by Claudia Gray
“Stop!” I insisted. “Who is it?”
The shape stood up slowly, rising into the moonlight. It was Lucas.
“Lucas? What are you doing here?” As soon as I asked it, I felt stupid. He’d come up here for the same reason I had, to see if Erich was stalking Raquel. Lucas didn’t answer. He was staring at me as if he didn’t know me at all, and he took one step backward.
“Lucas?” At first I didn’t understand, but then it hit me. My fangs were still sharp. My mouth was still wet with blood. If he’d crouched there for a couple of minutes, he would have heard me talking to Erich—he’d seen me bite him—
Lucas knows I’m a vampire.
Most people don’t believe in vampires anymore and wouldn’t believe no matter how hard you tried to convince them. But Lucas didn’t have to be convinced, not while he was staring a fanged, bloody-lipped vampire in the face. He looked at me like I was a stranger—no, like a monster.
Every secret I’d fought my whole life to protect had just been revealed.
Chapter Eleven
“WAIT,” I PLEADED. MY LIPS WERE STILL STICKY with blood. “Don’t go. I can explain!”
“Don’t come near me.” Lucas’s face was stark white.
“Lucas—please—”
“You’re a vampire.”
I couldn’t say anything else. My new talent for lying couldn’t help me now. Lucas knew the truth, and I couldn’t hide any longer.
He kept backing away, stumbling over the slate shingles, his arms jerky as he tried to steady himself. Shock had made him clumsy—Lucas, who always moved with purpose and strength. It was like he’d been blinded. I wanted to go after him to keep him from losing his balance and falling, if for no other reason. More than that, I was desperate to explain. But he wouldn’t let me help him, not anymore. If I followed, Lucas would panic and run away. Run away from me.
Shaking, I sat down on the rooftop and watched Lucas make his way across the roof. He didn’t dare turn his back on me until he was more than halfway to the north tower and the guys’ rooms. By then, my arms were wrapped around my knees and tears trickled down my cheeks. I was more frightened and ashamed than I’d ever been in my life, even more than when I’d bitten him.
Had he already realized what had really happened the night of the Autumn Ball and that I had been the one to hurt him? If he hadn’t, I knew he would soon.
What should I do? Tell my parents immediately? They’d be furious with me—and they’d also have to take action against Lucas. I didn’t know what the vampires would do to a human who learned the secret of Evernight, but I suspected it wouldn’t be good. Report this to Mrs. Bethany? Out of the question. I could try waking Patrice for advice, but she would probably shrug, readjust her satin eye mask, and fall back to sleep.
Now that the secret was out, all of those people were in danger. Lucas probably wouldn’t tell anyone, for fear of being called insane; even if he did, nobody was likely to believe him. But the risk—that one chance that we could all be exposed—was terrible. And it was all my fault.
There had to be some way I could fix it. Something I could do.
I’ll talk to Lucas. First thing in the morning—No, he has an exam first thing. It was so strange, even having to think about something as mundane as an exam in the middle of this. I can catch him after that. He won’t want to talk to me, but he won’t start yelling about vampires in the hall. So that gives me a chance, and if I can only figure out what to say—
Then what? I’d lied to Lucas. I’d hurt him. Maybe he was right to get as far away from me as possible.
Still, I knew I had to try. If I was in danger of losing Lucas forever, there was nothing I wouldn’t do—plead, cry, or reveal every secret I’d ever had. I only knew that I had to make Lucas understand.
After a long, sleepless night, I got up, put on my black sweater and kilt, and went stiffly downstairs. I thought I’d timed it to the end of Lucas’s exam, but apparently the students were being allowed to leave as they finished—and Lucas had finished early, according to some other guys in the class. That meant he was already back in his room, probably. Screwing up my courage, I sneaked into the guys’ dorm area. Vic and Lucas had once pointed out their window from the grounds, so I could find the room if I just didn’t get caught.
