That made two of us. The world around me slowed to a blur. Alberta kept calling names, but I didn’t hear any of them. What was going on? Clearly, someone had made a mistake. Lissa was my assignment. She had to be. I was going to be her guardian when we graduated. This made no sense. Heart racing, I watched Eddie walk over to Guardian Chase and get his packet and practice stake. He glanced down at the papers immediately, and I suspected he was double-checking the name, certain there was a mix-up. The expression on his face when he looked up told me that it was Lissa’s name he’d found.
I took a deep breath. Okay. No need to panic just yet. Someone had made a clerical error here, one that could be fixed. In fact, they’d have to fix it soon. When they got to me and read Lissa’s name again, they were going to realize they’d double-booked one of the Moroi. They’d straighten it out and give Eddie someone else. After all, there were plenty of Moroi to go around. They outnumbered dhampirs at the school.
“Rosemarie Hathaway.” I tensed. “Christian Ozera.”
I simply stared at Alberta, unable to move or respond. No. She had not just said what I thought. A few people, noticing my lack of movement, glanced back at me. But I was dumbstruck. This wasn’t happening. My Mason delusion from last night seemed more real than this. A few moments later, Alberta also realized I wasn’t moving. She looked up from her clipboard with annoyance, scanning the crowd.
“Rose Hathaway?”
Someone elbowed me, like maybe I didn’t recognize my own name. Swallowing, I stood and walked down the bleachers, robotlike. There was a mistake. There had to be a mistake. I headed toward Guardian Chase, feeling like a puppet that someone else was controlling. He handed me my packet and a practice stake meant to “kill” the adult guardians with, and I stepped out of the way for the next person.
Disbelieving, I read the words on the packet’s cover three times. Christian Ozera. Flipping it open, I saw his life spread out before me. A current picture. His class schedule. His family tree. His bio. It even went into detail about his parents’ tragic history, how they’d chosen to become Strigoi and had murdered several people before finally being hunted down and killed.
Our directions at this point had been to read through our dossiers, pack a bag, and then meet up with our Moroi at lunch. As more names were called, many of my classmates lingered around the gym, talking to their friends and showing off their packets. I hovered near one group, discreetly waiting for a chance to talk to Alberta and Dimitri. It was a sign of my newly developing patience that I didn’t walk right up to them then and there and demand answers. Believe me, I wanted to. Instead, I let them go through their list, but it felt like forever. Honestly, how long did it take to read a bunch of names?
When the last novice had been assigned his Moroi, Stan shouted above the din for us to move on to the next stage of the assignment and tried to herd out my classmates. I cut through the crowd and stalked up to Dimitri and Alberta, who blessedly were standing with each other. They were chatting about something administrative and didn’t notice me right away.
When they did glance at me, I held up my packet and pointed. “What’s this?”
Alberta’s face looked blank and confused. Something in Dimitri’s told me he’d been expecting this. “It’s your assignment, Miss Hathaway,” Alberta said.
“No,” I said through gritted teeth. “It’s not. This is somebody else’s assignment.”
“The assignments in your field experience aren’t optional,” she told me sternly. “Just as your assignments in the real world won’t be. You can’t pick who you protect based on whim and mood, not here and certainly not after graduation.”
“But after graduation, I’m going to be Lissa’s guardian!” I exclaimed. “Everyone knows that. I’m supposed to have her for this thing.”
“I know it’s an accepted idea that you’ll be together after graduation, but I do not recall any mandatory rulings that say you’re ‘supposed’ to have her or anyone here at school. You take who you’re assigned.”
“Christian?” I threw my packet on the floor. “You’re out of your mind if you think I’m guarding him.”
“Rose!” snapped Dimitri, joining the conversation at last. His voice was so hard and so sharp that I flinched and forgot what I was saying for half a second. “You’re out of line. You do not speak to your instructors like that.”
I hated being chastised by anyone. I especially hated being chastised by him. And I especially hated being chastised by him when he was right. But I couldn’t help it. I was too angry, and the lack of sleep was taking its toll. My nerves felt raw and strained, and suddenly, little things seemed difficult to bear. And big things like this? Impossible to bear.
