watched them carefully, feeling a kind of nervousness I couldn’t rationally explain. I might have passed it off as leftover anxiety from the school bathroom fire, but who needed that many cameras inside a house?
    Clearly I wasn’t the only one with secrets.

Chapter Four
    Ethan
    “It’s not too late to change your mind,” I told Colt as he made a pass through the obstacle course, dripping sweat. I didn’t have much time to convince him to back out.
    “You don’t have to do this,” I added as he swung from one rope to another, like Tarzan with a military crew cut. “Just because our parents drank the Kool-Aid doesn’t mean we have to.”
    He snorted a laugh down at me, eyes gleaming with a manic kind of intensity. “Are you high? Of course I do. I owe my parents.”
    “No, you don’t.”
    “You don’t get it. My mom cried for two days straight after I came out. When I get my ring, she’ll realize everything’s the same. I’m still me.”
    “She’ll get over it even without the ring. Your dad doesn’t care if you’re gay, and he’ll calm her down,” I insisted quietly. “Colt, you’re not ready.”
    “And you really need to work on those motivational speeches,” he shot back. “If I do this, my mom can focus on the champion thing instead of the gay thing.”
    I didn’t know how else to make him understand. The Cabal had raised us with stories of glory and visions of medieval knights and ancient champions testing their mettle against monsters. I could recite all of Hercules’s trials before I could recite the alphabet. But there was one thing worse than the reality of being chased through the woods, of being hunted. And that was being the hunter, of emerging from the forest covered in blood and with a life on your conscience. Monster or not, those creatures hadn’t chosen to be part of the Blackwood bestiary.
    But our parents didn’t get it. They were drunk on the romance of it, on adventures they wished they’d had at our age. In college they’d fancied themselves hunters and cryptozoologists. They wanted an excuse to travel to exotic places and kill things. They got tired of hunting lions and tigers, of exotic game in exotic places, and took it one step further by joining the Cabal. It was one step too far. And we had no choice but to keep up. Even after my mom died, and Sloane’s parents, Tobias’s parents. Summer. All because of the Cabal and the bestiary. It was like the old saying: if you got off the tiger, you got eaten.
    My dad might play at being the king of the castle, but the Cabal had real power. They could go anywhere, through barbed fences and magical wards. They oversaw the zoos around the world. Without them, we wouldn’t have the resources to run the bestiary or to keep it hidden. So they were in charge, even here. But there was a price to pay for that kind of protection: absolute obedience. And it didn’t matter that we were the children of the Cabal and the whole hunting lodge wasn’t even our choice in the first place; we were family.
    And family’s a bitch.
    “Are you sure you’re not worried that you won’t be the only guy with a silver ring? The only champion?” Colt snarled. I could already tell he was pumped full of adrenaline and testosterone, even though the actual Trials wouldn’t