“Lenah Beaudonte.”
He stuck out a wet hand. “Justin Enos.”
We shook hands, and I held on a bit longer than I expected. His skin was rough on the palms but smooth on the top. He let go first.
“Thank you, Lenah Beaudonte,” he said, and put his hand by his side before I could sneak a peek at his inner wrist. We kept our eyes on each other and I didn’t look away. I tried to decipher the new emotion coming up through my body. It was—strange. This boy wasn’t Rhode, but he was—something to me. I examined the curve of his upper lip, the way it sloped down and met a proud and full bottom lip. His nose was slim, and his eyes were green but set farther apart than Rhode’s. They were well-framed beneath dirty blond eyebrows. The green was so different from Rhode’s blue. My Rhode. Who was gone forever.
“You look really sad,” he said, interrupting my thoughts.
Not what I was expecting.
“Do I?”
Justin lifted his face up into the air so the rain smacked his face even more directly.
“Are you?” he asked, still looking up.
I nodded once when he looked back at me. “A little.”
“You miss your parents?”
I shook my head. “Brother,” I said. It was the closest I would get to the truth. Boyfriend was wrong. Lover was wrong. Soul mate was a bit dramatic.
“What would cheer you up?” He was almost smiling at me now, a crooked smile. “Besides standing in the rain.”
This is helping, was the thought that came to mind. Thank goodness it was getting dark. He couldn’t see me blush.
“I’m not sure.”
“I’m gonna have to do something about that,” he said. I could feel his energy. It was mischievous, yet he was harmless. I liked the combination.
He started to walk backward toward his dorm. He admired me with a look of relaxed contentment and said, “See you at assembly.”
I picked up my bag of books and headed toward the path to Seeker. Once on the pathway, I looked back at his dorm. He was in the archway of the building, leaning his shoulder against the stone, and had one ankle crossed over the other. The rain was still falling and when our eyes met through the drops, he cracked a smile and turned into the darkness of the building alleyway.
Chapter Five
Bleeeeeep. Bleeeep. I smacked the alarm clock with the palm of my hand. Saturday morning, placement test morning. As I hadn’t been, well…above ground, I was required to take the tests when I arrived on campus. The night before, I read directions for various electronics and fumbled with timers and dials. It all worked and I was awake at 7 a.m. in time to get ready and walk to Hopper. Turns out Tony was right. According to my itinerary for the first few days before school started, anything and everything I needed to do was in that building.
With a backpack slung over my shoulder, I walked into Hopper building and down the first-floor hallway toward the administrative offices. As I walked, I noticed school advertisements and posters. A notable one said, biology club. we love blood! I smiled but I wanted to tell Rhode. I wondered if he had seen what I was seeing.
I approached the headmistress’s door at the end of the hallway. MS. WILLIAMS was embossed in gold lettering on the glass. I opened the door, and Ms. Williams stood beside her desk.
“Come with me, Ms. Beaudonte,” Ms. Williams said, and gestured to the open doorway. I followed after.
They made me take five tests. Yes, five. The headmistress herself stood over my right shoulder and watched me take the Japanese test. She didn’t believe I could speak and write in every language that Wickham offered. In this world, the human, contemporary world, clocks are everywhere. Mortals live their lives by a ticking clock. Vampires spend days, even weeks, awake. We’re not truly alive. We look alive, though there is no circulation, there is no pumping heart, no reproductive organs that thrive. Our chests do not rise and fall because there is no oxygen in the blood to flow through our veins. In moments when I wanted to escape the pain and terror, I longed to inhale. If I felt the air hit the back of my throat, I could pretend I was alive. I never did feel it, though. There was just an eternal aching—a constant reminder that I was numb, turned off, no longer part of the living world. Being a vampire is an ancient magic. Nothing exists…nothing but our minds.
I have traveled the entire earth more than once, learned many languages, some that don’t exist anymore. Heath, one in my coven, taught himself Latin in three months and when he did, it was all he would speak. He was tall, blond, and strong boned, like a swimmer. He was so beautiful that no woman ever saw it coming when he whispered Latin into her ear and then ripped out her throat.
