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“Raquel is not the short straw!”
“Be that way.” Then she slammed her door.
Wait, did Courtney just try to sympathize with me?
I shook my head. The idea of Courtney trying to be sort of friendly was almost weird enough to make me forget what I’d seen in the stairwell. But not quite.
When I told my parents I would be camping out that Friday night for the meteor shower, they didn’t bother worrying about me out in the woods; the school grounds were extremely safe, at least if you were a vampire. I knew they wouldn’t double-check whether there really was any meteor shower—a good thing, because there wasn’t. But they asked a whole lot of other questions, and in my paranoia, I wondered why.
“It seems like you could get some friends together to go with you,” Mom said as we sat down to Sunday dinner: lasagna for me, big glasses of blood for us all. Billie Holiday sang from the stereo, warning about a lover she had believed in once upon a time. “Maybe Archana. She seems like a nice girl.”
“Uh, yeah, I guess.” Archana was an Indian vampire, about six centuries old; I’d met her in history class last year, but we had hardly said ten words to each other. “I don’t know her that well, though. If I were going to ask anybody, I’d ask Raquel, but she couldn’t care less about astronomy.”
“You’re spending a lot of time with Raquel.” Dad took a deep swallow of his glass of blood. “Wouldn’t it be good to have other friends, too?”
“Vampire friends, you mean. You always told me not to be a snob, that we’re more like humans than most vampires claim. What happened to that?”
“I meant every word of it. But that’s not what I’m talking about,” Dad said gently. “The fact remains that you’re going to be a vampire. In a hundred years, Raquel will be dead, and your life will only have just begun. Who’s going to be with you then? We brought you here to make friends you can keep, Bianca.”
Mom gently laid one hand on my forearm. “We’ll always be here for you, sweetheart. But you don’t want to hang out with your parents forever, right?”
“That wouldn’t be so bad.” I meant it—but not the same way I would have once. Last year, I had wanted nothing except to hide out from the world forever in our cozy home, only the three of us; now I wanted so much more.
Balthazar stepped to the edge of the fencing area, his mask still tucked under one arm. He looked incredibly dashing in his white fencer’s garb, which outlined his powerful body like he was roughly carved of marble.
Me? I glanced in the mirror along one side of the room and sighed. Dashing was not the word for me. I looked like the lost white Teletubby Pasty. Also, I had no idea how to handle a sword. But there was no way I could claim I needed a second year of Modern Technology class, and fencing was the only other elective that fit my schedule.
“You look terrified,” Balthazar said. “You won’t actually be dueling for your life in here, you know.”
“I get that, but still—sword fighting. I don’t know.”
“First of all, the actual fighting won’t come for a really long time. Neither will the actual swords. Not until you know how to move. Second, I’ll fix it so we’re partners, at least at first. That way I can make sure you’re comfortable.”
“You mean, you’d rather fence with somebody you can beat.”
“Maybe.” He grinned, then tugged the mask down over his face. “Ready?”
“Give me a second.” I busied myself with the mask, which to my surprise I could see out of perfectly well.
Sure enough, we didn’t start fighting right away. In fact, most of the first day was spent learning how to stand. Sound easy? It’s not. We had to hold our legs just so, tensing this muscle but not that one, and position our arms in this incredibly formal, stylized way. I hadn’t realized it was possible to exhaust every single muscle in my body just by trying to stand still, but before the hour was up, I was trembling all over and sore from my shoulders to my calves.
“You’ll be all right,” Balthazar said encouragingly as he adjusted one of my elbows. Our teacher, Professor Carlyle, had already designated him as one of her assistants for the course. “You have good balance, and that’s the main thing.”
“I would think the main thing would be not getting hit with a sword.”
“Trust me. Balance. That’s what it all comes down to.”
The bell rang. Sighing with relief, I stumbled to the nearest wall and sagged against it. I pulled off the fencing mask so that I could breathe more deeply. My cheeks felt hot, and my hair was damp with sweat. “At least I’ll lose weight this year.”
“You don’t need to lose weight.” Balthazar hesitated as he tucked his mask beneath his arm. “You know, if you want to work on this extra, outside of class—we could meet up tomorrow, maybe. Get a little practice in.”
“I can’t this weekend.” If I’d been any less exhausted, would Balthazar have seen the nervous anticipation in my eyes? “Can I take a rain check?”
“Sure.” He grinned at me as he headed for the door. All at once, I wondered if Balthazar hadn’t meant his offer as a way to get close to me. If so, I’d have to figure a way out of it.
