I waited for Graves to say something, but he remained stubbornly silent even when I looked up at him. His eyes glowed from under a thatch of dyed-black hair, his coloring back to normal. A bruise ran up his cheekbone, turning a mottled purple as it swelled.
It would be gone by tomorrow. Loup-garou heal even quicker than wulfen. They get all the benefits of the change, like speed and strength, without the allergy to silver or the risk of losing control.
Go figure. I’d learned more about wulfen in one week here than from all the painstaking work Dad and I did with moldering leather-bound books and years of hunting weird stuff.
Graves’ mouth was set, pulled down at the corners, and he looked mulishly defiant. Only his earring sparkled a bit, peeking out from all that hair. He stood behind my chair and glared at Dylan.
No help from that quarter. It was all on me.
“It was my fault,” I finally repeated. “None of the teachers have time to spar with me. They treat me like I’m glass, and the classes you have me in are remedial shit I could get in any normal high school. I’m not going to get any better if they keep putting me through kindergarten work.”
“You’re svetocha, Dru. You’re precious. You have no idea what you’re worth, dead for the nosferat, or alive to us.” Dylan rested his elbows on his desk. Paper crackled. “Should I say it again? You haven’t bloomed yet. Once you do, you’ll be able to handle harder sparring, but until then—”
“Until then I’m just supposed to sit around and look pretty? No thanks.” I could feel my chin jutting forward, a sure sign that I was Being Difficult. “I want to help. I was out hunting with my dad when most of these kids were probably taking basic how-to-ID-a-sucker classes. Keeping me in kindergarten isn’t going to work.” Why couldn’t he get that through his head? I wasn’t some nine-to-fiver, some Kmart shopper.
I was a hunter too. I’d been Dad’s helper, hadn’t I?
“Oh Lord. Not this argument again.” Dylan sighed. His eyes were bloodshot and dark-circled with fatigue. He always looked tired and stressed out. It didn’t make him ugly, though. “You have bad habits from your time as an amateur, Dru. it’s time for you to unlearn them from the bottom up, and that means low-level classes just like everyone else. That’s what the control directive said. My hands are tied.” He gave me an odd look, his dark eyes unreadable, then continued. “Irving will heal completely in less than twelve hours, your loup-garou friend there in under eighteen. You’re stuck with longer healing time and less speed, strength, and stamina. You’re not even ready for a practice run, let alone some of the junior cleaning expeditions. Not to mention the fact that any nosferat who gets wind of your existence will try to drain you to fuel their own hunger, or take you to—” He stopped dead, swallowed hard.
“Sergej.” I said the name. It burned my tongue, made the air tighten. Here they didn’t talk about it.
Naming a sucker is bad luck, and who knows if they can hear? Even hunters like Dad wouldn’t say a sucker’s name out loud. They’ll use initials, or code words.
But I’d said it before.
Dylan didn’t flinch. He did, however, sigh. Again. “Dru. You have not bloomed. You can’t hold a candle to even the prefects or the senior students, and there’s nobody with enough control if something, God forbid, happens and you start really bleeding. If—” He caught himself just in time.
“If Christophe was here, things would be different.” I made the words a singsong. “Come on, Dylan. I’m not stupid. Christophe isn’t here, and nobody else is going to be allowed to train me, even though he’s disappeared and nobody will talk about him. Even though he saved my life. What’s the deal?”
“It’s very complex.” He looked at the silver-dipped skull on his desk, and his jaw set. Every boy at the Schola had good skin, bright eyes, sparkling teeth. It was like being trapped in a goddamn sitcom. You could only tell the teachers from the students by seeing them actually teaching. Or by the way certain older ones had of stopping and tilting their heads, becoming absolutely motionless.
They didn’t even seem to breathe when they did that, and it was usually a sign of Restriction.
Which meant being sent to my room while everyone else manned battle stations. Twice in the past week, and I heard there were regular Restriction drills, too. Just like fire drills out in the stupid daylight world.
