Skye saw it too and winced. “So, not just a bruise. Don’t guess you happen to have any Band — Aids on you?”
“No,” Lucas said slowly. His gaze — his whole being — was focused entirely on the blood. As his jaw worked, I realized his fangs were threatening to emerge.
Lucas, no. Lucas, snap out of it. Did I dare to materialize? It would scare the hell out of Skye, but if Lucas was about to bite her. . but he wouldn’t. He couldn ‘t.
“Of course you don’t have a Band — Aid. Guys don’t carry purses,” Skye said as if she were scolding herself. She bent the leg, bringing the knee closer to her face — and his. “Maybe I’ve got a tissue in my backpack, but I think I left my ftrst — aid stuff in the stables. Let me check.”
As she unzipped her backpack, her shining brown hair fell across her face and obscured her view of Lucas. I could feel temptation radiating from him like heat. He wanted blood — her blood — this second. He wanted it worse than anything else, enough to forget that I was watching, maybe enough to forget everything but his vampire hunger. l made up my mind to appear and was gathering myself together to do it, when I heard someone else walk onto the floor above. The click — clack 150 of footsteps made Skye look up, though Lucas never took his eyes off the bleeding wound.
“Miss Tierney.” Mrs. Bethany’s rich voice echoed slightly in the stairwell. I saw her appear first as a shadow in the darkness, as if she were made out of nothing but night. “I see You’ve had an accident. And Mr. Ross is helping you.”
Skye smiled unevenly. “Yeah, tripped and fell.”
As they spoke, Lucas finally pulled himself together with a start. He didn’t seem to remember where he’d been or how he’d gotten here. Hurriedly he held out his arm to help Skye to her feet.
Mrs. Bethany held out a lacy white handkerchief. “Bandage it as best you can until you can get the first — aid kit.”
“It’s so pretty,” Skye protested, her fingers brushing over the delicate lace. “I don’t want to bleed on it.”
“If you rinse the linen in cold water as soon as possible, there will be little chance of any stain, “Mrs. Bethany said. “And a ruined handkerchief would be infinitely preferable to a student bleeding profusely in the hallways.”
Obviously Mrs. Bethany knew better than to tempt the undead half of the student body.
Skye thanked Mrs. Bethany and Lucas as Lucas returned her books to her backpack and handed it over. Just as she was leaving, she cast a curious glance at Lucas, maybe realizing that he’d hardly spoken a word since he’d seen her skinned knee. But she said nothing about it as she went limping back up toward her dorm room.
When Mrs. Bethany and Lucas were again alone, except for me, she gave him a hard stare. “You found that difncult, didn’t you?”
Lucas just nodded. He couldn ‘ t meet her eyes. I knew that shame had to be consuming him from the inside out. He hated himself for craving blood, and being tempted to attack a human — especially a human who had always been kind to him — would be unbearable.
“Take heart, Mr. Ross.” Mrs. Bethany put that familiar hand on his shoulder again. “There is a way beyond your present difficulty.”
“What, is there a way to stop vampires from wanting blood?” he scoffed.
“‘ Yes.”
He stared at her in blank surprise, at least so far as I could tell; I was too astonished to notice anything but my own shock.
Wanting blood — that was what made a vampire a vampire. Besides, Evernight Academy was almost wholly made up of vampires who didn’t 151 attack humans; wouldn’t they teach this kind of thing instead of driver’s ed!?
At Lucas’s stunned response, Mrs. Bethany smiled thinly. Her fingers tightened on his shoulder. “A way to silence the bloodlust forever,” she murmured. “It’s real. And it’s going to be mine. “
Lucas was utterly still, staring up at her raptly. “Teach me,” he said.
“When you’re ready.” She turned to go, but said, as she began to walk upstairs with her long skirts in her hands, “I think that will be very soon.” When we were alone again, he whispered, “Is it real? Bianca, can she be telling the truth?”
“I don’t know.”
The rest of the day passed in a weird sort of blur for me. My anxiety about Mrs. Bethany’s increasing hold on Lucas kept me from focusing properly on anything, including the task at hand. But as night fell and Lucas and my friends went to bed, I forced myself to get it together.
If I failed tonight, I would never have the courage to stand up to the wraiths again. And that meant I might never be able to control my own destiny.
I concentrated on an object that had been meaningful to me during my life — a potential “subway stop” I could travel to at any time. This would be tricky, though; this object hadn’t belonged to me. It was owned by someone else. Someone who maybe never wanted to see me again — but she was about to.
I filled my mind with the image, willing myself to see it, to be one with it: a braided, tawny leather bracelet.
Evernight Academy vanished. Everything around me went dark. As I looked around, I could see a few points of illumination — strips of lights through Venetian blinds, revealing the garish neon of a cheap hotel’s sign and blocky numerals on a digital alarm clock.
To my relief, this was a private room instead of a full Black Cross lair. I’d suspected as much, but all the same, it was better to know for sure. I decided the room needed another light source and turned up my own glow, filling the room with soft blue light that outlined my spectral form. Now I could see the hotel bed, and the two figures who slept there.
One of them shifted beneath the covers, then sat bolt upright. She blinked once, then said, “Bianca?”
I smiled. “Hey, Raquel.”
Chapter Fifteen
RAQUEL STARED AT ME, HER SHORT BLACK HAIR rumpled and her eyes wide. “Am I dreaming?” she whispered. “No,” I said.
She punched at the other person sleeping in the bed — her girlfriend, Dana, who sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes. “What is it, babe?”
I brightened a little more, daring to take firmer shape. “Hey, Dana.”
Dana did a double take that, under other circumstances, would’ve been funny.
“Are you here to haunt me?” Raquel asked. She had scooted backward, against the headboard of the bed, like she wanted to get away. One of her crazy — quilt montages had been pinned to the wall, a collection of magazine snippets and found objects that Raquelliked to turn into art. “I knew it.”
“What? No.” Then I realized why Raquellooked so scared and guilty; she thought I remained angry about her having turned me in to Black Cross.
Which I was, a little bit. I hadn’t quite realized that until I saw her again, without any horde of Black Cross fighters to get in the way. Dana interrupted, “How’s Lucas doing? In Riverton, he didn’t look good.”
“He’s having a hard time.” That was totally inadequate for what Lucas was going through, but I didn’t know what else to say.
Dana slumped, as if crushed. She and Lucas had grown up together — and she also had been indoctrinated by Black Cross, to the point where she would consider vampirism the worst possible fate. Maybe she was the only person who could fully comprehend the depth of Lucas’s self — loathing now. Then her eyes fixed on mine, flashing with anger. “How come you didn’t behead him?”
As horrible as that was to contemplate, I’d considered it difficult enough to know my answer: “Because I’d been a vampire myself. I knew it wasn’t always the worst thing. I thought maybe he could handle it, and maybe he can.”
“You were never anything but a vampire,” Dana shot back. Raquel watched us argue with wide eyes, as if afraid to remind either of us she was there. “How do you know what’s the worst thing? I know for damn sure that if
