Evernight With Bonus Materials

by Claudia Gray

  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—even 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.

  We didn’t make another trip up to the room at the top of the north tower. Although I wanted to be with Lucas as badly as ever, and I knew he felt the same way, we were both cautious. We had enough trouble controlling my hunger for blood as it was; if something had changed deep within Lucas, there might be other dangers if we started kissing and got too carried away. So you can guess how much I wanted to finally get some answers.

  One evening, I decided we ought to try the ultimate test.

  I met Lucas at the gazebo with a thermos in m
y hands. “What’s that?” he asked, obviously unsuspecting.

  “Blood.”

  “Oh.” His expression was strange. “If you’re hungry, just—you know, don’t mind me.” As he shifted from foot to foot, Lucas avoided meeting my eyes. Apparently Lucas still wasn’t comfortable with the idea that I drank blood, which didn’t bode well for the experiment I was about to try.

  “It’s not for me,” I began. “It’s for you.”

  Appalled, he retorted, “No way.”

  “Lucas, let’s face it. When I bit you the second time, something changed, down deep, maybe forever. If I’ve made you part vampire, or a vampire-to-be like me, then we have to know.”

  He looked pale and drew his long coat more snugly about him. “You really think that’s what happened? Because—Bianca, I can’t face turning into a vampire. Not ever.”

  His blunt rejection of the idea hurt; I’d already begun to dream about us going through the centuries together, vampires forever young and beautiful and head over heels for each other, just like my mother and father. Lucas obviously hadn’t gotten that far yet. It was disappointing, but I remained focused on the test. I wore fingerless gray gloves, so I was able to unscrew the lid on the thermos easily. “We have to find out how you react to blood. You know it’s true. Just take a drink and get it over with.”

  “This isn’t, like, from a person, right?”

  “No! It’s cow blood. Superfresh.”

  Lucas looked like he would rather have stripped naked in the freezing night air. But he took a deep breath, accepted the cup, and managed not to make too much of a face as I poured a rivulet of blood. I only gave him a sip; that would be enough to tell. With a grimace, Lucas lifted the cup to his mouth, slowly tilted it back, and drank—

  —and then spat blood all over the ground. “Ugh! Jesus Christ, that’s disgusting!”

  “That answers that.” Grimly I screwed the thermos cap back on. I’d heated the blood and sampled it myself, so I knew it was delicious. If Lucas didn’t like that, then he still had no appetite for blood at all. “You’re not what I am. You’re something else.”

  “How are we supposed to figure that out?” Lucas was busily wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, trying to remove every last trace of the blood. “We don’t have reference works; and it’s not something either of us has ever run into before. And before you ask, no, they don’t have anything on this on Wikipedia. I got so desperate, I checked. Nothing. There’s just…nothing.”

  I wished Lucas would stop talking like he knew something about vampires; it was sort of annoying. Still, he’d just tasted something really gross, so I figured I’d let him off this time. “I have a suggestion. You won’t like it, but I think that if you consider it, you’ll realize it’s the best thing to do.”

  “Okay, tell me this suggestion I won’t like.”

  “Let’s ask my parents.”

  “You were right about my not liking it.” Lucas ran his hands through his hair, like he wanted to rip it from its roots in frustration. “Just…tell them? Tell the vampires what’s wrong with me?”

  “Stop thinking of them as ‘vampires’ and think of them as my parents.” I knew it would take Lucas a while to make this transition, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to push. He’d learned to see me for myself, given time. Eventually he could do the same for Mom and Dad. “They’ll hear you out, and if they can help, they will.” Lucas shook his head. “If they’re going to be mad at someone, that’s going to be me. I’m the one who bit you again and started all this.”

  “Then we shouldn’t get you into trouble.”

  “If you need help, then that’s what’s important. Nothing else.” I faced him squarely. “Think about it, Lucas. Once they know, we can talk openly. Get answers to all your questions and mine, too. If you’re destined to be a vampire—”

  He shuddered. “We don’t know that.”

  “If, I said. You need to know all about us, don’t you? Even the history and powers that I don’t know about yet. We could learn all about it together.” And perhaps Lucas would like what he heard and decide to join me as a vampire forever. I could hope, couldn’t I? “Once you’re one of us—in whatever way—then they can talk to you openly. You can ask whatever you want. And maybe this will make my parents realize that I’m old enough to hear the whole truth now. We won’t be confused or lost anymore. We’ll learn what we need to learn; we’ll learn everything. Don’t you see?”

  Lucas froze. For the first time, he seemed to understand what I’d been saying—that whatever had happened to him would, in some way, let him become a part of Evernight. Despite his dislike of the school, I sensed that he wanted to know more about it, so much so that it surprised us both. Maybe Lucas needed to belong to something after all.

