Good vs. Evil High (27 page)

“Yes, sir.” She handed it over and we got
halfway to the girls’ quarters before I realized I’d left my shoes
behind.

“Dang it!”

“I know, all that work and we don’t even get
to finish the dance,” Harmony said.

“No, I need to go back for my shoes. Will you
come with me?”

“Yeah, if you tell me what really happened
when the fight started.”

“I’ll tell you who started it—Roman.” I
vented my frustration all the way to the dining hall and back about
him and the trouble he’d caused.

When I saw all the North Haven guys crowded
on the stairs outside of the girls’ quarters, I knew something was
very wrong.

Chapter
Thirty-Two

~ Whatever It Takes ~

Harmony and I had to push our way through the
crowd into the girls’ quarters. All over the left side, pillows and
blankets were shredded. Contents of dressers had been dumped all
over the floor. Mirrors and glass containers were smashed all over
the place.

Nadine and Sassy were making their way toward
us, so we moved to a clean spot on our side of the room, which
hadn’t been touched at all.

“Roman said he saw Luke heading this way
before the dance,” Nadine said when she reached me.

“They sent Cinders to search his room,” Sassy
added. “I didn’t know where you were—”

Without waiting for her finish, I ran around
the edges of the frightened girls to the dresser and tapestry
beside Liz’s bed. The dresser scraped noisily against the floor as
I pried it away from the wall. I ripped the tapestry from the
hidden door and raced through it toward the fourth floor.

When I entered the Cinder boys’ hallway, I
could already see guys crowding around the outside of Luke’s room.
I shoved through them until I was inside his bedroom, where Luke,
Titus, his Headmaster, and a bunch of security guards stood. One
was on the floor, pulling a bunch of random things out from under
Luke’s bed, including many of the items that had been stolen over
the last few weeks.

“I don’t know how those got there,” Luke was
saying.

“I’ll bet half of this was taken from the
Haven girls just now,” the rummager said.

“I didn’t put that stuff there!”

The man on the floor sat up holding a blue
wire with a metal piece at its end. “Isn’t this part of what was
missing from his snow bike?”

“Indeed it is.” Their headmaster turned an
accusing stare on Luke.

“I didn’t do it,” Luke said. “Why would I
blow myself up?”

“You didn’t. Titus took that fall.”

“That’s right,” Titus said, “because you
weren’t there. You knew I wanted your ride. You knew I’d take it.
Maybe that’s why you were late.”

“He was late because he was with me,” I said,
stepping forward.

I recognized one of the guards from the day
of the accident at the same time he recognized me. “Not you again,”
he said.

The man holding the wire stood up and carried
it to his headmaster. “A lying North Havener. Will wonders never
cease?”

“I’m not lying.”

His headmaster stared at the wire for a
moment before saying, “Search everything.”

The one from the floor reached out for the
top dresser drawer.

“No!” Luke said. Three guys grabbed him when
he tried to move toward his dresser. “Those are my things.”

“You won’t mind if we have a look at them if
you really have nothing to hide,” his headmaster said.

Luke got an arm loose and punched one of the
guys, freeing himself for a moment, but three more grabbed on. He
continued fighting to get away as the guys rummaged through his top
drawer.

“Would someone get a syringe to sedate him?”
his headmaster said.

“No,” I pleaded, thinking fast. “He’s just
trying to protect something of mine.” Luke stopped struggling to
stare at me. I tried to go to the dresser, but Titus and one of the
guards grabbed my arms from each side and pulled me back.

Luke went back into fight mode, kicking and
clawing and pulling. “Don’t touch her,” he roared.

“I’m just getting my stuff,” I said to the
guys holding onto me. Their headmaster nodded to them and they let
me go. I knelt on the dirty floor and pulled open the bottom
drawer. The room got quiet as Luke became still. I took the heavy
safe and stood up, the hem of my yellow dress now black. Luke
stared at me in a way that made me unsure of whether he was angry
or just very surprised.

“Open it,” Tobias said.

“No, these are my personal things.”