Yeah. My favorite thing ever, being stuffed in a room while someone else goes out and fights. The ice crackled again as I shifted my weight. Somehow I’d bruised one of my ass cheeks, it felt like.
“Well, I’m a smart girl. Try me.”
“It’s not a question of your brains, Dru. it’s a question of what is safe for you, since Christophe feels there’s a mole in the Order. You’re the only svetocha we’ve been able to save for a good thirty years, you’re rare, and any other svetocha we manage to locate are killed before we can bring them in. We want to make sure you don’t come to any harm, and part of that is making sure you’re properly trained from the beginning. Though why they’ve sent you out here and given us such a confusing directive…” Maddeningly, he stopped again.
A conversation with Dylan is like that. He stops in the middle of sentences, refuses to go any further, just stares down at his desk with a mournful look. You could almost feel sorry for him.
I dropped the ice pack into my lap. A thin trickle of wetness kissed the knee of my jeans, soaked in. “Why don’t the teachers have any time to train me if I’m so goddamn important? Why are we waiting for Christophe when this Council of yours has such a problem with him? And why—”
“The Council doesn’t have a problem with him. A significant minority of the Council does. it’s not the same thing, and it’s not anything you should be worrying about. You have enough to deal with.” He eyed me. “That’s going to swell more. You should go take some ibuprofen and a turn in the bath.”
In other words, la di da, I was dismissed. “You’re not answering my questions.” I hauled myself upright, clapped the ice pack to my face again. “Thanks for nothing.”
“You’re welcome. At least I’m not putting your friend there in detention for interfering and making things worse.” He probably regretted it as soon as he said it, because I wheeled around and caught him closing his mouth with a snap. But Graves finally did something, he grabbed my shoulder and hauled me out of Dylan’s office suite, past the twin suits of rusting, cobwebbed armor glowering at the door, and into the quiet hall.
“Let it go, Dru.” Graves finally spoke up when we got to the end of the hall, and the stairway loomed in a cochlear spiral. “He’s just threatening.”
Oh, so you finally open your mouth? “Thanks a million. I know that.”
“You’re welcome. Come on, let’s get you down to the bath.” He let go of me and dug in the pockets of his long dark coat until he came up with a battered pack of Winstons.
He got to go off-campus to get smokes almost every day. He got to hang around with the wulfen without a tide of whispers following him everywhere. He got to spar and go to classes with them, and he was starting to catch their jokes and make a few friends.
Me? I was the only girl in a boys’ school, and I was kept inside like a goddamn hamster while everyone went out and had fun. Not that I wanted to go anywhere for a while, after being plucked out of snow and insanity and deposited here. The food was okay, they’d ordered jeans and T-shirts for me, and there was no shortage of drawing paper or anything else I might want. All I had to do was let Dylan or another “advisor” know and then, wham-bam, it would show up at my door the next morning. Or evening.
It was creepy. Especially since every time I wanted to take a walk, even outside on the quad of cracked pavement and dead winter garden squares, an “advisor” would show up as well. Usually Dylan, who didn’t even pretend to be looking something over or just walking around.
No, he stared right at me with a mixture of worry and weirdness on his face. And that was thought-provoking too.
I just didn’
t know what thought it was supposed to provoke.
“How long have we been here?” I peered at him around the ice pack. “About a week, right?”
He got that prissy precision look on his face again, just like every time he corrected me. “Nine days, give or take. Yeah.” He hunched his thin shoulders. Between that and the beak nose he looked birdlike. But there was something else in the set of his face now. Graves was looking more worried and adult than ever. “Seriously, you should get into the baths. That’s puffing up and looking pretty bad.”
The ice pack was leaking. Cold water slid a questing tendril down my wrist, soaking into my jacket sleeve, or Dad’s jacket sleeve, since it was his spare army-surplus green one.
His billfold was under my bed. It wasn’t the safest place in the world, but…
That thought hurt my chest too. The unsteady ball of fury and something else behind my ribs got a little bigger. I grabbed my temper with both hands, shoved it down. Let out a gusty sigh. “Fine, I’ll go to the bath. Jesus. By the way, why did you jump on him?”
