CLAUDIA GRAY

Afterlife

Contents

Cover

Title Page

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

Chapter One

“SUNRISE IS COMING,” BALTHAZAR SAID.

Those were the first words anyone had spoken aloud in hours. Although I didn’t want to hear anything Balthazar had to say—about this or anything else—I knew he was right. Vampires could always feel the approaching dawn deep in their bones.

Could Lucas feel it, too?

We sat in the projection room of an abandoned theater, where the poster-covered walls still bore marks from last night’s battle. Vic, the only human in the room, dozed on Ranulf’s shoulder, his sandy hair mussed from sleep; Ranulf sat quietly, bloodstained ax across his lap as though he expected more danger at any second. His long, thin face and bowl haircut had never made him look more like a medieval saint. Balthazar stood in the far corner of the room, keeping his distance out of respect for my grief. Yet his height and his broad shoulders meant he took up more than his share of room.

I cradled Lucas’s head in my lap. Had I been alive, or a vampire, so many hours without moving would have made me stiff. As a ghost, though, freed of the demands of a physical body, I’d been able to hold him through the whole long night of his death. I brushed back my long red hair, trying not to notice that the ends had trailed in Lucas’s blood.

Charity had murdered him in front of my eyes, taking advantage of Lucas’s desire to protect me rather than himself. It was her latest and most horrible attempt to hurt me, driven by her hatred for anybody who mattered to Balthazar, her brother and sire. She’d violated a vampire taboo by biting someone another vampire had bitten first—who had, in effect, been prepared for the transformation from living to undead. Lucas was supposedly mine to turn, or no one’s. But Charity hadn’t cared about any taboos in a long time. She didn’t care about anyone or anything except her twisted relationship with Balthazar.

Wherever she was now, she was no doubt reveling in the fact that she’d broken my heart, and that she’d thrust Lucas into the very last place he would ever want to be.

I’d rather be dead, Lucas had always said. When I was alive and so much more innocent, I had dreamed of him becoming a vampire with me. But he had been raised by the hunters of Black Cross, who loathed the undead and pursued them with the passion of a cult. Turning into a vampire had always been his ultimate nightmare.

Now that nightmare had come true.

“How long?” I said.

“Minutes.” Balthazar took one step forward, saw the expression on my face, and came no closer. “Vic should go.”

“What’s happening?” Vic’s voice was scratchy with sleep. He pushed himself upright, and his expression shifted from confusion to horror as he looked at Lucas’s body, bloody and pale on the floor. “Oh. I—for a sec, I thought I’d just had a nightmare or something. But this—it’s real.”

Balthazar shook his head. “I’m sorry, Vic, but you need to leave.”

I realized what Balthazar meant. My parents, who had always wanted me to follow in their footsteps, had told me about the first hours of the transition. When Lucas rose as a vampire, he would want fresh blood—want it desperately, as much as he could get. In the first frenzy of awakening, his hunger could push every other thought out of his mind.

He’d be hungry enough to kill.

Vic didn’t know any of that. “Come on, Balthazar. I’ve gone this far with you guys. I don’t want to leave Lucas now.”

“Balthazar is correct,” Ranulf said. “It is safer that you leave.”

“What do you mean, safer?”

“Vic, go,” I said. I hated to push him away, but if he didn’t understand what was going on here, he needed a dose of harsh reality. “If you want to survive, go.”

Vic’s face paled.

More gently, Balthazar added, “This is no place for the living. This belongs to the dead.”

Vic ran his hands through his shaggy hair, nodded once at Ranulf and walked out of the projection room. Probably he would head home, where he’d try to do something useful—clean house, maybe, or make food nobody else could eat. Human concerns seemed very distant at that moment.

Now that Vic had left, I could finally voice the thought that had been haunting me for hours. “Should we—” My throat choked up, and I had to swallow hard. “Should we let this happen?”

“You mean that you believe we should destroy Lucas.” From anybody else, this would have sounded too harsh to bear; from Ranulf, it was simple, calm fact. “That we should prevent him from rising as a vampire, and accept this as his final death.”

“I don’t want to do that. I can’t begin to tell you how much I don’t want that,” I answered. Every word I spoke felt like blood being squeezed from my heart. “But I know it’s what Lucas would want.” Didn’t loving someone mean putting their wishes first, even with something as terrible as this?

Balthazar shook his head. “Don’t do it.”

“You sound very sure.” I tried to say it calmly. Still, I was so angry at Balthazar that I could hardly look at him; he’d brought Lucas into the battle against Charity, even though he knew Lucas was numb with grief and unable to fight at his best. It felt like Lucas’s death was as much his fault as Charity’s. “Are you just telling me what I want to hear?”

Balthazar frowned. “When have I ever done that? Bianca, listen to me. If you’d asked me the day before I became a vampire whether I’d want to rise as undead, I would have said no.”

“You would still say no, if you had the chance. If you could go back. Wouldn’t you?” I demanded.

That caught him off guard. “We aren’t only talking about me. Think about your parents. About Patrice, and Ranulf, the other vampires you know. Would they really be better off rotting in their graves?”

Some vampires were okay, weren’t they? That was true of most of the ones I’d ever known. My parents had known centuries of happiness and love together. Lucas and I could have that, maybe. I knew he hated the idea of being a vampire—but only two short years ago, he’d hated all vampires with blind, unthinking prejudice. He’d come so far so quickly; surely he could come to accept himself in time.

It was worth a chance. It had to be. Everything in my heart told me that Lucas deserved another chance, and that we deserved another hope of being together.

I traced a finger across Lucas’s face: his forehead, his cheekbone, and the outline of his lips. The heaviness and paleness of his body reminded me of a carving on a tombstone—fixed, unliving, unchanging.

“It’s close,” Balthazar said. He came closer. “It’s time.”

Ranulf nodded. “I sense it as well. You should step away, Bianca.”

“I’m not letting go of him.”

“Just be ready to move, then. If you have to.” Balthazar shifted his weight from one foot to the next, steadying his stance like a fighter preparing for battle.

It’s going to be okay, Lucas, I thought, willing him to hear me past the divide between this world and the next. Wasn’t he about to cross that divide to return to me? So maybe we were close enough for him to listen. We’re dead, but we can still be together. Nothing matters more than that. We’re stronger than death. Now nothing else ever has to come between us. You and I never have to be apart again.

I wanted him to believe that. I wanted to believe it, too.

Lucas’s hand twitched.

I gasped—a reflex of the body I’d created, more a memory of what shock did to a living being than anything else.

“Be ready,” Balthazar said. He was talking to Ranulf, not to me.

Shakily, I laid one hand upon Lucas’s chest. I realized only then that I was waiting for a heartbeat. His heart would never beat again.

One of Lucas’s feet shifted slightly, and his head turned a couple inches to the side. “Lucas?” I whispered. He needed to understand that he wasn’t alone, before he realized anything else. “Can you hear me? It’s Bianca. I’m waiting for you.”

He didn’t move.

“I love you so much.” I wanted so badly to cry, but my ghostly body created no tears. “Please come back to me. Please.”

The fingers of his right hand straightened, muscles tensing, then curled back in toward his palm.

“Lucas, can you—”

“No!” Lucas shoved himself away from the floor, from me, stumbling to all fours. His eyes were wild, too dazed to truly see. “No!”

His back slammed against the wall. He stared at the three of us, his eyes displaying no recognition, no sanity. His hands pressed against the wall, fingers curved like claws, and I thought he might try to dig through it. Maybe it was a vampire instinct for digging your way out of a grave.

“Lucas, it’s okay.” I held my hands out, doing my best to remain completely solid and opaque. It was better to look as familiar as possible. “We’re here with you.”

“He doesn’t know you yet,” Balthazar said. “He’s looking at us, but he can’t see.”

Ranulf added, “He wants only blood.”

At the word blood, Lucas’s head tilted, like a predator catching the scent of prey. I realized that was the only word he’d recognized.

The man I loved had been reduced to an animal—to a monster, I realized, the sick, empty, murderous shell that Lucas had once believed every vampire to be.

Lucas’s eyes narrowed. He bared his teeth, and with a shock I saw, for the first time, his vampire fangs. They altered his face so much that I hardly knew him, and that more than anything else tore at me. His posture shifted into a crouch, and I realized he was about to attack—any of us, all of us. Anything that moved. Me.

Balthazar moved first. He leaped—pounced—toward Lucas, colliding with him so forcefully that the wall behind them crunched and plaster dust fell from the ceiling. Lucas threw him off, but then Ranulf was on him in an attempt to push him into a corner.

“What are you doing?” I cried. “Stop hurting him!”

Balthazar shook his head as he rose from the floor. “This is the only thing he understands right now, Bianca. Dominance.”

Lucas pushed Ranulf backward, so hard that he thudded against me, and I stumbled into the old projector. Sharp metal jabbed into my shoulder. I felt pain, real pain, the kind I’d experienced back when I had a real body instead of this ghostly simulation. When I put my hand to my shoulder, I felt a lukewarm wetness beneath my fingers and pulled them away to see blood—silvery and strange. I hadn’t even realized that I still had blood now. The liquid gleamed like mercury, almost iridescent in the dim light.

The three-way fight in front of me was growing more violent—Balthazar’s foot to Lucas’s gut, Lucas’s fist to Ranulf’s jaw—but Balthazar saw that I was injured and shouted, “Bianca, stay back! You’re bleeding!”

What was that supposed to mean? Surely vampires didn’t drink wraiths’ blood, so there was no danger of my driving Lucas further into a killing frenzy. At that moment, I wasn’t sure he could become more frenzied than he already was. Younger and weaker he might be, but desperation goaded him on, made him fierce. It was possible he might defeat Ranulf and Balthazar both. I couldn’t bear to see that, but I didn’t think I could stand the alternative either. My fear sharpened—and became anger.

Enough of this.

I pushed myself toward them, blood on my fingertips, and flung out my hand as I cried, “Stop!”

Droplets of silvery blood spattered through the air as all three of the guys shrank back.

At my side, Balthazar whispered, “Don’t get into this.”

Ignoring him, I stepped directly in front of Lucas. He had backed against the wall, glancing around wildly as though he could think of nothing but escape—or, perhaps, in search of living prey. Death had sharpened his features, making him both more beautiful and infinitely frightening. The only features that remained the same were his eyes.

So I focused only on his eyes. “Lucas, it’s me. It’s Bianca.”

He said nothing, just stared at me, utterly motionless. I realized he wasn’t breathing—most vampires did just as force of habit, but it seemed that death had claimed him entirely. No way was I going to let that happen.

“Lucas,” I repeated. “I know you can hear me. The guy I love is still in there. Come back to me.” Once again, I longed for the release of tears. “Death couldn’t keep me from you. And it can’t keep you from me, not if you don’t let it.”

Lucas didn’t speak, but some of the tension left his body, relaxing his hands and his shoulders. He still looked edgy, almost crazed, but some semblance of control had returned to him.

What could I do? Was there anything I could say that would get through to him? Something he would remember . . .

When Lucas had first learned that I was born to two vampires, he had to overcome his revulsion of the undead in order to hold true to his love for me. If he could remember what it had meant for him to accept me for what I was, maybe he could begin to face what he, too, had become.

Haltingly, I spoke his words as they came back to me: “Even though you’re a vampire—it doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t change how I feel about you.”

Lucas blinked, and for the first time since he had risen from the dead, his eyes seemed to fully focus. I realized that his fangs had retracted, leaving only the unearthly pallor and beauty of the vampire. In every other way, he looked human. He looked like himself.

He whispered, “Bianca?”

“It’s me. Oh, Lucas, it’s me.”

Lucas clutched me to him in an impossibly tight embrace, and I wrapped my arms around his shoulders. I felt hot tears against my shoulder; I wished I could cry, too. Our legs gave out at the same time, and we sank to the floor together.

I glanced over my shoulder to tell Balthazar and Ranulf to leave us, but they were already halfway out the door.

Once we were alone, I ran my hands through Lucas’s hair, stroked his back, and kissed his cheek. “You made it back,” I said. “We’re together. We’ll be okay.”

“I never thought I’d see you again. I thought you were dead.”

“I am. We both are.”

“Then how—how is this real?”

“I’ve become a wraith. Only, wraiths like me who were born to it, born to two vampires—we have powers the others don’t. I can have a body if I want, at least for a while. If I’d realized before . . . if I could have told you . . . this would never have had to happen.”

“Don’t say it.” His voice was strangled.

We rested our foreheads against each other, and the contact should have been comforting, but we were both so cold.

“My body feels heavy. Wrong. Dead.” Lucas’s hands tightened on my shoulders. “And yet there’s this hunger making me wild. Driving me insane. You’re back in my arms—I’d lost you forever, and here you are—but the only thing I can think about, the only thing I want—” He couldn’t finish; he didn’t have to. I knew all he wanted was blood.