“Then what are they doing here?”

“This box holds some of my most precious
memories. While I’m here I thought they’d be safer in a room with
only two people in it. Knight promised to protect it with his life,
and there’s no one I trust more than him.” I turned to look at
Luke, so he would understand. “But it’s not safe here anymore. So
I’ll protect it with my own life instead.”

He offered me a look of great relief and
gratitude, and allowed the guard to search his things.

One pulled a black bodysuit out of the second
drawer. “This isn’t one of ours,” he said, holding it under the
lamp. White spread over the area the light was touching.

“I wonder...” His headmaster rubbed the
material between his thumb and fingers. “Could it be the one whose
footprint was found at the location of Miss Jennings’ attack?”

“He was with me during the attack, and a
bunch of other Cinders,” I said.

His headmaster fixed me with an icy stare
that made me recoil. “Young lady, don’t you dare number yourself
among my students—“

“I wasn’t—” I squeaked.

“And that is hardly a valid defense. No one,
not even Rose Jennings, has any idea how much time passed between
the attack and when she called for help.”

“But Knight wouldn’t do that.”

His lips thinned as he came to hover over me,
an overbearing nightmare with the stench of death on his breath.
“Do you make it a habit to argue with your superiors? Because if
you were my student, I would have you thrown out into the cold to
die. Knight, come with me.” He turned away and moved fluidly toward
the door, looking back only to say, “Search the rest. Bring me
whatever you find.” Then he and Luke were gone.

With the terror of the Cinder Headmaster gone
from the room, the unique fear of what had just happened began to
set in. Evidence of Luke doing the terrible things I knew he
couldn’t have done had been found.

I should have pled his case better.
But really, arguing that I was with him when each offense happened
wouldn’t do any good. Because they could have happened before I was
with him. But I knew he didn’t do it. No one knew Luke like I did,
especially not the Cinders.

Then again...he was a whole other person when
he was with them.

But he didn’t do it! Anyone could have put
those things there. Titus could have done it. But he was the one in
the explosion.

“Dang it!” I said to the room full of Cinders
who I realized were all watching me. “He didn’t do it,” I said,
before walking out of the room and through the Cinder boys whose
numbers had multiplied since I got there.

Someone grabbed my arm in the midst of them
all and began walking beside me. “I’ll walk you down,” Bane
said.

“I’ll be fine.” I tried to pull my arm away,
because I didn’t feel like being near any Cinder at that moment,
but he held on.

“No, you won’t. It’s dangerous for you to be
up here alone. Half of those guys would have jumped all over you if
those security guards weren’t here.”

“Fine.” My mind spun uncontrollably as we
walked past bedroom doors. “Knight
will
be okay, won’t
he?”

Bane didn’t say a word until we were at the
bottom of the stairway and he’d lit a torch in the long hallway.
“Look—you can’t talk to our headmaster like that. I can’t tell you
why, but—in Cinder matters, you can’t get involved. I want you to
promise me that no matter what happens, you’ll stay out of it.” He
looked really angry, as we moved through the passageway, and it
felt like he knew something he wasn’t telling me.

“Why? What’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know, but whatever it is I want you
to stay out of it. Knight wouldn’t want you to get involved.”

“I love him, Bane, and I’m not going to stay
out of anything. If he needs me, I’m gonna be there.”

I tried to open the door at the end so I
could head back to my bed to think, but Bane put a hand on it and
slammed it shut.

“You have to listen to me. Knight can handle
himself.” He looked down and stared at the floor self-consciously.
“You’re always so happy, and it feels good to be around you. You’ve
been like a little sister to me and I don’t want anything to happen
to you.”

I felt a deep tugging in my heart for him.
Until that moment, I’d never thought of him that way. It always
felt like he was above me, the top dog in the Cinder world. I was
touched, honored, to mean so much to him. I had to put my agony
over Luke aside to be grateful for that. So I set down the safe and
wrapped my arms around Bane’s waist.

