Afterlife (17 page)

“You’re not the only ones who need me.” I swept out of the
great hall, afraid she was going to chase me. But she let me go.

 “You’re sure you want to learn how to do this?”
Patrice folded her arms, studying me as severely as Mrs. Bethany had during
midterms.

The real answer was that no, I wasn’t sure. This was, in its
way, as scary as training with Black Cross had been — it never felt good,
learning how to attack creatures like myself.

The only way to make myself free was to give myself power.
And that meant learning how to strike back against the wraiths, if necessary.

“Let’s begin,” I said.

Patrice pulled out her compact. “To catch a wraith,” she
said, “you first have to detect that a wraith is there.”

“Done and done.” When Patrice glared at me for interrupting,
I said, “I’ve kind of got an edge there, okay?”

“I see your point. Now, watch.” She opened the mirror
slowly, with exaggerated movements, like a preschool teacher. I would have
laughed if the situation had been any less serious and the setting had been any
less spooky. Outside, heavy cold rain had been falling steadily the whole day,
draining the sky of any color besides gray. Although Patrice had turned on both
of the lamps in her dorm room, they weren’t able to counteract the gloom
outside. One of the lights danced on the open mirror, sending a little spot of
brightness darting around the stones surrounding us. “You need 112 to open the
mirror after you’ve sensed ilie presence of the wraith, but before you’ve
actually confronted it. This isn ‘t like Mrs. Bethany’s traps — a wraith can resist
a mirror, if she knows ilie attack is coming.”

My amusement got the better of the moment. When I started
grinning, Patrice cocked her head in confusion. I said, “I’m sorry. It’s just
so weird hearing you talk about attacking people.”

“Excuse me
?
”

“You know, aren’t you worried about breaking a nail or
something?”

Patrice looked annoyed, until she realized I was only
teasing. She raised one eyebrow. “Did you see me worrying about iliat while I
kicked some Black Cross butt?”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“Mind you, I’m a bit out of practice. I’ve done all the
killing I ever intend to do. Drinking blood can give you skanky breath. If you
ask me, Evernight Academy should add a hygiene class, because some people here?
They haven’t gotten that critical message
.•
I wasn’t
interested in gossiping about who had blood — induced halitosis. “
You’ve .
. . done a lot of killing?”

“Not so much,” Patrice said easily. “Just a few slave owners
and redneck sheriffs, back in the day. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, if
you were black in this country, there was always someone trying to take your
freedom away. Literally, I mean; figuratively, it never stops. After I became a
vampire, I didn’t have to put up with that anymore.”

Pretty much every vampire I’d ever known had killed
sometimes — except my parents, iliough maybe they just hadn’t shared with me.
Even the best of them, like Patrice and Balthazar, had drunk from, and
murdered, humans. Balthazar’s kills had mostly taken place during wartime, and
I couldn’t blame Patrice for striking back at anyone who wanted to enslave her.
But just the same, they’d drunk human blood. Balthazar had even murdered his
own sister, with consequences that continued to haunt us.

Did that mean iliere was really no choice for Lucas
?
That sooner or later, he would inevitably snap? Knowing
him as I did, I was sure he’d never be able to forgive himself. No wonder he
was desperate to find a way beyond the bloodlust. Mrs. Bethany was offering him
the thing he 113 wanted most in the world.

“Can we get back to ilie lesson here?” Patrice tapped one
perfect, lilac — tinted nail against the mirror. “Okay. It helps if you have
some sense of a draft, or a breeze, some idea of which way ilie wraith is
traveling. If iliey’re visible, easy. If not, you have to pay close attention
to things like the chill in the air, any signs of frost, so on and so forili.
And you want to angle the mirror perpendicular to that direction.”

“You just hold it out iliere like a catcher’s mitt, and ilie
wraith flies right into it?”

“If only.” Patrice hesitated. “Essentially, you have to
iliink of your own death.” Caught short, I said, “Why?”

“Not just think about. Be one with. It’s like you have to
reach inside yourself and sort of
..
.
resonate
on a dead frequency, I guess. Find the way that You’re
like the wraiths. That’s what pulls them into the mirror — they’re coming close
to you, because of that resonance, and then that weird mirror mojo does its own
thing.”