“It will get better.” My parents had always told me so, and weren’t most of the vampires of Evernight proof of that?

Lucas didn’t seem to believe me, but he said, dutifully, “Gotta hang on.”

“Right.”

For a few moments, we simply held each other. The faded film-star faces on the tattered movie posters around us seemed to be watching us, an audience of dark, soulless eyes. When I leaned against Lucas’s shoulder, I tried to breathe in the familiar scent of his skin, but that was gone. Either his scent had been lost when he died, or I no longer had a sense of smell like I had before, or both. So many things had been taken from us.

But not each other, I reminded myself. We have to remember that.

First I had to get him out of the place where he had been murdered. We needed to go someplace better, more familiar. Vic’s house, I decided. We’d hidden out there for the past month or so this summer, while Vic’s family vacationed in Italy. Our little makeshift apartment in the wine cellar wouldn’t be that much more comforting—it was where I had died just the day before— but maybe we could remain there until we figured out what to do.

“Come on.” I took one of his hands in mine. The coral bracelet he’d given me for my last birthday jangled at my wrist. “They’re waiting for us outside.”

“Who’s waiting for us?” Lucas couldn’t seem to focus; it was like he was listening to a cell phone at the same time he was trying to listen to me. Not in a rude way; he just couldn’t help it, which was worse.

“Balthazar—and Vic and Ranulf, too. They came back from Italy after you e-mailed them. Remember?”

Lucas nodded. His hand tightened around mine, so hard it nearly hurt. Lucas didn’t seem to have any way to judge his new strength—and this despite the fact that he already had enhanced power from having been bitten. He worked his jaw, as if practicing biting down, over and over.

If he needed me to be the steady one, I would be. Of course I was better at being dead, I decided; I’d had a whole day’s practice. It had taken me a few hours to get the hang of being noncorporeal. So no wonder it would take him a while to deal with becoming a vampire.

We left the projection room and walked out through the abandoned theater. The scene in the lobby wasn’t pretty: Beheaded vampires lay crumpled on the floor, and I tried not to look at any of the abandoned heads. Vampires didn’t bleed much after death—no heartbeat to pump out the blood—but I noticed Lucas looking hungrily at the few droplets on the floor.

“I know you’re hungry,” I said, trying to comfort him.

“You don’t know. You can’t know. There’s nothing like this.” Lucas’s grimace revealed his fangs. Just the sight of blood had brought them out again. When I had been alive, part vampire, I had experienced the desperate yearning for blood, but I suspected Lucas was right: The craving he felt now had intensified beyond anything I’d ever known.

We walked outside to see Balthazar, alone, leaning on his car in the otherwise empty parking lot. His shadow stretched out, long and broad, in the beam of the nearby streetlamp. Balthazar spoke to me first. “Vic was hanging around out front. The only way Ranulf could get him to leave was to go along.”

“Okay,” I said as we reached him. “Let’s just get out of here. I never want to see this place again.”

Balthazar didn’t move; he and Lucas just stared at each other. For years, they’d loathed one another; only in the aftermath of my death had they been able to work together. Now, though, what I saw between them was total understanding.

“I’m sorry.” Lucas’s voice was rough. “Some of the stuff I said to you—about choices, being a vampire, and everything like that—Jesus. I get it now.”

“I wish you didn’t. I wish you’d never had to understand.” Balthazar closed his eyes for a second, maybe remembering his own transformation centuries ago. “Come on. We’ll get you something to drink.”

With a pang, I realized that Lucas and Balthazar understood each other now on a level that I would never fully grasp. For some reason, it felt like a loss. Or maybe in that moment, with Lucas seemingly so far from me in spirit, everything felt like a loss.

Balthazar drove us back toward the nicer neighborhood in Philadelphia where Vic lived. Lucas and I sat together in the backseat, his hand gripping mine tightly, his gaze focused in the distance beyond the windshield. Sometimes he frowned and closed his eyes like a person in the throes of a migraine; his feet moved restlessly against the floorboards, as though he were pushing back, or attempting to push through. He didn’t want to be here, to be contained—everything around him now was just one more thing between him and the blood he needed. I knew better than to try to get him to talk. After he’d had something to drink, then he would be okay. He had to be.

Balthazar broke the wretched silence by turning on the radio, classic jazz, the kind of thing my dad used to listen to around the house. As Billie Holiday crooned about foolish things, I wondered what my parents would say now, and whether there was any advice they could have given us. We’d parted badly before I ran off with Lucas at the beginning of the summer; at the moment, I missed them so much it hurt. What would they think of everything that had happened in the past couple of days?

I glanced at Lucas—the pale, cool stillness of his flesh, the way that death had brightened his eyes and carved out his cheek-bones—and thought bleakly, Well, they always wanted me to end up with a nice vampire boy.

The car turned onto the road where Vic lived, an upscale area with broad yards separating the palatial homes. As every house had a four-car garage, we rarely saw other cars out on the street, but there were three right in front of Vic’s house. Not the usual kinds of Mercedes or Jaguars that drove around here either—these were beat-up trucks and station wagons. Something about this began to feel familiar.

Then I realized nearly a dozen people were standing in the street and in Vic’s yard. When I glimpsed a stake in one man’s hands, I realized at least that some of them were armed.

“Is this Charity’s tribe?” Balthazar said. “Is she still after Lucas?”

I remembered the e-mails Lucas had sent out just before my death, when he’d been so desperate that he’d asked anyone and everyone for help, even people we had every reason to expect to turn against us. His messages had been answered.

“It’s not Charity,” I whispered. “It’s Black Cross.”

Chapter Two

“BLACK CROSS,” BALTHAZAR REPEATED. IF I HADN’T been there when Black Cross captured Balthazar—and tortured him—I might have thought he was being very calm about the fact that a band of vampire hunters had showed up. Instead, I could see the hints of fear and anger submerged in his gaze. His fists tightened around the steering wheel. “We should get out of here.”

“We can’t just leave Vic and Ranulf!” I said.

Then Lucas leaned forward and whispered, “Mom?”

I saw her, too: Kate, a Black Cross cell leader and Lucas’s mother. Her honey gold hair, so like her son’s, shone beneath the streetlamp’s light; shadows etched the firm muscles of her arms and the stake she wore at her belt. When Black Cross had learned of my true nature and cast us out of their cell, they’d kept her away. I’d always believed this was because of Kate’s fierce love for her son, which was often hidden beneath her discipline and duty but was undeniable. Was it strong enough to sustain them now?

“It’s okay,” I said to Balthazar. “She brought some friends and came here to help Lucas, not to hunt. See?” Pointing, I showed him where another Black Cross hunter was at the front door, apparently asking Vic a lot of questions while Vic did a bad job of looking casual.

“These ‘friends’ are some of the hunters who captured me and discovered you, Bianca,” Balthazar said. “They might have come here to help, but once they see us, all bets are off.”

“I need to talk to her,” Lucas said. “If you guys want to go, go.”

I wasn’t afraid for myself; these hunters knew little about the wraiths and would be unable to hurt me. That didn’t mean I wasn’t afraid. “Do you think Kate can protect you from them? And Balthazar?”

“She’ll hold off if I tell her to,” Lucas insisted. “And what about you?” Balthazar said. His hands only clutched the steering wheel harder. “Who’s going to hold you off?”

Lucas glared at him. “I won’t attack my own mother.”

“You think that now. Wait until you get out there and smell fresh blood. You’ll be able to feel her pulse, almost—like a magnet, drawing you in.” Balthazar knew too well what he was talking about; his first act after being turned into a vampire had been to murder his own sister. Also, the hunters had begun paying attention to our car, moving closer. Balthazar continued, “If we’re going, we need to go now.”

“We’re not going.” Lucas’s jaw was set, his stare resolute. “I can handle it. I’ve got to. And—come on, it’s my mom.”

As he slid out of the backseat, Balthazar glanced at me in the rearview mirror, like I was suddenly going to take his side versus Lucas’s and run away. If Lucas trusted himself, then I would trust Lucas. I simply stepped out behind him. Balthazar could get out of the car to back us up or not; I didn’t care.

“Lucas?” Kate said. She jogged toward him, a smile lighting her face for the brief moment before she saw me. In the distance, I could see the hunters walking toward us and away from Vic’s house, and Vic slumping against his doorjamb in relief.

“Mom.” Lucas remained still, as if frozen to the spot. His features tightened, and I could tell that he was staring at her throat. What Balthazar had said was true. He could feel her pulse—sense her blood.

Kate’s eyes narrowed as she came closer to us. “Thought you were supposed to be sick,” she said. Distrust and contempt laced her every word. “So sick you couldn’t move.”

“I was,” I said. “But—not now.” I couldn’t exactly claim to have gotten better.

“No more reason for Lucas to stick around, then.” Kate held out her hand to her son. “You can come back. It’s okay. The people who would hold it against you—we don’t need them. All you have to do is realize you made a mistake.”

Lucas didn’t take her hand. “I didn’t make a mistake.” His voice was thin, his words forced. His eyes glittered brightly in the dim light, and I could sense the waves of killing madness washing over him. Yet he stood his ground. “I love Bianca. I made my choice. But . . . I’m glad you came.”

Movement in the farther distance caught my attention. My eyes widened when I recognized two of the hunters in this small group, standing at the far side of Vic’s lawn—a heavyset, dark-skinned woman with her hair in thick braids, and another with golden skin and hair sheared crazily short against her scalp: Dana and Raquel. Dana had been Lucas’s best friend since they were little kids, and when my true nature had been revealed, she was the one who had helped us escape. Raquel had been my best friend and junior-year roommate at Evernight Academy, and the victim of a terrible wraith haunting ever since childhood. She had run away with Lucas and me, joining us when we’d become part of Black Cross.

Raquel was also the one who had turned me in to Black Cross when she’d realized I was the child of vampires.

They loved each other. Would Raquel have come around to Dana’s way of thinking and stand with us now? Or would Dana side with Raquel instead of the old friend who had abandoned her?

I turned away from them, focusing entirely on Lucas. Kate stood only a couple of feet away from him. Although she radiated disapproval, I could tell that it was only me she loathed; for her son, she had an uncertain smile. “Lucas, think about this,” she said. “We’re not only your cell. We’re your family. Because family’s not just about blood—it’s about what you share, what you believe.”

Lucas winced when she said blood, but Kate didn’t seem to notice. She was too angry at me, and too worried about him.

“Bianca can’t have told you what she was at first,” Kate said. “She lied to you.”

Although Lucas and I had gotten past the fact that we’d kept so many secrets from each other at the start, the memory of our old mistakes stung.

Kate continued, “Are you going to forget your duty, forget everything else you learned, and throw away your whole life chasing after some girl who lied to you? I think you’re smarter than that.”

He had thrown his life away, literally dying in an attempt to avenge me. The reminder of what he’d lost to be by my side scalded me with shame. Lucas didn’t notice—he shook with the need to restrain himself. His need for blood had become so overpowering that I could tell he might break.

“I need to talk to you.” Lucas’s voice sounded ragged with strain. “Please, Mom, can the two of us just . . . talk for a while? I have a lot to tell you. A lot of stuff I need to make sense of.”

Concern made Kate stop trying to convert him and start listening. “Lucas, are you okay? You look pale, and you’ve obviously been in a fight—”

“I’m—” His throat choked off the word fine. “We have to talk. That’s it. I need you to come through for me on this.” His eyes met hers. “I really need you to do that.”

Kate’s expression softened. The mother had won out over the fighter. “Okay.”

She took another step toward him and held out her arms. Lucas paused only a moment before embracing her tightly. I saw him grimace as he took in the scent of her blood—but he didn’t break.

He’s done it, I thought with delight. Lucas can control the blood hunger.

Then Kate’s arms tensed, and her eyes went wide. I realized that, for the first time, she saw that the blood staining his T-shirt was his own—and she saw the wound at his neck. The wound obviously caused by a vampire’s bite.

If I had noticed how cold Lucas felt to the touch, then his mother could, too.

Kate jerked away from him, leaving Lucas to stumble back in confusion. Her hand went to her stake. “What did Bianca do to you?”

Lucas took a step toward her, eyes pleading. “It wasn’t Bianca. Mom, just listen.”

“Ask the others to leave,” I said. Maybe Kate had a chance to accept her son as whatever he had become, but I didn’t want to take my chances on the rest of the Black Cross hunters. “Let Lucas explain.”

“You’ve been killed.” Kate’s voice was almost a sob. “You’re a vampire.”