“Wh—” He leaned away for a second, clearly
not expecting it. And then, slowly and awkwardly, he put his arms
around me.

“Thanks, Bane,” I let him go and picked the
safe back up. “But I’m going to do whatever it takes to be with
Knight.”

I opened the door again and left him behind
this time.

Chapter
Thirty-Three

~ Wedge ~

When I walked back into the half-destroyed
girls’ quarters, I was met by cots and fresh mattresses being
dragged up the stairs and into the room. Men and women were picking
up and putting everything back in its place. I doubted I would get
to sleep anytime soon.

Sassy, Harmony, and Nadine were all waiting
for me in Harmony’s bed. I climbed on up, still stunned. “What
happened?” Harmony asked me.

“It was awful.” I found myself crying
unexpectedly. No matter what the end result was, Luke was about to
undergo a lot. And our Christmas evening together was ruined, along
with my beautiful dress. “They, they found the suit and the wire
and all the things that’ve been stolen in Luke’s stuff...He’s in
big trouble, guys.”

“What suit, Kristine?” Sassy asked.

“The one Rose’s attacker was wearing—They
found the wire from Luke’s snowmobile—But why would he try to blow
himself up?!”

“Oh, Kristine,” Harmony pulled me close. “The
Cinders’ minds have been warped by their past and by their
school.”

I sat up straight and stared at her in
outrage. “He didn’t do it!”

“I know it’s hard to accept something so
horrible, but you have to at least consider it.”

“Cinders are always getting in bloody fights
and even they don’t trust each other,” Nadine said.

“You seriously—I can’t listen to this,” I
said, before climbing off Harmony’s bed and into mine. I pulled the
curtains closed and hated them for thinking he could be the
culprit.

I lay down and pulled my blanket over my
dirty dress.
They can’t prove an innocent man guilty
, I
thought. And he couldn’t have been the one to destroy our room,
because he arrived at the dance when girls were still leaving it.
And he was always by my side after that. Except when we were
casting votes.

“This whole thing is stupid,” I said, rolling
over onto my stomach and reaching under my pillow. Something thin
crunched against my fingers. I let them glide over a sheet of
paper. Pulling my pillow halfway up, I took out a folded piece of
notebook paper and a bigger, heavier piece of shiny black paper,
which had been rolled up and tied with a gold ribbon. Letting the
pillow go, I rolled onto my back and slid the ribbon off of the
heavier one. I unrolled a poster of Luke—or Knight, as it said.

The guy in the picture was different from the
one I knew. Someone else almost. The man version of the kid I once
knew and was now completely in love with. As I stared into his dark
eyes and felt that overpowering attraction he always caused, I saw
him in a new light—a Cinder light.

Perhaps the happy childhood memories and
feelings he brought about every time I saw him made me blind to all
the changes he’d undergone over the years. Could he really have
committed all those crimes?

He sneaked into my room sometime during the
day to leave me this present. But he was with me when the room had
to have been wrecked. He couldn’t have been in here, leaving this
for me, when it happened.

It was really confusing.

Setting the poster aside, I opened the piece
of notebook paper.

Dear, dear Kristine,

First, I love you more than anything. I
always have. That’s why it could never be anyone else. Now that I
know you love me too and that you’re mine, I can never go back. I
can never go back to life without you. It would hurt more than
ANYTHING else ever has.

I take the note you wrote me out of my
pocket every night and let your voice read it to me as I fall
asleep. You’re the last thing I ever see or hear. I want to be the
same thing for you. I want you to feel like I’m there with you
every night, especially when you’re back at North Haven. So keep
this under your pillow. Let me be the one to put you to sleep every
single night.

And always remember that we share blood,
never to be contaminated by another. The same blood pours through
our veins. The same blood—something no one else shares with
you—keeps me and you alive. And know that I love you. I live for
you. I would die for you. And you are mine, only mine. Never forget
that.

I love you, Kristine.

Love, Luke

It made me cry. Everything was making me cry.
It was a rough night.

“Kristine,” Harmony said from the other side
of my drapes, “can I please come in?”