by Claudia Gray
Instead he kissed me, blood and all.
When our mouths parted, I whispered, "That's all it is. I promise. Is that okay? Can you take that?"
"I want to be with you, Bianca," he said. "No matter what you are. No matter what."
Chapter Fourteen
"Can you sit up?"
"Not yet." Lucas held his hands over his eyes, then let his arms sag back onto the floor. "I need another second."
"I tried not to take too much blood." I really, really did not want to have to go to Mrs. Bethany for help again. "You gave me permission, right?"
"I did. I'm not sure I was thinking straight, but that's my fault, not yours." Something in me that had been strung too tight finally relaxed, and I could breathe deeply again. As long as Lucas felt that way, everything would be all right. "Did your parents or Mrs. Bethany tell you to do this?"
"To bite you?"
"I know better than that. I meant, to tell me about the school?"
"The exact opposite. They wanted me to lie to you, which is why I did at first." This part still made me feel ashamed. "I'm sorry, Lucas. I thought it would be safest for both of us if I went along with the story Mrs. Bethany made up to cover the hours you forgot."
"It's weird. I remember you biting me this time—but it's hazy. Like how sometimes you can't quite remember a dream five minutes after you wake up. If you hadn't been here with me the whole time and kept me awake, I probably would have forgotten that, too. You'd think being bitten by a vampire would be one of those things that would stick in your memory. You know, stand out from the usual?"
"The forgetting is part of the bite. I don't know why. Maybe nobody knows why. It's not like there are scientific explanations for vampires."
Lucas breathed in deeply, then slowly pushed himself up on his elbows until he was sitting. I braced his shoulder with my free hand, but he shook his head. "I'm okay, I think."
"Now you know why, when we kiss, sometimes I have to, well, hold back."
"I understand now." His smile looked a little funny. "That part is sort of a relief. I was starting to think I needed to switch to a new mouthwash or something."
I giggled and kissed him on the cheek. "Don't worry. I didn't turn you into a vampire."
"I know. I mean, my heart's beating. So no vampire." Lucas took the handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his neck. As he dabbed at the wound, he winced. "I still can't believe you were born a vampire. I've never heard of that."
"How could you have heard of it before you ever knew that vampires were real?"
"Good point."
"I'll never bite you again, unless you ask me to."
"I believe you." Lucas laughed, and it was a strange sound—like he was laughing at himself for some reason I didn't understand. "I believe you completely. Even now."
I hugged him tightly. For Lucas to say that after he'd learned how I lied to him, well, it was as much as I could ever have asked for.
We bandaged Lucas so neatly that nobody would notice while he wore his uniform shirt, went back downstairs, and just managed to avoid missing curfew. He kissed me easily at the entryway to the guys' dorm and then walked away, giving no hint that tonight was different from any other.
"You're acting weird," Raquel said that night as we brushed our teeth at the sinks. "I know things have been tense with you and Lucas. Is everything okay?"
"We're great. We kind of had a misunderstanding over the holiday, but everything's all right now." What she'd perceived as me "acting weird" had been me trying to angle myself so that Raquel couldn't see that the toothpaste I was spitting out was pink with Lucas's blood. "How are you?"
"Me? I'm awesome." She said it with real relish, which made me stare at her in surprise. Raquel laughed. "Sorry. Now that Erich's gone, Evernight seems halfway bearable."
"Really? Listen to you. By next year you'll be Evernight's one and only cheerleader."
"One, if you ever call me a cheerleader again, I will wipe the floor with you," Raquel said around her toothbrush. "Two, it wouldn't be very exciting to cheer for a school whose only sports are equestrian events and fencing. Seriously, talk about being stuck in the Dark Ages."
"More like the early eighteen-hundreds." I turned off the cold water tap and gave her a smug smile. "And I notice that you didn't say you wouldn't come back next year."
This earned me a wet washcloth thrown at my head, but I managed to duck.
That night, as I lay in bed and Patrice slipped out the window for a late snack, I tried to evaluate how I felt. Once again, I knew that almost mystical closeness to Lucas, but this time it was even better. He knew now; he understood everything. I didn't have to lie any longer, and that alone was a vast, soaring relief. Nothing else really mattered.
Or so I thought, until the next morning.
I awoke with the same heightened senses I'd felt before. My parents had said that I would get used to the sensations, but I certainly hadn't yet. I tugged my pillow over my head in a futile attempt to muffle the sound of Genevieve singing madrigals in the shower, the birds cawing outside, and someone downstairs who was already sharpening pencils. The pillowcase felt coarse against my skin, and the smell of Patrice's nail polish was almost overpowering.
"Do you have to give yourself a pedicure every single day?" I threw back the covers.
Patrice glanced down at my bare feet, which obviously hadn't been given much attention in a while. "Some of us place a higher priority on hygiene and grooming than others. It's simply a matter of preference. I try not to look at it as a reflection on anyone's character."