There was a ripple of gasps and whispered curses from the other hunters. Dana hid her face against Raquel’s arm for a moment. I glanced behind us at Balthazar, who remained behind the wheel with the car’s motor idling.

Lucas kept his eyes locked with his mother’s. “Yes. I am. It’s not like they told us, Mom; I’m different but I’m still me. At least, I think I’m still me. This is . . . weird and scary, and I need to find out if there’s any way for me to be the person I was before. Please help me do that.”

Kate straightened. She never looked away from him, her gaze as cool and hard as iron. “You’re the shell of what my son used to be. I loved him more than a monster like you can ever know—”

“Mom, no,” Lucas whispered.

She acted like she hadn’t heard. “And you can taunt me with his voice and his face only as long as I let you.” Though her voice trembled, Kate pulled out her stake, her grip sure. “All I can do for Lucas now is give him a decent burial. And that means ending you.”

“Lucas!” I grabbed his arm to pull him toward the car, but he twisted away from me, as if unable to believe that his mother could do this to him. Then she swung at him so fast that he stumbled as he dodged the blow.

Most of the other hunters began running toward us. Ranulf burst from Vic’s doorway, ax in hand, courageously jumping into the fray despite the likelihood that he’d be staked and beheaded. None of that scared me as much as what was happening to Lucas.

Wham! Kate’s fist hit his jaw, and his expression went blank.

Wham! Lucas blocked one of her blows, and he narrowed his eyes, baring his teeth in rage.

Wham! This time he hit her. His fangs extended. I knew then that the threat had pushed him over the edge. The blood madness gripped Lucas now. He was fighting to kill.

I pulled at the clasp of my coral bracelet, the one Lucas had given me for my birthday—and my tether to corporeal existence. When it fell onto Vic’s lawn, I felt myself become lighter, insubstantial.

One of the hunters came at me, swinging a stake. I simply turned to vapor, so that his hand passed right through me—a weird sensation, sort of like a stomach cramp. The hunter screamed, which would have been hilarious any other time.

Zooming above the fray, I tried to take in the scene. Ranulf single-handedly held off the three hunters closest to Vic’s house. Vic had run out onto the lawn, not to fight but apparently to yell at Raquel, which at least was keeping her out of the battle. Dana, too—she had remained by Raquel’s side, maybe to defend her, maybe because she couldn’t attack her best friend even if he’d become a vampire. Lucas and his mother stood in the heart of it, locked in combat. He answered every punch she landed and clawed at her every chance he got, while throwing off the two hunters trying to come to her aid. If he got the upper hand, I knew he would kill Kate. And if he did that, if he drank his own mother’s blood, there was no way Lucas would ever be able to forgive himself.

At first it looked like Balthazar was just going to sit in the car and watch, which infuriated me. Then the motor revved, and with the screech of burning rubber, Balthazar drove the car straight onto Vic’s lawn, making the hunters scatter. He didn’t hit anybody, but not for lack of trying.

I wanted to protect the people I could. Quickly I pulled myself together into a physical form on the ground, right by Raquel, Dana, and Vic. Though I remained half transparent, they were able to see me.

“What the hell?” Dana yelled, throwing her arms around Raquel like I was going to hurt her.

“Get out of here,” I said. “Dana, take Raquel and try to get the others to follow you. Please!”

“Do it.” Vic folded his arms. “You don’t know what kind of badass ghost mojo she’s capable of. Trust me, I’ve seen her in action. You don’t want to be around.”

“Ghost?” Raquel whispered. Her face went pale. “Bianca— you’re dead?”

“We’re leaving.” Dana dragged Raquel toward one of the trucks. Raquel’s eyes met mine for one tortured moment before she turned to follow.

“Um, Bianca?” Vic tried to tap my shoulder, but his hand went through. “Whoa. Okay, some of that badass ghost mojo wouldn’t be a bad idea right now.”

A couple of hunters ran toward us, but Balthazar tackled them, taking them both down with his outstretched arms. Ranulf held his own, but I wasn’t sure how much longer he could go. And two hunters already lay dazed on the ground near Lucas, who battled his mother in blind rage.

I did have ghostly powers that were useful in combat, but I’d only ever tried them on vampires. Would that kill a human? I wasn’t ready to do that, even if the humans in question seemed very ready to kill me.

“We don’t need powers,” I said quickly. “We need the police.”

“Police?”

“Vic, call 911! Tell them there’s a—like, a home invasion or an attempted robbery in progress, something!” Black Cross tried to steer clear of the law, because they wanted to stay off their radar. “When they hear the sirens, they’ll go.”

Vic took off for the house and his cell phone. I ran toward Lucas, not sure what I was going to do but desperate to keep him from either being killed or killing his mother.

Lucas’s wild-eyed gaze told me he was beyond reasoning with. So I cried, “Kate, don’t! You don’t want to do this!”

“Let me give my son some peace!” She never stopped circling her son; one of her eyes was already blackening from his fist. Lucas would never have done that to her, never, if anything of his spirit was in control.

I slipped between them—not like she could do anything to me, what with me being dead and everything. “You can’t kill him. You know you don’t want to.”

Her gaze went right through me, focusing only on the cloudy figure of her son behind my transparent form. “I can and I will.”

My desperation peaked. I looked at Kate, pleading with every part of my soul for her to stop and try to see that her son was still with her—to see him through my eyes—until it felt almost like my desperation had become a blade that could cut through her—

Then this bizarre tidal pull seized me, dragging me toward Kate in the blink of an eye. Before I could ask myself what was happening, I felt myself being drawn into her, absorbed by her. Everything went dark for an instant, and then when I could see again, I knew I was looking through Kate’s eyes. I could feel her body all around me, like a suit of armor, but one with warmth, breath, and a heartbeat.

Kate’s hand dropped the stake as her feet stumbled backward. The only thing I could think was, I’m possessing someone. I’ve possessed Kate. How did I do that? The sheer power of my desperation had acted almost like a battering ram, opening a portal into her very self. Could all wraiths do this? I had no idea. All that mattered was my ability to stop this fight.

Lucas charged at me, and I dodged him, but clumsily, because controlling Kate’s body was weird and unfamiliar, sort of like my first driving lesson. I shouted, “Everyone, let’s go!” Talking in Kate’s voice sounded odd, but I kept giving orders. “We’re getting out of here now!”

Then I felt an even stranger sensation—Kate’s spirit, struggling against me, trying to push me out. Could she do it? I decided to let her, if it was possible.

Instantly, I felt myself scattered and invisible, floating upward in a dreamlike haze. My reverie was broken when I heard Kate say, voice shaking with fear, “We have to leave.”

The hunters ran for their trucks and vans, responding either to her first order or her last. Lucas sprang after her, but Balthazar shoved him aside and took him down, keeping him back.

As their tail lights vanished down the road, Vic jogged out of his house, both hands in his sandy hair, like he was trying to hold his head together. “What, I just called the cops for nothing?”

“First be glad that Black Cross is gone,” Ranulf pointed out, brushing himself off and calm as ever.

“Well, the police are coming. So maybe get the car out of the yard.” Vic looked at the deep tire tracks in the grass and groaned. “There are not even words for how grounded I’m going to be. They’re gonna have to invent words for it. New words.”

I coalesced amid the guys. “Ranulf’s right, though. This could have been a lot worse.”

Lucas turned toward Vic. His eyes remained flat and blind, his fangs still extended. With horror I realized that Lucas hadn’t yet drunk blood—and the killing rage from the fight held him in its grasp.

He lunged at Vic. Ranulf managed to knock Vic out of the way, but Lucas tore at him with his whole strength, willing to shred Ranulf if that got him closer to the human, to the source of fresh blood.

Vic’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my God,” he said, standing in place out of shock instead of running for his life. “This isn’t happening.”

“Vic, run!” Balthazar said, pulling Lucas off Ranulf. Vic took a couple of shuffling steps, then finally accepted what was going on and ran like crazy toward his front door. Lucas elbowed Balthazar sharply, but Balthazar was able, with difficulty, to maintain his grip. He said to Ranulf, “Get him into the wine cellar. Keep him there until we can get him some blood. After I move the car, I’ll come help you.”

“Lucas?” I pleaded. “Lucas, can you hear me?”

It was like I didn’t exist. Lucas only wanted blood, and he didn’t care if he had to kill Vic to get it.

Ranulf dragged Lucas backward, struggling with him the whole way. All I could do was open the wine cellar door for them. In the distance, sirens blared, coming closer.

“Let me go!” Lucas raged, clawing Ranulf viciously in the side. Ranulf grimaced but held on. “Let me go!”

“You have to calm down,” I said. “Please, Lucas, get ahold of yourself.”

“He cannot—hear you—” Ranulf managed to say as he wrestled Lucas toward a corner. “I remember the madness.”

Lucas roared, a terrifyingly animal sound. Every muscle of his body was flexed in his desperate need to escape, to kill and drink blood. Ranulf could hold him off, because of his great age and power, but after that battle, Ranulf’s strength had to be taxed to the limit. Seeing Lucas like this, reduced to an insane shell of himself, here in the little makeshift apartment where we had loved each other so much, nearly destroyed me.

The sirens got louder. Lucas roared again and smashed Ranulf backward against the wall with such force that the wine bottles rattled and Ranulf lost his grip. He leaped toward the door, and I started after him—but Balthazar came through.

Thank God, I thought. Balthazar can stop him, I know he can!

But then I cried out in horror as Balthazar brandished a stake and swung it, hard, so that it slammed deep into Lucas’s chest.

Chapter Three

LUCAS COLLAPSED UPON THE FLOOR, A STAKE jutting out from his heart.

I fell to my knees by his side. “Balthazar, no! What are you doing?” Just as I grasped the stake to pull it out, Balthazar roughly towed me up to my feet, away from Lucas. I went vapory again, slipping out of his arms easily. “You can’t stop me from taking care of him.”

“Think,” Balthazar said. “We need him to remain quiet while the police are here, and make sure he doesn’t go after Vic. I can’t come up with any other way to make that happen. Can you?”

“There has to be some way better than staking him,” I insisted.

“He is essentially unharmed,” Ranulf said, shaking off the impact of Lucas’s last blows. “The stake through the heart only paralyzes; it does not kill. When the stake is removed, Lucas will be as he was, except for a scar.”

“I know—but—” The sight of him lying at my feet, crumpled and dead as he had been just a few hours ago, was too raw for me to bear.

Balthazar stepped closer. In the relative darkness of the wine cellar, his shadowy form seemed more imposing than usual, which made the contrast with his quiet voice especially striking. “Lucas staked me once to save me. I’m returning the favor.”

“You probably enjoyed it.” I turned away from him then, but already I’d realized we couldn’t unstake Lucas yet. As he was, he was uncontrollable.

“Until we have fresh blood for him to drink, leaving him unconscious is a kindness,” Balthazar said. Just when I might have softened toward him, he had to add, “When you calm down enough to act like an adult, you’ll see that.”

“Please do not force me to listen to romantic bickering,” Ranulf said.

Ranulf’s request was simple enough, but it was an uncomfortable reminder of everything that had happened between Balthazar and me—how much more he had wanted, and what I had been unable to give. Although I didn’t think jealousy drove Balthazar’s actions, I wondered if it allowed him to gain some satisfaction by staking Lucas.

Balthazar had insisted on going after Charity the day after my death, and he had brought Lucas along, knowing that Lucas was too grief-stricken to truly fight. Lucas, near suicidal, had plunged in unprepared. The aftermath of Balthazar’s mistake would be on Lucas forever. That outweighed everything that had happened between us before, good or bad.

This is what you get for hanging out with the wrong kind of dead people, a sardonic voice said.

That would be Maxie, the house ghost. The others couldn’t hear her. She’d been connected to Vic throughout his childhood but had never appeared to him or any other living creature— except me. Anticipating my transformation into a wraith, she’d begun appearing to me back when I was a student at Evernight Academy; now that I’d died, she wanted me to abandon the mortal world and join her in other, more mystical realms. The whole idea terrified me, and I’d never been less in the mood to talk to her about it.

An awkward silence filled the room. A dead body on the floor made casual conversation pretty much impossible. Balthazar studied the wine racks for a few minutes, in what I thought was just a distraction, until he pulled a bottle out. “Argentinean Malbec. Nice.”

“You’re going to sit here and drink wine?” I protested.

“We’ve got to sit here and do something.” Balthazar looked around for a corkscrew, failed to find one, and then simply smashed the neck of the bottle against the tiny sink. Spatters of red fell onto the floor. “It’s not a particularly expensive bottle. We can replace it.”

“That’s not the problem,” I said.

“What is the problem, Bianca?” He, too, had become frustrated. “Are you freaking out because I look underage? My face might be nineteen, but I’m legal plus four hundred years or so.”