The smell of overly sweet perfume brought me back to the moment. Ms. Williams returned to her office. I sat in a brown leather lounger facing the secretary’s desk.
“What should we do?” I heard Headmistress Williams ask one of her colleagues, a stuffy, older woman holding a clipboard. “She’s placed out of all the AP classes,” Ms. Williams whispered.
“I need a job?” I offered. Might as well throw in my two cents. Also, I had a promise to keep to Rhode.
“What are your strengths, besides speaking languages?” Headmistress Williams asked.
“How about the library?” the stuffy colleague suggested.
They were speaking about me as though I wasn’t there. Anger shot through me, which surprised me at first. I wanted to kill them both, though something within me told me it wasn’t a good idea. In my vampire life, I would have drained their blood and murdered them just to release the constant anger that afflicted me. For an instant, I imagined pressing my hands into the arms of the chair, standing up, and grabbing Ms. Williams’s head between my palms. It would take no more than a flick of my wrists and I could have snapped her head back, drained her blood, and murdered her. Instead, I looked up and smiled lamely.
“The library sounds excellent,” Ms. Williams confirmed, and she pulled some paperwork out of a drawer in her desk.
Library? That sounded reasonable. As my thoughts revolved around my days surrounded by books, something miraculous happened. My anger subsided. It ebbed away as the thoughts of books, pages, and comfort entered my head. As the two women continued to talk, I realized that what I was feeling was simultaneous emotions. Feeling joy, hope, and anger at the same time? That was enough to dissolve my anger instantaneously. I looked up at the stuffy administrator handing me a pen. On second thought, I wouldn’t have sucked them dry—even if I were a vampire. I hated the taste of anyone over thirty, anyway.
HATHERSAGE, ENGLAND
OCTOBER 31, 1602
The living room was empty. A leather couch faced a crackling, lively fire. On the walls were paintings, and some portraits of Christ—for fun. Chatter, voices, and incoherent sentences echoed from the hallway. I ran a long index fingernail along the top of the couch. My nail was pointed so sharp that it made the tiny fibers inside the soft cloth stick out at jagged angles. The flames roared. The fireplace was more than five feet high and four feet wide, with a mantel made of black onyx. I sauntered past it. The year was 1602, the dwindling years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. I wore dresses made from the finest Persian silk and corsets that pushed my breasts so close together I was astonished a breathing human could survive the pressure.
I swung my hips as I turned and sauntered down a long hallway lit only by wall sconces in the shape of two palms facing up. In the hands were candles that had burned almost into nothing. The waxy drops fell in succulent globs onto the floor. The train of my dress spread them across the wood in luscious zigzags as I headed toward a doorway at the end of the hall. When I glanced behind me, the grand fireplace threw orange embers of light into the dark hallway and outlined me in a dark tangerine line. I stopped in front of the doorway and listened. I could hear orchestral music and laughter. I didn’t know it yet, but that night, October 31, 1602, was the last night of the very first Nuit Rouge celebration.
I grasped the handle, which was shaped like a d
agger facing downward. I pulled it open. Ancient greetings such as “merry meet” and “grand tidings” met my ears. There on the floor, in the center of the room, was a portly woman sitting on her heels. She wore a white wool dress that covered her up to her breasts, and a white bonnet on her head. Her blond hair fell across her face as she muttered something in Dutch. It struck me that she was most likely someone’s servant, though I did not recognize her. She probably had no idea her master was a vampire, and now here she was, in my house.
The ballroom was lovely, I should mention. This servant’s plump behind was seated on the finest wood floor in England. Tall torches rested high on the four circular stone pillars that supported the room. Their flames busily illuminated the dance floor, musicians played in the corner, and two hundred vampires stood in a circle around the fat woman.
