by Claudia Gray
Quickly, I said, “I’m reporting this to Mrs. Bethany.”
Erich’s smarmy grin slowly faded from his face. Even he had sense to be afraid of Mrs. Bethany. And after all her big speeches about how everyone had to keep the human students safe to protect the school? Oh, no, Mrs. Bethany wouldn’t like Erich’s attitude at all.
“Don’t,” Erich said. “Just drop it, okay?”
“You drop it. Get out of here. Go.”
Erich glared at Raquel one more time, then stalked off into the woods alone.
“Bianca!” Raquel stumbled through the last few branches that separated us. Quickly I ran my tongue across my teeth, settling down so that I looked and acted human again. “Oh, my God, what’s wrong with that guy?”
“He’s a jerk.” It was true, even if it wasn’t the whole truth.
Raquel hugged herself tightly. “Who comes after—acts like he would—Oh, man. Okay. Okay.”
I peered through the darkness to make sure that Erich was really retreating. His footsteps had faded, and I couldn’t see his pale coat any longer. He was gone, at least for the moment, but I didn’t trust him. “Come on,” I said. “We’re going to make a quick side trip.”
Too numb to ask questions, Raquel followed me as we walked back toward the river. We only had to go another quarter mile before we found a small footbridge made of stone. It hadn’t been used regularly in a long time, and some of the stones were loose, but she didn’t complain or ask questions as I led her to the other side. Erich could cross the river if he really wanted to, but his natural aversion to running water, coupled with his fear of Mrs. Bethany, would almost certainly be enough to keep us safe. Once we were on the far bank, I asked, “How are you?”
“Fine. I’m fine.”
“Raquel, tell the truth. Erich came after you in the woods—you’re still shaking!”
Her skin was clammy, but Raquel insisted, her voice shrill, “I’m fine!” We stared at each other in silence for a second, and then she added in a whisper, “Bianca, please. He didn’t touch me. So I’m fine.”
Someday Raquel might be ready to talk about this, but not tonight. Tonight she needed to get out of here and fast. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s get back to school.”
“Never thought I’d be glad to go back to Evernight.” Her laugh sounded broken, somehow. We started to walk away, but then she paused. “Aren’t you going to—to call the police or the teachers or somebody?”
“We’ll tell Mrs. Bethany as soon as we get back.”
“I could try to call from here. I have my cell—it worked in town—”
“We’re not in town any longer. You know we don’t get reception out here.”
“It’s so stupid.” She was shaking so hard that her teeth chattered. “Why don’t those rich bitches make their mommies and daddies pay for a tower?”
Because most of them haven’t even gotten used to landlines yet, I thought. “Come on. Let’s go.” She wouldn’t let me put my arm around her shoulders as we made our way out of the frosty woods. Instead she just kept twisting her leather bracelet over and over.
That night, after Raquel went to bed, I went to see Mrs. Bethany in her carriage house office. Given her disdainful attitude toward me, I’d assumed she would doubt my word, but she didn’t. “We’ll see to this,” she said. “You are dismissed.”
I hesitated. “That’s it?”
“Do you think you should be allowed to discuss his punishment? To mete it out, perhaps?” She arched one eyebrow. “I know how to keep discipline at my own school, Miss Olivier. Or would you like to write another essay as a reminder?”
“I just meant, what are we going to tell everybody? They’ll want to know what happened to Raquel.” Already I could envision Lucas’s handsome face, maybe questioning again if something strange was at work within Evernight. “She’ll tell people it was Erich. We’ll just have to say he was playing a practical joke or something, right?”
“That sounds reasonable.” Why did she look so amused? I realized the reason when Mrs. Bethany added, “You’re becoming quite adept in deception, Miss Olivier. Progress at last.”
I was afraid she might be right.