He knew that wasn’t what I meant either. Before I could snap at him, Ranulf groaned. “Still there is bickering.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Truce.” I was too tired for any of this.

Although Balthazar looked like he might keep it up, he finally let it go. From his pocket he withdrew my bracelet. “Picked this up off the lawn,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said flatly. But I hastened to clasp it around my wrist again. Since my death a couple of days ago, I’d learned that only a handful of things I’d bonded to strongly in life had the ability to empower me to be fully corporeal again—this coral bracelet, and a jet brooch in Lucas’s pocket. Both of them were made out of material that had once been alive; it was something we had in common. As the bracelet enhanced my power, I felt gravity settle around me, and I no longer had to work at retaining a regular form.

Balthazar sighed heavily, grabbed two glasses from the rack beside the sink, and poured for himself and Ranulf. After a moment, he said, “Can you drink wine anymore? Drink anything?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t seem to need food or water.” The mere thought of chewing was faintly disgusting to me now, I realized—one more difference between me and the living world.

There are better things than eating and drinking, Maxie said. Increasingly her presence could be felt, a sort of cool spot right next to me, but Balthazar and Ranulf remained oblivious. Aren’t you curious about what they are?

I ignored her. I had eyes only for Lucas, so pale and broken upon the floor. A thin circle of bloodstains ringed the stake, no more: evidence that his heart had stopped beating forever. The strong features that had always captivated me—his firm jaw, his high cheekbones—were more sculpted now, his handsomeness as compelling as it was unnatural.

The makeshift apartment in the wine cellar was where we had lived for the final weeks of our lives, virtually the only time we’d ever had to just be together without rules to keep us apart. We’d tried to make spaghetti on the hot plate, watched old movies on the DVD player, and slept together in the bed. Sometimes our situation had seemed so desperate, but I realized now that it was the greatest joy we’d ever shared. Maybe the greatest we ever would share.

We’re together, I reminded myself. You have to believe that as long as that’s true, we can make it. That belief had never been more important, but it had never felt so fragile.

I heard car doors slamming; Vic had apparently managed to get rid of the police. Ranulf and Balthazar lifted glasses to each other, or to Vic. Within a few seconds, there was a rapping on the door, and Balthazar opened it to let Vic in.

“Those guys did not want to believe my home invasion story,” he said. Vic remained on the doorstop instead of coming in. “Apparently my neighbors called them even before I did and said it was a wild party, though how that looked like a party, I don’t know. They made me take a Breathalyzer—oh, man.” Vic saw Lucas on the floor. “What did you guys do?”

“The staking will not harm him,” Ranulf explained. “When it is removed, Lucas will revive. Do you require some wine?”

Vic shook his head. He just stood there in his T-shirt and jeans, awkward and miserable, staring down at Lucas. “He won’t . . . he can’t . . .”

“He won’t attack you,” Balthazar said. “For the time being, Lucas can’t move. And we won’t unstake him until we can get him fed.”

Vic crammed his hands in his pockets, and although he had to know Balthazar was telling the truth, he couldn’t bring himself to walk any closer.

I realized that, no matter how upsetting this was for me, it had to be a hundred times worse for Vic. He was the only human in the room, and despite growing up in a haunted house and attending Evernight Academy, Vic’s experience of the supernatural was fairly benign—or it had been, before tonight, when one of his best friends had tried to kill him.

Balthazar took a pen and a scrap of paper from his pocket and began jotting something down. “Vic, if you can stay awake a while longer, you should head to this address,” he said. “It’s a butcher’s in town. They open within the hour. These guys have a side business in blood. You show up with cash, and they don’t ask any questions about why you need it.”

“Don’t think I could sleep right now,” Vic said. “I’m not one hundred percent sure I’m ever sleeping again.” Though he was trying to joke, his voice broke on the last words.

I went to him in the doorway and embraced him tightly. “Thank you,” I whispered. “You’ve done so much for us, and we’ve done nothing for you.”

“Don’t say that.” Vic’s hands patted my back. “You’re my friends. Nothing else to it.”

How could we begin to repay Vic everything we owed him? Not just money—though we owed him that, too—but his loyalty and his courage? I didn’t know if I had it in me. The rest of us had powers, but Vic might have been the strongest one.

When we pulled apart, Vic gave me an uneven smile. “All my best friends are dead people. Someday I’ve got to figure out how that happened.” Despite everything, I laughed a little.

“Come, Vic,” Ranulf said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I, too, would like to purchase a few pints. And perhaps we can repair some of the damage to the grasses in front of your home later today.”

Vic shook his head as they started out the door. “Doubtful. Unless you spent all your time in ye olden Viking days doing landscaping.”

The door shut behind them, leaving me and Balthazar basically alone. It was hard to know what to say; the silence between us was terrible. “The blood—that’s going to snap Lucas out of it,” I said. “Right?”

“That’s not how being a vampire works. You should know that.”

“Can you please stop lecturing me?”

“You’re one to talk.”

This situation was only going to get worse. Balthazar and I definitely needed some space between us for a while. I unfastened my bracelet and again released my tie to the physical world. “Watch Lucas,” I said as I began to fade out.

“He’s not going anywhere.” Balthazar sat down and took a deep swallow of his wine.

The cellar became dimmer in my vision, until it faded into a blue-gray fog. As the mists closed around me, I concentrated on my memories of Maxie’s face and the first place we’d talked after my death, the attic of Vic’s home. As I imagined it—the old Persian carpet, the dressmaker’s dummy, the bric-a-brac lying around—the place took shape around me. So did Maxie. She stood there in the long, billowy nightgown she’d died in back during the 1920s, just as I wore the white camisole and cloud-printed pajama pants I’d had on at the end.

“Sorry about your boyfriend,” she said, and for pretty much the first time since we’d begun speaking, she truly did sound sorry. Maxie’s usual hard demeanor was softer now. “It’s lousy that you had to lose him like that.”

“I haven’t lost him. We’ll find a way.”

Maxie cocked an eyebrow, her saucy sense of humor already returning. “I already told you. Vampires and wraiths? Not a good mix. A really, really bad mix. We’re poison to them, and they’re no friends to us.”

“I love Lucas. Our deaths don’t change that.”

“Death changes everything. Haven’t you learned that much by now?”

“It didn’t change you haranguing me nonstop,” I snapped.

Maxie ducked her head, her dark blond hair tumbling around her face. If she’d had blood flow, I thought, she might have blushed. “Sorry. You’ve had a rough couple of days. I don’t mean to— I’m just trying to tell you how things are.”

A rough couple of days. I’d died, found out I was a ghost, seen Lucas get cut down and turned into a vampire, and fought off a Black Cross attack. Yeah, that counted as a rough couple of days.

“You used to play with Vic in this room, when he was a little kid.” I glanced at the place he’d shown me, where he used to sit and read his storybooks to her. “You didn’t separate yourself from the world after you died.”

“But I did. For the better part of a century, I just . . . I was stuck between here and there, and I didn’t quite know what was going on. Sometimes I’d stab into people’s dreams and turn them to nightmares, just to do it. Just to prove that I could affect the world around me.”

I’d heard of wraiths doing worse things, maybe for similar reasons.

Maxie sat on the windowsill, her long white nightgown seeming to glow as the moonlight filtered through the billowing sleeves. “As you can probably imagine, people usually didn’t stay in this house long. It was like a game for me, seeing how fast I could scare them out. But then the Woodsons took the place, and Vic was so tiny, just a couple of years old. When I showed myself to him, he wasn’t scared. That was the first time in so long that I remembered what it was like to—to be accepted. To care about someone.”

“So you understand,” I said. “You see why I can’t give up on the world.”

“Vic’s human. He’s alive. He anchors me to life and lets me experience it through him, just a bit. I don’t think Lucas can do that for you, not anymore.”

“He does. He can. I know it.” But I didn’t know any such thing. There was so much about being a wraith that I didn’t understand yet.

“You need to talk to Christopher,” she said encouragingly. “He’ll make you understand.”

I remembered Christopher. He had appeared to me, a mysterious and foreboding figure, at Evernight; he had attacked me there with intent to kill, so that my transformation into a wraith would be guaranteed. Yet when he had appeared to me and Lucas this summer, he had rescued us from Charity.

Was he benevolent or evil? Did the actions of wraiths even fit into any kind of morality I understood? The only thing I knew for sure was that Christopher had power and influence among the wraiths. Now that I had become one, our paths were certain to cross again.

Thinking about this made me nervous. I managed to ask, “He’s sort of the . . . wraith in charge, right?”

“Nobody’s ‘in charge.’ But plenty of us listen to Christopher. He has a lot of power, a lot of wisdom.”

“How did he get so powerful? Is it because he’s especially old?” That was how it worked for vampires. “Or is he, well, like me?” I’d already figured out that my status—as a child born of two vampires, and therefore able to die a natural death and yet become a ghost—gave me abilities most ghosts could never claim.

“Neither,” Maxie said. “He wasn’t born to be a wraith, like you were. Christopher learned everything on his own. He has this amazing inner strength. You’re going to like him, Bianca. Why don’t you come with me now?”

I couldn’t do it. Christopher might have amazing strength he’d used to save me—but he had also attacked me. The world of the wraiths remained foreign and frightening; I had no idea how my powers related to the cold, revenge-driven creatures I’d encountered at Evernight Academy. Maybe it was crazy to still be frightened of ghosts after I’d become one myself, but the thought of joining them forever scared me deeply. More than that: going into that world felt like giving up on life.

“I can’t,” I whispered. Maxie’s face fell, but she didn’t argue.

I pulled away from the room, away from her, and vanished again into the bluish fog that was my mind’s way of making sense of pure nothingness. Lucas filled my thoughts, and I willed myself back to his side.

When I reappeared in the wine cellar, I immediately got the sense that more time had passed for Balthazar than it had for me; he’d finished his glass of wine and was across the room, lying on our bed.

Lucas lay exactly as he had fallen. The sight of him as a corpse hit me anew, and it took my whole strength not to fade out again so I wouldn’t have to bear the loss for a while. He deserved better than that. No matter how difficult it was to endure, I would remain by his side.

Balthazar realized I was there with a start, but he said nothing.

I didn’t want to argue with him anymore; I was too sad for that, too tired. Instead I asked, “Isn’t there anything we can do for him?”

“No.” Balthazar sat up. His curly hair was mussed, and I realized he’d been asleep. No doubt he was exhausted; it hadn’t exactly been an awesome couple of days for him, either. “The urge to kill—it’s powerful, Bianca. It can be overwhelming. The vampires you’ve known have nearly all been the ones who mastered that urge, but they’re a minority.”

“You mean, most of them end up like—like Charity.”

He closed his eyes briefly at the mention of his younger sister’s name. “No. Charity and her kind are special cases. Individuals with the strength to keep going, but who have lost touch with what it meant to be human. They’re the most dangerous. And, fortunately, the most rare.”

“Then what happens to the others?”

Balthazar rubbed his temple. If vampires could get headaches, I’d think he had one. “They self-destruct,” he said quietly. “They get taken out by Black Cross, or by humans who’ve seen just enough horror movies to get the idea. Or they end themselves. Set a fire and walk into it. They’d rather burn than endure the killing rage any longer.”

I wanted to say that there was no way Lucas would ever do that, but I couldn’t. No, Black Cross wouldn’t be able to take him down easily. But hating his vampire nature as he did, already burdened with the fact that he’d tried to kill both his mother and one of his best friends—it was entirely possible that Lucas could end his existence. He’d see it as the right thing to do, the only way to keep people safe.

“The hunger is stronger for some of us than it is for others,” Balthazar continued. “As badly as I crave blood sometimes . . . it’s nothing compared to what some other vampires endure. The ones who self-destruct are always the ones with the greatest hunger. It makes them crazy, turns their minds inside out.”

Our eyes met, as if he was asking me whether he had to go on. But I knew I needed him to say what came next.

Balthazar, understanding, said, “It looks like Lucas is one of the hungry ones.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do for him?” I said. “Any way to make this easier?”

Slowly Balthazar rose from the bed and walked toward me, his expression uncertain. “I don’t think we can make it easier, exactly, but there’s a place where we can keep him away from most humans, and from Black Cross, too. Where Lucas might be able to learn how to handle what he’s become.”

I brightened until I realized what Balthazar meant. Or did I? Surely he couldn’t be thinking about that. “Where?”

Balthazar confirmed my worst suspicions by saying, “We have to take Lucas back to Evernight.”

Chapter Four

“TAKE LUCAS TO EVERNIGHT?” I REPEATED. “HAVE you gone insane? Balthazar, think about it! Lucas was Black Cross. He spied on Evernight for them. Mrs. Bethany hates him—everybody there hates him. They’ll kill him on sight.”

