Evernight (11 page)

* * *

Even
before I opened my eyes the next morning, I could tell the difference.
Every sense was sharper. I could feel almost every thread in the sheets against
my skin, and I heard not only my parents talking in the front room but sounds
from several floors below us—Professor Iwerebon yelling at someone who was
trying to sneak in after a night of partying, footsteps on the stone floors, a
leaky faucet somewhere. If I'd tried, I might have been able to count the
leaves rustling in the tree outside. When I opened my eyes, the daylight was
almost blinding.
At first I thought my parents must have been wrong. I'd become a true vampire
overnight, and that meant that Lucas was—
No. My heart was still beating. While I lived, Lucas lived. I couldn't die and
complete my transformation into a vampire until I had taken a life.
But if that was the case, what was happening to me?
During breakfast, Dad explained. "You're feeling the first hints of what
it's going to be like when you change. You drank blood from a human being; now
you know how it affects you. It gets even more powerful later."
"I hate it." I was squinting against the light in our kitchen. Even
the oatmeal Mom had given me tasted overpoweringly strong; it was like I could
sense the root and the stalk and the dirt of where the oats had come from. My
morning glass of blood, on the other hand, had never been blander. I'd always
thought it tasted good, but now I realized it was a pale imitation of what I was
supposed to be drinking. "How do you take this?"
"It's not always as vivid as it feels at first. For you, today, it will
probably wear off in another hour or two." Mom patted my shoulder. She had
her glass of blood in her other hand, apparently satisfied with it. "As
for later—well, you get used to the reactions after a while. Good thing, too.
Otherwise none of us would ever get any sleep."
My head was already pounding from the stimulation. I'd never had more than a
half a beer in my life, but I suspected this was a lot like a hangover.
"I'd rather not get used to it, thanks."
"Bianca." Dad's voice was sharp with the anger he hadn't shown last
night. Even Mom looked surprised. "Never let me hear you talk like that
again."
"Dad—I just meant—"
"You have a destiny, Bianca. You were born to be a vampire. You've never
questioned that before, and I don't intend for you to start now. Am I clear?"
He grabbed his glass and stalked out of the room.
"Clear," I said feebly to the space where he'd been.
By the time I went downstairs in jeans and my pale-yellow hoodie, my senses
were already going back to normal. In some ways, I felt relieved. The
brightness and din had nearly overwhelmed me, and at least I didn't have to
hear Courtney bitching about her hair anymore. Yet I felt a kind of loss, too.
What had been my normal world now felt strangely quiet and far away.
All that really mattered was that I felt better and could visit Lucas. After
what had happened, I knew he couldn't possibly be up and around, but at least I
could visit him in Mrs. Bethany's apartment. He'd be so horrified, waking up
there, and who knew what story Mrs. Bethany had told him?
Even thinking about that made my body tense up, as if anticipating a blow. Mom
swore that Lucas wouldn't remember, but how could that be true? I hadn't
thought about it at the time, but I realized that my bite had to have hurt like
hell. He would have been shocked and angry and probably frightened, too. I knew
I should hope that he'd forgotten it all, but then I would wonder if he'd
forgotten our kisses, too. Regardless, it was time to face what I'd done.
I set out across the grounds, ignoring the few students playing rugby on the
far corner of the lawn, though I saw some of them glancing in my direction and
heard some vaguely dirty laughter. Courtney had been talking, no doubt;
probably every vampire in the school knew what I'd done. Ashamed and angry, I hurried
toward the carriage house—and stopped mid-step as I saw Lucas walking toward
me. He recognized me and raised one hand, almost bashful.
I wanted to run away. Lucas deserved better than that, so I would have to
overcome my shame. Forcing myself to go toward him, I called, "Lucas? Are
you okay?"
"Yeah." The leaves crunched under his feet as we finally met.
"Jesus, what happened?"
My mouth felt dry. "Didn't they tell you?"
"They told me, but—a crossbar hit me in the head? Seriously?" His
cheeks were flushed with embarrassment, and he almost seemed angry—at the
gazebo or gravity or something. I'd seen Lucas lose his cool before, but I'd
never seen him like this. "Gashed my neck open on the stupid cast-iron
railing—that has got to be about the lamest—I'm just hacked off something had
to get in the way while I was kissing you for the first time."
Somebody bolder would've kissed Lucas again right then. I just gaped at him. He
looked fine, basically. Lucas was still pale, and a thick white bandage covered
the side of his neck, but otherwise it could have been any other day. In the
distance, I could see that a few people were watching us curiously. I tried to
ignore the fact that we had an audience.
"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.

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 knew 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
acting 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?"