“Sorry,” I said with great reluctance. “But this is stupid. Nearly as stupid as not bringing us to Victor Dashkov’s trial.”
Alberta blinked in surprise. “How did you know—Never mind. We’ll deal with that later. For now, this is your assignment, and you need to do it.”
Eddie suddenly spoke up beside me, his voice filled with apprehension. I’d lost track of him earlier. “Look . . . I don’t mind. . . . We can switch. . . .”
Alberta turned her stony gaze from me to him. “No, you certainly cannot. Vasilisa Dragomir is your assignment.” She looked back at me. “And Christian Ozera is yours. End of discussion.”
“This is stupid!” I repeated. “Why should I waste my time with Christian? Lissa’s the one I’m going to be with when I graduate. Seems like if you want me to be able to do a good job, you should have me practice with her.”
“You will do a good job with her,” said Dimitri. “Because you know her. And you have your bond. But somewhere, someday, you could end up with a different Moroi. You need to learn how to guard someone with whom you have absolutely no experience.”
“I have experience with Christian,” I grumbled. “That’s the problem. I hate him.” Okay, that was a huge exaggeration. Christian annoyed me, true, but I didn’t really hate him. As I’d said, working together against the Strigoi had changed a lot of things. Again, I felt like my lack of sleep and general irritability were cranking up the magnitude of everything.
“So much the better,” said Alberta. “Not everyone you protect will be your friend. Not everyone you protect will be someone you like. You need to learn this.”
“I need to learn how to fight Strigoi,” I said. “I’ve learned that in class.” I fixed them with a sharp look, ready to play my trump card. “And I’ve done it in person.”
“There’s more to this job than the technicalities, Miss Hathaway. There’s a whole personal aspect—a bedside manner, if you will—that we don’t touch on much in class. We teach you how to deal with the Strigoi. You need to learn how to deal with the Moroi yourselves. And you in particular need to deal with someone who has not been your best friend for years.”
“You also need to learn what it’s like to work with someone when you can’t instantly sense that they’re in danger,” added Dimitri.
“Right,” agreed Alberta. “That’s a handicap. If you want to be a good guardian—if you want to be an excellent guardian—then you need to do as we say.”
I opened my mouth to fight this, to argue that having someone I was so close to would train me up faster and make me a better guardian for any other Moroi. Dimitri cut me off.
“Working with another Moroi will also help keep Lissa alive,” he said.
That shut me down. It was pretty much the only thing that could have, and damn him, he knew it.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Lissa’s got a handicap too—you. If she never has a chance to learn what it’s like to be guarded by someone without a psychic connection, she could be at greater risk if attacked. Guarding someone is really a two-person relationship. This assignment for your field experience is as much for her as for you.”
I stayed silent as I processed his words. They almost made sense.
“And,” added Alberta, “it’s the only a
ssignment you’re going to get. If you don’t take it, then you opt out of the field experience.”
Opt out? Was she crazy? It wasn’t like a class I could sit out from for one day. If I didn’t do my field experience, I didn’t graduate. I wanted to explode about unfairness, but Dimitri stopped me without saying a word. The constant, calm look in his dark eyes held me back, encouraging me to accept this gracefully—or as close as I could manage.
Reluctantly, I picked up the packet. “Fine,” I said icily. “I’ll do this. But I want it noted that I’m doing this against my will.”
“I think we already figured that out, Miss Hathaway,” remarked Alberta dryly.
“Whatever. I still think it’s a horrible idea, and you eventually will too.”
I turned and stormed off across the gym before any of them could respond. In doing so, I fully realized what a bitchy little brat I sounded like. But if they’d just endured their best friend’s sex life, seen a ghost, and hardly gotten any sleep, they’d have been bitchy too. Plus, I was about to spend six weeks with Christian Ozera. He was sarcastic, difficult, and made jokes about everything.
Actually, he was a lot like me.
It was going to be a long six weeks.
