Stargazer
Claudia Gray

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-Two

Also by Claudia Gray

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

FROST BEGAN TO CREEP UP THE WALLS.

Transfixed, I watched lines of frost lace their way across the stone of the north tower’s records room. The pattern swept up from the floor, covering the wall, even icing the ceiling with something flaky and white. A few small, silvery crystals of snow hung in the air.

It was all delicate and ethereal—and completely unnatural. The room’s chill cut deeper than my skin, down to my marrow. If only I hadn’t been alone. If somebody else could have been there to see it, I might have been able to believe it was real. I might have been able to believe I was safe.

The ice crackled so loudly, I jumped. As I watched, my eyes wide and breath coming in thin, quick gasps, the frost etching its way across the window obscured the view of the night sky outside, blocking the moonlight, but somehow I could still see. The room possessed its own light now. All the many lines of frost on the window broke this way and that, not at random but in an eerie pattern, creating a recognizable shape.

A face.

The frost man stared back at me. His dark, angry eyes were so detailed that it seemed as though he were looking back at me. The face in the frost was the most vivid image I’d ever seen.

Then the cold stabbed into my heart as I realized: He really was looking back at me.

Once, I hadn’t believed in ghosts—

Chapter One

AT MIDNIGHT, THE STORM ARRIVED.

Dark clouds scudded across the sky, blotting out the stars. The quickening wind chilled me as strands of my red hair blew across my forehead and cheeks. I pulled up the hood of my black raincoat and tucked my messenger bag beneath it.

Despite the gathering storm, the grounds of Evernight still weren’t completely dark. Nothing less than total darkness would do. Evernight Academy’s teachers could see in the night and hear through the wind. All vampires could.

Of course, at Evernight, the teachers weren’t the only vampires. When the school year began in a couple of days, the students would arrive, most of them as powerful, ancient, and undead as the professors.

I wasn’t powerful or ancient, and I was still very much alive. But I was a vampire, in a way—born to two vampires, destined to become one myself eventually, and with my own appetite for blood. I’d slipped past the teachers before, trusting in my own powers to help me, as well as some dumb luck. But tonight I waited for that darkness. I wanted as much cover as possible.

I guess I was nervous about my first burglary.

The word burglary makes it sound sort of cheap, like I was just going to barge into Mrs. Bethany’s carriage house and ransack the place for money or jewelry or something. I had more important reasons.

Raindrops began to patter down as the sky darkened further. I ran across the grounds, casting a few glances toward the school’s stone towers as I went. As I skidded through the rain-slick grass to Mrs. Bethany’s copper-roofed carriage house, I felt the queasy pull of hesitation. Seriously? You’re going to break into her house? Break into anyone’s house? You don’t even download music you haven’t paid for. It was kind of surreal, reaching into my bag and pulling out my laminated library card for a use other than checking out books. But I was determined. I would do this. Mrs. Bethany left the school maybe three nights a year, which meant tonight was my chance. I slid the card between door and doorjamb and started jimmying the lock.

Five minutes later, I was still uselessly wiggling the library card around, my hands now cold, wet, and clumsy. On TV, this part always looked so easy. Real criminals could probably do this in about ten seconds flat. However, it was becoming more obvious by the second that I wasn’t much of a criminal.

Giving up on plan A, I started searching for another option. At first the windows didn’t look much more promising than the door. Sure, I could have broken the glass and opened any of them instantly, but that would have defeated the don’t-get-caught part of my plan.

As I rounded a corner, I saw to my surprise that Mrs. Bethany had left one window open—just a crack. That was all I needed.

As I slowly slid the window up, I saw a row of African violets in little clay pots, sitting on the sill. Mrs. Bethany had left them where they would get fresh air and perhaps some rain. It was weird to think about Mrs. Bethany caring for any living thing. I carefully pushed the pots to one side so I would have room to hoist myself through the window.

Getting in through an open window? Also much harder than it looks on TV.

Mrs. Bethany’s windows were pretty high off the ground, which meant I had to kind of jump to get started. Panting, I began to pull myself through, and it was difficult not to just fall flat on the floor inside. I was trying to come down feet-first. But I’d gone through the window headfirst, and I couldn’t exactly turn around halfway through. One of my muddy shoes hit a windowpane hard, and I gasped, but the glass didn’t break. I managed to lower myself the rest of the way and flop onto the floor.

“Okay,” I whispered as I lay on Mrs. Bethany’s braided rug, my legs still up above my head, braced against the windowsill and sopping wet from the rain. “So much for the easy part.”

Mrs. Bethany’s house looked like her, felt like her, even smelled like her—strong and sharp with lavender. I realized I was in her bedroom, which somehow made me feel like even more of an intruder. Though I knew that Mrs. Bethany had traveled to Boston to meet “prospective students,” I couldn’t help feeling as though she might catch me at any second. I was terrified of getting caught. Already I was shutting down, withdrawing deep into myself the way I did when I was afraid.

But then I thought of Lucas, the guy I loved—and had lost.

Lucas wouldn’t want to see me being scared. He’d want me to stay strong. The memory of him gave me courage, and I pushed myself up to get to work.

First things first: I took off my muddy shoes, so I wouldn’t track any more muck into the house. I also hung my raincoat on a nearby doorknob so it wouldn’t drip water everywhere. Then I went to the bathroom and grabbed a handful of tissues that I used to clean up the mess I’d already made, plus my shoes. I tucked the tissues in my raincoat pocket, so I could throw them away somewhere else. If anyone was paranoid enough to go through her own trash can to find evidence of an intruder, it was Mrs. Bethany.

It was surprising that she chose to live here, I thought. Evernight Academy was grand, even grandiose, all stone towers and gargoyles—very much her style. This place was hardly more than a cottage. Then again, here she had privacy. I could believe that Mrs. Bethany might treasure that above anything else.

Her writing desk in the corner looked like the place to begin. I sat in the hard-backed wooden chair, put aside a silver-framed silhouette of a nineteenth-century man, and started rifling through the papers I found there.

Dear Mr. Reed,

We have reviewed your son Mitch’s application with great interest. Although he is obviously an exceptional student and a fine young man, we regret to inform you—

A human student who wanted to come here—one Mrs. Bethany had rejected. Why did she allow some humans to attend Evernight Academy but not others? Why did she allow any humans in one of the few vampire strongholds left?

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Nichols,

We have reviewed your daughter Clementine’s application with great interest. She is obviously an exceptional student and a fine young lady, and so we are pleased to—

What was the difference between Mitch and Clementine? Fortunately, Mrs. Bethany’s organized filing system led me straight to their applications, but studying those didn’t offer any answers. Both of them had scary-high GPAs and tons of extra-curricular activities. Reviewing their lists of accomplishments made me feel like the world’s biggest slacker. Their pictures made them both look pretty normal—not gorgeous, not ugly, not fat, not thin, just regular. They were both from Virginia—Mitch lived in an apartment building in Arlington, and Clementine in an old house in the country—but I knew that they both had to be rich as sin to even think about going to school here.

As far as I could tell, the only difference between Mitch and Clementine was that Mitch was the lucky one. His parents would send him to a regular high-class boarding school on the East Coast, where he would mingle with other megarich kids and play lacrosse or go yachting or whatever they did at those places. Clementine, meanwhile, would be surrounded by vampires every second. Even though she would never know that, she would sense that something here was terribly wrong. She would never feel safe. Even I never felt safe at Evernight Academy, and I would become a vampire—someday.

Lightning brightened the windows, thunder following only a few seconds later. The storm would get harder soon; it was time for me to get back. Disappointment settled heavily upon me as I refolded the letters and put them back where they’d come from. I’d been so sure I would get answers tonight, but instead I hadn’t learned a thing.

Not true, I told myself as I slipped on my raincoat and glanced at the flowerpots. You learned Mrs. Bethany likes African violets. That’s going to be REALLY useful.

I straightened the violets on the windowsill just the way they’d been and left by the front door, which luckily locked automatically. How like Mrs. Bethany to not leave even that to chance.

The wind whipped the rain against my cheeks so that they stung as I ran back toward Evernight Academy. A few windows of the faculty apartments still glowed golden, but it was late enough now that I wasn’t worried about anyone seeing me. I put my shoulder to the heavy oak door, and it swung open obediently without even so much as a creak. Shutting it behind me, I figured I was home free.

Until I realized I wasn’t alone.

My ears pricked, and I peered into the darkness of the great hall. It was a vast open space, with no nooks to hide in or columns to duck behind, so I should’ve been able to see who it was. But I couldn’t see anyone. I shivered; it suddenly felt much colder to me, more as though I were in a dank, forbidding cave than within Evernight’s walls.

Classes wouldn’t start for another two days, so the only ones at the school were the teachers and me. But any of the teachers would’ve immediately started scolding me for being out on the grounds so late in the middle of a thunderstorm. They wouldn’t spy on me in the dark.

Would they?

Hesitantly I stepped forward. “Who’s there?” I whispered.

Nobody answered.

Maybe I was imagining things. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t actually heard anything. I’d just felt it, that weird sense you sometimes have that somebody is watching. I had been worrying about people watching me all night, so maybe the worry was catching up with me.