Would showing up in Lucas’s room unannounced scare him to death? Maybe. I’d have to risk it. I couldn’t take it any longer. The suspense was gnawing at me, turning me inside out. Even if Lucas told me never to come near him again, at least then I’d know. Not knowing was worse than anything.
I knew I’d reached my destination when I found a door decorated with two posters—one of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and another from something called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Nobody answered my knock, so I hesitantly pushed the door open. No one was inside. Lucas’s room smelled like him—spicy and woodsy, almost like being back in the forest. Half the room was covered in posters from action movies, guns and babes spilling out in every direction; this was the half with the bed that had a tie-dyed cover on it. In other words, Vic’s half. Lucas’s half of the room was almost bare. No pictures or posters hung on the walls, and on the small bulletin board that hung above everyone’s bed, he had pinned up only his class schedule and a movie ticket—Suspicion, from our first date. An army surplus blanket covered his bed.
Apparently there was nothing for me to do but wait. Unsure what to do, I walked toward the window, which showed a stretch of the school’s gravel driveway. A few cars were there, mostly parents picking up their kids on the last day of exams, taking them back home for Christmas. The human kids, of course. I watched people hugging, loading up luggage—and Lucas, striding out the front door with his duffel bag slung over one shoulder.
“Oh, no,” I whispered. I pressed my hands against the window so hard that I thought it would shatter—or I would—but Lucas never hesitated. He went straight toward a long black sedan with tinted windows. The sedan’s door opened, and I tried to get a look at who was inside, but I couldn’t see anyone. His stripped-down half of the room made sense to me now. I knew immediately that Lucas had left Evernight for Christmas break without saying good-bye and that he probably would never return.
“Whoa, the rooms are going coed? That’s made of awesome.” Vic came in behind me. I gave him a wan smile before turning back to watch Lucas’s car driving away. The car was speeding off as if they were in a hurry. “Good job sneaking in. You guys just said good-bye, huh?”
“Uh-huh.” What else could I say?
“Don’t get too depressed, all right?” Vic gave me a little punch on the shoulder. “Some guys know what to say to girls when they’re upset, but man, I’m not one of them.”
“I’m okay. Honestly.” I studied Vic carefully. He was the only person at school that Lucas might have shared his suspicions with. “Has Lucas seemed…okay to you?”
“He turned down my invitation to Jamaica.” Vic shrugged. “Something about getting together with family friends, but it didn’t sound like they were doing anything special. Wouldn’t you rather spend Christmas lying on the beach instead of hanging out with some old farts who know your mom?”
That wasn’t at all what I meant. Still, if that was the strangest behavior Vic could mention, probably Lucas had kept his thoughts about vampires to himself. Vic wasn’t the kind of guy who could bluff his way through something like that. With a sting, I realized that Vic was more honest than I was.
“Cheetos?” Vic offered me a half-empty, orange-powdery bag. I shook my head and tried very hard to pretend that I didn’t feel a whole lot like being sick. “He’s gonna regret it. Wait and see. Me and my family—we’re going to be having the time of our lives. And what’s he going to be doing? Minding his table manners somewhere.” Through a mouthful of Cheetos, Vic predicted, “It’s gonna be a long month.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “It really is.”
I suppose most people would assume that vampires don’t really g
et into Christmas. Most people would be wrong.
The religious part was uncomfortable. Crosses didn’t set us on fire or turn us to smoke, like in horror movies, but being in a chapel or church felt all wrong—sort of a strange creepy-crawly sensation as if someone unseen were watching. So no midnight mass, no crèche, nothing like that. However, vampires like getting presents as much as anybody. Add some time off from school, and you’ve got a holiday even the undead can enjoy.
Most of the undead, anyway. I was more miserable that Christmas than I’d ever been before in my life.