"Some people have better things to do than paint their nails," I retorted. She ignored me and continued brushing burgundy polish onto her little toe.
By the time I got downstairs, I felt like I was getting a handle on my enhanced senses. What worried me more was the suspense about seeing Lucas. Even though he'd asked to be bitten, the wound had to hurt. What if that had scared him off?
He wasn't waiting for me when I came downstairs. Last term, when we'd been together, he'd usually waited at the entry to the girls' dorm, backpack over one shoulder, but today, nothing. I shrugged it off and told myself that Lucas had simply overslept again. Sometimes he did, and after the previous night, no doubt he needed his rest.
At lunchtime, I looked for him on the grounds. Lucas was nowhere to be seen. Still, I said nothing to my parents or anyone else. Lucas had said last night that he believed in me, and that meant I had to believe in him. Even when I got to chemistry class and saw that Lucas had skipped, I kept telling myself that I had to have faith.
It was just after class when Vic sidled up to me in the hallway, doing a very poor job of acting casual. "Heya. Remember that time you sneaked into our room?"
"Yeah, just before Christmas." I squinted at him. "Why?"
"You think you could do it again? Something weird is going on with Lucas, and he won't say what's up. I figure if anybody could talk him into going to the doctor, it's you."
The doctor? Oh, no. Stricken, I grabbed Vic's arm. "Get me up there. Now."
"Okay, already!" He started leading me toward the guys' dorm, glancing around furtively as if we were being followed. "Don't panic. It's not like appendicitis or something. Lucas's just acting strange. Stranger than usual, that is."
Everyone was on edge since Erich's disappearance, so it wasn't quite as easy for me to sneak up there this time. Vic had to scout each hallway, wait for the coast to be clear, and then motion frantically to me. Then I hurried into the next hallway and ducked into a corner while Vic checked the next hall. Finally we made it, and I stepped inside their room.
Lucas lay on his bed with his hands on his stomach, as if he felt sick. When he looked up at me, I saw surprise—and then relief. He was happy to see me, despite everything, and that made me so glad I had to smile. "Hey," I said, kneeling by the side of his bed. "Stomachache?"
"I don't think that's the problem." He closed his eyes as I brushed a few strands of hair away from hi
s sweaty forehead. "Vic, could you give us a few seconds?"
"Sure thing. Just hang your necktie on the doorknob if you get busy in here. Usually I'm all about the free porn, but—"
"Vic!" we protested in unison.
He held up his hands and backed out, grinning. "Okay, okay."
The second the door shut, I turned back to Lucas. "What's wrong?"
"Ever since this morning, it's like—Bianca, I can hear everything. Everything in this whole school. People talking, walking, even writing. The pens scraping on paper. It's all so loud." It was all so familiar that an eerie shiver swept through me. Lucas squinted, as if the light was too much for his eyes. "Smells are intense, too. Everything is just…exaggerated, I guess. It's unbearable."
"It happened to me, too, after I bit you."
Shaking his head, Lucas insisted, "It can't be the bite. I didn't feel this last time. I woke up at Mrs. Bethany's sort of light-headed, but that was all."
"More than once," I whispered, remembering what my mother had told me. "You can't become a vampire until you've been bitten more than once."
Lucas jerked upright, so that his back was wedged against the metal headboard. "Whoa, whoa. I'm not a vampire. I'm alive."
"No, you're not a vampire. But you could become a vampire now. It's possible for you. And maybe—maybe once it's possible—your body starts to change."
He grimaced. "You're kidding me, right?"
"I wouldn't joke about something like this!"
"Well, can we, like, reverse it? Fix it so I couldn't become a vampire?"
"I don't know! I don't know how any of this works."
"How can you not know this? Don't you get some kind of vampire facts-of-life speech?"
Lucas was hinting again that my parents had kept important facts from me; I still found it irritating, but now I had the sinking realization that he might be right. "They told me how I would become a vampire. They prepared me for my own change. Not for you."
"I know, I know." His hand on my arm was reassuring, and I hated that he had to comfort me while he was so scared and uncomfortable himself. "I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around this."
"That makes two of us."
Why hadn't I realized until now how little I understood about the hard facts of being a vampire? It never seemed like anything I had to question, before. Maybe my parents weren't willfully hiding the truth from me; maybe they were simply waiting until I was ready. It hit me that this might've been the real reason they'd insisted I attend Evernight Academy. They could have been trying to prepare me to learn the entire truth.
If that were the case, they'd get their wish. "I'll try and find something out. There must be books in the library. Or I could ask someone who wouldn't get suspicious—Patrice, maybe. Balthazar would tell me, I know, but he'd figure out that I bit you again. He might not tell my parents, but he might, if he thought it was for our own good."
"Don't take any risks," Lucas said. "We'll figure this out somehow."
Learning that truth proved harder than I thought.