Then I saw something move. I realized that a girl was standing outside the great hall looking in. She stood, draped in a long shawl, on the other side of one of the windows, the only window in the hall that was clear instead of stained glass. Probably she was my age. Though it was now pouring outside, she looked completely dry.

“Who are you?” I took another couple of steps toward her. “Are you a student? What are you—?”

She was gone. She didn’t run, she didn’t hide—she didn’t even move. One second she was there, the next she wasn’t.

Blinking, I stared at the window for a couple of seconds, like she would magically reappear in the same place. She didn’t. I walked forward to try to get a better view, saw a flicker of motion, and jumped, startled—but I realized it was my own reflection in the glass.

Well, that was stupid. You just panicked at the sight of your own face.

That wasn’t my face.

But it had to have been. If any new students had arrived today, I would’ve known, and Evernight was so isolated that it was impossible to imagine any stranger wandering by. My overactive imagination had gotten the better of me again; it must have been my reflection. It wasn’t even that cold in here, once I thought about it.

Once I’d stopped shaking, I crept upstairs into the small apartment my parents and I shared over the summer, at the very top of Evernight’s south tower. Fortunately, they were sound asleep; I could hear Mom’s snoring as I tiptoed down the hallway. If Dad could sleep through that, he could sleep through a hurricane.

I still felt creeped out by what I’d seen downstairs, and being soaked to the skin didn’t improve my mood. None of that bothered me as much as the fact that I’d failed. My big bad burglary attempt had come to nothing.

It wasn’t like I could do anything about the human students at Evernight. Mrs. Bethany wasn’t going to stop admitting them just because I said so. Besides, I had to admit that she’d protected them, policing the vampire students to ensure they didn’t take even one sip of blood.

But knowing Lucas had made me aware of how little I understood the existence of vampires, even though I’d been born into that world. He’d made me see everything in a different way, made me more likely to ask questions and need answers. Even if I never saw Lucas again, I knew he’d given me a gift by awakening me to the larger, darker reality. No longer would I take anything around me for granted.

After I stripped off my wet clothes and curled up beneath the covers, I closed my eyes and remembered my favorite picture, Klimt’s The Kiss. I tried to imagine that the lovers in the painting were Lucas and I, that it was his face so close to mine, and that I could feel his breath on my cheek. Lucas and I hadn’t seen each other in almost six months.

That was when he’d been forced to escape Evernight because his true identity—as a Black Cross hunter of vampires—had been revealed.

I still didn’t know how to handle the fact that Lucas belonged to a group of people dedicated to destroying my kind. Nor was I sure how Lucas felt about the fact that I was a vampire, something he hadn’t realized until after we’d fallen in love. Neither of us had chosen what we were. In retrospect, it seemed inevitable that we would be torn apart. And yet I still believed, down deep, that we were destined to be together.

Hugging my pillow to my chest, I told myself, At least soon you won’t have so much time to miss him. Soon school will start again, and then you’ll be busier.

Wait. Am I reduced to HOPING for school to start?

Somehow, I have discovered a whole new level of pathetic.

Chapter Two

ON THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, NOT LONG AFTER dawn, the procession began.

The first few students arrived on foot. They stepped out of the woods, simply dressed, usually with just a single bag slung over one shoulder. I think some of them had walked all night. Their eyes searched the school hungrily as they came closer, as though hoping they would immediately be granted the answers they sought. Even before I saw the first familiar face—Ranulf, who was more than a thousand years old and didn’t understand the modern era a bit—I knew who the students in this group were. These were the lost ones, the oldest vampires. They didn’t make trouble for anyone; they sank into the background, studying, listening, trying to compensate for the centuries they’d missed.

Lucas had slipped in among these last year. I remembered the way he’d appeared from the fog in his long black coat. Even though I knew better, I kept searching the face of each student who arrived on foot, wishing I could see his face again.

At breakfast time, the cars started to arrive. I was watching from the hallway of the classroom area, just a couple of stories up, so I could see the ornaments on the hoods: Jaguar, Lexus, Bentley. There were little Italian sports cars and SUVs big enough for the sports cars to park in. I could tell that these were the human students, because none of them came alone. Most of them had their parents with them, with a few younger brothers and sisters along for the ride. I even recognized Clementine Nichols, who had a light-brown ponytail and freckles across her nose. To my surprise, Mrs. Bethany met most of them in the courtyard, holding out her hand as graciously as a queen receiving courtiers. She seemed to want to talk to the parents, and she smiled warmly at them as though they were making friends for life. I knew she was faking it, but I had to hand it to her—she was good. As for the human students, the longer they hung out in the courtyard and stared up at Evernight Academy’s forbidding stone towers, the more their smiles faded.

“There you are.”

I turned from the scene below to see my father, who had pried himself out of bed early for the occasion. He wore a suit and tie, like a professor should, but his rumpled, dark red hair revealed more of his true personality. “Yeah,” I said, smiling at him. “I just wanted to see what was going on, I guess.”

“Looking for your friends?” My father’s eyes twinkled as he stood by my side and peered out the window. “Or scoping out new guys?”

“Dad.”

“Backing off as requested.” He held up his hands. “You seem a little happier about this than you did last year.”

“I’d almost have to, wouldn’t I?”

“Guess you would,” Dad said, and we both laughed. Last year, I’d been so anti-Evernight that I’d tried to run away the day the students arrived—it seemed like a lifetime ago. “Hey, if you want some breakfast, I think your mother’s got the waffle iron fired up and ready to go.”

Even though they usually stuck to drinking blood from the clandestine shipments the school provided, my parents always made sure that I ate the real food I still needed. “I’ll be up in a sec, okay?”

“Okay.” His hand rested on my shoulder for a moment before he turned to leave.

I took one last look at the courtyard. A few families continued milling around or dragging in suitcases, but the third and final wave of students had begun to arrive.

They each came alone, in rented cars. There were a couple of taxicabs, but most of the cars were hired sedans or limousines. When the students emerged, they were already dressed in their tailored uniforms, their hair slicked back and shining. None of them had suitcases; these were the ones who had sent their many possessions on ahead in the boxes and trunks that had been arriving at Evernight for two weeks now. To my displeasure, I saw Courtney, one of my least favorite people, waving airily to some of the other girls. She was one of the many who wore dark sunglasses. That meant they were sensitive to sunlight, which in turn meant they hadn’t drunk blood in a while. Dieting, probably, so that they’d look thinner and fiercer.

These were the vampires who needed help with the twenty-first century but weren’t yet totally lost in the changes of time. These were the ones who still had their power—and weren’t going to let anyone else at this school forget. I always thought of them the same way.

They were “the Evernight type.”

By the time I’d finished my waffles and gone downstairs, the great hall was crammed with a throng of laughing, talking students. For a couple minutes, I was jostled around, feeling small, until I heard one voice shout out above the din, “Bianca!”

“Balthazar!” I smiled and raised my hand above my head, waving to him excitedly. He was a big guy, so tall and so muscular that he could’ve seemed intimidating as he pushed through the crowd toward me, if it weren’t for the kindness in his eyes and the friendly smile on his face.

I went on tiptoe to hug him tightly. “How was your summer?”

“It was great. I worked the night shift at a dockyard in Baltimore.” He said this with the same kind of relish that anybody else would use to describe a dream vacation in Cancun. “The guys and I made friends, hung out in bars a lot. I learned how to shoot pool. Started smoking again, too.”

“I guess your lungs can take it.” We grinned at each other, unable to complete the joke while the human students milled around nearby. “Do you need help getting your paper together?”

“Already done and on Mrs. Bethany’s desk.” All the vampires had to spend the summer months “engaged in the modern world,” as the assignment stated, and were required to submit reports on their experiences at the top of every school year. It was sort of the “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay from hell. Balthazar glanced around. “Is Patrice here?”

“She’s spending some time in Scandinavia instead.” I’d received a postcard of the fjords a month before. “Says she’ll finish up in a year or two. I think she met a guy.”

“Too bad,” Balthazar said. “I was looking forward to seeing a few more familiar faces. Besides the one approaching fast from four o’clock, I mean.”

“What do you mean?” I tried to figure out where four o’clock was, but then her voice cut through the murmuring like fingernails on a chalkboard.

“Balthazar.” Courtney held out a hand to him, as though she expected him to kiss it. He shook it once, then let it drop. Her lipstick-bright smile never wavered. “Did you have a wonderful summer? I was in Miami, hitting the club scene. Totally awesome. You should check it out with somebody who knows the hot places to go.”

“I’m surprised to see you here,” I said. Surprised seemed like a nicer way of putting it than disappointed. “You didn’t seem to enjoy it much last year.”

She shrugged. “I thought about ditching, but the first night I was out in Miami, I realized I was wearing last season’s dress. And my shoes were, like, three years old. Major faux pas! Obviously I needed a little more catching up, so I figured I could deal with a few more months at Evernight.” Already her gaze was focused on Balthazar again. “Besides, I always enjoy spending more time with old friends.”

I said, “If I wanted to learn about fashion, I wouldn’t go someplace where everybody wears uniforms.”