As if I didn’t know. But maybe this time he’d say it.
But he didn’t. He just looked away down the hall, hunched down even further, his long, clever fingers fiddling with the cigarette pack. “You were bleeding.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that I hadn’t been. But then I sniffed again, my skin crusted with copper-smelling dried blood, and thought that if a wulfen’s nose was sensitive enough to tell right before a bloody nose started, a loup-garou’s would be too. “Well, thanks.” I tried to sound gracious, and the ice crackled again. More cold water from the leaking bag slid down my sleeve.
Great.
“No problem, Dru. We’re going out for burgers tonight. Want me to bring you some?” He sounded hopeful.
My chest squeezed down on itself. “No.” I hated to rain on his parade. “They’ll be cold by the time you get back. I’ll just grab something in the caf.”
And all the way down the stairs, listening to his silence behind me as I stamped away, I kicked myself for not saying yes.
On the boys’ side of the sparring chapel there was a long room with a ton of individual stone-lipped tubs sunk in the floor. They had lot of partitions and community tubs too, and I’d heard there was always someone in there.
On the girls’ side, the long room was just as big. There were four tubs large enough to drown a couple girls apiece in. Six bathroom stalls. Granite flooring, all kept pretty spic and span. Except for the grotty corners that meant it had been damp in here for a long time. Even chlorine won’t work that funk out.
Still, it was warm and steamy, and the tubs were always bubbling. But there was never anyone in here but me.
I lowered myself into the tub on the farthest side from the door. My clothes lay tangled a few steps from the rim. I’d hurled the ice pack halfheartedly at the shiny new garbage bin set by the sinks, and it hung over the edge, melting water dribbling onto the floor.
I couldn’t even care.
The cloudy not-really-water bubbled. It smells like minerals, a flat palate-coating tang, and it doesn’t feel like regular water. it’s too jelly-thick. For a few seconds it’s so hot it stings. Then it coats the skin, and the bubbles turn sheer instead of translucent. Time spent in the tubs speeds the healing process up like crazy. Which is a good thing, because the combat training here is full-contact.
If you’re a boy.
I’d felt kind of weird about walking around in the locker room by myself. It was like having a whole suite to myself while the boys slept in dorms. And none of them had empty bookshelves, or a CD player of their own, or a personal advisor watching over their every sneeze. Or a computer all to themselves, with Internet shopping sites already bookmarked and a credit card registered to “Sunrise LLC” lying in a neat paper sleeve next to it on a rosewood desk, plus an info sheet telling me where to get stuff delivered to, PO box and mail stop.
Creepy. Dad never used credit cards. Not his own, anyway. Liquid resources for hunting were best. But these guys were the Order. They were big, it took money to run a place like this.
Still, it didn’t seem as big as Christophe had made it sound. Which was something else to think about. And I never went to any useful website, like a GPS ping to find out exactly where I was or county records to find out who owned this chunk of land, not to mention going hunting to find out if there were any news reports about my disappearance or Graves’. That kind of information would have been useful, but there was no point in leaving tracks on a machine I knew wasn’t private.
So, no shopping and nothing useful about the computer. It might as well have been a mute hunk of plastic.
A class schedule, Aspect Mastery, History, Algebra, Civics, had been tacked to my door two days after I’d gotten here, but after the first day of stupid boring remedial crap I’d wadded it up in a ball and started bugging Dylan to give me something challenging. Even the Aspect Mastery class was nothing special, just a social hour for a group of five boy djamphir who spent the time telling nasty jokes and watching me in their peripheral vision. History was run by some blond teacher who stared at me very hard between sentences, as if he was willing me to disappear.
I hadn’t stayed in any classroom for very long. Hanging out near the armory seemed like a better deal.
Graves was always on me about it. You shouldn’t skip, Dru. it’s important.