I’d worry about all that later. It was the first Friday in October, and that meant I was only a few hours away from being with Lucas again.
First I hurried back to the dorm so that I could shower. No way was I going to meet up with Lucas smelling like sweaty old socks. I didn’t fix my hair or carefully apply makeup, so I wouldn’t tip Raquel off to my plans. I imagined my ultrafeminine former roommate, Patrice, gasping in horror as I simply pulled my hair back into a sloppy bun.
Raquel noticed anyway. “Why are you getting dressed up to lounge around in the woods?”
“It’s hardly like I got out the fur coat and tiara.” I wore jeans and a plain sweater.
She shrugged. “Whatever.” Raquel sat cross-legged on the floor, in the middle of another of her art projects; this collage looked fairly depressing, with a lot of black and a prominently displayed etching of a guillotine. All that mattered to me was that she paid no attention as I finished getting dressed. Ideally I would’ve gone to see Lucas in my prettiest outfit, but there was no way I could believably wear anything dressy. I reached deep into the back of my underwear drawer for a tiny bundle wrapped in a scarf, which I tucked into my backpack along with a thermos that would’ve looked innocent to Raquel.
“See you tomorrow night, okay?” My voice sounded strange—taut and unnatural, as though it might break.
I put one hand on the doorknob, thinking I was all but home free, when Raquel idly asked, “Aren’t you taking your telescope?”
Oh, no. If I were going to watch the meteor shower, of course I would bring my telescope with me—it was heavy, and it had to be handled with care, but I could get it onto the school grounds. What I couldn’t do was lug that thing all the way to Amherst. I thought I’d gone over every detail of my getaway plan. How could I have forgotten something so basic?
“I have another one,” I lied, making it up as I went. “Telescope, I mean. It’s not quite as good as this one, but it’s a lot lighter. So I thought I’d get it from my parents’ apartment instead.”
“Makes sense.” Raquel looked up from her scissors, so that we could see each other’s faces. She looked a little sad; maybe Raquel would never admit that she would miss me over the weekend, but I thought she would. “Tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow.” Guiltily, I promised, “We’ll hang out next weekend. Figure out something fun to do.”
“Here? Yeah, right.” She buried herself in her work again, and I was free to go.
As I walked out onto the grounds, twilight was descending over the school. Dusk was one of my favorite times of day; to me it felt as much like a beginning as the sunrise. The sky was a milky violet-gray as I walked to the far end of the grounds and made my way into the woods. My ears pricked up in response to the night sounds: my own footsteps on soft pine needles, the hooting of a faraway owl and—very distant—a girl laughing in a drowsy kind of way that made me think she must be out there with a guy.
I continued on my way, realizing as I went how much sharper my hearing was than it had been last year. Perhaps I’d become so accustomed to the din of Evernight Academy that I didn’t sense the difference so much, but out in the woods, it was obvious. The flapping of birds’ wings, traffic whirring along the nearest road—all of that was clear and distinct. It wouldn’t have been, before.
I wouldn’t have been thinking about how good one of those birds’ blood would taste, either.
The vampire in me was closer to the surface. And being with Lucas always brought the vampire—the predator, the hungry one—to life in me more powerfully than before. Maybe I wasn’t the only one taking a risk with this meeting tonight.
I’ll take care of Lucas. I would never hurt him.
(If I bite him again and drink deeply enough, he becomes a vampire, and then the two of us could be together forever.)
I shook my head, refusing to get ahead of myself. Instead, I kept going until I reached the road. Then it was just a short stroll to the lone intersection in the area, a four-way stop. I took my place on the road that led to nearby Riverton and waited.
Five cars and a motorcycle came by; those were useless to me. From my hiding place in the nearby bushes, I sighed in frustration.
But lucky number seven was the one I’d been waiting for all this time: the laundry service that came to Evernight once a week for the school linens. As always, the driver had his music playing full blast. He would just have left the school, which meant he was headed back—and the sign on the side of the truck confirmed my recollection that the laundry service was based in Amherst.
The truck stopped at the sign. I ran to the back of the truck, which, luckily, was unlocked. As the metal clicked, I flinched, but fortunately the loud music in the cab must have covered it. Quickly I hopped inside among the bundles of laundry and pulled the doors shut behind me as the truck took off again.
See? That was simple! I was both so nervous and so elated that I had to fight not to start giggling. Instead, I curled down among the laundry bags, just one more bundle if he happened to glance back here. Everything smelled a little musty, but not unpleasant, and with all the cushioning around me, my ride promised to be pretty comfortable.