The stifling atmosphere eased up when the other kids left, so that only the vampires remained behind. People stopped putting on so much attitude; nobody remained for them to pick on or impress. A few departed, including Patrice, who insisted that the skiing in Switzerland this time of year was not to be missed. The rest of us, teachers and students alike, remained at Evernight because it was our home, or as close to a home as some people had.
“We’re the exception, Bianca.” My mother hung holly garlands over our doorway as I stood beneath her, steadying the ladder. She and Dad had picked up on my black mood and were trying extra hard to get me into the holiday spirit. “We’re the only family at Evernight, do you realize that? None of the others here now have had a family since—well, since they were alive, I guess.”
“It’s just weird to me that they don’t have homes to go to.” I handed up a thumbtack for her to secure the garland in place. “We had a house. How do people get by without houses?”
“We had a house for sixteen years,” Dad corrected me from his place on the couch, where he was busily going through his old records, trying to find Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. “That’s your whole life, but to your mother and me, it seems like—”
“The blink of an eye.” Mom sighed.
Dad smiled at her, and something about his smile reminded me that he was about six hundred years older than her—that even the centuries they’d spent together might be, to him, the blink of an eye. “There’s no such thing as permanence. People drift from place to place, getting lost in pleasure or luxury or anything else with the power to divert you from the occasional boredom of immortality. Life moves on, and those of us who aren’t alive have trouble catching up.”
“Which is why there’s an Evernight,” I said, thinking of Modern Technology and how confused people got when Mr. Yee introduced the concept of e-mail. Many of them had heard of it, and several even knew how to use it—but I was the only one who understood how it actually worked before Mr. Yee explained. It was one thing to bluff your way through twenty-first-century life, another to really comprehend what was going on. “What about the ones who look too old to be in school?”
“Well, this isn’t the only place we’ve got, you know.” Mom reached down for another garland. “There are spas and hotels, places like that where people are expected to be somewhat isolated from the rest of the world, and where you can control who gets in. Back in the day, we used to have a lot of monasteries and convents, but it’s difficult to establish new ones now. The Protestant Reformation took out quite a few—Huguenot mobs, fires, stuff like that. The residents couldn’t exactly explain they weren’t Catholics without making things a whole lot worse. These days we mostly stick to schools and clubs.”
Dad added, “They’re opening up a fake rehab center in Arizona next year.”
I imagined all of us, scattered throughout the world, brought together only here and there, and only once every century or so. Was that the way I would lead my entire existence?
It sounded unbearably lonely. What was the point of having unending life if that life was without love? Mom and Dad had been lucky enough to find each other and be together for hundreds of years. I’d found Lucas and lost him within just a few months. I tried to tell myself that someday it would seem like nothing—that the time I’d spent with Lucas would be “the blink of an eye”—but I couldn’t believe that.
So, for the first week of vacation, I mostly stayed in my room. A lot of the time, I just stayed in bed. Once in a while, I’d check my e-mail in the now-deserted computer lab, hoping against hope for a note from Lucas. Instead, all I got were various joke photos of Vic on the beach, wearing sunglasses and a Santa hat. I wondered if I should write Lucas instead of waiting for him to write to me, but what could I possibly say?
My parents drew me out for holiday activities whenever they could, and I tried to go along with them. Just my luck, to be born to the only vampires in the history of the world who baked fruitcake. Every once in a while, I’d catch them exchanging glances. Obviously they realized that I was miserable and were on the verge of asking me what was wrong.
In some ways, I wanted to tell them. At times I wanted nothing more than to blurt out the whole story and cry in their arms—and if that was immature of me, I didn’t care. What I did care about was the fact that, if I told my parents the truth, they’d have to report it to Mrs. Bethany, and I didn’t trust Mrs. Bethany not to go after Lucas and make his life miserable.
For Lucas’s sake, I had to keep my unhappiness to myself.
