I snapped out of the vision.
“Rose? Rose?”
Blinking, I focused on Dimitri’s face. He was leaning toward me, his hands gripping my shoulders. I’d stopped walking; we stood in the middle of the quad separating the upper school buildings.
“Are you all right?”
“I . . . yeah. I was . . . I was with Lissa. . . .” I put a hand to my forehead. I’d never had such a long or clear experience like that. “I was in her head.”
“Her . . . head?”
“Yeah. It’s part of the bond.” I didn’t really feel like elaborating.
“Is she all right?”
“Yeah, she’s . . .” I hesitated. Was she all right? Christian Ozera had just invited her to hang out with him. Not good. There was “coasting through the middle,” and then there was turning to the dark side. But the feelings humming through our bond were no longer scared or upset. She was almost content, though still a little nervous. “She’s not in danger,” I finally said. I hoped.
“Can you keep going?”
The hard, stoic warrior I’d met earlier was gone—just for a moment—and he actually looked concerned. Truly concerned. Feeling his eyes on me like that made something flutter inside of me—which was stupid, of course. I had no reason to get all goofy, just because the man was too good-looking for his own good. After all, he was an antisocial god, according to Mason. One who was supposedly going to leave me in all sorts of pain.
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
I went into the gym’s dressing room and changed into the workout clothes someone had finally thought to give me after a day of practicing in jeans and a T-shirt. Gross. Lissa hanging out with Christian troubled me, but I shoved that thought away for later as my muscles informed me they did not want to go through any more exercise today.
So I suggested to Dimitri that maybe he should let me off this time.
He laughed, and I was pretty sure it was at me and not with me.
“Why is that funny?”
“Oh,” he said, his smile dropping. “You were serious.”
“Of course I was! Look, I’ve technically been awake for two days. Why do we have to start this training now? Let me go to bed,” I whined. “It’s just one hour.”
He crossed his arms and looked down at me. His earlier concern was gone. He was all business now. Tough love. “How do you feel right now? After the training you’ve done so far?”
“I hurt like hell.”
“You’ll feel worse tomorrow.”
“So?”
“So, better to jump in now while you still feel . . . not as bad.”
“What kind of logic is that?” I retorted.
But I didn’t argue anymore as he led me into the weight room. He showed me the weights and reps he wanted me to do, then sprawled in a corner with a battered Western novel. Some god.
When I finished, he stood beside me and demonstrated a few cool-down stretches.
“How’d you end up as Lissa’s guardian?” I asked. “You weren’t here a few years ago. Were you even trained at this school?”
He didn’t answer right away. I got the feeling he didn’t talk about himself very often. “No. I attended the one in Siberia.”
“Whoa. That’s got to be the only place worse than Montana.”
A glint of something—maybe amusement—sparked in his eyes, but he didn’t acknowledge the joke. “After I graduated, I was a guardian for a Zeklos lord. He was killed recently.” His smile dropped, his face grew dark. “They sent me here because they needed extras on campus. When the princess turned up, they assigned me to her, since I’d already be around. Not that it matters until she leaves campus.”
I thought about what he’d said before. Some Strigoi killed the guy he was supposed to have been guarding? “Did this lord die on your watch?”
“No. He was with his other guardian. I was away.”
He fell silent, his mind obviously somewhere else. The Moroi expected a lot from us, but they did recognize that the guardians were—more or less—only human. So, guardians got pay and time off like you’d get in any other job. Some hard-core guardians—like my mom—refused vacations, vowing never to leave their Moroi’s sides. Looking at Dimitri now, I had a feeling he might very well turn into one of those. If he’d been away on legitimate leave, he could hardly blame himself for what happened to that guy. Still, he probably did anyway. I’d blame myself too if something happened to Lissa.
“Hey,” I said, suddenly wanting to cheer him up, “did you help come up with the plan to get us back? Because it was pretty good. Brute force and all that.”
He arched an eyebrow curiously. Cool. I’d always wished I could do that. “You’re complimenting me on that?”
“Well, it was a hell of a lot better than the last one they tried.”
“Last one?”
“Yeah. In Chicago. With the pack of psi-hounds.”
“This was the first time we found you. In Portland.”
I sat up from my stretches and crossed my legs. “Um, I don’t think I imagined psi-hounds. Who else could have sent them? They only answer to Moroi. Maybe no one told you about it.”
“Maybe,” he said dismissively. I could tell by his face he didn’t believe that.
I returned to the novices’ dorm after that. The Moroi students lived on the other side of the quad, closer to the commons. The living arrangements were partly based on convenience. Being here kept us novices closer to the gym and training grounds. But we also lived separately to accommodate the differences in Moroi and dhampir lifestyles. Their dorm had almost no windows, aside from tinted ones that dimmed sunlight. They also had a special section where feeders always stayed on hand. The novices’ dorm was built in a more open way, allowing for more light.
I had my own room because there were so few novices, let alone girls. The room they’d given me was small and plain, with a twin bed and a desk with a computer. My few belongings had been spirited out of Portland and now sat in boxes around the room. I rummaged through them, pulling out a T-shirt to sleep in. I found a couple of pictures as I did, one of Lissa and me at a football game in Portland and another taken when I’d gone on vacation with her family, a year before the accident.