“They won’t. They can’t,” Balthazar insisted. “Any vampire can come to Evernight at any time and ask for sanctuary. No matter who it is or what they’ve done, Mrs. Bethany has to take them in.”

“But that’s Mrs. Bethany’s rule, isn’t it? She can break it any time she wants.”

Balthazar’s mouth twisted, the closest he could come to a smile on a day as dark as this one. “Mrs. Bethany doesn’t break rules. You should know that. Remember, she let Charity in.”

True, and Mrs. Bethany and Charity hated each other fervently. I wasn’t convinced, though. Lucas had been a vampire hunter; surely that was worse than being any kind of vampire, no matter how dangerous.

Some of my reluctance was more selfish. Going back to Evernight Academy would mean returning to my parents. On one hand, I wanted to see them again so badly it hurt; on the other, I knew that they’d always feared and rejected wraiths. If they rejected me—as Kate had Lucas—I didn’t think I could bear it.

I heard footsteps on the concrete steps outside and went to the door to let in Vic and Ranulf, who had a large sack full of what I suspected were pints of cow’s blood. Vic did come in this time, but he didn’t move more than a couple steps past the door. When he caught me looking, Vic handed over the bag, then fished out a single bottle of Mountain Dew. “I figure I should probably hang in the backyard for a while,” he said, his eyes focused nervously on the floor where Lucas lay. “Until you guys chill Lucas out.”

“Good idea.” I took the shopping bag to the folding table. “Thanks again, Vic.”

“Just give me another day or so before we get attacked again. That’s thanks enough.”

Balthazar and Ranulf each took a pint from the sack, each one in a little plastic container like the kind they use to serve soup to go at a deli. They both opened them up and started drinking, while Lucas still lay on the floor. At first I thought they were being selfish, but I soon realized what they were doing: regaining their strength. If Lucas awoke as savage as he’d been when Balthazar staked him, they’d need it.

I took a couple of pints and put them in the microwave. Blood always tasted better at human body temperature. When they were ready, I glanced over at my friends. Ranulf was finishing, tipping up his cup to get the last drops; Balthazar’s lips were tinted dark red. Drinking blood had been so delicious. I realized that I missed it, maybe more than anything else about being alive.

The guys were prepared. I knelt at Lucas’s side, putting the pints within reach. Slowly I wrapped my hand around the protruding handle of the stake. Splinters jabbed into my palm, and I imagined the pain Lucas must have felt in the seconds before he passed out.

“On the count of three,” I said. “One . . . two—”

I tugged the stake out. It made a wet, disgusting sound. Lucas writhed on the floor, and his eyes opened wide. He inhaled, deliberately sniffing the air. I knew he’d caught the scent of blood.

“Drink,” I whispered. “Drink.”

Lucas’s hand shot out to clutch one of the containers. In an instant he was gulping down the blood, thick swallows that made his Adam’s apple bob in his extended throat. Within seconds, he emptied the first container, dropped it on the floor, and lunged for the second one. That one he drained even faster. I watched him, fascinated.

When that one was done, Lucas looked around wildly, and Ranulf threw him another container from the bag. Though I hadn’t warmed that one, he drank it just as quickly. As it fell to clatter on the floor, he didn’t go after one more—but he ran his tongue around his mouth, catching stray drops, then lifted his bloodstained fingers to his mouth to suck every last bit of it.

“Is that better?” I asked.

“Bianca.” Lucas turned to me, body remaining tense, but his expression no longer looked like that of an animal—it was his own. “That wasn’t some hallucination. You’re really here.”

“Really here. How do you feel?”

Instead of answering, Lucas pulled me roughly into his arms. The embrace was too hard, but it was human emotion, and for that I was grateful. His hands combed through my hair, which must have felt more or less real to him. I was very present in that moment.

I repeated, “How do you feel?”

“Better.” His words came haltingly. “Before, all I could think about was—no, I couldn’t think. I was just this hungry . . . thing.”

“You’re okay now.”

“As long as you’re with me.” His voice was tight, and I realized that he remained troubled. The blood hunger wasn’t his only problem. He shifted away from me, hanging on tightly to my hand, to look up at Balthazar and Ranulf. “I didn’t dream you two either.”

“Welcome to death,” Ranulf said cheerily. “It is not so bad once you get what is called the ‘hang of it.’ ”

“Thanks, buddy.” Lucas simply nodded at Balthazar; apparently he remembered the conversation they’d had. But then he froze, and his face twisted like he was about to be sick. I wondered if he’d drunk the blood too fast until he whispered, “Mom. Vic. I went after— I wanted—”

“Everybody’s fine. You didn’t hurt anyone.” I closed my fingers around his.

“I could have. I wanted to.” There was something in Lucas’s eyes that made me wonder if, instead of saying wanted, he’d nearly said want. “Mom’s never going to speak to me again.”

Balthazar folded his arms. “Do you really want to talk to her again, after the way she turned on you?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I said. As bitterly as my parents and I had parted, I wanted to see them again every single day. When my eyes met Lucas’s, I could see he felt the same way. He understood Kate’s revulsion and distrust of his new nature; he shared them.

Ranulf stepped forward, helpful as ever. “Vic bears you no ill will. He is outside drinking the Dew of the Mountain and will be glad to see you yourself again.”

Lucas shook his head. “He can’t want to hang out with me after I went for his throat.”

“I believe that he is somewhat . . . overwhelmed by the day’s events, but he will not abandon you,” Ranulf said.

“None of us will.” I wanted to embrace him again, but Lucas remained distant, focused inward. When I glanced at Balthazar, he shook his head slightly, a warning for me not to push. The control Lucas had gained was temporary, and we all knew it.

“Can you guys give us a few minutes?” Lucas said, running one hand through his dark gold hair, which was even more mussed than Balthazar’s. “I’m glad to see you and everything, but Bianca and I have to talk.”

“Sure.” Balthazar nudged Ranulf. “Come on, we’ll help Vic with the home repair.”

After the door closed behind them, Lucas and I looked at each other, and the sadness of it struck me so hard it almost hurt. I found myself remembering a time a few years ago, when I’d first learned he was Black Cross. Once he’d escaped from Ever-night, we had faced one another through a pane of stained glass, unable to believe there was any way we could ever be together again. I could picture it so perfectly, each shade of the glass, as though it still hung between us.

“What was it like for you?” I asked. “Being dead?”

“I don’t remember anything about it.” Lucas leaned his head back against the leg of our folding table, giving in to the exhaustion that followed rising from the grave. We remained on the floor, unable to summon the will to move. “Just now, when Balthazar staked me—that sounds so weird to say—whatever. Well, after that, I dreamed. Thought I saw Charity chasing after us.” He half laughed, a bitter sound, and looked up at the ceiling. “The last thing I needed was her in my nightmares.”

I shivered. Charity looked innocent, with her youthful face and bedraggled, waiflike appearance; she was anything but. I figured I would have nightmares about her forever, too, if I could still dream. I wasn’t sure about that yet.

“What was it like for you?” he asked, focusing on me again. “Did you become a ghost right away, or was there some time between? It’d be nice to think you got a sneak preview of heaven.”

“No sneak previews.” I folded my arms atop my knees and rested my chin there. “I think I turned into a ghost pretty much instantly, but it took me awhile to realize what had happened. At first I just drifted in and out.”

“Do you think there’s an afterlife for vampires? Do they— do we all go to hell, if there’s a hell?”

“Don’t say that!”

“Holy water burns me. I’ll never be able to set foot on consecrated ground again,” Lucas said. “God’s made it pretty clear where he stands, don’t you think?”

I cupped his face with my hands. “I know you hate this, but there are ways to go on, to enjoy the years to come. Think about it: We’re immortal now. We lost each other once, but at least we never have to again.”

Lucas pulled away, breaking contact between us. Slowly he pushed himself to his feet. He walked a few steps farther into our makeshift apartment in the wine cellar, studying it as though he were seeing it for the first time: the hot plate, the air mattress on a bed frame, the cardboard drawers that held our things. There were times in the past few weeks when I’d thought this was the most perfect, romantic place on earth. Now it seemed shabby and small, its beauty our last shared illusion.

He said, “Bianca, I don’t know if I can do this.”

“You can.”

“You’re saying that because you want to believe it. Not because you do.”

“You’re giving up without even trying.”

Lucas turned to me, his eyes anguished. “I’m going to try. Jesus, Bianca, do you think I wouldn’t try for you? As much as I hate this—this hunger inside me, this cold, disgusting, dead feeling—if it means being with you, I’ll try.”

“You’ll make it. You’ll learn how to handle the hunger. I promise.”

“How is that supposed to happen?” He gestured at the empty blood containers on the floor. “That’s, what, three pints of blood? It’s as much as I can do right this second not to tackle that bag and drink the rest immediately. Already when I think about Vic outside—it’s not about Vic anymore, it’s about the fact that he’s alive and he’s got blood I could drink. In another few minutes—”

“We have more blood. Drink as much as you need. We can get more.” But that was a purely temporary solution, and we both knew it.

He needed hope, and only one suggestion gave us any hope. I laid aside my own objections and fears about my parents; Balthazar’s plan was the best we had.

“Classes start in two weeks,” I said. “At Evernight. You’re going to go back there.”

Lucas stared at me for a second, then thumped his head against one of the wine racks so that the bottles rattled. “Great. I’m already hearing things. Halfway to crazy.”

“You’re not hearing things. You’re enrolling in Evernight Academy again as a student, a vampire student this time, and they’ll take care of you.”

“Take care of me? Bianca, the last time I visited, I rode with the guys who burned the place down.”

I remembered what Balthazar had said and clung to it. “You’re a vampire now. If you ask for sanctuary, Mrs. Bethany has to give it to you. They might not be friendly, exactly, but they’ll give you a place to stay, and plenty of blood to drink, and advice about how to deal with the hunger. For weeks or months, however long you need.”

“Or years,” Lucas said. “Balthazar’s kept coming back for years.”

Balthazar had attended Evernight Academy for different reasons, ones more focused on the school’s true mission: helping young-looking vampires pass for human by keeping them up-to-date with the modern world. I wasn’t about to point that out to Lucas, though. The last thing he needed to hear was how well all the other vampires could manage.

Lucas added, “Besides, it doesn’t matter how much they hate me. We’re not going to Evernight Academy because it’s dangerous for you.”

“For me?” I had hardly had a moment to consider this, but Lucas was right. We knew from the events at school last year that Mrs. Bethany was no longer merely the headmistress at Evernight; she was also using the school as a means of finding— and perhaps capturing—ghosts like me. Why she was doing this remained a mystery, but there was no doubt that she loathed the wraiths. Whatever she was up to couldn’t be good for us.

Seeing realization dawn on my face, Lucas nodded. His expression had become truly grim. “I’ve already screwed things up so badly that you died,” he said. “No way am I ever going back to the one place where that situation could get even worse.”

What else could we do, though? I forced myself to be brave. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Don’t ask me to go there without you. I couldn’t take it.” Lucas said it simply, like it was obvious; if he was parted from me, the thin tether of will that kept him going would snap.

“You’re going to Evernight Academy, and I’m going with you.”

“Bianca, no. It’s too dangerous.”

“Lucas, yes.” He always wanted to protect me against every risk, but it was time for a reality check. “Is it more dangerous than my being a vampire in a Black Cross cell? I made it through that, and I’ll make it through this. Besides, there are wraiths who managed to be at Evernight without being destroyed by Mrs. Bethany. Maxie’s one of them. It can be done. At least I know to be careful.”

Lucas didn’t look convinced. “We could do something else. Lock me up someplace until I—”

“Until you stop wanting blood?” I kept my voice low, to soften the impact of my next words. “That’s not going to happen. And I’m not turning you into a prisoner in some basement somewhere. I’m telling you, we can do this. We can because we have to.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I don’t either, but I’ll be all right. You’ll have a structure there, a blood supply, other vampires who can help teach you how to handle this. Ranulf and Balthazar will go with you,” I promised. “And Vic’s going back, too, remember?”

His dark green eyes widened, and I knew that Vic wasn’t a source of comfort for him; he wasn’t a friend. He was prey.

Hurriedly, I added, “You’ll be able to be around Vic while others are there to help you. Eventually it’s going to seem easy.”

Lucas stared down at the floor, and I hated myself for being so glib, so casual. Maybe he would learn to bear it, but it would never be easy. It didn’t help either of us for me to pretend that it could.

I remembered what Balthazar had said, about vampires walking into a fire rather than going on. Lucas knew better than most how to destroy a vampire’s body.

“Okay. It won’t be easy,” I said. “It never has been. And that’s never kept us apart.”

