“And how exactly are you going to get home?” asked Trey.
“Who says I’m going home?” I retorted.
“Me. You have no business going out and partying. You look like crap.”
“You’re the second person to tell me that today.”
“Well, then, maybe you’ll start listening,” he said, steering me toward the student parking lot. “Come on, I’ll drive.”
It was an easy offer for him to make because he was my roommate.
Things hadn’t started out that way. He’d been a boarder at Amberwood, living at school with the others. His former group, the Warriors of Light, had the same hang-ups the Alchemists had about humans and vampires interacting. Whereas the Alchemists dealt with this by covering up the existence of vampires from ordinary humans, the Warriors took a much more savage approach and hunted vampires. They claimed they only went after Strigoi, but they were no friends to Moroi or dhampirs either.
When Trey’s father had found out about Angeline, he’d taken a different approach than Sydney’s father. Rather than kidnapping his son and making him disappear without a trace, Mr. Juarez had simply disowned Trey and cut off all his funding. Lucky for Trey, tuition had already been paid for through the end of the school year. Room and board had not, and so the Amberwood dorm had turned Trey out a few months ago. He’d shown up on my doorstep, offering to pay me rent with his meager coffee shop earnings so that he could finish high school at Amberwood. I’d welcomed him in and refused the money, knowing it was what Sydney would’ve wanted. My only condition had been that I had better never, ever come home and find him making out with Angeline on my couch.
“I suck,” I said, after several minutes of uncomfortable silence into our drive.
“Is that some kind of vampire joke?” Trey asked.
I shot him a look. “You know what I mean. I screwed up. No one asks that much of me. Not anymore. All I had to do was remember to go to her fashion show, and I blew it.”
“You’ve had a lot of crap going on,” he said diplomatically.
“So has everyone else. Hell, look at you. Your whole family denies your existence and did their best to get you kicked out of school. You found a workaround, kept up your grades and sports, and managed to nab some scholarships in the process,” I sighed. “Meanwhile, I may have failed an introductory art class. A few of them, actually, if I’ve got more exams coming this week—which seems likely. I don’t even know.”
“Yeah, but I’ve still got Angeline. And that makes it worth putting up with all the other crap. Whereas you …” Trey couldn’t finish, and I saw pain flash over his tanned features.
My friends here in Palm Springs knew about Sydney and me. They were the only ones in the Moroi world (or the human world that shadowed the Moroi) who knew about our relationship. They felt bad for what had happened for my sake and also for hers. They’d loved Sydney too. Not like I did, of course, but she was the kind of person who was fiercely loyal and inspired deep bonds in her friends.
“I miss her too,” Trey said softly.
“I should’ve done more,” I said, slouching into my seat.
“You did plenty. More than I would’ve thought to do. And not just the dream walking. I mean, you harassed her dad, pressured the Moroi, made life a living hell for that Maura girl … you exhausted everything.”
“I am good at being annoying,” I admitted.
“You’ve just run into a wall, that’s all. They’re just too good at keeping her prison a secret. But they’ll crack, and you’ll be there to find that crack. And I’ll be right by your side. So will the rest of us.”
The pep talk was unusual for him but didn’t cheer me up any. “I don’t know how I’m going to find that crack.”
Trey’s eyes went wide. “Marcus.”
I shook my head. “He’s exhausted his leads too. Haven’t seen him in a month.”
“No.” Trey pointed as he pulled the car up to my apartment building. “There. Marcus.”
Sure enough. There, sitting on the building’s front step, was Marcus Finch, the rebel ex-Alchemist who’d encouraged Sydney to think for herself and who had been trying—futilely—to locate her for me. I had the door open before Trey even brought the car to a stop.
“He wouldn’t be here in person if he didn’t have news,” I said excitedly. I jumped out of the car and sprinted across the grass, my earlier lethargy replaced with a new sense of purpose. This was it. Marcus had come through. Marcus had found answers.
“What is it?” I demanded. “Have you found her?”
“Not exactly.” Marcus got to his feet and smoothed back his blond hair. “Let’s go in and talk.”
Trey was nearly as eager as me when we ushered Marcus inside to the living room. We faced him down with mirrored stances, arms crossed over our chests. “Well?” I asked.
“I got a list of locations that may have possibly been used as Alchemist re-education holding facilities,” Marcus began, not looking nearly as enthusiastic as he should have for news like that. I clutched his arm.
“That’s incredible! We’ll start checking them out and—”
“There are thirty of them,” he interrupted bluntly.
I dropped my hand. “Thirty?”
“Thirty,” he repeated. “And we don’t exactly know where they are.”
“But you just said—”
Marcus held up a hand. “Let me explain it all first. Then you can talk. This list my sources got is from cities in the United States that the Alchemists were scouting for re-education and a few other operations centers. It’s several years old, and while my sources confirm that they did build their current re-education facility in a city on the list, we don’t know for sure which one they ended up picking—or even where in that location they chose. Are there ways of finding out? Sure, and I know people who can start digging around. But we’ll have to do it on a city-by-city basis, and each one is going to take a while.”