Balthazar’s mouth twitched. Courtney narrowed her eyes, but her smile only grew wider as she glanced at my boxy, untailored sweater and plaid skirt. “And you’ve never had any interest in learning about fashion. Clearly.” She patted Balthazar on the shoulder. “We’ll catch up later.” Courtney sauntered off, long blond ponytail swinging from side to side as she went.

“I meant to try to get along with her better this year,” I muttered. “I guess I haven’t changed as much as I thought I had.”

“Don’t try to change. You’re wonderful the way you are.”

I glanced away shyly. Part of me thought, Oh, no, now I have to let Balthazar down again. The other part couldn’t help liking that he’d said that to me. I’d been so lonely all summer—without Lucas, without anybody—and knowing that somebody right here cared about me was like being given a warm blanket after months of cold.

Before I could think of the best way to respond, a hush fell over the crowd. We all turned instinctively to the podium at the far end of the great hall. Mrs. Bethany was about to speak.

She had on a slim gray suit, more like twenty-first-century clothes than she normally wore, but it suited her severe beauty. Mrs. Bethany’s dark hair was swept up into an elegant twist, and black pearls shone in her ears. Instead of looking at the students, her dark eyes looked slightly above us, as though we were hardly visible to her.

“Welcome to Evernight.” Her voice rang throughout the great hall. Everyone stood up straighter. “Some of you have been with us before. Others will have heard about Evernight Academy for years, perhaps from your families, and wondered if you would ever join our school.”

This was the same speech she had given the year before, but I heard it differently this time. I heard the lies inside every careful phrase, the way she was speaking to the vampires in the room who had been here twenty years ago or two hundred.

As if she’d read my thoughts, she glanced at me, her hawklike gaze piercing through the crowd. I tensed, half expecting her to accuse me of breaking into her home while she’d been gone.

But she did something even more surprising. She abandoned her script.

“Evernight Academy means something different for every person who comes here,” Mrs. Bethany began. “It is a place of learning, a place of tradition, and for some a place of sanctuary.”

Only if you’re a bloodsucking creature of the night, I thought. Otherwise? Not so much with the sanctuary.

With one hand she gestured toward some of the new students, her long fingernails glinting red in the light that flowed through the stained-glass windows. To my astonishment, she was pointing out the human students—though of course they couldn’t have understood why. “In order to get the most from your time at Evernight, you need to learn what this school means to your classmates. That’s why I urge those of you with more experience to reach out to the new students among us. Take them under your wings. Find out about their lives, their interests, and their pasts. Only in this way can Evernight Academy accomplish its true goals.”

A few people clapped uncertainly—humans who didn’t know any better. “Okay, that was odd,” Balthazar muttered beneath the slight applause. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think I’d heard Mrs. Bethany ask everyone to be friendly.”

I nodded. My mind was racing. Why did Mrs. Bethany want the vampires to get closer to the human students? If she didn’t want any humans hurt—and I still thought she didn’t—then what was she really after?

“Classes begin tomorrow.” The familiar, superior smile had returned to Mrs. Bethany’s face. “Take this day to get to know your fellow students, particularly those who are new here. We are glad to have you—all of you—and we hope that you will make the most of your time at Evernight.”

“Do you think she’s gone soft on us?” Balthazar turned to me as people began to mingle again.

“Mrs. Bethany? Hardly.” For a moment I considered asking Balthazar what he thought about the whole “admissions policy” mystery. He was smart, and even though he respected Mrs. Bethany, he didn’t take her word as gospel. Besides, he’d been around for more than three centuries; he’d probably have enough perspective to see my question in a different light and perhaps come up with a fresh answer. But Balthazar might also have the perspective to understand that I was asking because of my relationship with Lucas—something he wouldn’t like to be reminded of.

Just then, Balthazar grinned and waved at somebody else—no telling who in that crowd, especially given that he was friends with nearly everybody. “I’ll catch you later, okay?” I called after him as he started walking off.

“Definitely.”

For a moment, I felt lonely without him. I was surrounded by vampires—real vampires, powerful and sensual and strong, with centuries of experience behind their beautiful, young faces. I wasn’t yet a full vampire, and the distance between us hadn’t closed much during my first year at Evernight. Next to them, I was still small, naive, and awkward.

All the more reason to head upstairs right away, I decided. I would have a different roommate this year, and I couldn’t wait to say hello.

When I walked into my dorm room, Raquel sighed. “Welcome back—to hell.”

She was flopped across her bare mattress, arms splayed out. Her duffel bag lay crumpled on the floor, as if deflated, and her clothes and art supplies were strewn around. It looked like she’d shaken the bag out and left her unpacking at that.

“Good to see you, too.” I sat on the edge of my own bed. “I thought you’d at least be happy that we could be roommates this year.”

“Trust me, you’re the only reason I can stand the thought of being here again. Did your parents, like, bribe Mrs. Bethany or something? If so, I owe them big-time.”

“No, just the luck of the draw.” That was almost a lie. My parents hadn’t asked Mrs. Bethany for any favors, but apparently there had been an odd number of humans and vampires admitted this year—both boys and girls. Since I still ate regular food more than I drank blood, I was considered the female vampire most likely to be able to hide the truth from a human when we dined in our rooms, as everyone did at Evernight.

Getting Raquel, though—that had been luck. That, and the fact that nearly every other human girl who had come here for her sophomore year had made sure to go somewhere else for her junior year. I couldn’t blame them.

“So,” I said, trying to keep my voice playful, “besides spending more time in my fascinating company, why did you come back? I know that’s not what you’d planned.”

“No offense, but even your fascinating company wasn’t enough to change my mind.” Raquel rolled over onto her belly, so that we were facing each other again. Her dark hair was cut even shorter than last year; at least she’d had a barber do it so that it looked good, even a little bit punk. “I told my parents I wanted to try somewhere else. Maybe live with my grandparents in Houston, go to school there. They didn’t want to hear it. Evernight’s ‘private’ and ‘exclusive,’ and that should be enough for me, they said.”

“Even learning about—about Erich—”

Raquel’s mouth twisted into a scowl. “They said he was probably just trying to flirt with me. They said I was too standoffish with guys, and I had to learn to ‘like somebody back.’”

I stared at her, aghast. Erich hadn’t been some overzealous would-be boyfriend. He had been a vampire intent on stalking and killing her. Raquel didn’t know that, but she’d understood that he was dangerous. If I’d told my parents that somebody had scared me half as badly as Erich had scared her, my father would have held me tightly until I felt safe again, and my mother would’ve probably taken a baseball bat to whomever had dared threaten her little girl. Raquel’s parents had laughed at her and sent her back to this place she hated.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She shrugged one shoulder. “I should’ve realized they wouldn’t listen. They never have. Even when I—”

“When what?”

Raquel didn’t answer. Instead, she shoved herself into a sitting position and pointed accusingly at the wall behind me. “So, are we stuck with the Klimt?”

I’d hung my print above my bed. The Kiss was so important to me that I’d forgotten Raquel had never seen it before. “What? You don’t like it?”

“Bianca, that picture is so cliché. You can get it, like, on fridge magnets and coffee mugs and stuff.”

“I don’t care.” Maybe it’s stupid to like something just because everyone else likes it, but if you ask me, it’s even stupider to dislike something because everyone else likes it. “It’s beautiful, and it’s one of my favorite things, and it’s in my half of the room. So nyah.”

“I might paint my side of the room black,” Raquel threatened.

“That wouldn’t be too bad.” I imagined putting glow-in-the-dark stars upon the walls and ceiling, just the way my room had been when I was little. “That would be great, actually. Too bad Mrs. Bethany wouldn’t let us get away with it.”

“Who says she’d object? They’ve done everything else to make this place as creepy as possible. Why not black paint all over everything?”

I got the mental picture of the school’s stone towers in shining black—which was pretty much all it needed to go straight to Dracula’s castle territory. “Even the bathrooms. Even the gargoyles. I didn’t think we could make Evernight any scarier, but we could, couldn’t we?”

“It would still be better than being home.” Raquel’s eyes were strange as she said this—so weary that for a moment she looked older in spirit than the vampires who had surrounded us at the assembly.

I wanted to ask her more about what had happened with her parents, but I didn’t know how. As I tried to find the words, Raquel briskly said, “C’mon and help me put away this crap.”

“What crap?”

“My stuff.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding as we got to our feet and headed toward her boxes and duffel bag in the corner. “That crap.”

After we’d gotten her bed made and her few things situated, Raquel wanted to take a nap. Her parents weren’t wealthy, like most of the families of human students at Evernight; instead of being driven to the front door in a luxury sedan, she’d had to catch a bus from Boston before dawn, make a couple of transfers, and then wait for a cab to bring her up here. She was completely wiped and had fallen asleep even before I’d gotten done lacing up my shoes to go outside.

Raquel is here on scholarship, I thought. That means Mrs. Bethany is actually paying for her to attend this school. Why would she do that?

All the human students are here for a reason, and Raquel proves it’s not money. But what is it? Is Raquel somehow even more important than the rest?

More questions, still no answers.