It took approximately an hour to drive to Amherst. Around then, I’d start risking a few peeks out of the small window in the back. Once we reached Amherst, I’d take advantage of another stop to get out—again without being seen, I hoped. After that, I could catch a cab or walk or whatever I had to do in order to reach the train station.
By midnight, I would be in Lucas’s arms again.
Chapter Five (#ulink_0c071110-9954-5ae8-80df-9f026a243955)
“WOOHOO! BAY-BEEEEE!”
The car zipped past me, going way too fast in the Amherst town square. A couple of frat guys were hanging out of the windows and yelling at every girl they saw.
I’d thought that, by this hour, the streets would be pretty much deserted. What I hadn’t considered was that Amherst was a college town, with something like three or four universities crowded up against the city boundaries. The town didn’t slow down at midnight; the kids around me were just getting the party started.
Kids. These people were up to five years older than me. Their faces and bodies were more mature than those of the students at Evernight. It was strange to think that they’d already lived longer than Balthazar ever did. But when I was at Evernight, I could sense the experience, worldliness, and strength of my classmates; their faces were young, but their centuries showed in their eyes. Compared to them, the cigarette-smoking college students jostling one another on the sidewalk around me were only children.
What did that make me?
I couldn’t worry about that for very long. At that moment, I felt too happy to worry about anything—the lies I’d told, the rules I was breaking, or consequences that might follow. All that mattered was that I was about to see Lucas again.
“Excuse me.” A girl wove her way through the crowd toward me. Her fair, curly hair was pulled up into a knot from which a few strands dangled. “Can I walk with you?”
I began to tell her that she had me confused with someone else, but the moment our eyes first met, every word I might’ve said was replaced by only one: vampire.
It wasn’t that she looked so dissimilar from the other people around me, at least not in any obvious way. But to me, she stood out from the crowd as brilliantly as a bonfire. I’d been able to tell vampires from humans on sight all my life. The thing was, even for a vampire, this girl was different. She was the youngest-looking vampire I’d ever seen. Her heart-shaped face still had the roundness of the baby fat I saw in my own mirror, and she had wide-set, soft brown eyes. Her smile was almost shy. A port-wine birthmark mottled her neck near the jugular vein, probably almost exactly where she would have been bitten. I felt immediately protective, like it was my job to look after her—this lost young girl in clothes that didn’t match, a ragged sweater over a skirt with a torn hem.
“Wait.” Her expression was like the ones painted onto porcelain dolls, innocent and mischievous at the same time. “There’s something about you that’s—you’re not quite—oh. You’re a baby. One of our babies, I mean.”
I was impressed that she’d managed to figure that out so swiftly, given that most vampires never met a vampire like me, one born rather than made. “Yeah. I mean, yes, that’s what I am, and, yes, you can walk with me for a bit.”
“Thank you.” She slipped her arm into mine as though we were lifelong pals. Her body trembled, and I wasn’t sure whether it was from fear or cold. “This fellow won’t leave me alone tonight. Perhaps I’ll have better luck if he thinks I’ve run into a friend.”
“I’m actually going to meet somebody.” No sooner had I said the words than her smile wavered, revealing a glimpse of loneliness beneath. I remembered Ranulf and the handful of other lost ones at Evernight Academy, and I took pity on her. “But I can get you out of the town square, at least.”
“Oh, could you? Thank you so much. What a relief. Did I startle you? I didn’t mean to. If I did, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” There was something genuinely childlike about her, so much so that it was surprising to realize she was several inches taller than I was, nearly as tall as Balthazar. “Are you all right? Is there somebody we could call?”
“Fine. I’m fine. I’m alone tonight.”
I looked down at my forearm, where her hand rested. Her threadbare sweater was long enough that the only part of her hands visible beneath the sleeves were her fingers. Her nails were filthy and jagged—almost as though she’d been digging through dirt. All at once, I knew that this girl was the single loneliest person I’d ever met.
At first she simply followed me without comment or, apparently, will of her own. We pushed our way through a huge crowd of students that had congregated outside a pizza place. It must have been the most popular place to grab a slice, because more than a hundred kids jostled around outside, holding cardboard pizza boxes and plastic cups of beer. A couple of guys stared at us—at the fair-haired vampire more than me. Despite her youth and disheveled appearance, she had an ethereal, innocent kind of beauty, and her brown eyes searched the crowds as if longing for someone, anyone, to take care of her. I could see how some guys might find that appealing.
Only after we emerged from that crowd did she say, “Where are you going?”
“To the train station.”