I might have carried on that way for the whole holiday break if it hadn’t been for the next snowfall, two days before Christmas. This was more generous than the first, blanketing the grounds with silence, softness, and blue-white glitter. I’d always loved snow, and the sight of it, shining and perfect across the landscape, nudged me out of my depression. I tugged on jeans and boots and my heaviest cable-knit green sweater. My brooch safely pinned to the lapel of my gray coat, I trudged downstairs for a walk. I knew I’d get chilled to the bone, but it would be worth it if mine were the first footprints on the grounds and in the woods. When I reached the door, I saw that I wasn’t the only one who liked that idea.
Balthazar smiled at me sheepishly above his red muffler. “Hundreds of years in New England, and I still get excited about snow.”
“I know how you feel.” Things between us were still awkward, but it was only polite to say, “We should walk together.”
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
We didn’t say much at first. It wasn’t strained, though. The snowfall and the pinkish-gold early morning light asked for silence, and neither of us wanted to hear anything louder than the muffled crunching of our boots in the snow. Our path took us across the grounds and into the woods—like the walk we’d taken the evening of the Autumn Ball. I breathed in and out, a soft gray puff of warmth in the winter sky.
Balthazar’s eyes crinkled at the corners, like he was amused, or at least happy. I thought about all the centuries he must have known, and the fact that he still didn’t have someone to share them with. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
He blinked, surprised but not offended. “Sure.”
“When did you die?”
Instead of answering me immediately, Balthazar walked a few more steps. The way he studied the horizon made me think that he was trying to picture how things had been for him, before. “1691.”
“In New England?” I asked, remembering what he’d said.
“Yeah. Not far from here, actually. The same town where I grew up. I only left it a handful of times.” Balthazar’s gaze was distant. “One trip to Boston.”
“If this is making you sad—”
“No, it’s all right. I haven’t talked about home in a long time.”
A hungry crow perched on a branch of a nearby holly bush, black and shining amid its sharp-cornered leaves, plucking at berries. Balthazar watched the bird at its task, probably so he wouldn’t have to look me in the eyes. Whatever it was he was preparing to say, I knew it was difficult for him. “My parents settled here early. They didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they weren’t far behind. My sister Charity was born during the voyage. She was a month old before she ever saw dry land. They said it made her unsteady—that she wasn’t rooted to the earth.” He sighed.
“Charity. That was a Puritan name, wasn’t it?” I thought I remembered reading that in
a book once, but I couldn’t imagine Balthazar dressed up like a Pilgrim in a Thanksgiving pageant.
“The elders wouldn’t have said we were among the Godly. We were only admitted to membership in the church because—” My face must’ve betrayed my confusion, because he laughed. “Ancient history. By any modern standard, my family was deeply religious. My parents named my sister for one of the sacred virtues. They believed in those virtues as something real enough to touch, just far away—the way we believe in the sun or the stars.”
“If they were so religious, why did they name you something edgy like Balthazar?”
He gave me a look. “Balthazar was one of the Three Wise Men who brought gifts to the Christ Child.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.” One broad hand rested on my shoulder, for just a minute. “Very few people teach their children that any longer. Back then, it was common knowledge. The world changes a lot; it’s hard to keep up.”
“You must miss them all very much. Your family, I mean.” It felt so inadequate. What must it have been like for Balthazar, to have not seen his parents or his sister for centuries? I couldn’t begin to imagine how badly that must hurt.
(What will it be like when you haven’t seen Lucas for two hundred years?)
I couldn’t bear to think about that question again. I concentrated on Balthazar instead.
“Sometimes I think I’ve changed so much that my parents would hardly know me. And my sister—” Balthazar paused, then shook his head. “I realize that you’re asking me how different things were then. How much things change. But we don’t change, Bianca. That’s the scariest part. And it’s one reason a lot of people here act like teenagers, even when they’re centuries old. They don’t understand themselves or the world they have to join. It’s sort of like perpetual adolescence. Not so much fun.”
I hugged myself as I shivered from the cold and from the thought of all those years and decades and centuries stretching out before me, shifting and uncertain.