  Or maybe he was starting to think about becoming a vampire and staying with me forever.

  “Don’t ask me to do this,” Lucas said quietly. “Don’t give me that chance.”

  “Are you afraid you’ll like what you hear?” I challenged him.

  Lucas didn’t answer. Finally, slowly, he nodded. “Let’s talk to them now.”

  I’d predicted that Mom and Dad would be upset with me, but I hadn’t guessed the half of it. First Mom read me the riot act about ignoring all their warnings. Then Dad wanted to know just what Lucas was thinking taking a young girl to the top of the north tower alone.

  “I’m almost seventeen!” I shouted at one point. “You keep telling me to make mature decisions, and when I make one, you yell at me!”

  “Mature decisions!” My father was so outraged that I half expected him to grow fangs any second. “You reveal all our secrets because you like a boy and you want to talk about mature decisions? You are on thin ice, young lady.”

  “Adrian, calm down.” Mom put both her hands on his shoulders. I thought she was sticking up for me until she added, “If Bianca wants to spend the next thousand years looking too young to get a job or rent a car or do any of the basic things that make life manageable, then we can’t really stop her.”

  “That’s not what I want!” I couldn’t even imagine getting carded for all eternity. “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t change. Okay?”

  Dad retorted, “You came damn close to it, and you know it.”

  “I don’t know that at all! You never explained to me what would happen if I bit a human and didn’t kill him! You never explained to me what humans would or wouldn’t know the next day! There’s a whole lot you never explained to me, and now I finally realize how stupid you’ve kept me all these years!”

  “Excuse us for not knowing exactly how to handle this! There’s only a handful of vampire babies born a century. It’s not like we had anybody to turn to for advice, you know.” Mom looked mad enough to pull her hair out. “But, yeah, Bianca, at this point, I agree with you. Clearly, somewhere, we screwed up. If we hadn’t, you’d be behaving sensibly now instead of carrying on like this!”

  From his place on my parents’ couch, where he had been forcefully told to remain, Lucas attempted to defend me. “This is mostly my fault—”

  “You keep quiet.” Dad’s glare could have melted metal. “I intend to have a long talk with you later.”

  Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, Mom said, “We’ll have to tell Mrs. Bethany.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Lucas’s eyes opened wide. “Mom, no!”

  “Your mother is right.” Dad stalked toward the doorway. “You’ve told a human the secret of Evernight. We have to explain that to Mrs. Bethany, which you should have realized from the start.”

  As the door slammed shut behind him, Mom added, more quietly, “Our secrets protect us, Bianca. Someday you’ll understand that.”

  It felt like I would never understand any of this. I sank down beside Lucas on the sofa, so that at least we’d be together when the boom fell. All three of us sat in sullen silence for several minutes, until footsteps began to echo on the stone staircase outsi
de. The sound made me shiver. Mrs. Bethany was near.

  She swept in as if she owned the place and the rest of us were merely intruders. My father, behind her, might as well have been her shadow. Lavender fragrance followed her, changing the space subtly from ours to hers. Her dark eyes focused instantly on Lucas, who faced her steadily but said nothing.

  “So much for your promised self-control, Miss Olivier.” Her long skirts brushed along the floor as she stepped closer. Tonight she wore a silver bar pin at the collar of her blouse, so bright that the light glinted off it. Her long fingernails were painted the darkest imaginable purple, but it didn’t hide the deep grooves in each nail. “I suspected it would come to this sooner or later. Sooner it is.”

  “This isn’t Bianca’s fault,” Lucas said. “It’s mine.”

  “How very gallant of you, Mr. Ross. But I think it’s rather obvious who was the active party here.” She tugged his collar open, a weirdly intimate gesture from a teacher toward a student. Lucas tensed, and I thought that if she actually put her hand on his neck, he might snap. His temper had frayed from less. Instead, she merely glanced at the pink scars left after two weeks. “You’ve been bitten twice by a vampire. Do you know what that means?”

  “How could he?” I asked. “He didn’t even know vampires were real until a couple of months ago.”

  Mrs. Bethany sighed. “Remind me to go over the concept of the ‘rhetorical question’ in class. As I was saying, Mr. Ross, you are now marked as one of our own.”

  “Marked,” Lucas repeated. “You mean, as Bianca’s?”

  “The change is subtle at first.” She paced slowly around Lucas, studying him from head to toe. “I sense it now, but only because you called my attention to it. As time goes on, however, the change will become more pronounced. The other vampires around you will notice. Eventually they will be unable to ignore it. You have surrendered to a vampire, and more than once. That has brought you to the very brink of being changed into one of us.”