THREE
“WHY SO GLUM, LITTLE DHAMPIR?”
I was heading across the quad, toward the commons, when I detected the scent of clove cigarettes. I sighed.
“Adrian, you are the last person I want to see right now.”
Adrian Ivashkov hurried up beside me, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air that of course drifted right toward me. I waved it off and made a great show of exaggerated coughing. Adrian was a royal Moroi we’d “acquired” on our recent ski trip. He was a few years older than me and had come back to St. Vladimir’s to work on learning spirit with Lissa. So far, he was the only other spirit user we knew of. He was arrogant and spoiled and spent a lot of his time indulging in cigarettes, alcohol, and women. He also had a crush on me—or at least wanted to get me into bed.
“Apparently,” he said. “I’ve hardly seen you at all since we got back. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were avoiding me.”
“I am avoiding you.”
He exhaled loudly and raked a hand through the sable brown hair he always kept stylishly messy. “Look, Rose. You don’t have to keep up with the hard-to-get thing. You’ve already got me.”
Adrian knew perfectly well I wasn’t playing hard-to-get, but he always took a particular delight in teasing me. “I’m really not in the mood for your so-called charm today.”
“What happened, then? You’re stomping through every puddle you can find and look like you’re going to punch the first person you see.”
“Why are you hanging around, then? Aren’t you worried about getting hit?”
“Aw, you’d never hurt me. My face is too pretty.”
“Not pretty enough to make up for the gross, carcinogenic smoke blowing in my face. How can you do that? Smoking’s not allowed on campus. Abby Badica got two weeks’ detention when she got caught.”
“I’m above the rules, Rose. I’m neither student nor staff, merely a free spirit wandering your fair school as I will.”
“Maybe you should go do some wandering now.”
“You want to get rid of me, you tell me what’s going on.”
There was no avoiding it. Besides, he’d know soon enough. Everyone would know. “I got assigned to Christian for my field experience.”
There was a pause, and then Adrian burst out laughing. “Wow. Now I understand. In light of that, you actually seem remarkably calm.”
“I was supposed to have Lissa,” I growled. “I can’t believe they did this to me.”
“Why did they do it? Is there some chance you might not be with her when you graduate?”
“No. They just all seem to think this is going to help me train better now. Dimitri and I will still be her real guardians later.”
Adrian gave me a sidelong glance. “Oh, I’m sure that’ll be quite the hardship for you.”
It had to be one of the weirdest things in the universe that Lissa had never come close to suspecting my feelings for Dimitri but that Adrian had figured it out.
“Like I said, your commentary isn’t appreciated today.”
He apparently didn’t agree. I had a suspicious feeling he’d been drinking already, and it was barely even lunchtime. “What’s the problem? Christian’ll be with Lissa all the time anyway.”
Adrian had a point. Not that I’d have admitted it. Then, in that short-attention-span way of his, he switched subjects just as we neared the building.
“Have I mentioned your aura to you?” he asked suddenly. There was a strange note to his voice. Hesitant. Curious. It was very uncharacteristic. Everything he usually said was mocking.
“I don’t know. Yeah, once. You said it was dark or something. Why?” Auras were fields of light that surrounded every person. Their colors and brightness were allegedly linked to a person’s personality and energy. Only spirit users could see them. Adrian had been doing it for as long as he could remember, but Lissa was still learning.
“Hard to explain. Maybe it’s nothing.” He came to a stop near the door and inhaled deeply on his cigarette. He went out of his way to blow a cloud of smoke away from me, but the wind carried it back. “Auras are strange. They ebb and flow and change colors and brightness. Some are vivid, some are pale. Every once in a while, someone’s will settle and burn with such a pure color that you can . . .” He tipped his head back, staring into the sky. I recognized the signs of that weird “unhinged” state he sometimes fell into. “You can instantly grasp what it means. It’s like seeing into their soul.”
I smiled. “But you haven’t figured mine out, huh? Or what any of these colors mean?”