Chapter Ten
THE FIRST SNOWFALL OF WINTER DISAPPOINTED us all—only an inch and a half, just enough to melt into ice and slick the sidewalks. The countryside appeared patchy and dull, yellow-brown hills spotted with watery clumps of snow. Outside the bedroom window of my turret room, the gargoyle wore beads of frozen water over his scales and wings. It wasn’t enough snow to play in or even to enjoy looking at.
“Suits me,” Patrice said, artfully draping an acid-green muffler around her neck just so. “I’m glad we’re getting more sunshine.”
“Now that you can go back out in it again, you mean.” I had been so frustrated with Patrice and the others with their constant “dieting” before the Autumn Ball; like all vampires denied blood, they’d become thinner—and more vampiric. Courtney and her admiring clique had all been staying out of the sunlight, something that didn’t bother a well-fed vampire but was painful to a starving one. I’d had to put up with Patrice spending hours in front of the mirror trying to see herself as her reflection faded more and more, approaching invisibility. I thought they’d seemed bitchier, too, but with that crew, it was hard to tell.
Patrice knew what I was referring to and shook her head, so exasperated with me. “I’ve been fine since the day after the ball. It was worth a few weeks of hunger pangs and staying in the shade! Eventually you’ll learn the value of self-denial.” Her round cheeks dimpled with amusement. “But not while Lucas’s around, right?”
We laughed a long time at one of our few shared jokes. I was glad we were pretty much getting along, because between Raquel’s trouble and exams approaching, I needed as little stress in my life as possible.
Finals were brutal. I’d expected as much, but that didn’t make the papers for Mrs. Bethany write themselves or the trig exam any easier. My mother revealed an unexpected sadistic streak by covering every single thing she’d ever mentioned in class—though the main essay on the Missouri Compromise had at least been signaled in advance by some bouncing on the balls of her feet. Guess that means Balthazar is doing okay, I thought as I wrote so fast that my hand cramped around my pen. I hoped I was doing half as well.
I threw myself into my studying during finals week, not only because of the intensity of the tests but also because work served as a distraction. Making Raquel quiz me nonstop took her mind off what had nearly happened in the woods. It helped that Mrs. Bethany had Erich on penalty, which involved him spending virtually every free moment scrubbing down hallways and glowering at me furiously when he got the chance.
“I don’t trust that guy,” Lucas said once as we walked past him.
“You just hate his guts.” That was true as far as it went, though I knew other, better reasons for not trusting Erich.
Despite our efforts to keep Raquel busy, she remained haunted. Whatever fears she’d always carried within her had been magnified by Erich’s harassment. I knew that she wasn’t sleeping at night because of the dark circles under her eyes, and one day she came to the library with her hair freshly hacked off—obviously something she’d done herself, and not very carefully either.
In an attempt to be tactful, I shifted my books to one side so she could sit next to me at the table and began, “You know, I used to cut hair for my friends in my hometown—”
“I know my hair looks crappy.” Raquel didn’t even look at me as her backpack thudded onto the floor. “And, no, I don’t want you or anybody to fix it for me. I hope it looks crappy. Then maybe he won’t keep looking at me.”
“Who? Erich?” Lucas said, immediately tense.
Raquel sank into her seat. “Who do you think? Yeah, Erich.”
Until then, I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t the only one Erich was staring at. I’d interrupted Erich in the middle of a hunt; he’d made up his mind to drink Raquel’s blood, maybe—m
aybe even to hurt her. Most vampires never killed, Mom and Dad said. Was Erich the exception to that rule?
Surely not, I thought. Mrs. Bethany wouldn’t let anybody like that in Evernight.
As Lucas quickly changed the subject, asking Raquel for a copy of the study sheets for my dad’s biology class, I looked at him and felt, once again, the surge of longing—of possessiveness—that I always knew in his presence. Mine, I thought. I always want you to be mine.
I’d always thought that was emotion talking, but maybe it was something else. Maybe that need to claim someone else was part of being a vampire and therefore more powerful than any human longing.
