by Claudia Gray
"Mostly, yes. There are superior recording formats, but any casual listener and even some pros wouldn't be able to tell the difference, as long as the iPod was hooked up to a superior audio system. Anyone else?" Mr. Yee looked around the room and then sighed. "Yes, Ranulf?"
"What spirits animate this box?"
"We've been over this." Putting his hands on Ranulf's desk, Mr. Yee slowly said, "No spirits animate any of the machines we've studied in class. Or will study, moving forward. In fact, no spirits animate any machines at all. Is that finally clear?"
Ranulf nodded slowly but didn't look convinced. He wore his brown hair in a bowl haircut and had an open, guileless face. After a moment, he ventured, "What about the spirits of the metal from which this box is made?"
Mr. Yee slumped, as if defeated. "Is there anyone from the medieval period who might be able to help Ranulf with the transition here?" Genevieve nodded and went to his side.
"God, it's not that hard—it's just, like, a turbo Walkman or something." Courtney shot Ranulf a skeptical glare. She was one of the few at Evernight who never seemed to have lost touch with the modern world; as far as I could tell, Courtney had mostly come here to socialize. Worse luck for the rest of us. I sighed and went back to creating a new playlist with my favorite songs for Lucas. Modern Technology really was too easy for me.
Weirdly, the place where it was hardest to forget the trouble lurking just beneath the surface was English class. Our folklore studies were behind us, and now we were making a review of the classics and digging into Jane Austen, one of my favorites. I thought there was no way I could go wrong there. Mrs. Bethany's class was like some mirror universe for literature, someplace where everything got turned on its head, including me. Even books I'd read before and knew inside out became strange in her classroom, as if they'd been translated into some rough, guttural foreign language. But Pride and Prejudice—that would be different. Or so I thought.
"Charlotte Lucas is desperate." I'd actually raised my hand, volunteering to get called on. Why did I ever think that was a good idea? "In that day and age, if women didn't get married, they were, well, nobody. They could never have money or homes of their own. If they didn't want to be a burden on their parents for forever, they had to marry." I couldn't believe I needed to tell her that.
"Interesting," Mrs. Bethany said. "Interesting" was her synonym for "wrong." I started to sweat. She walked in a slow circle around the room, and the afternoon sunlight glinted on the gold brooch at the throat of her frilly lace blouse. I could see the grooves in her long, thick nails. "Tell me, was Jane Austen married?"
"No."
"She was proposed to, once. Her family was quite clear on that point in their various memoirs. A man of means offered his hand in marriage to Jane Austen, but she refused him. Did she have to get married, Miss Olivier?"
"Well, no, but she was a writer. Her books would've made—"
"Less money than you might think." Mrs. Bethany was pleased I'd walked into her trap. Only now did I see that the folklore section of our reading had been to teach the vampires how twenty-first-century society thought about the supernatural, and that the classics were ways of studying how attitudes were different between their histories and now. "The Austen family was not especially wealthy. Whereas the Lucases—were they poor?"
"No," Courtney piped up. Since she was no longer bothering to put me down, I figured she was doing it to get Balthazar to look at her. Since the ball, she'd renewed her efforts to win him over, but as far as I could tell, he was still unmoved. Courtney continued, "The father is Sir William Lucas, the only member of the gentry in town. They're wealthy enough that Charlotte doesn't have to marry anybody, not if she doesn't really want to."
"Do you think she really wants to marry Mr. Collins?" I retorted. "He's a pompous idiot."
Courtney shrugged. "She wants to be married, and he's a means to an end."
Mrs. Bethany nodded approvingly. "So, Charlotte is merely using Mr. Collins. She believes she is acting from necessity; he believes that he is acting from love, or at least the proper regard for a potential wife. Mr. Collins is honest. Charlotte is not." I thought about the lies I'd told Lucas, gripping the edges of my notebook so hard that the crisp paper edges seemed to slice into my fingertips. Mrs. Bethany must've known what I was feeling, because she continued, "Doesn't the deceived man deserve our pity instead of our scorn?"
I wished I could sink into the floor.
Then Balthazar gave me an encouraging smile, the way he used to, and I knew that even if we weren't hanging out any longer, at least we were still friends. In fact, none of the Evernight types were looking down their noses at me like they used to. Even if I wasn't really a vampire yet, I'd proved something to them. Maybe I was "in the club."
In some ways, it felt like I'd gotten away with something—that I'd pulled off a trick of some kind—closed my eyes and said abracadabra and turned the whole world upside down. When I was holding hands with Lucas, laughing after class at one of his jokes, I could believe that everything was going to be better from now on.
That wasn't true, though. It couldn't be true as long as I was deceiving Lucas.
Before, I'd never thought of keeping my family's secret from Lucas as lying; I'd been taught to keep that secret since I was a tiny child, drinking blood from the butcher shop out of my bottle. Now I knew how close I'd come to hurting him, and my secret didn't seem innocent any longer.