He shrugged. “I’m figuring it out. You talk to enough people, get a feel for what they’re like and then start to see the same kinds of people with the same kinds of colors. . . . After a while, the colors start to mean something.”
“What’s mine look like right now?”
He glanced over at me. “Eh, I can’t quite get a fix on it today.”
“I knew it. You’ve been drinking.” Substances, like alcohol or certain medications, numbed spirit’s effects.
“Just enough to chase the chill away. I can guess what your aura’s like, though. It’s usually like the others, sort of those swirling colors—it’s just kind of edged in darkness. Like you’ve always got a shadow following you.”
Something in his voice made me shiver. Although I’d heard him and Lissa talk about auras a lot, I’d never really thought of them as anything I needed to worry about. They were more like some kind of stage trick—a cool thing with little substance.
“That’s so cheerful,” I said. “You ever think about motivational speaking?”
His scattered look faded, and his normal mirth returned. “Don’t worry, little dhampir. You might be surrounded by clouds, but you’ll always be like sunshine to me.” I rolled my eyes. He dropped his cigarette onto the sidewalk and put it out with his foot. “Gotta go. See you later.” He swept me a gallant bow and started walking away toward guest housing.
“You just littered!” I yelled.
“Above the rules, Rose,” he called back. “Above the rules.”
Shaking my head, I picked up the now-cold cigarette butt and took it to a garbage can that was outside the building. When I entered, the warmth inside was a welcome change as I shook off the slush on my boots. Down in the cafeteria, I found lunch wrapping up for the afternoon. Here, dhampirs sat side by side with Moroi, providing a study in contrasts. Dhampirs, with our half-human blood, were bigger—though not taller—and more solidly built. The girl novices were curvier than the ultra-slim Moroi girls, the boy novices far more muscular than their vampire counterparts. The Moroi complexions were pale and delicate, like porcelain, while ours were tanned from being outside in the sun so much.
Lissa sat at a table by herself, looki
ng serene and angelic in a white sweater. Her pale blond hair cascaded over her shoulders. She glanced up at my approach, and welcoming feelings flowed to me through our bond.
She grinned. “Oh, look at your face. It’s true, isn’t it? You really are assigned to Christian.”
I glared.
“Would it kill you to be a little less miserable?” She gave me a censuring yet amused look as she licked the last of her strawberry yogurt off her spoon. “I mean, he’s my boyfriend, after all. I hang out with him all the time. It’s not that bad.”
“You have the patience of a saint,” I grumbled, slouching into a chair. “And besides, you don’t hang out with him 24/7.”
“Neither will you. It’s only 24/6.”
“Same difference. It might as well be 24/10.”
She frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
I waved off my idiotic remark and stared blankly around the lunchroom. The room was buzzing with news of the impending field exercise, which would kick off as soon as lunch ended. Camille’s best friend had gotten assigned to Ryan’s best friend, and the four of them huddled gleefully together, looking as though they were about to embark on a six-week double date. At least someone would enjoy all this. I sighed. Christian, my soon-to-be charge, was off with the feeders—humans who willingly donated blood to Moroi.
Through our bond, I sensed Lissa wanting to tell me something. She was holding off because she was worried about my bad mood and wanted to make sure I got enough support. I smiled. “Stop worrying about me. What’s up?”
She smiled back, her pink-glossed lips hiding her fangs. “I got permission.”
“Permission for—?” The answer flitted from her mind faster than she could have voiced it. “What?” I exclaimed. “You’re going to stop your meds?”
Spirit was an amazing power, one whose cool abilities we were just starting to figure out. It had a very nasty side effect, however: It could lead to depression and insanity. Part of the reason Adrian indulged in drinking so much (aside from his party nature) was to numb himself against these side effects. Lissa had a much healthier way of doing it. She took antidepressants, which completely cut her off from the magic altogether. She hated not being able to work with spirit anymore, but that was an acceptable trade-off for not going crazy. Well, I thought it was. She apparently disagreed if she was considering this insane experiment. I knew she’d been wanting to try the magic again, but I hadn’t really thought she’d go through with it—or that anyone would let her.
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