I strolled onto the grounds to see how much Evernight had changed, now that the other students were here. The humans were talking to one another eagerly, making new friends, while the vampires watched them, languid and disdainful.

My stomach growled. It was nearly lunchtime. I hoped I was the only vampire thinking about food while we were looking at the humans, but I probably wasn’t.

“Yo, Binks!”

Nobody had ever called me “Binks” before in my life, but I knew who it had to be even before I recognized the voice. “Vic!”

Vic was loping toward me across the grounds, a big grin on his face. As usual, he’d made a few adjustments to the Evernight uniform; instead of the school colors, his tie was decorated with a hand-painted hula girl, and his beloved Phillies cap was on his head. We ran into each other’s arms, laughing, and he spun me around so that my feet didn’t touch the ground.

By the time he dropped me, I was dizzy but still smiling. “Did you have a good summer? I got your pictures from Buenos Aires, but then I didn’t hear from you.”

“After all the seaside fun, I was put to work. Woodson Enterprises has a summer internship program, and Dad was all, You need to learn the ropes of the family business. But when you’re an intern? You’re not learning any ropes. You’re learning how people like their coffee. I spent the rest of the summer trying to remember who wanted a hot chai soy latte. Seriously lame. Were you stuck here the whole time?”

“We spent the Fourth of July in D.C. Mostly my mother dragged us around to monuments and stuff. But the Natural History Museum was pretty cool—they had some meteorites on display that you could actually touch—”

Vic’s hand stole toward the pocket of my skirt. I pretended not to notice the envelope he held. My heart started beating faster.

“Well, it was fun. At least I got to be away from this place for one week of the summer, because as boring as it is during the year, it’s even worse when you’re here practically all alone.” I was babbling, paying no attention to what I was saying. “I went down to Riverton on the weekends sometimes but that’s pretty much it. Um, yeah.”

“We gotta catch up later.” Vic obviously understood that I couldn’t think about anything right now besides the item he’d just tucked into my pocket. “You want to meet up after dinner? You can meet my new roommate. He seems pretty cool.”

“Okay, sure.” I would’ve agreed if Vic suggested we get together to shave our heads. Adrenaline coursed through me, making me giddy. “Meet up right here?”

“You got it.”

Without another word, I ran away from him, heading straight for the cast-iron gazebo at the edge of the grounds. Fortunately, none of the other students were in there yet, which meant I still had it to myself.

I went up the steps and settled onto one of the benches. The thick canopy of ivy leaves overhead sheltered me from the sunlight as I reached into my pocket and withdrew what Vic had tucked there—a small white envelope, addressed only with my name.

For the first second, I couldn’t open it. I could only stare down at the handwriting I remembered so well. The letter had been sent to me through Vic, by Vic’s roommate from the year before.

Lucas.

Chapter Three

BIANCA,

I know it’s been way too long. I hope you haven’t been checking your e-mail all this time hoping to hear from me; my Evernight account got yanked, obviously, and they police our computer use pretty tightly in Black Cross. Besides, I figure they’re monitoring your Evernight account.

But it doesn’t feel like it’s been so long since we talked. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to you all the time, every second, and I have to remind myself that you aren’t there to hear me, no matter how bad I wish you were.

Hasn’t been much of a summer, to tell you the truth. We went down to Mexico for a couple of months, but it wasn’t beach volleyball and Coronas by a long shot. In fact, half the time I ended up sleeping in the back of the pickup truck. Swear to God, I can still feel the metal ridges against my spine. Not fun.

Lucas didn’t explain why he was in Mexico, or who “they” were who had gone with him. He didn’t because he didn’t have to; I already knew. Black Cross had traveled there on a vampire hunt.

Most of the time, I did a pretty good job of not remembering that the guy I loved was a member of Black Cross. Still, though, it was there, the hard fact that separated the world into two halves: mine and his.

Lucas’s mother had become a member of Black Cross before he was born, and he’d been raised in the group—the only family he’d ever known. He’d been taught since childhood that all vampires were evil, and that killing them was the right thing to do.

But Lucas had learned things weren’t that simple. Although he had fallen for me before he’d learned that I was born to vampire parents, or that I would become a vampire myself someday, learning the truth hadn’t changed his feelings. Nothing had ever surprised or moved me more than the moment Lucas said he still wanted to be with me, that he still trusted me. Even though I had drunk his blood.

If you’re reading this, that means the vampires aren’t searching Vic’s stuff. Obviously, Vic doesn’t know what’s really going on at Evernight or that he’s actually dealing with vampires. That means it’s not fair to keep putting him in danger. A couple of notes every once in a while—that we could probably get away with. But I know that’s not enough for you or for me.

Oh, no. I sat upright, clutching the pages between my fingers so hard they crumpled. Was Lucas about to say that it was too risky for us to stay in touch? That we couldn’t ever see each other again?

If I were a better guy, I’d break it off with you. I know I’m asking you to go against your parents, and with Mrs. Bethany breathing down your neck, even reading this puts you in danger. I ought to be strong and walk away.

But I can’t do it, Bianca. I’ve been trying to talk myself into it for weeks now, and I just can’t. I have to see you again somehow. Soon, I hope, because I don’t think I can stand this much longer.

We’re headed back to Massachusetts soon—not far from Riverton, as it turns out. Looks like a few of us are going to be scouting around Amherst near the end of September. I don’t know how long we’ll be there, but I figure it will be a while.

Is there any way you could get to Amherst the first weekend of October? If so, I’ll meet you at midnight at the Amherst train station—Friday or Saturday night, whichever you could make it. I’ll wait both nights just in case.

I realize that I might be off base here. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other or been able to talk, and maybe you don’t feel the same way anymore. Your parents have had a while to work on you about what a bad influence I am, and if Black Cross freaks you out, I don’t guess I can blame you. Besides, a beautiful girl isn’t going to be left alone for long. Maybe you’re with somebody else now, like that Balthazar guy.

Remembering Balthazar’s gentle flirtation that morning—and the warmth I’d felt in response—made me embarrassed all of a sudden, like Lucas had been eavesdropping and had overheard more than I’d meant to reveal.

If that’s how things are, then—I can’t say I’d be happy for you, because “happy” is not how I’d be feeling. I’d understand, though. I promise you that. Just send word to me in Amherst somehow so I know.

But I feel the same way. I still love you, Bianca. I think I love you more than I did when we said good-bye, and I didn’t even think that was possible. If there’s any chance you still feel it, too, then I have to try.

Okay, I keep reading this letter and feeling like it doesn’t say everything I meant to say. I’m not so good with words. I guess you know that by now, huh? If you come to Amherst, I swear I’ll find the right words to say. Or maybe we won’t need words at all.

I love you.

Lucas

I blinked fast, trying to clear my swimming eyes. The letter shook in my trembling fingers, and my heart felt like a drumbeat beneath my skin. At that moment I could have taken off running toward Amherst, down the roads and over the hills, and been there in minutes—no, seconds—if I’d only known how, maybe I could have shut my eyes and just willed myself there. I wanted it that badly.

Instead, the tie between us was fragile; we were connected only by smuggled sheets of paper and a promise to meet. That was all we could have, because probably Lucas was right about the e-mail monitoring. For all her prim, old-fashioned ways, Mrs. Bethany stayed on top of every technological development that might help her remain in total control of the school. No doubt Mr. Yee had set it up so the headmistress could read every e-mail in the school accounts.

Even being connected only through the mail seemed miraculous now, as I held Lucas’s letter in my hand. He had folded the pages within a greeting card, an unusual one—no message inside, and the photo on the cover was one of the constellation Andromeda. Lucas would’ve had to buy this someplace like a science museum or a planetarium. He remembered how I loved the stars.

Laughter across the grounds made me look up. Courtney and a few of her friends were strolling together at the edge of the lawn, snickering at some of the new human students. She made sure to point. Last year, I had been so intimidated by her. Now she seemed as insignificant as a buzzing fly at a picnic.

However, her presence reminded me that most of the vampires at Evernight knew about Black Cross and about Lucas. The card I held in my hands was evidence that I was communicating with “the enemy.” I would have to destroy it, and soon.

At least Lucas had chosen an image that I could always see for myself, one that nobody could take away.

“That’s Andromeda,” I said to Raquel, pointing up at the night sky.

We were hanging out on the grounds after dinner—our regular dinner, that was. We’d made tuna fish sandwiches in our dorm room; after Raquel was in bed, I’d have to find a way to take a few swigs of the blood I had in a thermos in my dresser. Day one, and my mealtime situation was already complicated, but I’d just have to figure it out.

“Andromeda?” Raquel squinted upward. She had on the same faded black sweater that she’d worn threadbare last year. “That’s from Greek mythology, right? I remember the name, but I don’t remember anything about her.”

“Sacrificial victim, Perseus to the rescue, Medusa head, yada yada.” Vic walked up, hands in his pockets. “Hey, do you guys know my roommate?”

My eyes went wide as I turned my head from the stars to focus on the figure by Vic’s side. “Ranulf?”

Ranulf held up one hand in a sheepish wave. His soft brown hair was still in the same bowl cut it had been in the year before—and, probably, the thousand years before that. Modernity was a very foreign concept to him; every single class was a challenge for him to even comprehend, much less absorb. And Ranulf was the male vampire chosen to have a human roommate? What could Mrs. Bethany have been thinking?

