Evernight With Bonus Materials

by Claudia Gray

  “I thought—I mean, I guess—” Before I could get any more incoherent, I quickly said, “At first I thought you fainted. Sometimes I have that effect on guys. It’s too intense. They can’t take it.”

  Lucas laughed. The sound was sort of hollow, but he was laughing. It was really okay; he really didn’t know a thing. Relieved, I put my arms around him and hugged him tight. Lucas held me, too, and for a few moments we stood there, wrapped in each other, and I could pretend nothing had gone wrong at all.

  His hair gleamed like bronze in the sunlight, and I breathed in the scent of him, so much like the woods that surrounded us. It felt so good, the knowledge that he was mine—I could hold him like this, out in the open, because we belonged to each other now. And every second we touched, the memories became stronger: kissing him, feeling his hands on my back, the salty softness of his skin between my teeth and hot blood gushing into my mouth.

  Mine.

  Now I knew what my mother had meant. Biting a human wasn’t as simple as taking a sip from a glass. When I drank Lucas’s blood, he became a part of me—and I became a part of him. We were bound now, in ways I couldn’t control and Lucas could never understand.

  Did that make the way he held me less real? I closed my eyes tightly and hoped it didn’t. It was too late to do anything else.

  “Bianca?” he murmured into my hair.

  “Yeah?”

  “Last night—I just fell into the railing like that? Mrs. Bethany told me how it went down, but it seems to me—Well, I don’t remember any of it. But you do? You remember?”

  His old suspicions about Evernight must’ve been kicking in again. The obvious thing to do was say yes. I couldn’t bring myself to do it; it was one lie too many. “Kind of. I mean, it was all really confusing, and I—I guess I panicked. It’s all kind of a blur, if you want to know the truth.”

  That was the worst dodge imaginable, but to my astonishment, Lucas seemed to believe it. He relaxed in my arms and nodded, like he understood everything now. “I’ll never let you down again. I promise.”

  “You never let me down, Lucas. You never could.” Guilt crushed me, and I clung to him more tightly. “I won’t let you down either.”

  I’ll keep you safe from every danger, I swore. Even from myself.

  Chapter Nine

  AFTER THAT, IT SEEMED AS IF I LIVED IN TWO worlds at once. In one of them, Lucas and I were finally together. That felt like the place I’d always wanted to be my whole life. In the other, I was a liar who didn’t deserve to be with Lucas or anyone.

  “It just seems weird to me.” Lucas’s whisper was pitched low, so that it wouldn’t carry through the library.

  “What seems weird?”

  Lucas glanced around before he answered me, to make sure nobody would overhear. He needn’t have worried. We sat in one of the far archways, one lined with hand-bound books a couple of centuries old—one of the most private corners of the school. “That neither of us really remembers that night.”

  “You got hurt.” When in doubt, I stuck to the story that Mrs. Bethany had come up with. Lucas didn’t wholly buy it yet, but in time he would. He had to. Everything depended on that. “Lots of times, people forget what happened just before they got hurt. It makes sense, doesn’t it? That iron scrollwork is sharp.”

  “I’ve kissed girls before…” His words trailed off as he saw the look on my face. “Nobody like you. Nobody even close to you.”

  I ducked my head to hide my embarrassed smile.

  Lucas continued, “Anyway, it doesn’t make me pass out. Not ever. You are a seriously great kisser—trust me on that—but not even you could make me black out.”

  “That’s not why you passed out,” I suggested, pretending that I really wanted to go back to reading the gardening book I’d found; the only reason I’d picked it up in the first place was some lingering curiosity about what the flower was that I’d glimpsed in my dream months before. “You passed out because this huge iron bar whacked you in the head. Hello.”

  “That doesn’t explain why you don’t remember.”

  “You know I have some problems with anxiety, right? I freak out sometimes. When we first met, I was in the middle of a huge freak-out. Huge! There are parts of my great escape that I don’t remember very well either. When you got hit in the head, I probably freaked out again. I mean, you could’ve been killed.” That part, at least, was close to the truth. “No wonder I was scared.”

  “There’s no bump on my head. Just a bruise, like I fell or something.”

  “We put an ice pack on it. We took care of you.”

  Unconvinced, Lucas said, “Still doesn’t make sense.”

  “I don’t know why you’re still thinking about this.” Even saying that made me a liar again, and worse than before. Sticking to the story was something that I had to do for Lucas’s own protection, because if Mrs. Bethany ever realized that he knew something was up, she might—might—oh, I didn’t know what she might do, but I suspected it wouldn’t be good. But telling Lucas that he was wrong to have doubts, that the good and sensible questions he had about Evernight and his memory lapse that night were just foolishness—that was worse. That was asking Lucas to doubt himself, and I didn’t want to do that. I now knew how bad it felt, doubting yourself. “Please, Lucas, let it go.”

  Lucas slowly nodded. “We’ll talk about it some other time.”

  When he dropped the subject and stopped worrying about the night of the Autumn Ball, our time together was wonderful. Almost perfect. We studied together in the library or in my mother’s classroom, sometimes with Vic or Raquel along. We ate lunch together on the grounds, sandwiches wrapped in brown bags and stuffed into our coat pockets. I daydreamed about him during class, rousing myself from my happy stupor only as often as I had to in order to keep from flunking out. On the days when we had chemistry together, we walked to and from Iwerebon’s room, side by side. Other days, he found me as soon as classes were over, as if he’d been thinking about me even more than I’d been thinking about him.

