Betrayals

years, you’re rare, and any other svetocha we manage to locate are killed before we can bring them in. We want to make sure you don’t come to any harm, and part of that is making sure you’re properly trained from the beginning. Though why they’ve sent you out here and given us such a confusing directive…” Maddeningly, he stopped again.

A conversation with Dylan is like that. He stops in the middle of sentences, refuses to go any further, just stares down at his desk with a mournful look. You could almost feel sorry for him.

I dropped the ice pack into my lap. A thin trickle of wetness kissed the knee of my jeans, soaked in. “Why don’t the teachers have any time to train me if I’m so goddamn important? Why are we waiting for Christophe when this Council of yours has such a problem with him? And why—”

“The Council doesn’t have a problem with him. A significant minority of the Council does. It’s not the same thing, and it’s not anything you should be worrying about. You have enough to deal with.” He eyed me. “That’s going to swell more. You should go take some ibuprofen and a turn in the bath.”

In other words, la di da, I was dismissed. “You’re not answering my questions.” I hauled myself upright, clapped the ice pack to my face again. “Thanks for nothing.”

“You’re welcome. At least I’m not putting your friend there in detention for interfering and making things worse.” He probably regretted it as soon as he said it, because I wheeled around and caught him closing his mouth with a snap. But Graves finally did something, he grabbed my shoulder and hauled me out of Dylan’s office suite, past the twin suits of rusting, cobwebbed armor glowering at the door, and into the quiet hall.

“Let it go, Dru.” Graves finally spoke up when we got to the end of the hall, and the stairway loomed in a cochlear spiral. “He’s just threatening.”

Oh, so you finally open your mouth? “Thanks a million. I know that.”

“You’re welcome. Come on, let’s get you down to the bath.” He let go of me and dug in the pockets of his long dark coat until he came up with a battered pack of Winstons.

He got to go off-campus to get smokes almost every day. He got to hang around with the wulfen without a tide of whispers following him everywhere. He got to spar and go to classes with them, and he was starting to catch their jokes and make a few friends.

Me? I was the only girl in a boys’ school, and I was kept inside like a goddamn hamster while everyone went out and had fun. Not that I wanted to go anywhere for a while, after being plucked out of snow and insanity and deposited here. The food was okay, they’d ordered jeans and T-shirts for me, and there was no shortage of drawing paper or anything else I might want. All I had to do was let Dylan or another “advisor” know and then, wham-bam, it would show up at my door the next morning. Or evening.

It was creepy. Especially since every time I wanted to take a walk, even outside on the quad of cracked pavement and dead winter garden squares, an “advisor” would show up as well. Usually Dylan, who didn’t even pretend to be looking something over or just walking around.

No, he stared right at me with a mixture of worry and weirdness on his face. And that was thought-provoking too.

I just didn’t know what thought it was supposed to provoke.

“How long have we been here?” I peered at him around the ice pack. “About a week, right?”

He got that prissy precision look on his face again, just like every time he corrected me. “Nine days, give or take. Yeah.” He hunched his thin shoulders. Between that and the beak nose he looked birdlike. But there was something else in the set of his face now. Graves was looking more worried and adult than ever. “Seriously, you should get into the baths. That’s puffing up and looking pretty bad.”

The ice pack was leaking. Cold water slid a questing tendril down my wrist, soaking into my jacket sleeve, or Dad’s jacket sleeve, since it was his spare army-surplus green one.

His billfold was under my bed. It wasn’t the safest place in the world, but…

That thought hurt my chest too. The unsteady ball of fury and something else behind my ribs got a little bigger. I grabbed my temper with both hands, shoved it down. Let out a gusty sigh. “Fine, I’ll go to the bath. Jesus. By the way, why did you jump on him?”

As if I didn’t know. But maybe this time he’d say it.

But he didn’t. He just looked away down the hall, hunched down even further, his long, clever fingers fiddling with the cigarette pack. “You were bleeding.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that I hadn’t been. But then I sniffed again, my skin crusted with copper- smelling dried blood, and thought that if a wulfen’s nose was sensitive enough to tell right before a bloody nose started, a loup-garou’s would be too. “Well, thanks.” I tried to sound gracious, and the ice crackled again. More cold water from the leaking bag slid down my sleeve.

Great.

“No problem, Dru. We’re going out for burgers tonight. Want me to bring you some?” He sounded hopeful.

My chest squeezed down on itself. “No.” I hated to rain on his parade. “They’ll be cold by the time you get back. I’ll just grab something in the caf.”

And all the way down the stairs, listening to his silence behind me as I stamped away, I kicked myself for not saying yes.

On the boys’ side of the sparring chapel there was a long room with a ton of individual stone-lipped tubs sunk in the floor. They had lot of partitions and community tubs too, and I’d heard there was always someone in there.

On the girls’ side, the long room was just as big. There were four tubs large enough to drown a couple girls apiece in. Six bathroom stalls. Granite flooring, all kept pretty spic and span. Except for the grotty corners that meant it had been damp in here for a long time. Even chlorine won’t work that funk out.

Still, it was warm and steamy, and the tubs were always bubbling. But there was never anyone in here but me.

I lowered myself into the tub on the farthest side from the door. My clothes lay tangled a few steps from the rim. I’d hurled the ice pack halfheartedly at the shiny new garbage bin set by the sinks, and it hung over the edge, melting water dribbling onto the floor.

I couldn’t even care.

The cloudy not-really-water bubbled. It smells like minerals, a flat palate-coating tang, and it doesn’t feel like regular water. It’s too jelly-thick. For a few seconds it’s so hot it stings. Then it coats the skin, and the bubbles turn sheer instead of translucent. Time spent in the tubs speeds the healing process up like crazy. Which is a good thing, because the combat training here is full-contact.

If you’re a boy.

I’d felt kind of weird about walking around in the locker room by myself. It was like having a whole suite to myself while the boys slept in dorms. And none of them had empty bookshelves, or a CD player of their own, or a personal advisor watching over their every sneeze. Or a computer all to themselves, with Internet shopping sites already bookmarked and a credit card registered to “Sunrise LLC” lying in a neat paper sleeve next to it on a rosewood desk, plus an info sheet telling me where to get stuff delivered to, PO box and mail stop.

Creepy. Dad never used credit cards. Not his own, anyway. Liquid resources for hunting were best. But these guys were the Order. They were big, it took money to run a place like this.

Still, it didn’t seem as big as Christophe had made it sound. Which was something else to think about. And I never went to any useful website, like a GPS ping to find out exactly where I was or county records to find out who owned this chunk of land, not to mention going hunting to find out if there were any news reports about my disappearance or Graves’. That kind of information would have been useful, but there was no point in leaving tracks on a machine I knew wasn’t private.

So, no shopping and nothing useful about the computer. It might as well have been a mute hunk of plastic.

A class schedule, Aspect Mastery, History, Algebra, Civics, had been tacked to my door two days after I’d gotten here, but after the first day of stupid boring remedial crap I’d wadded it up in a ball and started bugging Dylan to give me something challenging. Even the Aspect Mastery class was nothing special, just a social hour for a group of five boy djamphir who spent the time telling nasty jokes and watching me in their peripheral vision. History was run by some blond teacher who stared at me very hard between sentences, as if