* * *
"See how easy it is?" Patrice was so happy that I'd asked her to teach me the art of the pedicure, you would've thought I was paying her for private tutoring. "Tomorrow we'll switch to a color more suitable to your skin tone. That coral looks a bit sickly."
"Oh, great. I mean, that would be great." I hadn't counted on having to repaint my toenails for the rest of the school year, but if I could learn something useful, it would be worth it. I began, "It must have been difficult keeping things up in the old days, before, like, nail polish remover and stuff like that."
"Well, we didn't have nail polish to remove. But grooming was a challenge. Talcum powder helped a lot." Patrice sighed, a soft smile on her lips. "Florida water. Scented sachets, too, and perfume on little handkerchiefs that you could tuck in the bosom of your dress."
"And that drew the guys in?" When she nodded, I pushed it a little further. "So you could, well, bite them?"
"Sometimes." Her face changed then, shifting into an expression I'd hardly ever seen on Patrice's face: anger. "The men I met weren't beaus, you know. They were bidders. Buyers. The balls I went to before the War Between the States were octoroon balls—You don't even know what those are, do you?"
I shook my head.
"Girls like me—who were part white and part black, pale enough for plantation owners to consider pleasing—a lot of us were sent to live in New Orleans, and we were brought up as proper young ladies. You could almost forget you were a slave." Patrice stared down at her half-painted toenails, three of which gleamed wetly. "Then, when you got old enough, you could go to octoroon balls so that white men could look you over and buy you from your owner, as a kind of concubine."
"Patrice, that's horrible." I'd never even heard of anything so disgusting.
She simply tossed her head and said airily, "I was changed the night before my first ball. So I went through the entire social season, drinking from man after man. They thought they would use me, but I used them instead. Then I ran away."
This was the first time Patrice had ever shared anything with me—at least, anything real. I would've liked to let her keep talking, so that she could reveal more about her past, but I had to change the subject for Lucas's sake. "Did you ever drink from the same guy more than once?"
"Hmmm?" Patrice seemed to be coming back from a great distance. "Oh, yes. Beauregard. Fat. Self-satisfied. He could lose two pints and not even feel it, which came in handy."
"Did anything happen to Beauregard?"
"On the last night of the social season, he fell from his horse and broke his neck. Maybe it's because he was light-headed from blood loss, but probably he was just drunk. Do you think plum works with my skin tone?"
"Plum looks great on you."
And just like that, it was over. The open door between us was shut again, and Patrice was again cocooned in her silks and perfumes, safe from having to look at the harshness of her past. I knew I couldn't ask again without making her suspicious, so the entire conversation had been useless.
And the library? Worse than useless. You would think a library in a vampire school would have some books about vampires, right? But no. The only volumes they had were horror novels (shelved in the Humor section) and serious studies of folklore, more fiction than fact, like the ones we'd read in Mrs. Bethany's class. Apparently there weren't any books written by vampires for vampires. As I leaned my head back against a row of encyclopedias, sighing in frustration, I wondered if maybe I ought to break into the market someday. That helped with my potential career choices but not so much with Lucas's situation.
Fortunately, Lucas felt better in a couple of days. His enhanced senses dulled slower than mine had, but they did eventually get back to normal, so that wasn't a problem any longer. But there were other changes, too—ones that were harder to understand that felt even more familiar to me.
* * *
"Look at this," Lucas said, as we walked out on the edge of the grounds the weekend after. As I watched, he jumped for the lowest branch of a nearby pine and grabbed it, hanging easily from the branches. Then, slowly, he pushed his legs upward, changing his grip on the branch as he pulled himself up and up, curling around the branch and finally stretching into a handstand, his feet up straight above his head.
"I don't guess you're actually an Olympic gymnast," I joked, uneasily.
"Aw, damn, my secret life is out."
"Thought I saw you on a Wheaties box one time."
"Seriously, I'm in shape, but there is no way in hell I ought to be able to do this. And coming back down should hurt, but"—Lucas curled downward, dropped, and landed solidly on his feet—"it's not a problem."
"I can do that, too," I confided, "but only right after I've eaten. My parents could do stuff like that anytime."
"So you're saying this is vampire power." Lucas didn't like the sound of that, I could tell. "That I'm stronger than a human—maybe even stronger than you now—ev
en though I'm not a vampire."
"It doesn't make sense to me either, but—maybe."
* * *
As January turned into February, we made other discoveries about the changes in Lucas. We would run together through the countryside, and I didn't hold back. We ran faster than any human could, sometimes for hours. It tired us both out, but we could do it. At nighttime, we slipped out onto the grounds or onto the roof, and I quizzed Lucas on what he could hear. He could pick up the hooting of an owl half a mile away or the snapping of a twig. His hearing wasn't quite as acute as mine, and neither of us felt anything as vividly as we had right after I'd drunk his blood, but it was still superhuman.