  “Face it,” Lucas whispered to me one Sunday afternoon when I’d invited him up to my parents’ apartment. (They had tactfully greeted us, then let us hang out in my room for the rest of the day.) We lay together on the floor, not touching but close beside each other, staring up at the Klimt print. “I don’t know anything about art.”

  “You don’t have to know anything about it. You just have to look at it and say what you feel.”

  “I’m not so great at saying what I feel.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. Just give it a try, okay?”

  “Well, okay.” He thought about it long and hard, staring up at The Kiss all the while. “I guess—I guess I like the way he’s holding her face in his hands. Like she’s the one thing in the world that makes him happy, that really belongs to him.”

  “Do you really see that in the painting? To me he looks—strong, I guess.” The man in The Kiss certainly looked in control of the situation to me; the swooning woman seemed to like it that way, at least for the moment.

  Lucas turned to me, and I let my head loll to one side so that we were face-to-face. The way that he looked at me—intent, serious, filled with longing—made me hold my breath. He said only, “Trust me. I know I got that one right.”

  We kissed each other, and then Dad picked the perfect moment to call us for our dinner. Parental timing is uncanny. They made the most of dinner, even eating food and acting like they enjoyed it.

  Being close to Lucas meant that I had less time to be with my other friends, though I wished it didn’t. Balthazar was still as kind as ever, always greeting me in the hallway and nodding to Lucas, as though Lucas were his pal and not someone who had nearly tackled him the night of the Autumn Ball. But his eyes were sad, and I knew that I’d hurt Balthazar by not giving him a chance.

  Raquel was lonely, too. Even though we invited her along for study nights sometimes, she and I never shared lunch anymore. She hadn’t made any other friends that I k
new of. Lucas and I had a half-baked idea of setting her up with Vic, but the two of them simply didn’t click. They hung out together with us and had fun, but that was that.

  I apologized to her once for spending less time with her, but she blew it off. “You’re in love. That makes you actually kind of boring to people who aren’t in love. You know, the sane ones.”

  “I’m not boring,” I protested. “At least not more than I was before.”

  Raquel responded by clasping her hands together and looking up at the library ceiling with her eyes slightly unfocused. “Did you know that Lucas likes sunshine? He does! Flowers and bunny rabbits, too. Now let me tell you all about the fascinating laces in Lucas’s fascinating shoes.”

  “Shut up.” I swatted her shoulder, and she laughed. Still, I felt the odd distance between us. “I don’t mean to leave you alone.”

  “You don’t. We’re cool.” Raquel opened her biology textbook, obviously ready to drop the subject.

  Carefully, I said, “You seem okay with Lucas.”

  She shrugged and didn’t look up from her book. “Sure. Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Just—some of the stuff we talked about before—it’s not a problem. Really.” Raquel had been so sure that Lucas might attack me, never realizing that it was the other way around. “I want you to see him for who he is.”

  “A fabulous, wonderful guy who loves sunshine and barfs roses.” Raquel was joking but not quite joking. When she met my eyes at last, she sighed. “He seems okay.”

  I knew I wouldn’t get any further with her that day, so I changed the subject.

  While my best friend at Evernight wasn’t thrilled that I was with Lucas, a lot of my worst enemies thought it was a great idea. They were actually glad I’d bitten him.

  “I knew you’d get with the program eventually,” Courtney said to me in Modern Technology, the one class no human students had been enrolled in. “You’re a born vampire. That’s, like, super-rare and powerful and stuff. There was no way you could stay an enormous loser forever.”

  “Wow, thanks, Courtney,” I said flatly. “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Don’t see why you’re all weird about it.” Erich gave me a smarmy grin while he fiddled with the day’s assignment, an iPod. “I mean, I figure any guy as greasy as Lucas Ross has an aftertaste, but hey, fresh blood is fresh blood.”

  “We should all get to snack sometimes,” Gwen insisted. “Hello, this school now comes complete with a walking buffet, and nobody gets to take a bite?” A few people mumbled agreement.

  “Everyone pay attention,” demanded Mr. Yee, our teacher. Like all other teachers at Evernight, he was an extremely powerful vampire—one who had remained part of the world for a very long time and yet retained his edge. Mr. Yee wasn’t especially old; he’d told us that he’d died in the 1880s. But his strength and authority radiated from him almost as powerfully as they did from Mrs. Bethany. That was why each of the students, even those centuries older than him, gave him respect. At his command, we all fell silent. “You’ve had a few minutes with the iPods now. Your first questions?”

  Patrice raised her hand first. “You said that most electronic devices can establish wireless connections now. But it doesn’t seem like this one does.”

  “Very good, Patrice.” When Mr. Yee praised her, Patrice shot me a grateful smile. I’d talked her through the whole idea of wireless communications a few times. “This limitation is one of the few design flaws of the iPod. Subsequent models are likely to incorporate some form of wireless connection, and, of course, there’s also the iPhone—which we’ll cover next week.”

  “If the information inside the iPod actually re-creates the song,” Balthazar said thoughtfully, “then the sound quality would depend completely on what kind of speakers or headphones you used. Right?”

  “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 ac
ting 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.