“That’s only a few blocks away.” The vampire cast a worried glance over her shoulder. How she could make out anything in that throng of people, I didn’t know, but she tensed up. “I think he’s still back there. Let me walk with you to the train station. Won’t you, please? It’s darker around there, and I can slip away, I just know it.”
Selfishly, I wanted to refuse; Lucas would be coming any second, and I didn’t want any company around for our reunion. Lucas wouldn’t exactly be thrilled to see another vampire, because I was the only one he trusted. There was a chance he wouldn’t recognize her as a vampire, but given his Black Cross training, I doubted it. Yet she looked so timid that I didn’t have the heart to refuse. “Okay, sure. Let’s go.”
We continued through the square, arm in arm. Music blared from each bar so loudly that the various drumbeats seemed to crash into one another.
“Let me guess.” She cast a shy glance in my direction. “Evernight, right?”
“Yeah. Did you go there?”
“I tried once. But the headmistress—oh, she didn’t like me. Mrs. Bethany was her name. Is she still there?”
“Like she would ever leave her kingdom,” I muttered.
“So true. Well, she didn’t care for me a bit. It made things very unpleasant.”
“Mrs. Bethany doesn’t care for me either. I think she hates most people who aren’t—well, her.”
“Have you run away from school, too? That’s what I did.”
I smiled. “Only for the weekend.”
“I could never go back, I don’t think. Not unless—” Her gaze became distant, but then she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
As we walked away from the main square toward the train station, a breeze gusted past us and I could smell a definite whiff of body odor. That alone didn’t gross me out—I guessed everybody got sweaty sometimes—but along with everything else, it made me feel sorry for her. She hardly seemed able to take care of herself. How terrible it would have to be, living forever alone like this, getting more and more out of sync with civilization.
For the first time, I understood—really understood—why vampires needed an Evernight Academy. I’d always known that we had a tendency to lose track of the ever-changing now, and my parents had cautioned me about how easy it was to look up and realize your clothes were a couple decades out of date, or that you not only didn’t know what was happening in the world but also didn’t care. But I’d never really comprehended how that would look—how it would feel, being so alienated. Looking at this girl, I finally got it.
The train station lay only a few blocks away from the main square, but the walk seemed longer. It had something to do with the contrast between the noise and bustle of the student-filled square and the dead silence of the nearby neighborhood. With fewer streetlights around, it was darker, too. My new companion had nothing else to say. She apparently was content just to hang on to me.
I checked my watch. 11:55.
The fair-haired vampire pulled open the train station’s door with trepidation, like it might be booby-trapped. Hardly likely for a one-room train station that was basically a hut beside the tracks. “Nobody’s home. Your young man hasn’t arrived yet.”
“I don’t guess so.” I peered at the station in dismay. I’d hoped it would be pretty or at least cozy; I knew a train station couldn’t possibly be romantic enough for our reunion, but it could’ve been better than this. Scuffed linoleum floor, dim fluorescent lights hanging from above, and a few hard wooden benches bolted to the walls: not exactly my dream setting.
Then again, what did that matter? What would any of it matter? I knew that I would be with Lucas again soon—within minutes—and once we saw each other, I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay attention to anything else.
What if it’s not the same for him? His letter was so amazing, but, still, we haven’t seen each other in months. What if things have changed between us? What if it’s awkward? What if he doesn’t feel the way he used to?
“You must be so very happy.” The vampire was curled up on a bench, her knees hugged to her chest. She drummed her jagged fingernails against the pale flesh of her calves. The sole was peeling away from the bottom of one of her shoes. “So very happy not to be alone anymore. Sometimes I think I’d die if I had to be alone all the time.”
Now I felt awkward saying this, but I had to: “If you don’t mind, I’d sort of like some privacy. We haven’t seen each other in a while.”
“Private time.” Her smile was shy and a little bit sad. I wanted to apologize for leaving her so alone, but what else could I do? The only alternative I could offer was her coming with me back to Evernight, and she’d made her feelings about that plain. Who could blame her for loathing Mrs. Bethany? As if she sensed my guilt, she said, “I understand, I do. I’d meant to wait awhile, see if he wouldn’t move on, but—okay.”
I heard footsteps on the gravel outside and whirled toward the door as Lucas walked in.
He wore a denim jacket, black T-shirt, and jeans. His dark-gold hair had grown slightly longer, but other than that he was the same. Looking at him felt like diving into a sun-warmed pool, filled with light.
“Lucas?” I took one step forward. I wanted to throw myself into his arms, and yet it felt like I could hardly move. “You made it. We both made it.”