He held out his arms, and I ran into them. Already his embrace had cooled, but it was still Lucas, still us.

Into my hair, Lucas whispered, “Will I only see you in my dreams?”

“As long as you have my brooch, I can get to you.”

He frowned, then pulled the brooch from his back pocket. The Whitby jet flower, ornately carved, had been a gift from him to me when we were first dating. He’d taken it with him when he went into the fight, to die; that was the only thing that had allowed me to reach him. “Why the brooch?”

“Things that wraiths bonded to strongly in life, meaningful things—like this brooch, or my bracelet, or the gargoyle outside the window of my old room—well, we can use them to travel. They’re like stops on a subway line; I can travel to them, just sort of appear wherever they are. The coral bracelet and the jet brooch are especially powerful, because they’re made out of materials that were once living creatures.” I closed his hand around the brooch. “So as long as you keep this with you, I’ll always be able to find you. See, you’ll still have a way to make sure I’m safe.”

“Evernight,” he said. “Okay.” I could tell I hadn’t convinced him as much as worn him down. He remained more frightened for me than for himself. But we truly had no other place to turn.

We hugged again, more tightly this time. How badly I wanted to believe that Lucas had found a reason to hope. Even as we embraced, though, I could tell he was looking over my shoulder, staring at the blood.

Chapter Five

“REST,” I SAID AS WE STEPPED INTO ONE OF THE hotel rooms in downtown Philadelphia that Balthazar had paid for. It was ridiculously luxurious, with white cotton quilts on high platform beds—too clean for undead creatures smeared with dried blood. “We both need to rest.”

“Can you sleep?” Lucas asked. He’d eaten again on the way over, several pints, and now had the half-dazed look that I recognized as a result of overfeeding—like Mom and Dad on Thanksgiving. We’d had to give him as much as he could take; it was the only way to ensure he could get through the hotel lobby without snapping. Soon he’d crash.

“I’m not sure ghosts need to sleep. Sometimes I need to sort of . . . fade out, I guess. But it’s not quite the same thing.”

“Where do you go? When you fade out.”

I shrugged. There was so much I still didn’t know about my new wraith nature. “Someplace I can get back from. That’s the only thing that matters.”

He nodded wearily. Through the thin hotel walls, I could hear Balthazar roughly throwing down his gear in the next room. We’d decided to spend the last days before the new semester in the hotel because Vic’s parents were due to return from Italy. He was going to be in enough trouble about the torn-up front lawn without his mom and dad discovering an infestation of vampires in the basement.

Besides, we needed to give Vic some more space. He and Lucas hadn’t come face-to-face since the attack, by their mutual agreement. It was obvious that Vic was trying hard to come to terms, but it was just as obviously going to take a while.

“Why do vampires need sleep? Doesn’t make much sense.” Lucas kicked off his boots and slid out of his jeans. Now that he wore only his boxers and a T-shirt, I could see that his whole body had taken on the sculpted beauty of the vampire. The tee outlined every broad muscle of his chest.

Although I had lost my mortal body, I could still feel desire.

I turned off one of the side lamps nearer the window and pulled shut the heavy drapes that would keep out the morning sun. Lucas had fed recently enough that sunlight wouldn’t hurt him, but he’d probably hate the glare. “My mom used to say that she thought it was more of a habit than anything else, like the body keeps on doing what it knows it should do. See how you’ve started breathing again? You won’t stop, even when you’re sound asleep.”

“Though I’ll never need air again.” Lucas said it as a joke, but it fell flat. I could tell he’d just realized that he’d never feel the relief of a good, deep breath, or a heartfelt sigh.

He collapsed into bed, sinking back gratefully into the feather-plump pillows. Probably he could have fallen asleep within seconds, but I had different ideas.

Maybe Lucas’s ravenous blood hunger could be channeled into other things. Other needs. Where being ravenous wouldn’t be a problem—quite the opposite, actually.

Carefully, I tried shimmying out of the cloud-patterned pajama bottoms. They weren’t so much actual clothes as they were the memory of clothes, so I wasn’t sure whether or not they’d come off.

They would. The pajamas crumpled to the floor and just sort of vanished. I hoped they’d come back—but later. Ideally, I wouldn’t want them for a while.

Lucas raised an eyebrow.

As I slipped into the bed beside him, he smiled a little—the first sign of real pleasure I’d seen from him since his resurrection. “Does this still work?” he murmured. “You and me?”

“Let’s find out.”

He pulled me down into his arms; we were cold against each other now, but it was natural to him and to me, to what we had become. Delicate lines of frost laced the sheets around us as our lips met gently. For the first moment, Lucas was so unsure— of his reactions, of mine—that I felt unbearably tender toward him. Like all I wanted to do was wrap myself around him like a blanket and shelter him from everything we’d been through.

His mouth opened beneath mine as he tangled his fingers in my hair. The only thing I wore now was the coral bracelet that would keep me solid, make this possible.

We made it, I thought. Every complication we faced seemed to have faded away. We’re back where we began. Death couldn’t take this away from us.

Our kisses intensified and deepened. Lucas’s hands were still his hands, strong and familiar. He touched me the same way. I felt pleasure differently now—softer, more diffuse and yet allencompassing—but it was no less for having changed. And as I grew surer, passion building between us, it seemed as though my joy in him flowed through us both.

He rolled me onto my back, but then his expression changed. I saw his fangs, understood, and smiled. I felt the urge to bite, too—not as strongly, now that I no longer needed blood, but sex and fangs would always go together for me.

“It’s okay,” I whispered against his throat, between kisses. “You can be hungry for this. You can have this.”

“Yes,” he said roughly. His green eyes bored into me, a desperate plea.

“Do you need to drink?” I arched against him and let my head fall back, exposing my throat. Lucas breathed in, a hard gasp. “Drink from me.”

With a growl, he sank his teeth into my flesh. I felt again the real pain of having a body, and that alone was its own kind of pleasure. My hands gripped him tightly around the back, surrendering to his hunger —

—until he shoved himself away from me, shouting out in pain.

“Lucas?” I sat upright, clutching the sheet to me. “Lucas, what’s wrong?”

“It burns!”

As he stumbled from the bed, clutching at his throat, he choked and then spat. Silver wraith blood shimmered on the floor briefly before it faded. I smelled smoke and snapped on the bedside light; on the carpet I could see a couple of faint singe marks. Then I realized the sheets were scorched too—coffee-colored drops from where my blood had fallen. I put my hand to the wound at my throat, but it was already closing. The skin knitted beneath my fingertips, a ticklish sensation.

For a few seconds, we just stared at each other. The only thing I could think of to say was, “Now we know why vampires don’t drink wraiths’ blood.”

“Yeah.” Lucas winced when he spoke, and his voice was hoarse. I realized that his lips, tongue, and throat remained scorched. As a vampire, he’d heal quickly, but not instantly. Every place we touched was just a source of pain for him now.

Maybe he saw the pity in my eyes, because he turned his head. “We should sleep.” He yanked back the covers on the other hotel bed.

“Lucas—it doesn’t always have to involve blood drinking. You remember that.”

“I know.” He lay down in the other bed, heavily, as though he could no longer support his body. “We’ll—we’ll figure it out.”

Though I wanted to argue, I knew this wasn’t the time. I simply shut off the light again and slid back beneath the covers, cold and lonely in the big bed. After a couple of seconds, it felt pointless to remain solid, so I took off my bracelet and dissolved into the blue, misty void by myself.

So much for thinking death couldn’t take anything from us.

“Last chance to change your mind,” I said a few days later, as Lucas bundled up his few possessions early on the morning of the first day of school. For a moment I regretted the joke; it would be disastrous if Lucas did change his mind, because we didn’t have a Plan B.

But Lucas attempted to roll with it. “Always meant to get a diploma someday. I guess after death counts as someday, huh?” He tried to smile for me, but it didn’t go far. “Does it feel weird? Not going?”

That was the first time I realized I’d died as an eleventh-grade dropout. “Yeah, kinda.”

These days hadn’t been easy for us. We had to keep over-feeding Lucas blood, and he mostly refused to leave the room. I’d memorized the hotel maids’ schedule, so we could make sure Lucas avoided them. Lucas still thought Evernight was too much of a risk for me, and I wasn’t sure I disagreed. But what other options did we have?

The dawn light brightened the edges of the hotel window shade as Lucas shrugged on the uniform sweater—Balthazar had ordered supplies for them both online. He’d gotten a little taller and a lot more muscular since he’d been an Evernight student, so the sweater was a bit tight, but in a good way. “You look great,” I said. “Reminds me of when we met.”

“When I tried to save you from the vampires.” Lucas paused, then stepped closer to me and put his hand on my cheek. “You know the only reason I’m doing this is so I can come back to you. Be decent enough for you, know how to act. You get that, right?”

“I do.”

“And you’re going to be careful, right? You won’t take any chances at Evernight?”

“I’ll be very careful.” I took his hand in mine and kissed his palm. Then I removed my coral and silver bracelet, going half-transparent as it dropped into Lucas’s fingers. “Take this with you. I’ll get it there.”

“You don’t want it with you? Just in case? You can’t afford to lose this thing, and your brooch is already in my bag.”

“It’s not like I can take it myself,” I pointed out. “When I go incorporeal to travel, nothing physical can travel with me. Besides, it couldn’t be anywhere safer than with you.” I folded his hand around the bracelet.

He leaned forward, as though to kiss me. Now that I was incorporeal—a soft shadow of blue mist in the vague shape of my body—our lips couldn’t touch. But a little of Lucas passed through me, a faint cool tickle that made me shiver, just where our kiss would have been.

Just as I began to smile, though, there was a rap on the door: Balthazar. Time to go.

* * *

After they’d begun the long drive from Philadelphia, I prepared for my own journey. Maxie had told me that wraiths remained bonded to certain places and things that had been meaningful to us during our lifetimes. We could always travel to them, no matter how far away we might be. I wasn’t sure what every single one of those places was yet, though I had ideas: the old maple tree in Arrowwood where I’d liked to play as a child, the theater where Lucas and I had gone on our first date, and perhaps the wine cellar where we’d lived our final weeks. Those were just theories, though.

The only place I knew I could travel was the first place I’d gone, by accident: Evernight Academy, specifically the gargoyle that had perched outside my bedroom.

I drifted into foggy darkness, and at first the sensation was deliciously like sleep, so tempting. But my mind remained focused on the gargoyle. I’d spent so much time looking at his gap-fanged grin that I could picture him perfectly: stony claws, hunched back, pointy wings. Briefly I imagined the way the stone had felt beneath my hands, cold and hard—

Then I could feel it.

The world clarified around me. I perched atop the gargoyle, which would’ve been massively uncomfortable if I’d been alive but was fine now that I could float when I wanted. Curlicues of frost streaked across the windows, heralding the presence of a wraith.

Would my parents see it? They had the first time I’d accidentally come here. Instead of realizing it was me, though, they’d freaked out, believing the frost came from yet another of the ghosts that had invaded Evernight.

Not invaded, I reminded myself. Drawn here, because of the students. Brought here specifically by Mrs. Bethany. I had to remain on my guard.

I heard nothing from the apartment. Probably my parents were downstairs, helping Mrs. Bethany welcome the students. Looking downward, I could see that the first few people had already begun to arrive. Mostly humans at this point, too noisy and too happy—but every once in a while silent, dark-clad figures would sweep through the crowd as though they belonged here more than anyone else. They did belong here more; they were the vampires.

Quickly I shimmered along the side of the building, invisible except for the trails of frost I left behind. At first I just wanted to get a better view, but then I realized: Something felt odd about the school.

Well, big surprise. Evernight Academy was pretty much made of odd. This was different, though, something I had never sensed before—as if, in places, the school was pushing back at me, trying to keep me out. Probably it was something only the wraiths could feel. In those places, I felt as though I was being watched right through the walls. Curious, I whisked along the side of the building, leaving trails of frost on the windows in my wake. Although there were places I could get into the school, there were places that I couldn’t. And one place—the area at the very top of the south tower, right above my parents’ apartment—felt shut off to me completely, in a way that gave me cold shivers.

So don’t go there, I told myself. It’s not like you’ve ever had a single reason to go up there before. As long as you can get in anywhere in the building, you can get to Lucas. Nothing else matters.

However, the knowledge of that strange forbidding energy made me uneasy. I darted downward again, the better to get away from it, and to watch the arrivals, which was what I needed to be paying attention to anyway.

As I focused again on the group, I saw my first familiar face and felt a warm glow of happiness that could’ve been a smile. Patrice!

