Betrayals

The wulfen dragged me out into the hall, and the rushing noise inside my head got bigger. I think I probably passed out. At least, the world got really faraway and dim, and the only thing that mattered was hearing Graves. He could talk now that the rage had passed, and he was saying the same thing over and over again, a catch in his voice right before my name.

“It’s okay, Dru. I promise it’s okay.”

He didn’t sound like he believed it either.

CHAPTER 2

The ice pack stung, but holding it against the bridge of my nose meant less swelling and bruising. I sighed, shifted uncomfortably, and blinked away the hot welling of reflex tears. Graves had thought to grab my jacket, too, so the goose bumps on my arms were covered.

“It was my fault,” I repeated stubbornly. “I should have pulled Irving past me instead of trying to paste him on the nose.”

“That’s not the point.” Dylan sighed. Some days he sighed more than others, and some days it seems like he did nothing but. He had a face that could have been on a Roman coin, and I’d heard his real name was something unpronounceable and Goth. Not like black-lipstick-and-angst, but actual barbarian.

Around here, you never knew. Even the teachers looked like teenagers. The really old ones look about twenty sometimes. But they’re late drifters, and they never get to looking thirty. My dad’s friend August, the one I’d called to confirm Christophe’s story, must’ve been one of them. I wondered about it, but it didn’t seem polite to ask.

Dylan pushed a hand back through his dark hair and settled more firmly in his chair. His desk was stacked with papers, and a large silver blob I stared at the first time I was in here until I realized it was a skull dipped in shiny metal. The skull had long canines and long pointed incisors, and I decided not to ask if it was a real sucker skull for the thousandth time.

Behind Dylan, shelves of dusty leather-bound books stood frowning down on me, cobwebs ghosting up near their tops. The place smelled like leather, dust, and the musky smell of teenage hormones, but it still felt like the principal’s office.

I’ve been in principals’ offices all over America. Before I figured out the best way to get by was to just keep my head down.

I’ve kind of been sucking at that lately.

Graves stood just behind me. Dylan didn’t offer him a chair. I didn’t like that, especially since Dylan had refused to talk or sit until I sat down. His office had windows, with the obligatory iron bars. I’d made some sort of joke when I first got here about whether the bars were to keep us in or the suckers out, and the dead silence and pained look on everyone’s face had told me to shut up.

Outside the barred windows, the lawns were painted with moonlight. Trees stood guard, silvered with threads of fog, a white wall sending spectral fingers up to touch naked black branches.

The ice pack crackled as I held it to the bridge of my nose, then peeked out at Dylan.

“Look.” He had that I’m-being-patient tone again. “Combat training for you is going to take a while, and it won’t really get started until after you bloom. If you must, you should be practicing with the teachers, not the students. And Graves… he can’t be interfering every time he thinks someone’s insulted you, or whatever it is. It’s not safe. For either of you.”

Dylan was magnanimously leaving out the part where I drove Irving into the hunger by bleeding all over him. Nice.

I waited for Graves to say something, but he remained stubbornly silent even when I looked up at him. His eyes glowed from under a thatch of dyed-black hair, his coloring back to normal. A bruise ran up his cheekbone, turning a mottled purple as it swelled.

It would be gone by tomorrow. Loup-garou heal even quicker than wulfen. They get all the benefits of the change, like speed and strength, without the allergy to silver or the risk of losing control.

Go figure. I’d learned more about wulfen in one week here than from all the painstaking work Dad and I did with moldering leather-bound books and years of hunting weird stuff.

Graves’ mouth was set, pulled down at the corners, and he looked mulishly defiant. Only his earring sparkled a bit, peeking out from all that hair. He stood behind my chair and glared at Dylan.

No help from that quarter. It was all on me.

“It was my fault,” I finally repeated. “None of the teachers have time to spar with me. They treat me like I’m glass, and the classes you have me in are remedial shit I could get in any normal high school. I’m not going to get any better if they keep putting me through kindergarten work.”

“You’re svetocha, Dru. You’re precious. You have no idea what you’re worth, dead for thenosferat, or alive to us.” Dylan rested his elbows on his desk. Paper crackled. “Should I say it again? You haven’t bloomed yet. Once you do, you’ll be able to handle harder sparring, but until then—”

“Until then I’m just supposed to sit around and look pretty? No thanks.” I could feel my chin jutting forward, a sure sign that I was Being Difficult. “I want to help. I was out hunting with my dad when most of these kids were probably taking basic how-to-ID-a-sucker classes. Keeping me in kindergarten isn’t going to work.” Why couldn’t he get that through his head? I wasn’t some nine-to-fiver, some Kmart shopper.

I was a hunter too. I’d been Dad’s helper, hadn’t I?

“Oh Lord. Not this argument again.” Dylan sighed. His eyes were bloodshot and dark-circled with fatigue. He always looked tired and stressed out. It didn’t make him ugly, though. “You have bad habits from your time as an amateur, Dru. It’s time for you to unlearn them from the bottom up, and that means low-level classes just like everyone else. That’s what the control directive said. My hands are tied.” He gave me an odd look, his dark eyes unreadable, then continued. “Irving will heal completely in less than twelve hours, your loup-garou friend there in under eighteen. You’re stuck with longer healing time and less speed, strength, and stamina. You’re not even ready for a practice run, let alone some of the junior cleaning expeditions. Not to mention the fact that any nosferat who gets wind of your existence will try to drain you to fuel their own hunger, or take you to—” He stopped dead, swallowed hard.

“Sergej.” I said the name. It burned my tongue, made the air tighten. Here they didn’t talk about it.

Naming a sucker is bad luck, and who knows if they can hear? Even hunters like Dad wouldn’t say a sucker’s name out loud. They’ll use initials, or code words.

But I’d said it before.

Dylan didn’t flinch. He did, however, sigh. Again. “Dru. You have not bloomed. You can’t hold a candle to even the prefects or the senior students, and there’s nobody with enough control if something, God forbid, happens and you start really bleeding. If—” He caught himself just in time.

“If Christophe was here, things would be different.” I made the words a singsong. “Come on, Dylan. I’m not stupid. Christophe isn’t here, and nobody else is going to be allowed to train me, even though he’s disappeared and nobody will talk about him. Even though he saved my life. What’s the deal?”

“It’s very complex.” He looked at the silver-dipped skull on his desk, and his jaw set. Every boy at the Schola had good skin, bright eyes, sparkling teeth. It was like being trapped in a goddamn sitcom. You could only tell the teachers from the students by seeing them actually teaching. Or by the way certain older ones had of stopping and tilting their heads, becoming absolutely motionless.

They didn’t even seem to breathe when they did that, and it was usually a sign of Restriction.

Which meant being sent to my room while everyone else manned battle stations. Twice in the past week, and I heard there were regular Restriction drills, too. Just like fire drills out in the stupid daylight world.

Yeah. My favorite thing ever, being stuffed in a room while someone else goes out and fights. The ice crackled again as I shifted my weight. Somehow I’d bruised one of my ass cheeks, it felt like.

“Well, I’m a smart girl. Try me.”

“It’s not a question of your brains, Dru. It’s a question of what is safe for you, since Christophe feels there’s a mole in the Order. You’re the only svetocha we’ve been able to save for a good thirty