I set them on my desk and booted up the computer. Someone from tech support had helpfully given me a sheet with instructions for renewing my e-mail account and setting up a password. I did both, happy to discover no one had realized that this would serve as a way for me to communicate with Lissa. Too tired to write to her now, I was about to turn everything off when I noticed I already had a message. From Janine Hathaway. It was short:
I’m glad you’re back. What you did was inexcusable.
“Love you too, Mom,” I muttered, shutting it all down.
When I went to bed afterward, I passed out before even hitting the pillow, and just as Dimitri had predicted, I felt ten times worse when I woke up the next morning. Lying there in bed, I reconsidered the perks of running away. Then I remembered getting my ass kicked and figured the only way to prevent that from happening again was to go endure some more of it this morning.
My soreness made it all that much worse, but I survived the before-school practice with Dimitri and my subsequent classes without passing out or fainting.
At lunch, I dragged Lissa away from Natalie’s table early and gave her a Kirova-worthy lecture about Christian—particularly chastising her for letting him know about our blood arrangement. If that got out, it’d kill both of us socially, and I didn’t trust him not to tell.
Lissa had other concerns.
“You were in my head again?” she exclaimed. “For that long?”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I argued. “It just happened. And that’s not the point. How long did you hang out with him afterward?”
“Not that long. It was kind of . . . fun.”
“Well, you can’t do it again. If people find out you’re hanging out with him, they’ll crucify you.” I eyed her warily. �
��You aren’t, like, into him, are you?”
She scoffed. “No. Of course not.
“Good. Because if you’re going to go after a guy, steal Aaron back.” He was boring, yes, but safe. Just like Natalie. How come all the harmless people were so lame? Maybe that was the definition of safe.
She laughed. “Mia would claw my eyes out.”
“We can take her. Besides, he deserves someone who doesn’t shop at Gap Kids.”
“Rose, you’ve got to stop saying things like that.”
“I’m just saying what you won’t.”
“She’s only a year younger,” said Lissa. She laughed. “I can’t believe you think I’m the one who’s going to get us in trouble.”
Smiling as we strolled toward class, I gave her a sidelong glance. “Aaron does look pretty good though, huh?”
She smiled back and avoided my eyes. “Yeah. Pretty good.”
“Ooh. You see? You should go after him.”
“Whatever. I’m fine being friends now.”
“Friends who used to stick their tongues down each other’s throats.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Fine.” I let my teasing go. “Let Aaron stay in the nursery school. Just so long as you stay away from Christian. He’s dangerous.”
“You’re overreacting. He’s not going Strigoi.”
“He’s a bad influence.”
She laughed. “You think I’m in danger of going Strigoi?”
She didn’t wait for my answer, instead pushing ahead to open the door to our science class. Standing there, I uneasily replayed her words and then followed a moment later. When I did, I got to see royal power in action. A few guys—with giggling, watching girls—were messing with a gangly-looking Moroi. I didn’t know him very well, but I knew he was poor and certainly not royal. A couple of his tormentors were air-magic users, and they’d blown the papers off his desk and were pushing them around the room on currents of air while the guy tried to catch them.
My instincts urged me to do something, maybe go smack one of the air users. But I couldn’t pick a fight with everyone who annoyed me, and certainly not a group of royals—especially when Lissa needed to stay off their radar. So I could only give them a look of disgust as I walked to my desk. As I did, a hand caught my arm. Jesse.
“Hey,” I said jokingly. Fortunately, he didn’t appear to be participating in the torture session. “Hands off the merchandise.”
He flashed me a smile but kept his hand on me. “Rose, tell Paul about the time you started the fight in Ms. Karp’s class.”
I cocked my head toward him, giving him a playful smile. “I started a lot of fights in her class.”
“The one with the hermit crab. And the gerbil.”
I laughed, recalling it. “Oh yeah. It was a hamster, I think. I just dropped it into the crab’s tank, and they were both worked up from being so close to me, so they went at it.”
Paul, a guy sitting nearby whom I didn’t really know, chuckled too. He’d transferred last year, apparently, and hadn’t heard of this. “Who won?”
I looked at Jesse quizzically. “I don’t remember. Do you?”
“No. I just remember Karp freaking out.” He turned toward Paul. “Man, you should have seen this messed-up teacher we used to have. Used to think people were after her and would go off on stuff that didn’t make any sense. She was nuts. Used to wander campus while everyone was asleep.”
I smiled tightly, like I thought it was funny. Instead, I thought back to Ms. Karp again, surprised to be thinking about her for the second time in two days. Jesse was right— she had wandered campus a lot when she still worked here. It was pretty creepy. I’d run into her once—unexpectedly.
I’d been climbing out of my dorm window to go hang out with some people. It was after hours, and we were all supposed to be in our rooms, fast asleep. Such escape tactics were a regular practice for me. I was good at them.
But I fell that time. I had a second-floor room, and I lost my grip about halfway down. Sensing the ground rush up toward me, I tried desperately to grab hold of something and slow my fall. The building’s rough stone tore into my skin, causing cuts I was too preoccupied to feel. I slammed into the grassy earth, back first, getting the wind knocked out of me.