Rhode leaned against a pillar watching me, smiling. His arms were crossed over his chest. His ensemble was simple. He wore black leggings and solid black shoes with thin leather soles that were flat with no heels. The clothing at the time was very rich in texture, and wealthy vampires loved to show off. Rhode wore a black linen jacket fastened with a thick black ribbon. The muscles of his arms were well defined under the tight sleeves of the black jacket. He must have just fed, because his teeth looked whiter than I had seen them in ages.
I walked languidly around the inner part of the circle of vampires. I held my eyes on Rhode until I reached the ballroom doorway, which now was open and showed the long hallway and the dance of light from the fireplace.
The woman in the middle of the room kept glancing at the hallway. I felt, as always with my vampire extrasensory perception, what this woman wanted. She wanted to make a run for it.
“Do you know why you are here?” I asked the woman, speaking to her in Dutch. I circled her very slowly, keeping my hands behind my back.
She sat on her heels watching me. She shook her head no.
“Do you know what I am?” I asked.
Again, she shook her head. “I want to—to leave,” she said, her voice quivering. “My mother and father.”
I raised my index finger and placed it over my lips. Images from my human life drifted to the front of my mind. My parents’ stone manor. The wet earth. An earring in a palm. I refocused on the servant’s features. Her keen blue eyes, their round shape and short blond eyelashes. I stopped circling and stood above her, looking down.
“You know,” I said, and smiled. The moment before the vampire will kill, the fangs lower. At first they appear as regular teeth, but when the kill is happening, like an animal, the fangs are bared. And mine lowered; I felt them lower, as though slowly unfolding a blade. I bent over and looked deeply into her eyes. I whispered into her right ear, “You’re going to taste horrible. Look at your disposition.”
I pulled back and looked into her eyes again. “I wouldn’t dare sully my insides with what you are.” I stood back up. For a moment, relief swept over her face.
I walked past her, the low heels of my black leather shoes clicking against the wooden floor. The train of my gown swiveled behind me like a snake. I threw one long glance back at Rhode and smiled. It was silent in the ballroom. The musicians had stopped playing. I was midway back down the hallway when I lifted my right hand in the air, bent my wrist down, and snapped my fingers.
Two hundred vampires descended upon her at once. I smiled all the way back up to my bedroom.
The library at Wickham was a Gothic masterpiece with panoramic glass windows. I entered through the two double doors, taking in the plush chairs, rows and rows of books, and students investigating the stacks. Decorating the ceiling were three-dimensional, octagonal tiles made out of black wood.
“Your job, Ms. Beaudonte, is to sit here behind this desk. When people ask you questions, you answer them to the best of your ability. You can always direct them to a librarian if you can’t answer something they want to know.” The librarian, who was leading me on a tour, was a tall woman with a thin nose and eyes shaped like a cat.
These contemporary humans were so horribly misinformed. I was a former vampire who had been asleep the last hundred years. They expected me to act as a reference guide?
“You get paid every Friday. I’ll have your semester schedule at the end of your shift at seven p.m. Headmistress Williams also suggested you tutor some of the students in their language skills, as you are so proficient. I’ll make a sign for you to put up on the miscellaneous bulletin board at the Union.”
Once she walked away, I collapsed into a chair behind the semicircular reference desk. Wickham private school certainly was going to keep me busy. In front of me was a computer, which basically blinded me with its blue light. There were all sorts of contraptions I had never seen before: staplers, ballpoint pens, paper clips, printers, and electrical outlets. Keyboards, virtual desktops, search engines—these were just some of the hundreds of words that I had to learn in order to fit in, and quickly. To assimilate within Wickham or, as Rhode would say, “to become a teenage girl again” would require all of my best efforts. This society was particularly complicated.
I glanced at the clock around 4:30 and realized I had two more hours on my shift. I decided to explore the library. I walked aisle after aisle, deep into the depths of the stacks, taking in the beauty of Wickham’s library. As I turned into the last aisle of books, a girl’s laughter echoed from somewhere nearby. It was a kind of vibrating chortle that came from deep within her, bouncing under her ribs. Pure laughter. I wanted to see who she was. I raised on my tiptoes and peered over the tops of the books. Running parallel to the row were study atriums with glass walls and panoramic windows. Inside the room were deeply padded, blue couches and study desks.