“Hey, Ranulf.” Raquel didn’t stand and offer a hand to shake, but for Raquel, even speaking to a stranger was being pretty friendly. “I remember seeing you around last year. You seem okay. You know—nonferal. Not like Courtney and her bitch patrol.”

Clearly Ranulf didn’t quite know what to make of that. After a moment’s hesitation, he simply nodded. At least he’d learned how to bluff.

“Checking out the stars, huh? Vic flopped down beside us on the grass, his usual lopsided grin on his face. “I forgot you were into that.”

“If you’d ever seen my telescope, you’d never forget.”

“Big?” he asked.

“Huge,” I said with relish. My telescope was one of my proudest possessions. “I kind of wish I’d hauled it down here tonight. The sky’s incredibly clear.”

Vic lifted one finger to the sky as if painting a little squiggle. “And that’s Andromeda, right?” I nodded. “You see it, Ranulf?”

“Shapes in the sky?” Ranulf ventured as he hesitantly sat down with us.

“Yeah, the constellations. You need us to point them out to you?”

“When I look at the sky, I do not see shapes,” Ranulf explained patiently. “I see the spirits of those who died before us, watching over us for all time.”

I tensed, expecting the others to freak out or start asking Ranulf questions he couldn’t answer. But Raquel merely rolled her eyes, and Vic nodded slowly as he took it in. “That’s deep, man.”

Ranulf had to pause to think up an appropriate reply. “You are ‘deep’ also, Vic.”

“Thanks, dude.” Vic punched Ranulf’s shoulder.

Fighting back laughter, I rolled onto my back to look up at the stars. Mrs. Bethany hadn’t chosen Ranulf to room with a human; she’d chosen Vic to live with a vampire. Apparently she’d realized that Vic didn’t sweat the small stuff and so would simply blow off any of his roommate’s weird habits.

Once again, she’d proven how insightful she was—and how well she understood all of us, even Vic. It made me glad that I’d already destroyed Lucas’s card and letter. I’d wanted to hang on to them forever, but it was too dangerous. Besides, I still had the stars.

I traced the image of Andromeda over and over again in the night sky. October seemed a thousand years away; it could never have been near enough.

Chapter Four

AFTER THE FIRST RUSH OF EXHILARATION PASSED, I had to ask myself—How was I going to get to Amherst?

Students weren’t permitted to keep vehicles at Evernight Academy. Not that I had one to keep here in the first place, but I couldn’t borrow a ride from a friend either.

“Why aren’t the students allowed to have cars?” I asked Balthazar in a low voice as he walked me to my English class on one of the first days of school. “A lot of people here have been driving cars as long as there have been cars to drive. You’d think Mrs. Bethany would trust them behind the wheel.”

“You’re forgetting that Evernight was around even before the automobile.” Balthazar glanced down at me, in one of those odd moments that reminded me he was almost a foot taller than I was. “When the school was founded, everyone would’ve had horses and carriages, which are a lot more trouble to store than cars. Horses have to be fed, and their stalls have to be mucked out.”

“We have horses in the stables.”

“We have six horses. Not three hundred. It’s a big difference when it comes to feed—”

“And mucking out stalls,” I finished for him, making a face.

“Exactly. Not to mention that there were a lot of hurt feelings when people got hungry and snacked on other people’s transportation.”

“I bet.” Poor horses. “Still, it’s not like anybody would be in danger of chowing down on a Toyota. And there’s plenty of room around here where people could park. So why hasn’t Mrs. Bethany changed the rules?”

“Mrs. Bethany? Change a rule?”

“Good point.”

Mrs. Bethany presided over her classroom like a judge presided over a courtroom: peering down at everyone around her, dressed in black and unquestionably in charge. “Shakespeare,” she said, her voice ringing throughout the room. Each of us had a leatherbound edition of Shakespeare’s complete works in front of us. “Even the least educated of you will have studied his plays in some context before now.”

Was I imagining things, or had Mrs. Bethany looked at me when she said “least educated”? Given the smirk on Courtney’s face, maybe I wasn’t imagining. I shrank down in my desk and stared at the book’s cover.

“As you are all familiar with Shakespeare already, you might justifiably ask—why here? Why again?” Mrs. Bethany gestured as she spoke, and her long, thick, grooved fingernails reminded me of claws. “First of all, a deep understanding of Shakespeare has been one of the foundations of Western cultural knowledge for centuries now. We can expect it will remain so for centuries to come.”

Education at Evernight wasn’t for college prep, or even just to make you smarter or happier. It was meant to carry its students through the impossibly long lives of the undead. That lifespan was something I’d tried to imagine ever since I was a little girl and first learned how I was different from the other kids in kindergarten.

“Second, these plays have been interpreted in a number of different ways since they were first written. Shakespeare was a popular entertainer in his own time. Then he was a poet and artist whose works were meant to be read by scholars, not enjoyed by the masses. In the past one hundred fifty years, Shakespeare’s plays have reemerged as drama. Even as their language becomes more foreign to the modern ear, the themes speak to us strongly today—sometimes in ways Shakespeare himself could perhaps not have guessed.”

Although Mrs. Bethany’s voice always set my nerves on edge, I couldn’t help feeling encouraged that we were going to concentrate on Shakespeare this year. My parents were huge Shakespeare buffs; they had named me after a character in The Taming of the Shrew, telling me that they’d been certain any name from Shakespeare would be familiar for hundreds of years to come. Dad had even gone to see him act in a few plays, back in the days when William Shakespeare was just one playwright among many fighting for audiences in London. So I’d memorized the dirge from Cymbeline before my tenth birthday, seen Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet on DVD about twenty times, and kept the sonnets on my shelf. Mrs. Bethany might give me a hard time this year, too, but at least I’d be prepared for anything she could throw my way.

Again, she seemed to have overheard my thoughts. Strolling beside my desk, where I could smell the lavender scent that always seemed to surround her, Mrs. Bethany said, “Prepare to have any preexisting assumptions you may hold about Shakespeare’s works challenged. Those of you who think you can learn all about it from modern film adaptations would be well advised to think again.”

I mulled the potential need to reread Hamlet until class was dismissed. As we all filed out of the classroom, I saw Courtney sidle up to Mrs. Bethany, saying something in a low voice, obviously hoping she wouldn’t be overheard.

Mrs. Bethany wasn’t having it. “I will not reconsider. You must resubmit your report, Miss Briganti, as yours was inadequate.”

“Inadequate?” Courtney’s mouth was a perfect O of outrage. “Finding out how to get into the best clubs in Miami—that’s, like, really important!”

“Under some dubious standard of importance, I suppose that may be true. You may not, however, submit your report in the form of phone numbers scrawled on cocktail napkins.” With that, Mrs. Bethany swept out of the room.

Courtney stomped after her in a huff. “Great. Now I have to type.”

I wished I could’ve told the story to Raquel, who loathed Courtney as much as I did and would probably be in a crummy mood after our first day at the school she hated so much. Instead, we just hung out in our dorm room that evening, talking about pretty much anything except what had happened in classes.

Unfortunately, that whole night, Raquel only left the room once. Her bathroom trip gave me enough time to gulp down about two swallows of blood, not nearly enough. I became hungrier and hungrier, and finally I insisted that Raquel turn off the lights early.

Once she finally seemed to have fallen asleep, I kicked off the covers and slipped out of bed. Raquel didn’t stir. Carefully I withdrew the thermos of blood from its hiding place. Tiptoeing into the hallway, I glanced around to make sure nobody else was up either. The coast was clear.

I considered my options before I hurried down the hall toward the stairwell. The stone stairs were chilly at night, particularly considering that I was only wearing boxer shorts and a cotton camisole. But the cold was one reason nobody was likely to come that way in the dead of night and find me drinking blood.

Lukewarm, I thought with distaste as I took the first swallow. I’d nuked it earlier that day, but even the thermos couldn’t keep it piping hot forever. Didn’t matter. Every coppery mouthful flowed into me like electric power. Yet it wasn’t quite enough.

I wish the blood were hotter. I wish it were alive.

Last year, Patrice used to sneak out all the time to catch squirrels on the grounds. Could I do that? Just, like, chomp into a squirrel? I’d always thought I couldn’t. Every time I’d pictured it, I’d thought about the fur getting stuck in my teeth. Blech.

When I thought about it now, it felt different. I didn’t think about the fur or the squeak or anything like that. Instead, I thought about that tiny heart beating so very fast, as though I could feel that thrum-thrum-thrum against the tip of my tongue. And it would sound so good when I bit down and all those little bones snapped, like popcorn popping in the microwave—

Did I just think that? That’s disgusting!

That is, I thought it was disgusting—but it didn’t feel disgusting. It still felt like a live squirrel would be just about the most delicious thing on earth, short of human blood.

Closing my eyes, I remembered what it had been like to drink Lucas’s blood while he lay beneath me, clutching me in his arms. Nothing could compare to that.

Something crackled down in the stairwell.