All the hope and enthusiasm I’d felt upon seeing Marcus shattered and blew away. “And let me guess: ‘A while’ is a few days?”
He grimaced. “It’ll be a case-by-case basis, depending on the difficulties of researching each city. Might take a couple days to knock one off the list. Might take a few weeks.”
I hadn’t thought I could feel worse than I had over the exam and Jill, but apparently I was wrong. I threw myself down on the couch, defeated. “A few weeks times thirty. That could be over a year.”
“Unless we get lucky and she’s in one of the first cities we search.” I could tell even he didn’t think that was likely, though.
“Yeah, well, ‘lucky’ hasn’t really been the way I’d describe how things have been going for us,” I remarked. “Don’t see why that should change now.”
“It’s better than nothing,” said Trey. “It’s the first real lead we’ve got.”
“I need to find her dad,” I muttered. “I need to find him and compel the hell out of him so that he tells me where she’s at.” All attempts at locating Jared Sage had proven unsuccessful. I had managed a phone call and been promptly hung up on. Compulsion didn’t work so well over the phone.
“Even if you did, he probably wouldn’t know,” said Marcus. “They keep secrets from each other, for the very purpose of protecting against forced confessions.”
“And so there we are.” I stood up and headed for the kitchen, off to make a drink. “Stuck just like we were before. Come get me in a year when you’re able to verify your list was a dead end.”
“Adrian—” began Marcus, looking more at a loss than I’d ever seen him. He was usually the poster boy for cocky confidence.
Trey’s response was more pragmatic. “No more drinks. You’ve had too much today, man.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” I snapped. Rather than actually making a drink, I ended up just grabbing two liquor bottles at random. No one tried to stop me as I went to my room and slammed the door.
Before I began my one-man party, I mad
e another attempt to reach out to Sydney. It wasn’t easy since some of this afternoon’s vodka was still hanging around, but I managed a tentative grasp of spirit. As usual, there was nothing, but Marcus’s certainty that she was in the United States had made me want to try. It was early evening on the East Coast, and I’d had to check, just in case she was calling it an early night. Apparently not.
I soon lost myself in the bottles, desperately needing to wipe away everything. School. Jill. Sydney. I hadn’t thought it was possible to feel this low, to have my emotions so black and so deep that there was no way to raise them into any sort of constructive feeling. When things had ended with Rose, I thought no loss could be more terrible. I’d been wrong. She and I had never really had anything substantial. What I’d lost with her was possibility.
But with Sydney … with Sydney, I’d had it all—and lost it all. Love, understanding, respect. The sense that we’d both become better people because of each other and could take on anything so long as we were together. Only we weren’t together anymore. They’d ripped us apart, and I didn’t know what was going to happen now.
The center will hold. That was the line Sydney had coined from “The Second Coming,” a poem by William Butler Yeats, for us. Sometimes, in my darkest moments, I worried the poem’s original wording was more fitting: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
I drank myself into oblivion, only to wake up in the middle of the night with a raging headache. I felt nauseous too, but when I staggered to the bathroom, nothing came up. I just felt miserable. Maybe that was because Sydney’s hairbrush was still in there, reminding me of her. Or maybe it was because I’d skipped dinner and couldn’t remember the last time I’d had blood either. No wonder I was in such bad shape. My alcohol tolerance had built up so much over the years that I rarely felt ill from it, so I must’ve really screwed myself up this time. The smart thing would’ve been to start hydrating and drinking gallons of water, but instead, I welcomed the self-destructive behavior. I returned to my room for another drink and succeeded only in making myself feel worse.
My head and stomach calmed around dawn, and I managed some kind of fitful sleep back in my own bed. That was interrupted a few hours later by a knock at the door. I think it was actually pretty soft, but with the lingering remnants of my headache, it sounded like a sledgehammer.
“Go away,” I said, peering bleary-eyed at the door.
Trey stuck his head in. “Adrian, there’s someone here you need to talk to.”
“I’ve already heard what Merry Marcus has to say,” I shot back. “I’m done with him.”
The door opened farther, and someone stepped past Trey. Even though the motion made my world spin, I was able to sit up and get a better look. I felt my jaw drop and wondered if I was hallucinating. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Usually, I only imagined Aunt Tatiana, but this person was very much alive, beautiful as the morning sunlight illuminated her chiseled cheekbones and blond hair. But there was no way she could be here.
“Mom?” I croaked out.
“Adrian.” She glided in and sat down beside me on the bed, gently touching my face. Her hand felt cool against my fevered skin. “Adrian, it’s time to go home.”
CHAPTER 3
Sydney
I COULD FORGIVE THE ALCHEMISTS their light-show shock tactics because once I was able to see reasonably well again, they offered me a shower.
The wall in my cell opened up, and I was greeted by a young woman who was maybe five years older than I was. She was dressed in the kind of smart suit that Alchemists love, with her black hair pulled back tightly in an elegant French twist. Her makeup was flawless, and she smelled like lavender. The golden lily on her cheek shone. My vision still wasn’t at full capacity, but standing beside her, I became acutely aware of my current state, that I hadn’t truly washed in ages and that my shift was little more than a rag you might use to scrub the floors.