Erich certainly didn’t care about Raquel the way I did for Lucas, but if he felt one-tenth as much possessiveness toward her as I did toward Lucas—
—then there was no way Erich was done with Raquel yet.
That night, in the bathroom, I ran into Raquel again. She was shaking the sleeping pills I’d recommended into her palm—four or five of them. “Watch it,” I said. “You don’t want to take too many.”
Raquel’s face was bleak. “And never wake up again? Doesn’t sound that awful to me.” She sighed. “Trust me, Bianca, this isn’t nearly enough to kill anybody.”
“It’s more than you need to sleep.”
“Not with the sounds on the roof.” She popped the pills into her mouth, then bent over to gulp a couple of swallows of water directly from the cold tap of the sink. After wiping her face with the back of her hand, Raquel continued, “They’re still there. Louder now, I think. All the time. And I’m not imagining them.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “I believe you.”
It was just something to say, but Raquel’s eyes got wide. “You do?” Her voice was no more than a whisper. “Really? You’re not just saying it?”
“Really, I believe you.”
To my shock, Raquel’s eyes teared up. She quickly blinked them away, but I knew what I’d seen. “Nobody ever believed me, before.”
I stepped a little closer. “Believed you about what?”
She shook her head, refusing to answer. But as she walked past me to go to her own room, she touched my arm—just for a moment. From Raquel, that was almost like a bear hug. I had no idea what troubled her in her past, but I knew that Erich had her spooked. Probably he had no intention of actually hurting her, but he seemed like the kind of guy who would enjoy making her afraid.
That, at least, I could do something about.
Later that evening, well after curfew, I got up and slipped into jeans, sneakers, and my warm black sweater. My black knit cap slipped over my head and hid my red hair. Briefly I considered painting black smudges across my cheeks and nose, like cat burglars do in the movies, but I decided that was overkill.
“Going out for a snack?” Patrice mumbled into her pillow. “The squirrels are hibernating. Easy meal.”
“I’m just looking around,” I insisted, but Patrice was already asleep again.
The night air was cold when I lifted myself onto the windowsill, but my dark gloves and sweater kept me from shivering. Once I’d balanced myself on the tree branch, I began stretching my arms to catch the higher limbs, then bracing my feet against the bark of the trunk to find purchase. Some branches creaked from my weight, but nothing broke. Within a few minutes, I had made it to the roof.
The roof of the lower part of the building, I mean. A few feet away, the south tower reached up toward the night sky; if I craned my neck, I could even make out the darkened windows of my parents’ apartment. Across the way was the vast north tower. Between was the shingled roof of the main building—not a single flat surface, but one that sloped at different angles, reflecting the fact that the school had been built slowly, over centuries, and not every new addition perfectly matched the rest. It looked a little like a stormy sea with waves that jutted up and down, all of them gleaming blue-black in the moonlight.
Gritting my teeth, I crawled up the slope nearest me and made sure to move as quietly as I could. If anybody was out for a snack, it wouldn’t matter if they saw me or not. However, if anybody was up here for another reason, I wanted the advantage of surprise.
I was scared to death, even though I kept telling myself that there was really no reason to be afraid. I knew that I was no good at confrontations; when challenged, I usually wanted to curl up into a ball. Still, somebody had to stand up for Raquel, and it looked like I was the only one who could. So I ignored the butterflies in my stomach and told myself to deal.
I tried to imagine the layout of the rooms below, doing my best to figure out where Raquel’s room would be. She was well down the hall from me. The room I shared with Patrice was below the south tower, but Raquel wouldn’t have that same luxury. No, somebody could stand right on top of her room, only a few feet above her sleeping head.
Once I had the location fixed in my head, I started walking. Fortunately there was no ice, so I didn’t slip and slide too much as I climbed up one gable and down another, sometimes walking, sometimes crawling. The whole way, I listened carefully for any sound: a footstep, a word, even a breath. Even the thought of danger had awakened my darker instincts, and every sense was sharp. I was ready for anything—or so I thought.
