She didn't want it! She didn't want any of it! She thought about her grandmother who'd spent the last years of her life in some sort of psychiatric hospital because she'd been so weird, if not insane. Victoria was already an orphan and an outcast. And after what had happened at school, being anything like her grandmother was exactly what she didn't want or need.
Leto looked up at her and made a sound that was halfway between a hiss and a growl.
Victoria avoided the cat's penetrating gaze. She threw the amulet into the music box and slammed the lid.
"Everything all right, Tori?" asked Holly, coming back into the room and noticing Victoria's wild expression. "You're bleeding!"
Victoria stared blankly at the long, nearly black scratches on the backs of her hands. A strange rusty-sweet odor filled her nostrils. "Just Leto," she said, wiping the blood with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. "It's nothing."
"You're sure everything's okay?"
"I'm fine. I just need some fresh air." Victoria forced a smile to her face and kissed Holly's cheek. "Thank you for a wonderful birthday present, it's exactly what I wanted. I can't wait to set up my laptop."
"What about the necklace?" Holly asked, looking at the music box on the table.
"I don't want it. I'm sorry."
"What happened?" Holly said cautiously. "Was there something in the box?"
"No, nothing important," said Victoria. "I'll see you later, Aunt Holly."
"Do you want me to put it in your room?"
Victoria glanced at the box, and the heat surged in her chest. Her palms tingled painfully and she dug her nails into the soft flesh, looking away with effort.
"I don't care what you do with it. Really. Just give it away."
Leto's sharp hiss was cut off by the door slamming behind her. She stared down in surprise at her throbbing hands and the new streaks of fresh blood seeping from her scratches. They bled, hot and angry.
Something inside her smiled.
VICTORIA CHEWED HER bottom lip as she drove to the registration building. She didn't know why she was nervous but she was. She had enrolled at Windsor Academy, a private preparatory school about three and a half hours south of Millinocket, where she'd been accepted with a partial scholarship to finish her senior year of high school. Money-wise, it would be hard even with the financial aid, but she'd preferred to scrimp and save, rather than go back to St. Xavier's. The local high school had been an option but the gossip would only follow her there.
Canville was perfect—far enough away but still close to Holly. She was staying with an old friend of Holly's who rented out a tiny apartment in her house. To offset her tuition, she'd secured a job at a local restaurant, the Black Dog, as a waitress and bartender. Luckily, Maine was the only state that allowed bartenders at seventeen, so she'd be able to get more shifts and make more money. Her part-time job as an assistant to the music director would be just enough to cover the rest of her costs.
Despite her recent disturbing tendency to know what people were going to say before they said it, things had been quiet over the summer. She'd spent most of her time working at the local bookstore in Millinocket. All she'd wanted was to be normal—no strange voices, no weird energy, and no mysterious music boxes with hidden family secrets. The strange blood disease and her stay in the hospital had faded into a distant, if troubling, memory. That part of her life—St. Xavier's, the hospital, Brett—was over, and she was determined to forget it. She'd buried her grandmother's music box in a carton full of other unwanted things in a corner of her new apartment.
Victoria hadn't told anyone, not even Holly, that she'd remembered what had happened with Brett. At first, it'd just been bits and pieces over the months, but eventually she'd remembered it all in cold, gruesome detail. She had almost killed him. She also remembered what had happened in the hospital, which was a little harder to come to terms with, because it was in every sense, impossible.
She died.
She'd read Dr. Mills' report from the hospital. Her heart had stopped beating for forty-three minutes, enough time for her to be completely brain-dead, and they'd tried everything including a defibrillator at its highest level to resuscitate her. And just as Holly had said, when they'd been about to call it quits, her pulse had resumed of its own accord. No wonder Dr. Mills had looked at her as if she were a freak.
In the end, her regeneration had been so dramatic that within days, despite her blood's atypical dark color, her blood count was back to normal, healthy levels, and the abnormal cells that had supported the initial diagnosis seemed to have disappeared. They'd kept her in a medically induced coma for four days after she'd been admitted, but for all intents and purposes, her recovery had been deemed a medical miracle.