She didn’t have to explain “weird mirror mojo” to me. One of
the unsolvable puzzles of being a vampire was why mirrors stopped showing
reflections when a vampire had been too long without blood; the phenomenon didn’t
make any sense, and yet it was true. The simple physical property of reflection
had a power to it none of us understood, but aU of us respected.

Patrice continued, “It should work better for you than for
vampires, as I guess you can resonate with other wraiths pretty easily. But
this trick Wouldn’t be much use to a human.”

“Okay. Sounds simple enough.”

“Sounds simple,” she scoffed. “It takes a few tries to
learn, or at least it did for me.” Our eyes met, and her mask of indifference
fell. I must have looked terrified.

“They frighten me,” I said. “I am one, but — I don’t know.”

“You’re strong, Bianca.” Patrice spoke in a whisper. I’d
never seen her this serious before, or this sincere. “Stronger than I ever
would ‘ve thought.
for
somebody so young. If anybody
can face them down, it’s you.”

“I don’t know ifl’m scared they’ll hurt me, or
.. .”

“Or what?”

“Or if they’ll take me away from here, from Lucas and the
rest of you. Keep me from ever coming back.”

Patrice shook her head. The lamp behind her made her curls
seem to glow. “Not you. I know You’ll always find your way home.”

I wished I could be as certain.

Seeing my reluctance, Patrice sat up and smoothed her
tailored uniform back into perfect order. “What we need to do is give you more
of a home to come back to.”

 
114 “Where are we
going?” Lucas asked as I led him up the winding stairs of the guys’ tower. “Is
this more fun than astronomy?”

“You always acted like you were interested in my astronomy!”

“I was.
just
more interested in
you.”

“It’s a secret,” I said, ruffling his hair as a cool breeze.
“You’ll see when we get there.”

Samuel Younger came down the stairs as we went up, and I
could sense Lucas tensing as they came close to each other. Samuel said,
“Talking to yourself, freak?”

“Sometimes that’s what you’ve gotta do for some intelligent
conversation,” Lucas answered. Samuel flipped him off but kept going down the
stairs.

Once we were truly alone again, I said, “We’ve got to watch
that.”

“We do okay. Besides, it’s crazy what IJeople won’t notice.”

By this time Lucas and I were almost to the top of the tower
— the old records room. “Anyway, Patrice and I were thinking that it’s not good
for any of us to be alone so much.”

“I’m never alone as long as I’ve got you.”

As Lucas said this, he opened the door to reveal the group
gathered within: Patrice, who was smoothing a scarf on one of the dusty tru
:nks
before sitting on it; Vic and Ranulf, who seemed to
have brought his movie posters and an inflatable chair; and Balthazar, who was
blowing smoke from his cigarette out the window. Somebody’s iPod and speaker
dock had been parked in the corner, turned up about as loud as it could be
without attracting attention.

While Lucas gaped at this, I whispered, “We’ll always have
each other — but we can have this, too.”

“Hey, guys!” Vic was the first to spot us. “We thought we’d
try to cheer this place up. Nothing like some vintage Elvis movie posters to
add a touch of class.”

“I could make some other suggestions,” Patrice said, in a
tone of voice that suggested “a touch of class” was not what had happened here.
But 115 she was smiling.

“Is this safe
?
” Lucas said.

Balthazar stubbed out his cigarette on the stone windowsill.
“I don’t see why not. We might get caught, but they’ll probably think we’re
just hanging out up here.”

“And we are going to do some hanging out,” I said, “but
seriously, we need a place Mrs. Bethany doesn’t know about. A place
to .
. . strategize.

Figure out what she’s up to. Find a way to communicate
better with the wraiths. All of that. I can’t just keep muttering to you guys
between classes.”

“There’s no reason for anybody to realize Bianca’s up here
with us,” Patrice agreed. “And if someone overheard a lot of us talking, they
wouldn’t think anything of it. She’s right. If we keep meeting up with her one
on one, it sounds like we’ve started talking to ourselves, and that makes
people wonder. Besides, Bianca can leave something here to help anchor her. It
would be good for her to be hooked in to a place, as well as to people. ‘“

Vic’s initial cheer had faded somewhat, and he and Lucas
studied each other warily. Lucas said, “I’m not sure about — about this.” About
being around Vic, he meant. About being around any human for long.