When I got within a few feet of the area above Raquel’s room, I heard a scrape along the roof: long, slow, and probably deliberate. Somebody was up there. Somebody wanted Raquel to hear.
Cautiously I pulled myself up the next high slope. There, crouching in the shadows, was Erich. He clutched a broken-off branch in one hand and was dragging it back and forth over one of the slate tiles.
“You,” I said quietly. Erich jerked upright, startled. Something about his reaction and the way he hurriedly drew his long coat around him made me wonder just what his other hand had been doing. Grossed out and nervous, I wanted to run, but I managed to stand my ground. “Get lost.”
“We’re both breaking the rules now,” Erich muttered, glancing from side to side. “You can’t turn me in without turning us both in.”
I stepped closer to him, close enough to touch. His skinny face and sharp nose made him look more like a rat than ever. “Then—then I’ll turn us both in.”
“Big damn deal. Breaking curfew. So what? Everyone does it. They don’t really care.”
“You’re not out to grab something to eat. You’re harassing Raquel.”
Erich gave me the most disgusted look I’d ever seen on someone’s face, like I was something he would step over on the sidewalk. “You can’t prove it.”
Anger flared up inside me, submerging my fear. All my muscles tensed, and my incisors began pushing forward, lengthening into fangs. Reacting like a vampire meant never backing down. “Oh, really?”
Then I grabbed his hand and bit him hard.
Vampire blood doesn’t taste at all like human blood or the blood of anything else living. It’s not filling, not even food, really. It’s information. The taste of a vampire’s blood tells you how that vampire is feeling at that very instant—you feel it, too, a little bit, and images flash in your mind that were in the other vampire’s mind just a moment before. My parents had taught me this and even let me try it out on them a couple of times, though the one time I asked them if they ever bit each other, they both got really embarrassed and asked whether I didn’t have any homework I should be doing.
Tasting my parents’ blood, I had felt only love and contentment and seen only images of myself as a child prettier than I really was, curious to learn about the world. Erich’s blood was different. It was horror.
He tasted like resentment, like rage, and a bone-deep craving to take human life. The liquid was so hot it burned and so angry that it made my stomach turn over, rejecting it and rejecting him. An image flickered in my mind, bigger and brighter every second like a fire blazing quickly out of control: Raquel as Erich wanted her to be—sprawled on her bed, neck ripped open, gasping for her last breath.
“Ow!” Erich wrenched his hand back. “What
the hell are you doing?”
“You want to hurt her.” It was hard for me to keep my voice steady; I was shaking now, freaked-out by the violence I’d seen. “You want to kill her.”
“Wanting isn’t the same as doing,” he retorted. “You think I’m the only guy here who wants to tear into some fresh meat once in a while? No way could you get me punished for that.”
“Get the hell off her roof. You leave tonight and you don’t ever, ever come back. If you do, I’ll tell Mrs. Bethany. She’ll believe me, and you’ll be out of here.”
“Do it, then. I’m sick of this place. But I deserve a good meal before I go, don’t you think?” Erich laughed at me, and for one horrifying moment, I thought he meant to fight me after all. Instead he leaped off the roof, not even bothering to catch a tree branch on the way down.
I’d never felt anything like that kind of sick rage before. I hoped I never would again. For all the pettiness and darkness of Evernight, I felt like I’d just seen true evil for the first time.
Do you believe in evil? Raquel had asked me. I’d said yes, but I hadn’t known what it looked like before. Shaking, I breathed in and out a couple of times, trying to get my bearings. I’d have to think long and hard about what had just happened, but for tonight, I just wanted to get the hell out of here.
I took another couple steps and slid down the far slope of the roof, trying to get a look at where Erich had landed. I wanted to make sure he was leaving for real. But as I started down, I saw another shape in the darkness—like a shadow down in the deepest of the waves. Maybe Erich hadn’t come alone.