“Who’s there?” I said, startled. My words echoed. More quietly, I repeated, “Who’s there? Anybody?”

Once again, I thought I heard it: a strange crackling sound, like breaking ice. The crackling came closer, as though it were traveling up the stairs. Hurriedly I screwed the lid back on my thermos, so that no human student would see me drinking blood. I ducked into the hallway and tried to figure out what could be causing that sound.

Had a girl sneaked out of the dorms for a snack, just like I had? The sound was a little like the popping noise ice cubes made after they were dropped into water. Then I stifled a giggle when I wondered if it was a guy instead, sneaking up here to visit the girl he liked. Maybe it wasn’t even a person. It could just be an old building reacting to the deepening autumn cold.

The crackling came closer. The air around me instantly went colder, as if I’d just opened a freezer door. My hair stood on end, and goose bumps appeared on my arms. My breath looked foggy, and once again I sensed that somebody was watching me.

Farther down the stairwell, I saw a wavering light. It flickered like a candle, but the light was a brilliant blue green, the color of a swimming pool. Ribbons of illumination rippled across the stones. It looked eerily like Evernight was under water.

By now I was shaking from cold, and I lost my grip on the thermos. The moment it clattered to the floor, the lights vanished. The air around me warmed again instantly.

That was not a reflection, I thought. That was not my imagination.

So what the hell was it?

The door nearest the stairwell swung open. Courtney stood there in a hot-pink nightshirt, her blond hair messy around her face. “What is your damage?”

“Sorry,” I mumbled as I ducked down to grab my thermos. “I had to sneak out to eat. I—I guess I lost my grip.”

Eventually I would have to tell somebody what I’d just seen, but Courtney was the last person I would take into my confidence. Even admitting that I’d done something as simple as dropping a thermos made her roll her eyes.

“God, just catch mice like a normal person, okay?” But instead of slamming her door, she shifted from foot to foot, then said, “I guess that does suck.”

“—dropping my thermos?”

Courtney scowled. “Sneaking out to eat. You drew the short straw when it came to roommates.”

“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

“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.”

But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking past me—at the vampire.

“Get the hell away from Bianca,” he growled.

“Oh, no.” The vampire began scrambling backward, trying to wedge herself into a corner. “No, no, no—”

“Lucas, it’s okay. She’s harmless.”

“The hell she is.”

The vampire cried, “I told you, I told you, he’s after me, he’s after us both!”

This was who she’d been afraid of. She’d been running from Lucas.

Lucas’s hand closed around mine—the first touch in so long. He was trying to tug me toward the door. “Bianca, you gotta get out of here.”

“Wait, stop. Both of you.” I looked from one to the other, but they weren’t listening to me. They were both shifting into battle mode, ready to fight.

I didn’t know what to do or what to think, not for that first split second—and that was one second too long. The vampire launched herself at us, pouncing like a tiger, and Lucas shoved me out of the way so hard that I stumbled and fell on my hands and knees, smacking into the concrete floor. Behind me I heard the sound of shattering wood.

Scrambling back to my feet, hands stinging, I saw to my horror that the vampire had knocked Lucas through the door of the train station. Despite her girlish behavior and appearance, she was obviously a powerful vampire—more powerful than I’d realized. She and Lucas grappled in the doorway for a second, their desperate struggle silhouetted by the glare of the nearby streetlight. Then the vampire threw Lucas into the railing of the station porch. He fell onto the railroad tracks.

“Lucas!” I shouted. He didn’t rise to his feet, and he blinked like he couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Clearly, being tossed through the door had stunned him.

“You shouldn’t be allowed to scare young girls.” The vampire tugged at the curls of her hair that had escaped from her bun, just like a nervous child. “You should be stopped. I should stop you.”

She’s scared enough to kill him, I realized. I had to help Lucas, but how? I was stronger than any human being, but not nearly as strong as a full vampire, no matter how childlike she might appear. Then I realized that when the door had splintered, pieces of wood had been scattered all over the train station’s floor. One next to me was the perfect size and shape to be used as a stake.

Staking doesn’t kill vampires, not permanently anyway. If the stake goes through the heart, the vampire falls down as if dead—but if the stake is pulled out, then it’s just like it never happened. So I should’ve slammed the stake into the vampire’s back without hesitation.

But staking that poor girl—I couldn’t do it.

I grabbed a much larger piece of wood from the floor, something almost like a two-by-four, and inched forward, one foot, then the other.

“You shouldn’t have followed me.” She leaned over Lucas, every muscle in her skinny body tense and her hands curved so that her fingernails seemed like claws. “You’ll be sorry.”

With all my strength, I swung the board into her head. The vampire went flying a few feet from us—I’d gotten stronger than I realized—and rolled along the ground, over and over. Before she stopped, I dropped the board and grabbed Lucas’s hand. “Can you run?”

“Gonna find out.” He panted, struggling to his feet.

I pulled him in the direction of the town square, thinking that we’d stand a better chance of losing her in a crowd. But Lucas tugged back to steer us in the opposite direction, so that we were running into the quiet residential section nearby. “Nobody’s around, Lucas. We’ll be all alone!”

“That means nobody else gets hurt!”

“But—”

“I’ve got you, Bianca. Trust me.”

We ran onto a small street lined with large, classic New England houses. Comfortable family cars and SUVs were parked in every driveway, and front windows glowed and flickered with the lights from television screens. With every step, I longed to scream for help, but I knew doing that would only put the people inside at risk. If they came outside to investigate, there was every chance they would get caught up in a dangerous fight that now seemed inevitable. Lucas and I were on our own.

“He’s not who you think!” a thin, quivering voice called, not nearly far enough behind us. “He’s Black Cross! You’ve got to get away!”

Oh, crap. I realized, She’s chasing us to try and save me.

“Lucas, we don’t have to do this!” I could hardly breathe. We could both run almost supernaturally fast, and farther than most humans could, but the vampire was faster. “Just let me talk to her!”

“She’s not going to stop at talking!”

Lucas still assumed all vampires were dangerous—but in this case, he might be right. This vampire was powerful; worse, she was scared. People could do terrible things when they were scared. If she hurt Lucas on my behalf, I knew I’d never forgive myself.

We veered around a corner as Lucas pulled me to the right, and I figured he was trying to lose the vampire. It didn’t work; her footsteps pounded behind us on the pavement, closer and closer. Sweat rolled down my back.

“I’m going to draw her off.” Lucas squeezed my hand tighter. “Count of three, you’re going to dive behind the nearest car. Got it?”

“Lucas, I’m not leaving you!”

“I can get help. You have to be safe. One, two—”

No time to argue. He swung his arm around, flinging me toward the side of the road; I dived for cover. Skidding to the ground scraped my palms and knees, but I was able to roll behind a large truck and curl beside one of the tires.

For a few seconds, there was only silence. Get help, I remembered Lucas saying. Black Cross was here on a hunt. That meant he had plenty of support nearby. Without me, he stood a chance. I began to calm down and take comfort in the knowledge that he was safe—until the vampire dived behind the truck, too.

Maybe I should’ve screamed for Lucas, but I didn’t want to give her away.

She didn’t attack; I’d known she wouldn’t. Instead she held out her hand with its jagged, dirty nails. “We have to go,” she said. “You don’t know what he is.”

“I know he’s Black Cross. He won’t hurt me, but he’s coming back with others. Get out of here!”

She shook her head at me in horror. “You’re mad. He’s the enemy.”

“I’m fine!” I insisted. “You’re the one in danger!”

She let her hand drop and stared at me, head tilted to one side. In that pose, she looked like a broken toy, and I had the weird but undeniable sense that I’d hurt her feelings. After one long, strange second, she leaped up and ran, vanishing so quickly that I didn’t hear even a footstep.

As soon as I was sure she was gone, I called out, “Lucas?” No response. “Lucas?”

I heard footsteps farther down the road. Rising to my feet, I saw Lucas running toward me. He motioned for me to duck down again, but I ignored that.

“She’s gone,” I promised. “We’re safe, okay?”

Lucas slowed to a walk, then took another couple of heavy steps and leaned forward, bracing his hands against his knees. I still felt shaky myself, and I’d had a couple of minutes to get my breath. “You sure?”

“Pretty sure. Are you all right?”

“As long as you are.” Lucas straightened up again and brushed back his sweaty hair with the back of one hand. “God, Bianca—if she had come after you—”

“She wasn’t dangerous. Not until she got scared.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” It hit me: For the first time in more than six months, Lucas and I were alone together. I threw my arms around him, and he held me so tightly that I could hardly breathe.

“I missed you,” I whispered into his hair. “I missed you so much.”

“Me, too.” He laughed softly. “I can hardly believe this is real.”

“I’ll convince you.” I took his face in my hands, and we leaned closer to kiss—until headlights swept over us and made us both jump.

The van sped toward us, screeching to a halt only a few feet away. In the brilliant light, I could barely make out that there were apparently several people crowded inside.

Lucas groaned, “Oh, no.” When one of the van doors opened, he yelled, “Crisis over. Way to take too long, guys.”

“It hasn’t been five minutes since your page.” The woman emerging from the van sounded familiar. Even before I could see her features, I realized it was Kate, Lucas’s mother.