Vic blurted out, “I’m daubed.”

“What?” Lucas looked confused; I couldn
‘
t
blame him.

“I mean, I got my parents to send me some holy water, which
took, like, some serious explaining, and now I think they believe I want to
become a priest, which, come on, hardly, but they sent it. I keep it in a
cologne bottle on my desk. And now I’m daubed.” Vic yanked open the neck of his
shirt; his hula — girl painted tie swung slightly. “Holy water.
daubed
all over my neck. So even if you did lose it and bite
me, which I’m hoping You’re not going to do, it would burn. Like biting into a —
a .
. . jalapeno pepper. Me equals jalapeno pepper. So
you’d back off immediately.” He glanced around at the rest of us. “Right?”

“Urn, maybe?” That was as much as Patrice could come up
with; the rest of us had nothing.

Lucas obviously was as nonplussed as we were, but slowly, he
nodded. “You know, weirdly, that helps. I don’t think we should be alone up 116
here, but — yeah. Okay.”

Vic relaxed a little. There was still distance between them,
but less. Maybe Lucas could get the hang of being around a human if it was one
he couldn’t easily bite; maybe their friendship could start to heal. “Come on,
man. I haven’t kicked your ass at chess in more than a year. Time for you to
learn some humility.”

Ranulf said, “He now challenges you because he can no longer
defeat me.” Vic mock — shoved him away from the chessboard.

Lucas handed me my bracelet, and I slipped it on, taking
form again. For the first time in what felt like forever, I could just spend
time witl1 my friends like anybody else. It was as close to normal as I could
possibly get. “This is going to work. You ‘11see.”

“Yeah.” Lucas said. But I knew he remained uneasy about Vic
and the rest of it.

Give it time, I told myself, and him, too.

 As dusk came earlier and the leaves began to cover the
ground more tl1ickly than the branches of trees, Lucas gave me back my bracelet
for good. He kept my brooch, so I could reach him at any time. But, at Patrice’s
suggestion, I hid a small box beneath a loose stone in the wall, and I stored
the bracelet there. That way I could reach it anytime I wanted to turn solid.

“If anything happened to me or my stuff, I wouldn’t want you
to be stuck,” Lucas said as he placed it into my hand.

“Nothing’s going to happen,” I insisted, but I knew he was
right. I just couldn
‘ t
have guessed how quickly
events would prove it.

Later that night, Lucas and I decided it was time for me to
try entering his dreams again. “This time I’ll know you’re coming,” he said,
obviously trying hard to psych himself up for it. “That’s going to help me
break out of the pattern of the nightmare.”

His one assumption — the way he matter — of — factly said
nightmar told me that all his dreams were nightmares, now.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said. Although I felt sure it was
true, it felt a little like a lie. I hadn’t mentioned the mysterious scratches
I’d received during his dream about the fight with Erich. They had stopped
hurting very quickly and had completely vanished after only a few days.
Besides, they were only scratches. How much could something like that injure me
?
                              
 
117 Lucas, I decided, was already too worried
about me. If I got some kind of mystical bruise or scratch while visiting his
dreams, it Wouldn’t mean much afterward — but if he was concerned about it
before we began, it could infect his mind and maybe his dreams. He needed an
escape from that anxiety, not another reason for it. I knew it was best to
remain silent.

After hours, I drifted downward into Lucas’s and Balthazar’s
room, where they were clearly in the last stages of getting ready for bed. I didn’t
announce myself — I knew Lucas would sense my presence — but wished I had when
Balthazar promptly stripped off his uniform.

His whole uniform.

“Uh, Balthazar?” Lucas said.

“Yeah?” Balthazar threw his boxers in the laundry hamper. I
was trying hard not to look, but what sliver of a view I’d gotten was exactly
the kind of thing that made me want to look more.

“You get that we’re not exactly alone, right?”

Balthazar froze for a second, then quickly grabbed a pillow
and held it in front of himself. “When I said that about following me into the
shower, I was joking. Bianca!”