Patrice Deveraux, my roommate during my first year at Evernight, stepped out of a lean gray Lexus. Her tailored version of the school uniform made her look sophisticated and trim, even in a kilt and sweater, and her hair now bounced with its natural curl, a thick dark halo that suited her. She’d skipped last year to have fun in Scandinavia with her new guy, but one or the other of them must have broken it off—probably Patrice, who seemed to think of men primarily as fashion accessories.

Despite her obsessions with appearances and luxury, Patrice had a fundamental grit that made me like her. Sort of to my surprise, she’d tried to reach out to me during the summer after I’d run away, proving that she wasn’t as thoughtless as she could sometimes seem. It made me happy to remember that not every vampire at Evernight Academy was sinister and forbidding. Besides, this was the first time I’d seen her since I’d died. I wished I could have said hello, but of course that was impossible.

Just before Patrice stepped inside, she paused at the door and looked upward, directly at where I was hovering. Could she see me? I realized quickly that she couldn’t, but the coincidence was striking. Patrice hesitated a second longer before readjusting her sunglasses and going inside.

A few more familiar faces began to appear, both vampire and human, mostly people I hadn’t known too well but had shared classes with and spoken to from time to time. A couple of teachers, too—both Mr. Yee and Professor Iwerebon mingled among the newcomers, saying hello to parents. I looked for my mother and father, half in dread, half in hope, but they didn’t make an appearance. Among the human students, I didn’t see any old friends but recognized a few faces—like Clementine Nichols, whose ticket to Evernight had been her family’s haunted car, and Skye Tierney, Raquel’s sophomore-year lab partner. Raquel had said Skye was “good people, basically.” Coming from Raquel, who hated most people on principle until they gave her a reason to feel otherwise, that was high praise.

And yet I never tried to have a real conversation with her, or with a lot of these people. How could I never ask Clementine what it was like to have a haunted car? I should’ve reached out to people more often. I’d never been incredibly outgoing, but death made me feel lonelier, somehow.

The Woodsons’ car finally showed up, and Vic and Ranulf both emerged. Each of them wore the regulation uniform, but Vic had on a Phillies cap, as usual—and to my delight, Ranulf wore one as well.

“How very striking.” Mrs. Bethany swept out of the school, as if she could sense deviations from protocol at a distance. “Mr. Woodson, your sartorial influence on Mr. White is both profound and unfortunate.”

“We’ll take them off before class,” Vic promised, edging around her. “Absolutely.”

“See that you do.”

Mrs. Bethany watched them go, her sharp eyes following them like a hawk follows prey. She looked darkly beautiful with her thick hair piled atop her head and her long fingernails painted crimson. But the only thing I could think about was the last time I’d seen her—during the raid she’d led on Black Cross’s New York headquarters. She’d killed Lucas’s stepfather in front of my eyes without hesitating. The headmistress of Evernight enforced her idea of the law, absolutely, whether seeking revenge for a Black Cross attack or regulating the school dress code. I wondered if those things were any different for her, or whether it was all just a matter of rules.

That was what Balthazar seemed to think. I wasn’t sure, though. Lucas and I had met because, two years before, Mrs. Bethany had suddenly changed the rules of Evernight Academy in order to allow human students to enroll—without informing those humans that they would be surrounded by vampires, of course. Each of those many human students had connections, one way or another, to ghosts. She’d been hunting the wraiths—creatures like me—for reasons we had yet to learn. Mrs. Bethany was complicated in ways I couldn’t pretend to fathom.

But I had to hope she would play by the rules today, at least, because I recognized the car that Balthazar had rented coming up the long gravel drive.

When Balthazar stepped out, several of the students— vampire and human—smiled at him; he’d always been effortlessly popular, trusted by everyone. But when Lucas got out of the passenger seat, the vampires’ smiles vanished, replaced by expressions of pure loathing.

The ones who had been here two years ago knew that Lucas had been Black Cross—that he had first come to Evernight to spy on them, and that he had been raised to kill vampires on sight. All of them would have heard how narrowly he had escaped Mrs. Bethany when he’d been discovered. The fact that Lucas had been changed into a vampire, something they had to sense instantly, didn’t diminish their hatred in the slightest.

The only vampire who didn’t gape in shock and fury was Mrs. Bethany. She stepped forward smoothly, her long black skirt swirling around her, to face Lucas. Her expression was unreadable as she stared into his eyes.

Could he bring himself to do it? His face betrayed his confusion and doubt, and who could blame him? To ask for the vampires’ protection—to declare himself one of them at last— was a kind of second death for him. The death of who he had been, his whole life.

But he didn’t have much other choice.

Lucas took a deep breath. “I call upon the sanctuary of Ever-night.”

Chaos followed. Several of the vampire students tried to protest, either to Balthazar, who refused to be baited, or Mrs. Bethany, who ignored them as she stood entirely still amid the din. The human students, of course, had no idea what was going on or why this new guy was so despised by a lot of the student body; understandably, they were suspicious of him already.

Lucas stood his ground, though I could see how he longed to lash back, and how his dark green eyes sometimes followed one of the human students a little too long. Mrs. Bethany studied him, her eyes searching, until she gestured for him to follow her and walked toward the edge of the campus—toward the carriage house where she lived.

As Balthazar watched them go, a space widening around him as he was shunned by the other vampire students, I willed myself to his side and whispered, “How do you think she’s taking it?”

He jumped, then hissed, “You scared me.”

“From now on, take it for granted that I’m around.”

“Even when I’m in the shower?”

“You wish.”

After a glance from side to side, making certain that nobody realized he was talking to “himself,” he murmured, “I think if she were going to turn him away, she would’ve done it immediately. But she never would, Bianca. Trust me.”

Despite everything he’d done for Lucas since his turning, I wasn’t ready to totally trust Balthazar again yet. He was the guy who’d led Lucas to his death—the person who had gotten Lucas into this situation to start with. Wasn’t he?

I couldn’t take the uncertainty between us another second. Instead I darted after Mrs. Bethany and Lucas, eager to hear what I could.

Mrs. Bethany lived in a carriage house at the edge of the school grounds, a place I knew well. But I forgot one very basic thing about it until I swept down toward the roof, ready to sink inside—and felt myself shoved back violently. Of course, I realized. The roof.

Metals and minerals found in the human body, such as copper and iron, repelled wraiths strongly. This was why Mrs. Bethany had chosen a copper roof: to keep us out. The impact reminded me of the “blocked” areas of Evernight, except that in this case, the entire place was shut off to me.

Well, if I couldn’t follow Lucas inside, I could try the same thing I’d done back when I was a student—eavesdrop.

I curled into a soft cloud at the edge of one window, where the branches of the nearest elm almost scraped the glass and would disguise me in their shadows. This gave me a view of Mrs. Bethany’s desk—so neat and tidy that everything was at right angles, with only a framed nineteenth-century gentleman’s silhouette as decoration. As I watched, she strode into the room, as much in command as ever. Lucas followed her, shoulders tense and gaze wary, the look he wore when he expected a fight.

“There is one question we must address before any other, Mr. Ross,” Mrs. Bethany said as she took a seat behind her desk. “Where is Bianca Olivier?”

Startled, I jumped, and the leaves around me rustled. She glanced my way for only a second; no doubt she thought I was merely the wind.

Lucas sat heavily in the chair opposite her, gripping the arm-rests hard. “Bianca’s dead.”

Mrs. Bethany said nothing. Her dark eyes remained fixed on him in a silent demand for the whole truth.

He continued, “About six weeks ago, her health just . . . failed. She didn’t want food. Didn’t want blood. I tried taking her to the doctor, but she’d started to, well, to change, so they didn’t know what to make of her anymore.”

“It must have been clear to you what needed to be done.”

Slowly, Lucas nodded. “Bianca needed to turn into a vampire to stay alive. I asked her to kill me. I would’ve let her turn me into a vampire, to save herself. But she wouldn’t do it.” His voice broke on the last word, and he turned his head away from Mrs. Bethany.

My resurrection as a ghost might have lessened Lucas’s grief, but I realized in that moment that the wounds he’d suffered when he watched me die would scar him forever.

“You could not have prevented it,” Mrs. Bethany said. She didn’t sound sympathetic, exactly, but her voice was slightly softer. “If Miss Olivier didn’t transform you into a vampire, who did?”

“That would be Charity.” Lucas’s jaw tightened. A shudder of pure hate passed through me. “We had a run-in right after Bianca died, back in Philadelphia. I don’t know why she did it.”

“With Charity More, reason rarely enters into the equation.” That was as close to a joke as I’d ever heard from Mrs. Bethany.

“I didn’t know what to do at first. It’s— I guess you know how it is, when you change. Balthazar was around, trying to deal with his sister, and he helped me out. I tried to talk to my mother, but she—she’s Black Cross.”

Mrs. Bethany straightened, her eyes flashing. “You mean that she attacked you.”

“Yeah.”

“Your own mother.” To my astonishment, I realized Mrs. Bethany was feeling righteous outrage—on Lucas’s behalf. “Indecent. Shocking. Hateful. The sort of behavior I would have expected from most members of Black Cross, to be sure, but one would think that at least a mother’s love would prove more powerful than their anti-vampire dogma.”

“Guess not,” he muttered.

Mrs. Bethany rose to her feet, walked around the desk to Lucas’s side, and put her hand on his shoulder. If his wide eyes were any indication, he was as surprised as I was. “It is unfortunate that you had to learn the error of your ways in such a painful fashion. But you should know that my sympathies are entirely with those who have suffered persecution by Black Cross. Your past as a living man, and the mistakes you made then, have now been wiped away. The sanctuary of Evernight Academy is yours. We will protect you. We will teach you. You need not be alone any longer.”

For one half second, I actually liked Mrs. Bethany.

Lucas wasn’t won over quite so easily. “Thanks. I mean that. But it’s not going to be so simple. Those guys are about ready to stake me already.”

“They’ll obey the rules.” Mrs. Bethany’s smile held a hint of chill. “Leave that to me.”

“The human students—” His voice sounded strangled. “I’ve never killed.”

“The urge is strong.” She spoke as though this were only to be expected. “In your case, perhaps, stronger than most—I see the signs. But here you will have many guardians over your conduct; I daresay you are in less danger of harming a human here than you would be in the outside world. In time, you will discover how to be a part of the vampire world. You will become one of us.”

Lucas shut his eyes for a moment, and I wondered if it was in relief or despair.

Chapter Six

LUCAS WALKED TO THE WROUGHT-IRON GAZEBO, staring after Mrs. Bethany as she went inside to give the annual welcoming speech to the student body. Finally sure that nobody else was watching, I dared to materialize at his side.

“Hey,” he said. He half turned to see me and managed to smile for my sake. “Right back where we first kissed.”

“The more things change.” As the breeze ruffled his dark gold hair and the ivy leaves around us, I could imagine that we’d gone back to the beginning. The sunlight seemed to pass through me, warming me throughout. Despite the wind, my own red hair hung long and motionless, untouched, unreal. “Why aren’t you in there?”

“Mrs. Bethany gave me an exemption this go-round. Said she’d try to find a way to explain to the vampire students and teachers to leave me the hell alone without tipping off the humans. Me walking into a pack of vampires before she gives the hands-off speech—no way am I doing that unarmed.”

“She handled it better than I would’ve thought,” I said. “I guess Mrs. Bethany takes the sanctuary thing here seriously.”

Lucas shrugged. “She claims she’s got my back, but all the same, I’m glad Ranulf sneaked our weapons up here in his trunk.”

“Why not yours?”

“If Mrs. Bethany doesn’t search mine, she’s a fool. And that lady’s no fool.”

I studied his face, reading the emotions he was trying to hide. “You’re not frightened of the vampires. You never have been. It’s being around the human students that gets to you.”

He grimaced. “I can’t look at Vic without thinking— Bianca, I would’ve killed him. Vic. One of the best friends I’ve ever had. I’d have slaughtered him just to eat.”

“Is that why you won’t be alone with him?” When he shot me a look, I added, “Yeah, I noticed.”

“No, you didn’t,” Lucas said quietly. “It’s not just me. It’s Vic, too. He finds ways to avoid being alone with me.” I could hear the pain in his voice.

I put my arms around him; maybe it wasn’t a real embrace, but I could feel him next to me and knew he’d take some comfort from it. “He’ll trust you again. It’s just going to take some time.”

“How long will it be before I trust myself?”

There was no answer to that. I said the only thing I could: “I love you.”

“And I love you. That’s why I’m going to make this work. I have to.”

* * *

Just like Lucas was learning to be a vampire for my sake, I was learning to be a ghost for his. This meant I had to get the hang of this haunting thing.

I had the basics down: going invisible, appearing in my mist form and, when I had my bracelet or my brooch, becoming solid and lifelike once more. Moving from place to place required some concentration, but it could be done.