Lucas and I kissed constantly—all the time, before breakfast in the morning, as we went to our different dorm areas at night, and basically pretty much any other time we could be alone together for an instant. However, I always stopped us before we got carried away. Sometimes I wanted more, and I could tell Lucas did too from the way he watched me, paying attention to how I moved or the way my fingers wrapped around his wrist. He never pushed me, though. When I lay alone at night, my fantasies became even wilder and more desperate. Now I knew what Lucas's mouth felt like on mine, and I could imagine his touch against my bare skin with a clarity that startled me.
But when I had those fantasies now, the same image always bubbled up: my teeth sinking into Lucas's throat.
There were times I thought I would do anything to taste Lucas's blood again. That was when I was the most frightened.
* * *
"What do you think?" I modeled the old-fashioned velvet hat for Lucas, thinking that he would laugh; surely the deep purple of the fabric looked bizarre next to my red hair.
Instead he smiled at me in a way that made me feel warm all over. "You're beautiful."
We were in a secondhand clothing shop in Riverton, enjoying our second weekend in town together much more than the first. My parents had taken chaperone duty at the theater again, so we'd decided to skip our chance to see The Maltese Falcon. Instead we ran in and out of the shops that were still open, looking at posters and books, and dealing with some eye rolling from the clerks behind the counter, who were clearly sick of teenagers from "that school" running amuck. Too bad for them, because we were having a great time.
I took a white fur stole from a shelf and draped it around my shoulders. "What do you think?"
"Fur is dead." Lucas said it sort of wryly, but maybe he didn't think people should wear fur at all. I personally felt like vintage things ought to be okay; the animals had died decades and decades ago, so it wasn't like you were doing any more harm. All the same, I hastily took the stole off.
Lucas, meanwhile, tried on a gray tweed overcoat he'd dug out of an overstuffed rack in the back. Like the rest of the shop, it smelled sort of musty, but in a good way, and the coat looked amazing on him. "That's sort of Sherlock Holmesy," I said. "If Sherlock Holmes were sexy."
He laughed. "Some girls go for the intellectual type, you know."
"Aren't you lucky I'm not one of them?"
Fortunately, he liked it when I teased him. He grabbed me, arms around my arms so that I couldn't even hug him back, and kissed me soundly on the forehead. "You're imposs
ible," he murmured. "But you're worth it."
The way he held me, my face was buried in the curve of his neck; all I could see were the faint pink lines on his throat, the scars of my own bite. "I'm glad you think so."
"I know so."
I wasn't going to argue with him. There was no reason my one terrible mistake couldn't remain just that—one mistake, never to be repeated.
Lucas's finger brushed along my cheek, a gentle touch like the soft tip of a paintbrush. Klimt's Kiss flickered in my mind, gold and gauzy, and for a moment it was as though Lucas and I really had been drawn into the painting with all its beauty and its need. Hidden behind the racks as we were, lost in a maze of old, cracked leather and wrinkled satin and rhinestone buckles dulled with time, Lucas and I could've kissed for hours without being found. I imagined it for a moment—Lucas placing a black fur coat on the floor, laying me atop it, lowering himself over me—
I pressed my lips against his neck, right on the scars, the way my mother used to kiss a bruise or scrape to make it better. His pulse was strong. Lucas tensed, and I thought maybe I'd gone too far.
It can't be easy for him either, I told myself. Sometimes I think I'm going to go crazy if I don't touch him, so how much worse must it be for Lucas? Especially since he can't know the reasons why.
The jingling of bells jolted us out of our trance. We both peeked around the corner to see who had come in. "Vic!" Lucas shook his head. "I should've known you'd show up here."
Vic sauntered toward us, thumbs beneath the lapels of the striped blazer he wore beneath his winter coat. "This style doesn't put itself together, you know. It takes effort to look this good." He then groaned as he looked longingly at Lucas's tweed overcoat. "You tall guys get all the best stuff, man."
"I'm not buying this." Lucas shrugged it off, ready to leave. Probably he wanted to give us a few more moments of privacy; it was almost time to return to the bus. I knew how he felt. As much as I liked Vic, I didn't really want him tagging around.
"You're crazy, Lucas. Something like that fit me? I'd snap it up." Vic sighed. He looked dangerously close to accompanying us out to the bus.
I thought fast. "You know, in the back of the store, I think I saw some ties painted with hula girls."
"Seriously?" Just like that, Vic was gone, pushing his way through the clothes display in search of hula ties.
"Good work." Lucas pulled the hat from my head, then took my hand. "Let's go."
We were almost to the door when we walked past the jewelry rack, and a dark, glittering object caught my eye. A brooch, carved of something that was as black as the night sky but shone brilliantly: I realized that it was a pair of flowers, exotic and sharp petaled, just like the one in my dream. The brooch was small enough to fit in my palm and intricately carved, but what amazed me the most was how much it looked like a flower that I had started to think only existed in my imagination. I had stopped in my tracks to stare at it. "Look, Lucas. It's so beautiful."
