As Red as Blood (The Snow White Trilogy) Read Online Free Page B

population of the arts high school as she saw fit, and of course, as a being descended from a higher sphere, Tuukka was most girls’ fantasy, but some other glue seemed to bind them together too. Maybe they imagined that, as the alphas of the school, they were so far above everyone else that they could never seriously consider dating anyone else.
    “What should we do? Duh. We should keep it, of course. Duh. And keep our mouths shut,” Kasper said.
    Lumikki wondered how Kasper had gotten into the school in the first place. He seemed to concentrate more on ditching class than doing homework. The whispers in the hall said he was on the verge of expulsion if things didn’t change.Kasper dressed in black and wore flamboyant gold jewelry. Keeping his hair slicked back required a significant amount of gel, and in his world, he clearly thought he was some sort of bling-bling rap artist even though, in reality, his performances evoked more pity than excitement in the audience. Kasper was a weird dude, and you couldn’t tell whether he was a chump or an actual small-time thug. For ages, Lumikki had wondered why Elisa and Tuukka hung out with Kasper at all. Elisa glanced around and lowered her voice.
    “We can’t keep it,” she said.
    The panic in her voice was audible.
    “What do you think we should do then?” Tuukka asked. “Go tell the police?”
    Kasper snickered. Elisa’s dad was a cop. Occasionally, she received good-natured and sometimes less good-natured ribbing about that fact.
    “It isn’t ours. We ended up with it by accident, so someone out there is looking for it, and if they find us, we’re screwed.”
    Elisa was desperate to convince the boys.
    “Come on, Elisa, think. What can we really do? How can we explain everything that happened without getting in trouble? We should have done something right then that night,” Tuukka pointed out.
    “We did do something,” Kasper said, snickering.
    Elisa sighed. “Yeah. We acted like regular geniuses.”
    “It seemed logical at the time,” Tuukka said. “But you get what I’m saying. If we tell about the . . . it . . . we have totell about everything else. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t risk that.”
    “Neither can I,” Kasper said.
    Lumikki heard Elisa’s fingernails drumming nervously on the tabletop as she spoke.
    “My memory’s way too fuzzy to say anything for sure. I can’t even sort out what happened when. Mostly I just know that my house was a god-awful mess in the morning. You don’t even want to hear all the places I found puke.”
    “I bet you’ve got a lot of scrubbing to do so your dad doesn’t realize you weren’t just sitting at home studying physics all weekend.”
    Kasper leaned back in his chair with an amused look on his face.
    “Are you crazy? Today’s when the maid comes. She’s cleaning everything up right now. I promised to pay her double if she does it in half the usual time and keeps her mouth shut. If I could just remember everything that happened, maybe I could—”
    “Get us all in really, really big trouble? That sounds like an awesome plan.”
    Tuukka’s voice had a hard, threatening edge to it.
    Elisa was silent for a moment. At the next table, someone made it to the next level on Angry Birds and gave a satisfied, “Yes!”
    “Okay, fine,” Elisa said. “We’ll keep our mouths shut. For now. We’ll wait and see what happens. But I have to say, I have a really bad feeling about this.”
    “Maybe ten grand will make you feel better,” Tuukka said.
    “What? No, I don’t want any.”
    “Of course you do. I’ve got three bags. Ten thousand each. We’re all in this together.”
    There was some rustling and the sound of a zipper as Tuukka opened his backpack under the table. Lumikki turned her head slightly and watched out of the corner of her eye as two opaque black plastic bags were transferred from Tuukka’s backpack to Elisa’s and Kasper’s bags.
    Elisa pressed her face into her