“Bad form, Rosemarie. You should be more careful. Your instructors would be disappointed.”
Peering through the tangle of my hair, I saw Ms. Karp looking down at me, a bemused look on her face. Pain, in the meantime, shot through every part of my body.
Ignoring it as best I could, I clambered to my feet. Being in class with Crazy Karp while surrounded by other students was one thing. Standing outside alone with her was an entirely different matter. She always had an eerie, distracted gleam in her eye that made my skin break out in goose bumps.
There was also now a high likelihood she’d drag me off to Kirova for a detention. Scarier still.
Instead, she just smiled and reached for my hands. I flinched but let her take them. She tsked when she saw the scrapes. Tightening her grip on them, she frowned slightly. A tingle burned my skin, laced with a sort of pleasant buzz, and then the wounds closed up. I had a brief sense of dizziness. My temperature spiked. The blood disappeared, as did the pain in my hip and leg.
Gasping, I jerked my hands away. I’d seen a lot of Moroi magic, but never anything like that.
“What . . . what did you do?”
She gave me that weird smile again. “Go back to your dorm, Rose. There are bad things out here. You never know what’s following you.”
I was still staring at my hands. “But . . .”
I looked back up at her and for the first time noticed scars on the sides of her forehead. Like nails had dug into them. She winked. “I won’t tell on you if you don’t tell on me.”
I jumped back to the present, unsettled by the memory of that bizarre night. Jesse, in the meantime, was telling me about a party.
“You’ve got to slip your leash tonight. We’re going up to that spot in the woods around eight thirty. Mark got some weed.”
I sighed wistfully, regret replacing the chill I’d felt over the memory of Ms. Karp. “Can’t slip that leash. I’m with my Russian jailer.”
He let go of my arm, looking disappointed, and ran a hand through his bronze-colored hair. Yeah. Not being able to hang out with him was a damned shame. I really would have to fix that someday. “Can’t you ever get off for good behavior?” he joked.
I gave him what I hoped was a seductive smile as I found my seat. “Sure,” I called over my shoulder. “If I was ever good.”
SIX
AS MUCH AS LISSA AND Christian’s meeting bothered me, it gave me an idea the next day.
“Hey, Kirova—er, Ms. Kirova.” I stood in the doorway of her office, not having bothered to make an appointment. She raised her eyes from some paperwork, clearly annoyed to see me.
“Yes, Miss Hathaway?”
“Does my house arrest mean I can’t go to church?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said that whenever I’m not in class or practice, I have to stay in the dorm. But what about church on Sundays? I don’t think it’s really fair to keep me away from my religious . . . um, needs.” Or deprive me of another chance—no matter how short and boring—to hang out with Lissa.
She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I wasn’t aware you had any religious needs.”
“I found Jesus while I was gone.”
“Isn’t your mother an atheist?” she asked skeptically.
“And my dad’s probably Muslim. But I’ve moved on to my own path. You shouldn’t keep me from it.”
She made a noise that sort of sounded like a snicker. “No, Miss Hathaway, I should not. Very well. You may attend services on Sundays.”
The victory was short-lived, however, because church was every bit as lame as I remembered when I attended a few days later. I did get to sit next to Lissa, though, which made me feel like I was getting
away with something. Mostly I just people-watched. Church was optional for students, but with so many Eastern European families, a lot of students were Eastern Orthodox Christians and attended either because they believed or because their parents made them.
Christian sat on the opposite side of the aisle, pretending to be just as holy as he’d said. As much as I didn’t like him, his fake faith still made me smile. Dimitri sat in the back, face lined with shadows, and, like me, didn’t take communion. As thoughtful as he looked, I wondered if he even listened to the service. I tuned in and out.
“Following God’s path is never easy,” the priest was saying. “Even St. Vladimir, this school’s own patron saint, had a difficult time. He was so filled with spirit that people often flocked around him, enthralled just to listen and be in his presence. So great was his spirit, the old texts say, that he could heal the sick. Yet despite these gifts, many did not respect him. They mocked him, claiming he was misguided and confused.”
Which was a nice way of saying Vladimir was insane. Everyone knew it. He was one of a handful of Moroi saints, so the priest liked to talk about him a lot. I’d heard all about him, many times over, before we left. Great. It looked like I had an eternity of Sundays to hear his story over and over again.
“. . . and so it was with shadow-kissed Anna.”
I jerked my head up. I had no idea what the priest was talking about now, because I hadn’t been listening for some time. But those words burned into me. Shadow-kissed. It had been a while since I heard them, but I’d never forgotten them. I waited, hoping he’d continue, but he’d already moved on to the next part of the service. The sermon was over.
Church concluded, and as Lissa turned to go, I shook my head at her. “Wait for me. I’ll be right there.”
I pushed my way through the crowd, up to the front, where the priest was speaking with a few people. I waited impatiently while he finished. Natalie was there, asking him about volunteer work she could do. Ugh. When she finished, she left, greeting me as she passed.
The priest raised his eyebrows when he saw me. “Hello, Rose. It’s nice to see you again.”
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