"That's genuine Whitby jet. Victorian-era mourning jewelry." The saleslady peered at us over the lenses of her blue-rimmed reading glasses, trying to evaluate whether we were potential customers or kids who needed to be scared off. Probably she decided on the latter, because she added, "Very expensive."
Lucas didn't like being challenged. "How expensive?" he said coolly, like his last name was Rockefeller instead of Ross.
"Two hundred dollars."
My eyes probably bugged out. When your parents are schoolteachers, you don't get the biggest allowance in the world. The only thing I'd ever bought that cost more than two hundred dollars was my telescope, and my parents had chipped in for that. I laughed a little, trying to disguise my embarrassment and the sadness I felt at having to leave the brooch behind. Each black petal was more beautiful than the last.
Lucas simply pulled out his wallet and offered the clerk a credit card. "We'll take it."
She raised an eyebrow but took the card and started ringing up the purchase. "Lucas!" I grabbed his arm and tried to speak under my breath. "You can't."
"Can, too."
"But it's two hundred dollars!"
"You love it," he said quietly. "I can tell by the look in your eyes. If you love it, you should have it."
The brooch still sat in the display case. I stared down at it, trying to imagine anything so beautiful belonging to me. "I do—love it, I mean, but—Lucas, I don't want you in debt because of me."
"Since when do poor people attend Evernight?"
Okay, he had a point there. For some reason, I'd never really thought about the fact that Lucas must be wealthy. Vic, too, probably. Raquel was a scholarship kid, but there were only a handful of those. Most of the human students were actually paying through the nose for the chance to be surrounded by vampires—though, of course, they didn't realize that last part. They didn't come across like snobs, probably because they didn't have a chance. The ones who really acted like entitled rich kids were the ones who'd been saving money for centuries or who bought IBM stock back when the typewriter was a newfangled invention. The hierarchy at Evernight was so strict—vampires on top, humans hardly worthy of notice—that I hadn't realized that most of the human kids came from money, too.
Then I remembered that Lucas had tried to tell me once about his mother and how controlling she could be. They'd traveled all around, even lived in Europe, and he'd said that his grandfather or great-grandfather or somebody had attended Evernight as well, at least until he got expelled for dueling. I should've realized he wasn't poor.
Not that this was a bad surprise. In my opinion, all boyfriends should turn out to be secretly wealthy. But it reminded me that, as much as I adored Lucas, we were still only beginning to learn about each other.
And that made me remember the secrets I kept.
The saleslady offered to wrap up the brooch, but Lucas took it and pinned it on my winter coat. I kept tracing the sharp-carved petals with one finger as we walked out into the town square, hand in hand. "Thank you. This is the best gift anyone's ever bought for me."
"Then it's the best money I ever spent."
I ducked my head, bashful and happy. We would've gone on being mushy for a while if we hadn't walked into the town square and found the students milling around the bus, talking animatedly with each other with absolutely no teachers around. "Why is everybody standing around like that? How come they aren't boarding the bus yet?"
Lucas blinked, obviously thrown off by the sudden change in subject. "Uh, I don't know." Then, more focused, he continued, "You're right. They should've started calling us by now."
We walked down into the crowd of students. "What's going on?" I asked Rodney, a guy I knew from chemistry.
"It's Raquel. She's taken off."
That couldn't be right. I insisted, "She wouldn't leave by herself. She gets scared easily."
"Really? She always seemed kinda standoffish to me." Vic joined us in the crowd, holding a clear plastic bag stuffed with garish ties. Then Rodney paused, like he realized it might not be good manners to speak badly about the missing person. "I saw her earlier at the diner. Some townie kid was trying to talk to her and striking out. I didn't run into her after that."
I grabbed Lucas's hand. "Do you think that guy's done something to her?"
"She could just be running late." Lucas was trying to be reassuring, but he wasn't doing a very good job.
Vic shrugged. "Hey, maybe he finally said the right thing and she's making out with him right now."
Raquel wouldn't ever do that. She was too cautious and too distrustful to ever impulsively hook up with a guy she didn't know. Guiltily, I wished that I'd asked her to hang out with Lucas and me instead of leaving her on her own.
My father walked into the town square, his forehead furrowed. I realized that he was even more concerned than I was. Dad said only, "Everyone, get on the bus and head back. We'll find Raquel, so don't worry."
"I'll stay and look for her, too." I stepped toward my father and away from Lu
cas. "We're friends. I can think of a few places she might have gone."
"Okay." Dad nodded. "Everybody else, get going."
Lucas put one hand on my shoulder. This wasn't the romantic farewell I'd planned earlier. He wasn't selfishly disappointed, however. All I saw was concern for Raquel and for me. "I ought to stay behind, too, help you guys out."
"They won't let you. I'm sort of surprised they let me."
"It's dangerous," he said quietly.
My heart went out to him—desperate to protect me, completely unaware how well I could protect myself. I said the only thing that I thought might reassure him. "My father will look out for me." I went up on tiptoe to kiss Lucas's cheek, then brushed my fingers across the brooch again. "Thank you. So much."