A miracle or the devil's own luck?
Victoria breathed slowly and ignored the errant thought, inhaling through her nose and exhaling through her mouth as she walked to the entrance of the building. That chapter of her life was now closed. Over.
After she'd turned seventeen, things had just felt different. It had felt like she could do anything. Maybe it was the freedom from the chains of St. Xavier's, but at Windsor, Victoria discovered a new lease on life. This was her fresh start—new school, new personality, no craziness. She had even made sure that she looked different. Her hair had been cut in a flattering shoulder length style, and she'd chosen to wear a scarlet sweater, a far cry from the more somber colors she usually favored. She was older and wiser, and things would be different.
"Admissions, please?" she asked the security guard at the entrance. He nodded over his shoulder to the right without even raising his eyes from the magazine he'd been reading. Victoria went into the building and filed the required paperwork with the clerk, receiving her senior class schedule in exchange. She was finished in ten minutes. As she turned to leave the Admissions Office, she collided with someone walking in from outside and her papers went flying.
"Omigod, I am so sorry! That was totally my fault. I wasn't watching where I was going."
"I hardly think you were solely to blame," said a melodic husky voice.
Was that a French accent??? Victoria's head whipped up from where she was kneeling to collect her papers, and she immediately banged heads with him again as he knelt down to help her. The single thought that registered before stars blinded her vision was that he didn't look anything like the boys she'd known at St. Xavier's! He had strange eyes that were so light they didn't seem to have any color in them. They seemed hard, out of sync with the boyish contours of his face.
"Ouch," she said, suddenly tongue-tied. "That was ... me. I'm so sorry." Her eyes met his startling silver ones and her heart almost stopped as he smiled at her. His smile did not quite seem to touch his eyes despite the brilliance of it, and she bent her head quickly.
"Apology accepted. I'm Christian, Christian Devereux." The velvety voice washed over her already overheated senses, and her hands shook as her own voice stuck, paralyzed in her chest. Where she came from, boys did not speak like that, with mellifluous, perfect diction and voices that sounded like butterscotch! It was a voice that was also at odds with the hardness of his eyes. It confused her.
"I'm Tori Warrick. I'm a senior, I mean, I just enrolled ... transfer," she said. God, what was wrong with her! He was just a boy, for goodness' sake. Her hands felt clammy as she gathered up her papers. Her heart was hammering heatedly in her chest.
Stop it, she told herself. She couldn't understand the sudden rush of adrenaline deafening her ears, the unexpected liquidity of her limbs. His eyes met hers, and her blood burned in response.
Christian was not what she would consider in conventional terms to be good-looking. His face, though perfect in its symmetry, lacked the softness that would make him handsome. But he was ... magnetic. Dark blond waves of hair framed a face of striking sharpness, with strange silver-colored eyes as she'd noticed before. A thin white scar curved into his left eyebrow.
He had long delicate hands, she noticed as he gathered
the last of the papers before handing them to her. His mouth was wide, with beautifully shaped lips lending a brief softness to the rest of his face. Beautifully shaped smiling lips! Her eyes snapped up guiltily, flushing that he had caught her gawking like an adolescent girl.
"Here you go, this looks like all of them," he said.
Victoria must have imagined his eyes being cold before, for now they glinted a warm silver. He smiled and passed her the sheaf of papers. Every movement was smooth, unaggressive, yet something about him made her feel like prey that knows it is being hunted. Her pulse spiraled and she took a step back.
As he too stepped back, he looked at her with a slightly pained expression as if something had bothered him momentarily, but then he just said carelessly, "Well, see you around, Tori Warrick."
"Um, sure. Thanks for your help ... Christian," she responded, flustered. What was wrong with her? She watched his back as he walked away. Strangely enough, the further away he got, the less agitated she became. After several tense moments, she drew a long strangled breath and made her way out of the building.