Yeah. Like I needed a civics class, for God’s sake. Like anyone cared what I did as long as I stayed inside. Like I cared, now that my whole world was upside down.
Now that Dad was gone.
Don’t think about that.
The stone was slick and gritty at the same time. I found a bench and coughed, cupped some of the heavy not-really-water in my palms and smoothed it over my face. It crackled, soothing heat working its way past the ache of a pair of developing black eyes, and I let out a sound that was half-sigh, half -sob. Echoes fell flat against every clean, hard surface. The mirrors were fogged, as usual, but sound bounced off them nevertheless.
I wondered, like I did every time I sat here, if my mother had ever chosen this tub. If she’d ever sat here and heard her own voice bouncing off the stone and glass and metal. If she’d ever felt lonely.
She’d been a part of the Order, or so Christophe and Dylan had told me. But nobody would really talk about her, as if she were an embarrassment. And I didn’t know if she’d ever even been here; this complex was big enough but still tiny in the scheme of things.
Small school, about four hundred students. It wasn’t the kind of place that could scramble helicopters on short notice. But I could have been confused, since Christophe hadn’t exactly been giving out information left and right.
I was just avoiding thinking about it for as long as I could. It wasn’t working.
My eyes flew open, not-water cracking and falling away in little shards of white. Wet hair hung in strings, the curls struggling to spring up. I touched the smooth curve of metal at my throat and winced as if I’d poked at a bruise.
The locket lay just below the notch between my collarbones. Heavy silver, as long as my thumb, the heart and cross etched on the front and spidery, foreign-looking symbols on the back, their edges resting against my skin. I’d gotten so used to seeing the silver gleam on Dad. He never went anywhere without it.
Now whenever I caught sight of it in the mirror or brushed it with my hand, a shock would go through me. Like I’d stuck my finger in a light socket. It was just wrong to be wearing it.
The next hurtful thought arrived right on schedule. I couldn’t put it off any longer.
Dad.
He walked down the hall, and the buzzing got so bad it shook everything out of me, the dream running like colored ink on wet paper, and as it receded I struggled to say something, anything, to warn him.
He didn’t even look up. He just kept walking toward that door, and the dream closed down like a camera lens, darkness eating through its edges.
I was still tr
ying to scream when Dad reached out his free hand, like a man in a dream, and turned the knob. And the darkness behind it laughed and laughed and laughed….
I shut my eyes again. Loosened my legs and slid under the un-water’s surface. It closed over me like a dream, like a balm, and the heat worked in toward my bones. Only there was a coldness inside me, too deep for it to reach. A freeze that wasn’t physical.
He’s dead, Dru. You know who did it. You know why.
Or did I? I knew Dad had been expecting to come back. He had to have been, there was no way he would leave me in a house all alone for good. He’d always come back for me, sooner or later.
Well, he had come back. Just not alive. I’d shot a zombie in my living room, and it had been my father.
Christ. Of all the things that will fuck a kid up, that has got to have a category all its own.
I knew who had killed him and turned him into a zombie. The same person Christophe and Dylan and everyone else said killed my mother.
Sergej. The nosferat who looked like yet another teenager, with oily black curls and eyes that could swallow you whole. The same sucker who had tried to kill me. The reason why I was stuck inside the complex that was the Schola, barely even going outside to walk in the barren leafless winter gardens. I could go outside, but not without someone showing up to stare at me.
Standing guard. Because Sergej, or another nosferat like him, might come back. He was a big wheel among the suckers, the closest thing to a king that they had, and he knew I was alive.
I shuddered all over. My lungs burned. The not-water fizzed around me, heat burrowing in through my muscles, soothing and healing. My face gave one last heave of red pain and subsided. The shuddering got worse as I floated, and for a moment I thought of opening my mouth and letting the stuff in the tubs rush in, coating everything down to the back of my tongue and—
I surfaced in a rushing splash. The stuff dribbled away from my hair, slicked my face, crackled as it hit open air, and instantly formed a weird, wax-white coating over every inch of my exposed skin.