The row of books was a good hiding place because I could duck down behind the shelves, if I needed to. I peered over the top of the books again and kept walking, following the laughter.
I stopped short, just when I realized who the laughing girl was—Tracy Sutton, Justin’s girlfriend. They were in the very last study atrium. Justin was relaxing in a lounger, and Tracy sat on his lap. In chairs on either side of him were his brothers Curtis and Roy. Tracy laughed that same happy sound again. It struck me how easily people laughed in this age. How easily they could express their happiness. I had forgotten what that was like. Justin was tall, very tall, so Tracy looked tiny in his lap. If I had been in Tracy’s place, my legs would have dangled over Justin’s knees like a spider’s.
Tracy stood up and shrieked something unintelligible. The other members of the Three-Piece, Kate and Claudia, stood on either side of her and pulled down the sides of their matching jeans to expose their hip bones. I raised higher on my toes and stared. They were wearing matching undergarments made to look like leopard skin. Claudia hung an arm over Kate’s shoulders, and Tracy slipped back into Justin’s lap. I couldn’t help it—the staring, I mean. I was transfixed by their happiness.
I was especially drawn to Justin. He had this…aura. There is no other way to explain his life force. The image of his chest dripping with rain flashed through my head. And how his lips looked when he formed words. Especially when he asked me if I was sad. I wanted him to talk to me more.
“I am so not into morning assembly,” Tracy said, and then kissed Justin’s cheek. She was facing in my direction. I gasped and ducked down out of sight. I didn’t want anyone to see me. Not from that group, anyway. I peered through the space between the shelf and the tops of the books.
I’d had a human reaction to Justin Enos. The flip-flopping of my heart and the way my breath skipped around in my chest. Would it have been this way for Rhode? Would Vicken, if he were human again, possibly have jitters when he looked at me?
Justin reached around Tracy and his palms rested on her thighs. As I examined him, by some horrible chaotic coincidence, Justin, who was looking at one of his brothers, furrowed his eyebrows and stopped speaking. His smile fell, and he turned his head, so I could see not just his profile but his whole mouth. Then, the sh
arp point of his nose, then his eyes, staring directly into mine.
“Ms. Beaudonte.”
I spun around. The librarian with the cat-shaped eyes stood before me. She held a black crate filled with slim plastic cases. “Please alphabetize these CDs in the listening room.”
“Listening room?” I said, wondering what on earth a listening room could be. Had the modern world evolved so much that people sat in a room and simply—listened?
The librarian handed me the crate and pointed down the aisle of atriums to a room at the end. When I didn’t move, she sighed. “This way…”
I followed behind her. She shuffled when she walked, as though her hips and behind were too heavy for her to pick up her feet properly. As a vampire, I would have been able to murder her in less than ten seconds. She looked back at me and motioned for me to hurry up. I decided to stop thinking about her slow gait and my deft ability to lure my prey.
I peeked into the crate. The slim cases held names, some of which I recognized. I slid one of them out; on it, I read the name George Frideric Handel. What was this? Handel was a musician, a composer—what on earth could those cases have to do with him? I flipped the case over. The artwork depicted a man wearing a white wig, a wig I had seen on countless men during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The wig curled on both sides of the man’s face and was held back into a ponytail. He held a small composing baton above a full orchestra.
Only when the librarian’s clip-clopping heels came to a stop did I realize that we had come to the listening room. Justin and his friends were at the long end of the hall. The librarian opened a black door with a paned window in the middle. She pointed inside the room; running over the walls was a thick, gray fabric that was very dense but soft to the touch. I let my fingers graze the plush material that crawled on the walls. Facing me was a towering, black machine that took over the entire wall. The librarian pointed at a wall of shelves. “Just place them on the racks and organize them by the last name.”