Haunting Evernight Academy, though—that was going to be a lot tougher. I’d need to figure out where I could travel in the hallways and where I couldn’t. Leaving trails of frost around wherever I went would tip off the other students and teachers about a ghost, and while I wasn’t sure they could do anything about it but scream, I didn’t intend to find out.

It was scary, to think about the myriad ways this could go wrong. But holding back meant leaving Lucas alone, and that was something I couldn’t do.

As he walked into the school, I followed. The heavy wooden doors were simple enough to slip through, maybe because they, like me, had once been alive. Once again, I entered the Ever-night Academy great hall. Dozens of students milled around, each wearing the uniform sweater with the school crest: a shield emblazoned with two ravens on either side of a sword. To my surprise, a wave of nostalgia swept through me. Maybe I hadn’t often been happy at Evernight—but sometimes I had. This was where I’d fallen in love and made so many good friends. This was where I’d lived.

My happiness lasted only a moment, though, as I focused once more on Lucas. Nobody attacked him, or said anything to him, which had to count as a positive sign; apparently Mrs. Bethany’s speech had done the trick. But if nobody planned on killing Lucas, nobody planned on forgiving and forgetting either. Every vampire student stared at him with undisguised loathing. Lucas didn’t slow down—he wasn’t a guy to crumple because of a little glaring—but that didn’t mean he liked it.

We encouraged him to come here because we wanted him to feel comfortable being a vampire, I thought. How can that happen if everybody else rejects him?

Every time he walked past a human student, his whole body went tense; I could see it in the set of his shoulders and the lines of his face. But he determinedly didn’t look directly at them, and his steps never slowed. His resolve was as strong as his hunger, at least for now.

Lucas kept going, heading toward the north tower where the guys roomed. I stayed with him. A few flakes of ice crystallized on the windowsill nearest me, and hurriedly I floated higher, closer to the ceiling. Until I learned how to avoid creating frost, it might be better for me to stay up high, where at least nobody was likely to see it.

The crowd began murmuring, as though there were some commotion. I glanced back and saw that the students were parting—that someone was shoving them aside to get closer to Lucas. Apparently Mrs. Bethany hadn’t managed to calm everybody down.

I folded myself tightly in a corner. Lucas cocked his head, hearing the danger before he saw it, and turned to face his would-be attacker. Probably it was some younger vampire guy, only at Evernight for a few laughs, ready to turn into a killer again the first time he felt like it—like Erich, that jerk who’d stalked Raquel during our first year here. Lucas would be able to handle somebody like that easily, I knew.

But when the attacker appeared, it was somebody Lucas couldn’t handle. Somebody I couldn’t handle.

It was my mother.

Mom stood in front of him, fists at her sides, eyes wild. “Is it true? Tell me.” Her voice shook. “I want you to look me in the face and tell me it’s true.”

Lucas looked like he’d been punched in the gut. As he opened his mouth to answer, though, Balthazar pushed his way to their side and grabbed Mom’s arm. “Not here,” he said quietly.

Mom didn’t even turn her head, like she couldn’t see or hear Balthazar, but after a moment she nodded and stalked toward one of the staircases. It was like she was daring Lucas not to follow her, but he did. Balthazar started to come, too, but Mom shot him a look that froze him in place on the stairs.

She led him into a small office on the second floor. I went along, although I desperately didn’t want to hear what I knew had to come next.

As soon as he’d shut the door behind them, Mom said again, “Tell me it’s true, Lucas.”

“It’s true,” Lucas said. He looked deader than he had the night after he’d been killed. “Bianca died.”

My mother stumbled backward, like she’d been spun so hard she was dizzy. Her face crumpled into tears. “She was supposed to live forever,” she whispered. “Bianca was going to be our little girl forever.”

“Mrs. Olivier, I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry? Sorry? You convince our daughter to leave her home and her parents and forsake the immortality that’s rightfully hers—her birthright—and she dies, she’s gone forever, and the only thing you can say is sorry?”

“That’s all I can say!” Lucas shouted. “There aren’t words for this! I would’ve died for her. I tried to. I failed. I hate myself for it, and if I could take it back I would, but . . . but . . .” His voice choked on a sob. He steeled himself and managed to say, “If you want to kill me, I won’t stop you. I won’t even blame you.”

My mother shook her head. Tears streaked her face, and a few caramel-colored strands of hair stuck to her flushed cheeks. “If you hate yourself as much as you say—if you loved her a tenth as much as we loved her—then you deserve immortality. You deserve to live forever, so you can suffer forever.”

Lucas was crying, too, but he never turned his head away, steeling himself to keep meeting my mother’s eyes. It was more than I could do.

This wasn’t Lucas’s fault. It was mine.

For one second I considered appearing in the room. If Mom saw that something of me lived on, maybe she wouldn’t hurt so badly. But at that moment, I was too ashamed of having hurt her to show my face.

“This isn’t over,” Mom said. She pushed blindly past Lucas into the hallway. He slumped into the nearest chair. I wanted to take form and comfort him, but I had the feeling that seeing me as a ghost wouldn’t be that comforting for Lucas right now.

And there was something else I had to do.

I followed my mother along the corridors. She wiped at her cheeks but otherwise didn’t try to disguise the fact that she’d been sobbing. Several of the students, both vampire and human, gave her curious glances, but she didn’t seem to care.

We went up the winding stone stairs of the south tower, all the way to my family’s apartment. My father lay on the sofa, his arms wrapped around himself and his eyes dull. He didn’t look at my mother as she walked in. Dad had put on one of his old records—one I recognized, one with Henry Mancini songs that I had liked a lot when I was a child. Audrey Hepburn was singing “Moon River.”

“It’s true,” Mom said in a small voice.

“I know. I think—I think I knew a long time ago. Just didn’t want to . . .” Dad shut his eyes tightly, like he was closing out Mom and memory and the whole rest of the world.

My mother stretched on the sofa beside him, taking him into her arms. As she bowed her cheek against his dark red hair, his shoulders began to shake with heavy sobs.

I couldn’t take it anymore. No matter how ashamed I felt, no matter how hard it would be, it couldn’t be worse than hearing them suffer. It was time for me to appear to them, to reveal what had happened.

But as I gathered myself together to take form, even as I struggled to find the right words to say first, my mother choked out, “May God damn the wraiths.”

I froze.

“It’s their fault,” she continued. “What happened to her is their fault.”

Dad cuddled her closer. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”

“I hate them. I hate them all. As long as I’m on this earth, I’ll never stop hating them…” Her voice ebbed into sobs again.

They hated the wraiths, for having had a hold on me, for haunting Evernight, for merely existing. If I appeared, they wouldn’t think of me as their little girl anymore. I would just be a monster. The way Lucas had been nothing but a monster to Kate.

I’d never known how much I needed their love for me until I’d lost it.

So I didn’t appear to them. How could I? I would only have made it worse for them and for me, as impossible as it seemed that anything, ever, could be worse than that moment. Compared to this, dying had been easy. But I remained there for a long time, watching them weep. I deserved to see it.

They cried themselves to sleep, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. For a while I drifted through my old room. Apparently most of my family’s stuff had made it through the fire, because many of my things remained there. Klimt’s The Kiss still hung on one wall, shining, ideal lovers that, in my mind, symbolized Lucas and me.

We’ll get back to that place, I thought. We’ll find a way.

I flowed through the window, not bothering about the frost, until I sat beside my old friend the gargoyle again. His stone wings were the same color as the gray autumn nightfall.

“Remember that time we talked here?”

Startled, I turned to see Maxie sitting next to me—actually a few inches off the windowsill, but once you were a ghost, gravity didn’t matter so much. She was smiling like this was the greatest day ever.

“Maxie, what are you doing here?”

“Uh, saying hello? Like the last time we met here. You figured out how to fog up the glass so I could write on it. That was when I decided maybe you weren’t terminally stupid.”

I’d fogged the glass with my breath—a trick I’d never be able to perform again. “Don’t take this personally, but honestly, I can’t do the banter thing right now.”

“Stop sulking, living dead girl.”

“Maxie. No.” I couldn’t feel good about being a wraith, about being dead, after seeing what my death had done to my parents.

“You’re not alone, you know.” Maxie tried to make it sound casual, but I knew she was reaching out as best she could. After decades of being isolated from the living world, except for visits from Vic, she wasn’t very good at the social-interaction thing. “You don’t have to be afraid of us.”

But I was. Going to “talk to Christopher” sounded the same as accepting my death, and at that moment, I couldn’t. “Not tonight, okay?”

She hesitated, clearly disappointed, but then she vanished.

After a second, I realized that Maxie was right about one thing: It was time for me to quit brooding and go to Lucas. By now, perhaps, he’d be ready to see me again, ghost or not.

The easiest way down proved to be sort of melting along the tower wall, feeling the stones ripple past me. As soon as I reached the new roof, I could feel that it was far more resistant to ghosts than before, but I could go in through the front door or most of the windows. I darted in and out, finding my way, memorizing paths in case I needed to use them later.

Occasionally I felt a small ripple of energy behind me, or in an opposite corner, and figured Maxie was trailing along after me. But then I realized that it wasn’t her.

It—they—were other ghosts.

Christopher? I thought, with a shiver of fear. He was the only other wraith I’d encountered at Evernight. But his was a powerful, unmistakable presence, one I didn’t detect here. And there were several of them: two, three, five, ten, maybe more. They were just slivers of fog, zephyrs of sensation, probably invisible to anyone who wasn’t a ghost, too. It reminded me of when I’d been a vampire, the way I’d started to be able to just sense when another vampire was nearby, whether or not I ever saw them. I wasn’t exactly seeing these ghosts—more the trails they left behind—but I knew they were there.

Mrs. Bethany’s plan to draw them here through the human students had obviously worked.

We always wanted to know why she was hunting the wraiths, I thought. I guess soon we’ll find out.

I rose through the north tower, searching as I went. Mostly I saw a lot of vampire guys hanging out in their rooms, chugging blood, and bragging about how much sex they’d had during summer vacation, and a few other rooms with human guys who were hanging out, eating potato chips, and bragging—less credibly—about the sex they’d had during summer vacation. If I’d had a body, I would’ve rolled my eyes.

Then I reached a room where the two inhabitants sat on opposite sides of a chess board, and I smiled.

“That pawn is now a queen, baby,” Vic said. “Booya.”

“Your soul is as devious as your stratagems.” Ranulf frowned as he considered what to do next.

I unfolded, willing myself into a visible form. Both Vic and Ranulf jumped, but then they each smiled. “Hey, ghostly lady.” Vic rose from his chair, like an old-fashioned gentleman. “How’s it going?”

“Not so hot,” I admitted. “How are you guys?”

“We compete now for the desirable bunk farther from the windows, which will be less drafty in winter,” Ranulf said. “Later, Vic’s iPad will be used to watch a film of the winner’s choosing. Much is at stake.”

“In other words, it’s all good.” Vic paused. “At least, in this room. On the sixth floor, you’re gonna find two guys who are having a suckier time of it.”

“So Mrs. Bethany let them room together?” Balthazar had said he would suggest it, and given the attitudes of the other vampires toward Lucas, it made sense for Mrs. Bethany to agree. But I felt better knowing for sure. “Well, that’s something, anyway.”

Vic was uncharacteristically quiet for a couple seconds. He avoided my eyes, instead studying the kitschy old Elvis Presley movie poster that he’d tacked onto his wall. Then he said, “I should’ve volunteered. To room with Lucas, I mean. He needs his friends with him—I know that—but I just—”

“No, Vic, it’s okay. Lucas should be with Balthazar, because he’s going to have a lot of questions that only a more experienced vampire could handle.” There were other reasons Vic didn’t need to room with Lucas right now, but reminding him of them wouldn’t do anybody any good.

“That’s not what I meant. I want Lucas to know I believe in him. You know?”

“I know. But . . . give it time. Don’t rush it.”

Vic nodded and said nothing else. The moment was threatening to become awkward when Ranulf triumphantly slid his queen across several squares. “I believe the superior bunk will be mine.”

“Oh, man.” Vic made a face, and I had to smile despite myself. Waving good-bye, I dematerialized again and went farther up, to the sixth floor. After searching through a few rooms, I found Lucas and Balthazar. They were already asleep.

No wonder they’d already gone to bed—this day had to have been exhausting and traumatic for both of them. I didn’t think they’d unpacked. Lucas’s half of the room was as spartan as ever, and Balthazar appeared to have stopped moving in as soon as he laid a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the window-sill. Balthazar, almost too broad and tall to fit in his bunk, was curled in facing the wall. Ever the fighter, Lucas slept on his back, large, scarred hands above the covers, the better to grab a weapon within moments if necessary. The only time he’d ever deviated from that was when he held me throughout the night.

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