Then the passenger door swung open to reveal a tall, heavyset black girl with braided hair. I searched my memory for her name: Dana. As we looked up at her, Dana’s expression shifted from concern to a broad smile.

“Look who we have here.” She leaned against the hood and gestured toward us with a crossbow she apparently no longer intended to use. “Lucas, didn’t anyone tell you the emergency number isn’t to alert us to your booty calls?”

Kate folded her arms. “Now I see why you insisted on joining the Amherst hunt.”

“Okay, you found me out,” he said lightly, refusing to be cowed. “Can we get Bianca someplace safe? The vampire just scared the hell out of her.”

“I realize that,” Kate said, more kindly. She liked me, mostly because she believed I’d saved Lucas’s life once. The people in the van were nodding and murmuring welcome. “Come on and get yourself cleaned up. Don’t worry; you’re safe now.”

Safe with Black Cross? I was safe only as long as they didn’t realize I was “the enemy.” Just the thought of turning myself over to a gang of vampire hunters made me feel cold and frightened inside. They’d been kind to me last time we’d met—but the last time had nearly ended in disaster. This time, if they learned the truth, it could get a lot worse.

Lucas and I shared a look, and I knew he understood how I felt. But there was nothing to do but smile, say thanks, and climb in the van.

Chapter Six

LUCAS’S HAND CLOSED AROUND MINE AS THE VAN drove into an industrial park—one that had seen better days, to judge by the fact that half the buildings seemed to be vacant. My head still whirled from the suddenness of the vampire’s attack and our escape; I don’t think I’d even fully processed the fact that Lucas and I were together again.

Or maybe, I thought as we stole sideways glances at each other, it’s just that it feels like we’ve never really been apart.

“I don’t guess you kids met up at random.” Kate glanced toward us, and her eyes narrowed as she glared at Lucas. She wore olive cargo pants and a black shirt with a lot of pockets; her dark-gold hair was slicked back into a no-nonsense ponytail. “Lucas, don’t tell me you went back to that place.”

“I didn’t go to Evernight,” Lucas said. “I asked Bianca to meet me here. But if I have to return to the school again to see her, I will.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Can you tell me where in the world we aren’t in danger, Mom? Because I just had a closer call than I ever had at Evernight Academy.”

Lucas was exaggerating somewhat, given how my father and Balthazar had pursued him last year, but I didn’t want to undermine him while he was defending his decision to meet up with me.

Kate sighed, then shook her head. She looked at me next—not gently, because nothing about her was gentle, but in a way that made it clear she didn’t blame me for the danger Lucas and I had been in. “Glad to see you’re okay, Bianca. I didn’t trust the bloodsuckers to keep their word last year.”

Those bloodsuckers are my parents, I wanted to retort, but instead I replied, “They did. I’m back in school and we all sort of—pretend it didn’t happen.”

Lucas helped me out. “Probably they figure even if you did tell, nobody would believe you.” I hoped our explanation sounded convincing.

“That was a brave thing you did, giving yourself up to save us from the fire,” said an elderly man who sat in the back beside Dana. He’d told me his name—Mr. Watanabe, I remembered. “I think you saved us all.”

“Yeah, Bianca, that was pretty badass of you.” Dana slapped her hands on my shoulders and gave them a hearty squeeze. “Seriously, you’ve got guts.”

“It wasn’t badass. I don’t really do badass.” That made the half-dozen or so people in the van laugh, even though I hadn’t actually been making a joke. Still, my tension eased a little.

Last year, when Lucas had been discovered as a member of Black Cross, he’d been forced to escape from Evernight Academy; I’d fled with him. Together we’d reached Kate and Eduardo’s cell, and safety—at least as long as Black Cross remained ignorant that I was a sort of vampire, too. But Mrs. Bethany, my parents, and several other vampires had tracked us down. When I’d gone back with my parents, I’d not only escaped that confrontation, I’d gotten away before Black Cross found out what I really was. They still believed me to be a human child kidnapped and raised by vampire parents—something I needed them to keep on believing.

We drove to one of the abandoned buildings around back. Kate flicked the van’s headlights: off, on; bright, off, bright. A metal door, like for a loading dock, started to open, revealing a driveway that sloped down sharply. We drove into an underground parking garage that looked pretty much like any other, except that it was illuminated by lanterns hung on the walls or the concrete pillars. As Kate pulled around a corner into a spot, I saw that a few partitions had been set up—walls of boxes or just tarps hanging over a stretched cord—to carve rooms out of this dank space.

I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice as I said, “This is Black Cross headquarters?”

Everyone laughed. Lucas squeezed my hand, reassuring me that the laughter wasn’t meant to be unkind. “We don’t have an HQ. We go where we need to go, find places to crash. This is secure. We’re safe here.”

To me it looked incredibly bleak. Had Lucas grown up in miserable places like this? The air still smelled like exhaust and oil.

As our crew got out of the van, another half-dozen people walked up to us, including a tall, forbidding man with twin scars across one cheek. I recognized Eduardo, Lucas’s stepfather and quite possibly his least favorite person. His dark gaze embodied everything that frightened me about Black Cross. “I see this is the big emergency,” he said, staring at me.

“You’d prefer another kind of emergency?” Kate said it like she was teasing, but she wasn’t. I could hear the real message in her words: Lay off my kid.

Either Eduardo didn’t hear that message, or he didn’t care. “The vampire got away? Again?”

Lucas’s jaw clenched at that again, but he said only, “Yeah. She’s fast.”

“Did you see her gang?” Kate shook her head, and I thought, What gang? I knew the lonely girl I’d seen tonight didn’t have any friends, much less a gang.

“You go to school with vampires for a year and can’t figure out why they’ve admitted humans, then you luck into a shot at this vampire and completely lose her while you’re hanging out with your girlfriend.” In the lantern’s light, Eduardo seemed to have been roughly carved from weathered wood. “This isn’t what we trained you for, Lucas.”

“What did you train me for? To shut up and follow your orders no matter what?”

“Discipline matters. You’ve never understood that.”

“So does having a life.”

“That’s enough,” Kate interjected, stepping between her husband and her son. “Maybe you two aren’t sick of this argument yet, but the rest of us are.”

They’re still freaking out about the human students at Evernight, I thought. If I figure that out and tell Lucas, we’d show Eduardo. Seeing how dismissively he treated Lucas made me want to take Eduardo down a notch or two. Or ten.

“Bianca looks really winded,” Dana said. “Lucas, you better get her to the first aid room and make sure she’s all right.”

“Oh, I feel—” I realized what Dana was doing and stopped myself. “That might be a good idea.”

Kate didn’t say Kids, but I knew she was thinking it. She waved us off. Eduardo looked as if he might object, but he didn’t.

The murmur of conversation welled up behind us as Lucas led me toward a side door. I realized that this led to the room the parking lot attendant had sat in when this was a garage. “Are they talking about us?” I murmured.

“Probably talking about that damn vampire. But as soon as they get done with that, yeah, they’ll start talking about us.”

“Who was that vampire?”

“I was kinda hoping you could tell us something,” Lucas said as we went up the short stairway to what was now the first aid room, “seeing as how you guys were hanging out.”

“She just sort of came up to me. I never met a vampire on the street before—I was curious.”

“Seriously, Bianca, you’ve got to be more careful.”

Before I could say anything else, Lucas turned on the small electric lantern in the first aid room. The area was hardly bigger than the one cot that was pushed against the wall. Dark gray carpet covered the floor, and this room was small enough for the lantern to fill with soft light. This was almost cozy, and definitely private. Lucas shut the door behind us. I felt a river of warmth flow through me as I realized that we were alone together at last, really alone.

Lucas grabbed me and pushed me hard against the wall. I gasped and he kissed my open lips, then kissed me again harder, as I started to respond. My arms slipped around his neck, and his body was pressed against mine from our knees to our mouths, and I could breathe in the scent of him, the one that reminded me of the dark woods near Evernight.

Mine, I thought. Mine.

We kissed frantically, like we’d been starved for each other the way people can be starved for food or water or air. The way a vampire can be starved for blood. I cupped his face in my hands and felt the stubble of his beard against my palms. His knee pushed slowly between mine, so that both my thighs straddled one of his, and one hand came up against the small of my back, beneath my shirt. The touch of his skin against mine made me dizzy but not weak. I felt stronger than I ever had in my life.

“I missed you,” he whispered against my neck. “God, I missed you.”

“Lucas.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say but his name. It was like there was nothing else worth saying.

I kissed him again, more slowly this time, and that only intensified the kiss. Both his hands pressed against my back now, and we held each other tighter, and I started to wonder how much closer we could get—and then I remembered what it had felt like when I drank his blood.

“Wait.” I turned my head away. My breath came in shaky gasps, and I couldn’t quite look directly at him. “We have to slow down.”

Lucas closed his eyes tightly, then nodded. “Mom is outside.” He was saying it to himself, not to me. “Mom. Outside. Mom. Outside. Okay, that kinda sobers me up.”

Our eyes met, and then we started to laugh really hard. Lucas stepped away from me, enough that I could breathe normally again, but he clasped both my hands tightly. “You look gorgeous.”