AS VICTORIA EXITED the building's front doors, Christian Devereux turned around and stared, coldly appraising her. He followed her and watched as she drove out of the parking lot, dissecting their meeting methodically in his mind.
Despite her coltish appearance, from the minute they had touched, something had caught and held his attention ... something obscure but potent. Every instinct in him had been drawn toward her, a moth to a flame.
And that was before her scent had invaded his already strained senses, her blood racing under the surface of her golden skin and amplifying the scent of her a hundredfold. It had taken almost all of his concentration to maintain his composure and not to bury his face in her neck, losing himself in that bewitching fragrance. He'd stopped breathing instead.
Christian closed his eyes, savoring her lingering scent. It was delicate yet underscored by something thick and heady. It troubled him because he was drawn to it so desperately, yet something else warned him away from her. Self-preservation had become an instinct unfamiliar enough to be completely foreign to him. He found it curious, and unsettling.
He deliberated whether to place the call or not, taking the sleek cell phone out of his pocket and turning it between his fingers. Christian thought about how he'd reached out just before she'd driven off, feather-lightly, attempting to explore her unconscious, and how easily she had blocked him from her thoughts. Her response had been intuitive, in fact, he was sure of it. That could only mean one thing. She had no idea what she was.
Christian frowned. Better safe than sorry, they would find out about her anyway. They always did. He shrugged off the remaining tendrils of her scent and dialed the number.
"Lucian," he said, when the voice on the other end answered. "Witch, mild paranormal strength, blocked me." He could hear the derisive snicker on the other end of the phone and it infuriated him, but he remained calm. "I don't believe it was conscious. It may just be purely instinctive, no need for you to intervene at this point. I will ... appraise the situation."
"Anything else?"
"No, that's all."
The phone went dead. Christian fought not to crush it between his fingers as he closed it shut. "Au revoir, mon frère." Nothing like a warm brotherly conversation, he thought. Then again, he'd expected nothing more.
Christian didn't like surprises, least of all, his brother's underlings invading his privacy and disrupting the life he had so carefully built over the last few years in this remote Maine town. His preemptive call would take care of that for the moment. His brother's obsession with identifying sources of magical energy and finding paranormal threats had reached new heights, and although Christian thought Lucian was being overly paranoid, he no longer had a say in how things were run in the House of Devereux. That, by his own choice, was now Lucian's realm.
It was just a minor hurdle that Tori Warrick had enrolled at Windsor, one that he would assess for his brother's sake, if not his own. He got into his car and gunned the engine. There was something elusive about this girl; he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He only knew that he didn't want Lucian to interfere just yet.
Tori.
The name rolled over his thoughts like honey, and he ruthlessly squashed the memory of her. He wasn't an animal. He wouldn't let one girl destroy the perfect balance and independence he had defied his own world to achieve. He wanted a life of obscurity and quiet. The rules of the Devereux aristocracy no longer applied to him. Christian wanted to keep it that way.
As he drove along the narrow roads at over a hundred miles per hour, the thick forest on either side cloaking the way with long, dappled shadows, he briefly considered returning to Paris but he just as quickly discarded the thought. The urge to run was not his style. It wasn't that he was afraid of her, he was afraid of something far worse. The violent temptation that she had put him through had been momentary, more an accident of fate than anything, yet his loss of control had been staggering. It had taken every ounce of his discipline to hold himself together and not succumb to his darkest urges ... the secret that haunted his existence.
Christian Devereux was a vampire.
A vampire, whose mask after almost two centuries, was perfect. He was cultured, urbane, sophisticated. Yet for all that, he'd never been more afraid of what he was, than he had been at that single moment when he'd locked eyes with Tori Warrick.
Christian hadn't killed anyone in more than one hundred years; he satiated his thirst and his victims lived, human or not. But with her, the most reviled part of himself craved her blood to the last drop, to the death. Already he could imagine the warm, briny taste of it, and his teeth lengthened, his body trembling. He willed himself under control, his jaw tightly clenched.