“My name is Sheridan,” she said coolly, not elaborating on whether that was her first or last name. I wondered if she might be one of the people behind the voice in my cell. I was pretty sure they’d worked in shifts, using some sort of computer program to synthesize it so it always sounded the same. “I’m the current director around here. Follow me, please.”
She turned down the hall in her black leather heels, and I followed wordlessly, not trusting myself to say anything yet. Although I’d had some freedom of movement in my cell, I’d also had limitations and hadn’t done a lot of walking. My stiff muscles protested against the changes, and I moved slowly behind her, one agonizing barefoot step at a time. We passed a number of unmarked doors along the way, and I wondered what they held. More dark cells and tinny voices? Nothing seemed to be marked as an exit, which was my immediate concern. There were also no windows or any other indication of how to get out of this place.
Sheridan made it to the elevator long before I did and waited patiently for me. When we were both in, we went up one floor and emerged into a similarly barren hall. One doorway led to what looked like a gym bathroom, with tiled floors and communal showers. Sheridan pointed to a stall that had been supplied with soap and shampoo.
“The water will last for five minutes once you turn it on,” she warned. “So use it wisely. There’ll be clothes waiting for you when you’re done. I’ll be in the hall.”
She stepped outside the locker room, in a seeming show of offering privacy, but I knew without a doubt I was still being watched. I’d lost all illusions of modesty the moment I got here. I started to strip off the shift when I noticed a mirror on the wall to my side, and more importantly, who was looking back from it.
I’d known I was in bad shape, but seeing the reality of that face-to-face was an altogether different experience. The first thing that struck me was how much weight I’d lost—ironic considering my lifelong obsession with staying thin. I’d certainly met that goal, met and blown past it. I’d crossed from thin to malnourished, and it showed not just in the way the shift hung on my thin frame but also in the gauntness of my face. That hollow look was intensified by dark shadows under my eyes and a paleness in the rest of me from lack of sun. I looked like I’d just recovered from some life-threatening disease.
My hair was in bad shape too. Whatever decent job I thought I’d been doing at washing it in the dark was now proven a joke. The strands were limp and oily, hanging in sad, messy clumps. There was no doubt I was still a blonde, but the color was dull, made much darker now by the dirt and sweat that scrubbing with a washcloth just couldn’t get off. Adrian had always said my hair was like gold and had teased me about having a halo. What would he say now?
Adrian doesn’t love me for my hair, I thought, meeting my eyes. They were steady and brown. Still the same. This is all exterior. My soul, my aura, my character … those are unchanged.
Resolved, I started to turn from that reflection when I noticed something else. My hair was longer than the last time I’d seen it, a little over an inch longer. Although I’d been well aware my legs needed a good shaving, I’d had no sense in the cell of what the hair on my head was doing. Now, I tried to remember how fast hair grew. About a half inch a month? That suggested at least two months, maybe three if I took the poor diet into account. The shock of that was more horrifying than my appearance.
Three months! Three months they’ve taken from me, drugging me in the dark.
What had happened to Adrian? To Jill? To Eddie? A lifetime could’ve passed for them in three months. Were they safe and well? Were they still in Palm Springs? New panic rose in me, and I staunchly tried to push it down. Yes, a lot of time had passed, but I couldn’t let the reality of that affect me. The Alchemists were already playing enough mind games with me without my helping them.
But still … three months.
I stripped off my poor excuses for clothes and stepped into the stall, pulling the curtain closed behind me. When I turned the water on and it came out hot, it was all I could do not to sink to the floor in ecstasy. I’d b
een so cold for the last three months, and now here it was, all the warmth I could want. Well, not all the warmth. As I turned the temperature up full blast, I secretly wished I had a bathtub and could just sink into this heat. Still, this shower alone was glorious, and I closed my eyes, sighing with the first contentment I’d experienced in a very long time.
Then, remembering Sheridan’s warning, I opened my eyes and found the shampoo. I applied it to and rinsed my hair three times, hoping it was enough to get out the worst of the grime. It’d probably take a few more showers to ever be fully clean again. After that, I scrubbed my body with the soap until I was raw and pink and smelled vaguely antiseptic, then just gloried in standing under the steaming water until it turned off.
When I stepped outside, I found clothes folded neatly on a bench. They were basic scrubs, loose pants and a shirt like you’d find hospital workers or—more fittingly—prisoners wearing. Tan, of course, since the Alchemists still had taste levels to maintain. They’d also given me socks and a pair of brown shoes, kind of a cross between loafers and slippers, and I wasn’t surprised to find they were exactly my size. A comb completed the gift set, nothing fancy, but enough to attempt some semblance of neatness. The reflection that peered back at me now still didn’t look good, exactly, but it certainly looked improved.
“Feeling better?” asked Sheridan, with a smile that didn’t meet her eyes. Whatever strides I’d made in appearance felt lame beside her stylish grooming, but I consoled myself with the thought that I still had my self-respect and ability to think for myself.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You’ll want this too,” she said, handing me a small plastic card. It had my name, a bar code, and a picture from much better days on it. A little plastic clip on its back allowed it to attach to my collar.