“I just got chased down the street. I probably look like a train wreck.” I knew my hair was mussed every which way, and my jeans were dusty.

“You gotta learn how to take a compliment, because I’m not going to stop making them.” Lucas lifted one of my hands to his mouth. His lips were soft against my knuckles. Outside I heard the conversation between the others in Black Cross getting louder. “How long can you stay?”

“Until tomorrow afternoon.”

“Almost a whole day?” He brightened so much that I couldn’t help but blush happily. “That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, it is.” By next week, I knew, this short time would seem like nothing. But for now it stretched out before me as infinite as a sky full of stars, and I didn’t want to think about what would come after. That would ruin it. What mattered was here and now.

I sat down on the corner of the cot, and Lucas sat beside me, laying his head on my shoulder. His arms circled my waist. I ran my fingers through his scruffy hair.

His voice was muffled against my shoulder as he said, “There were times I thought I’d never see you again. Sometimes I told myself that would be the best thing for both of us. But I couldn’t accept it.”

“Don’t ever believe that.” I kissed his cheek. “Not ever.”

The noise from downstairs grew louder yet, and I realized that it was an argument. I tensed, but Lucas sat up and sighed. “Eduardo’s mad as hell.”

“That girl—the one from tonight—she’s the one you guys are here to hunt?”

“That’s the whole reason we’re in Amherst. There have been reports in this area for a few months now. This vampire—we think she’s part of a gang that’s been causing trouble more and more often.”

“Reports? Like, in newspapers?”

“Sometimes, though of course the papers don’t know what they’re reporting. But we hear from people—people who know what’s really going on in the world, who know about us. Every once in a while, we even get info from vampires. They’ll try to buy us off by telling us there’s somebody more dangerous around the corner. Sometimes they’re telling the truth. The word we got was that this gang is killing about once a week—and that’s a lot, even for the deadliest vamps out there.”

I tried to think of that as encouraging. Even Black Cross hunters could talk to vampires rationally sometimes. “The girl we saw tonight can’t be part of any deadly gang. Lucas, she was scared to death.”

Lucas looked over at me again, and in his dark-green eyes I saw that he was wary. We’d had this discussion before, but it never ended well. Quietly he said, “Some vampires really are dangerous, Bianca.”

“Some really aren’t,” I said, just as quietly.

“I know that now.” Lucas leaned his head back against the wall, and I could glimpse a kind of tiredness in his eyes. He was three years older than me, an age difference I hadn’t really been able to see last year, but his maturity was more visible now. “There are bad vampires who ought to be stopped. We stop them. So I tell myself that what I’m doing here with Black Cross is the right thing to do. But if we were wrong about this girl tonight—if we’re ever wrong, even once—I don’t know how to deal with that. And I don’t know how to tell what’s true about the vampires we hunt.”

I wanted to provide some answer for him, but I didn’t know what that answer could possibly be.

Footsteps echoed on the floor outside, coming closer. “Incoming!” Dana called before she opened the door. When she did peer inside the first aid room, she frowned. “Oh, man, I thought I was going to interrupt some crazy monkey sex in here. Figured at least I’d get flashed for my trouble.”

I blushed bright purple. Lucas rolled his eyes. “We’ve been alone for five minutes, Dana.”

“You gotta learn to strike while the iron is hot. Because privacy and this place do not go together.” Dana braced her arms against the doorjamb. “We’re about to head back out. Kate and Eduardo want to resume the hunt before the vampire’s gone too far away.”

Resume the hunt? Oh, no.

“They said no patrol tonight.” Lucas scowled. “The equipment’s not ready, half of us aren’t even dressed—”

“That’s why we train to get ready fast, buddy.” Dana grinned at me, and the overlapping tooth in the front somehow made her look almost sweet. “Bianca can stay safe and warm here. But you and me and everybody else in the crew, we’re heading out.”

“Dana.” Lucas gave her his most melting, pleading look. “I haven’t seen Bianca in months. Come on.”

That look would’ve been more than enough to dissolve me into a puddle, but it didn’t seem to do much for Dana. “You know I don’t care, but Kate and Eduardo don’t want to hear it. You’re lucky they even let her get a look at this place. Hell, when you sent that distress page in, Eduardo was this close to putting us into lockdown.”

Lucas sighed as he looked at me. “Basically, we’re screwed. But only for a little while, okay? We’ll be back before too long.”

“Whatever we can have. It’s enough.”

“You gotta move, Lucas.” Dana started edging out the door. “Like, in about two minutes, when I come back into this room to get our med supplies ready.”

“Thanks,” Lucas said. I gave Dana a quick smile as she went.

As soon as the door shut, he kissed me very gently, with his lips closed, but then more roughly as our mouths began to part. That warm tide of feeling inside me started to flow again, so that I wanted to pull him closer, but neither of us could forget that Dana was just outside. Instead, Lucas leaned his forehead against mine and cradled my cheeks in his hands. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Lucas kissed me once more. After that he let go of me, stood up, and yelled, “All yours, Dana!”

“I don’t want your girlfriend!” she called back. “Just the damn first aid kit!” A few people outside laughed, but it was a kind laugh. Maybe Eduardo saw me as a nuisance, but everybody else in Black Cross seemed happy for Lucas and me. I could never get over how a bunch of vampire hunters could seem so—well—nice.

We’ll be okay, I told myself. I can make it through this. Already I was hungry, but I knew that if anybody in Black Cross caught me drinking blood, they’d attack first and ask questions later. Tomorrow, maybe, I’d have a chance to eat in private, or at least to pour the blood in my thermos down the drain. I could hang on until Saturday night if I needed to.

Lucas edged past Dana on the narrow stairs. Although she was smiling as she set to work, she never looked at me; instead she was focused on her task, hurriedly stuffing bandages and gauze into a small plastic box. “You doing okay, Bianca?”

“I guess,” I said. “How often do you do this? Go out on hunts like these?”

“You say ‘go out’ like we had some big mothership we all return to when our work is done. We mostly travel from place to place. Go where we’re needed. Some people have their own homes they go back to from time to time, but a lot of us don’t. I don’t.” After a short pause, she added, “Lucas doesn’t either. I guess he didn’t tell you that.”

“He hasn’t really had a chance.”

“I keep forgetting that you haven’t hardly gotten to talk to each other since that whole scene went down last spring. That has to be rough.”

“I guess it is.”

“He’s a good guy.” She closed the plastic box and looked at me, serious for once. “Lucas doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. I’ve known him since we were about twelve, and you’re the only girl he’s ever acted like this about. Just in case you were wondering.”

“Thanks.” Though that was pretty amazing to hear, I was thinking about larger concerns than my love life. Instead, I kept remembering the vampire, with her broken nails and uncertain smile. Black Cross might not be an immediate threat to me, but she remained in danger. She had been so lost and alone, another person made to feel small by Mrs. Bethany.

Was that the way I might end up someday? I shivered. Never. I’ll always have my parents and my friends—and maybe even Lucas.

That didn’t change the fact that the girl I’d met earlier was in desperate danger from Lucas’s family and friends. The injustice of it sickened me. But what could Lucas do about it? What could I do about it?

The answer came to me almost immediately, terrifying but inevitable. It took me a second to get out the words: “I’m coming with you.”

Dana stared at me. “On a vampire hunt? That’s crazy.”

“You have no idea”—I sighed—“but I’m going.”

Chapter Seven

“THIS IS NO PLACE FOR AMATEURS,” SAID EDUARDO. The twin scars on his cheek looked deeper—a trick of the dim lights of the camping lanterns on the walls.

I thought fast. “I’ve been going to school surrounded by vampires for more than a year now.” It was the truth, if not the whole truth. My voice shook, but I hoped desperately that Eduardo would chalk that up to emotion, not fright. The man was an unrepentant killer of vampires; it was hard to look him in the face. “I need to know what I’m really up against.”

I’d never seen Eduardo smile before. It wasn’t an attractive expression. “Supposedly they behave themselves at Evernight Academy. You’re only a kid. You should stick to the ones who pretend to be kids, too.”

“I was fighting vampires when I was a lot younger than Bianca is,” Lucas retorted. “I think she can handle it.” He slung his arm around my shoulders, and at last my fear started to wane. Lucas’s support seemed to end the argument; at any rate, Eduardo didn’t protest any longer, and if anybody else had objections, they kept them to themselves.

Lucas glanced over at me, questioning why I was dead set on joining them, but we both knew we’d have to talk about it later.

The hunt didn’t feel like a hunt at first. It was like any other road trip: People murmuring quietly as they pulled on their jackets, looking at one another with tired eyes and clambering into the beat-up van and Kate’s turquoise pickup truck.

I remembered the very first road trip I’d ever taken, when my parents drove me to the beach one summer. They hated the water—both the rivers we had to cross to get there and the ocean that lapped at the shore—but they took me because I wanted to go so badly. They sat under a beach umbrella the whole time. Even though they’d drunk blood before we left, they didn’t want to spend so much time in the sun. While I made sand castles, swam, and played with other kids, they watched and waved. It was a sacrifice they had made for me.

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