She was what she was, and he was what he was.
The laws were clear. And he was bound to them.
Christian pulled into the driveway of his house, an old Georgian mansion that he had spent the last few years restoring. It rested on ten acres of flawlessly manicured grounds, fringed by untouched woodland backing onto even more thickly wooded forest. The property afforded him the privacy he needed. He glanced at his watch. It was almost four o'clock. Right now he needed to hunt. He needed to satisfy his hunger, and drown the taste of her from his mouth.
VICTORIA WALKED ACROSS the open quad between the tall red and white brick buildings, following the student map together with the course assignments she held in her hand. Kramer Hall, it said, for psychology. Oh hell, not five minutes into the day and she was lost already.
Windsor shared the town and its rolling landscape with its sister school, Harland College. Both private institutions, they shared not just the same acreage, but the same benefactors and some of the same facilities, including a library and concert hall. Windsor prided itself on preparing its students for college, and according to the brochure, ninety-eight percent of Windsor graduates went on to a four-year college, with almost a fifth of its graduating seniors matriculating to Harland.
"Okay," Victoria told herself. "Head back to the library, that's the building over there with the big clock, and then start over."
"Hey there! Are you lost? You look confused, and well, you're talking to yourself." Her savior was a pretty girl with tight, reddish brown curls and brown eyes. She was with a dark-haired girl with an extremely sour face. The redhead continued in a friendly manner. "My name is Charla. That's Angie. Are you new? Where are you headed?" It was hard to keep pace with her rapid-fire speech.
"Um, yes, I'm a transfer. I'm looking for Kramer."
"Psych? Yeah, I'm in that building, too. Come on, we're headed there. Those maps are the worst, but don't worry, you'll get the hang of it. Only a few hundred students here, so it's not that big of a place and everything's pretty easy to find."
Victoria nodded her thanks and fell into stride beside Charla. The other girl followed and Victoria could feel the heat of her stare burning into her back.
&
nbsp; "I'm Tori by the way, Tori Warrick. Thanks so much for stopping. I was getting desperate."
The dark haired girl's sudden hiss of indrawn breath behind her was barely audible, but Victoria heard it and could feel an answering flush heating her cheeks. Before she could turn around, Charla announced that they had arrived. Victoria shook it off. Maybe she had imagined it—or not, as the dark-haired girl rudely pushed past her and tossed an unpleasant look over her shoulder. Victoria ignored her and smiled her thanks again to Charla before heading into the crowded classroom.
The senior class material was the same as what she would have been taking at St. Xavier's, and she took careful notes on her new laptop during the hour-long course, enjoying the feel of being back in a classroom after the summer.
She glanced around and recognized the dark-haired girl, Angie, sitting about ten rows down. As if she had felt the weight of Victoria's glance, she turned around and stared back malevolently, her dark eyes piercing. Victoria refused to look away—she hadn't done anything wrong—and only the teacher rapping his books on the table signaling the end of class broke their eye contact, neither willing to back down.
Victoria shook her head and gathered her things, refusing to let some random girl ruin her day. She quickly checked her schedule. She had a break and then history, which was in another building. People chatted loudly as they exited the room, laughing and talking about their summer holidays. It felt nothing like St. Xavier's, the energy and excitement were infectious. She couldn't help smiling to herself as she walked toward the concert hall to finalize her assistant job before her next class. This time, she found the building easily.
"Five minutes," mouthed a young woman sitting at the outer desk while she wrapped up a phone call. Victoria waited in the small hall area and perused the posters of concerts and events lining the walls. She loved music. Going to Carnegie Hall every weekend with her parents in New York had been one of her favorite pastimes, and remained a fiercely cherished memory. As she walked, the lilting sounds of Beethoven came from a piano down the hall, its haunting melody flawless. Curious, Victoria motioned to the assistant that she'd be right back.
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