Betrayals

he was willing me to disappear.

I hadn’t stayed in any classroom for very long. Hanging out near the armory seemed like a better deal.

Graves was always on me about it. You shouldn’t skip, Dru. It’s important.

Yeah. Like I needed a civics class, for God’s sake. Like anyone cared what I did as long as I stayed inside. Like I cared, now that my whole world was upside down.

Now that Dad was gone.

Don’t think about that.

The stone was slick and gritty at the same time. I found a bench and coughed, cupped some of the heavy not-really-water in my palms and smoothed it over my face. It crackled, soothing heat working its way past the ache of a pair of developing black eyes, and I let out a sound that was half-sigh, half—sob. Echoes fell flat against every clean, hard surface. The mirrors were fogged, as usual, but sound bounced off them nevertheless.

I wondered, like I did every time I sat here, if my mother had ever chosen this tub. If she’d ever sat here and heard her own voice bouncing off the stone and glass and metal. If she’d ever felt lonely.

She’d been a part of the Order, or so Christophe and Dylan had told me. But nobody would really talk about her, as if she were an embarrassment. And I didn’t know if she’d ever even been here; this complex was big enough but still tiny in the scheme of things.

Small school, about four hundred students. It wasn’t the kind of place that could scramble helicopters on short notice. But I could have been confused, since Christophe hadn’t exactly been giving out information left and right.

I was just avoiding thinking about it for as long as I could. It wasn’t working.

My eyes flew open, not-water cracking and falling away in little shards of white. Wet hair hung in strings, the curls struggling to spring up. I touched the smooth curve of metal at my throat and winced as if I’d poked at a bruise.

The locket lay just below the notch between my collarbones. Heavy silver, as long as my thumb, the heart and cross etched on the front and spidery, foreign-looking symbols on the back, their edges resting against my skin. I’d gotten so used to seeing the silver gleam on Dad. He never went anywhere without it.

Now whenever I caught sight of it in the mirror or brushed it with my hand, a shock would go through me. Like I’d stuck my finger in a light socket. It was just wrong to be wearing it.

The next hurtful thought arrived right on schedule. I couldn’t put it off any longer.

Dad.

He walked down the hall, and the buzzing got so bad it shook everything out of me, the dream running like colored ink on wet paper, and as it receded I struggled to say something, anything, to warn him.

He didn’t even look up. He just kept walking toward that door, and the dream closed down like a camera lens, darkness eating through its edges.

I was still trying to scream when Dad reached out his free hand, like a man in a dream, and turned the knob. And the darkness behind it laughed and laughed and laughed….

I shut my eyes again. Loosened my legs and slid under the un-water’s surface. It closed over me like a dream, like a balm, and the heat worked in toward my bones. Only there was a coldness inside me, too deep for it to reach. A freeze that wasn’t physical.

He’s dead, Dru. You know who did it. You know why.

Or did I? I knew Dad had been expecting to come back. He had to have been, there was no way he would leave me in a house all alone for good. He’d always come back for me, sooner or later.

Well, he had come back. Just not alive. I’d shot a zombie in my living room, and it had been my father.

Christ. Of all the things that will fuck a kid up, that has got to have a category all its own.

I knew who had killed him and turned him into a zombie. The same person Christophe and Dylan and everyone else said killed my mother.

Sergej. The nosferat who looked like yet another teenager, with oily black curls and eyes that could swallow you whole. The same sucker who had tried to kill me. The reason why I was stuck inside the complex that was the Schola, barely even going outside to walk in the barren leafless winter gardens. I could go outside, but not without someone showing up to stare at me.

Standing guard. Because Sergej, or another nosferat like him, might come back. He was a big wheel among the suckers, the closest thing to a king that they had, and he knew I was alive.

I shuddered all over. My lungs burned. The not-water fizzed around me, heat burrowing in through my muscles, soothing and healing. My face gave one last heave of red pain and subsided. The shuddering got worse as I floated, and for a moment I thought of opening my mouth and letting the stuff in the tubs rush in, coating everything down to the back of my tongue and—

I surfaced in a rushing splash. The stuff dribbled away from my hair, slicked my face, crackled as it hit open air, and instantly formed a weird, wax-white coating over every inch of my exposed skin.

Rinsing it out of my hair would take ten minutes in the shower.

I blinked away the clinging on my eyelashes and inhaled, mouth gaping open to take in a deep wallop of steamy air.

White light hit my eyes, scoured through the mishmash inside my head. My breathing deepened, evened out, with a hitching at the end of each exhale.

Underneath the weird white paraffinlike coating of whatever was in the baths, the tears were hot and oily. They slicked my cheeks, but there was nobody around to see. Or to hear.

I settled back onto the stone seat, drew my knees up so I could hug them, and sobbed. Then I went up to my stupid room and cried some more, until dawn came up through a pall of cloud and I finally fell into a thin, troubled sleep.

CHAPTER 3

The cafeteria was a long, narrow space, every railing and molding made of dark wood. The walls were stone and half paneled with heavy, age-varnished oak, but the floor was garish blue linoleum.

Both were chipped and worn from hard use. The tables and the squeaking plastic chairs could have been in any high school in America.

I sat alone near the exit to the halls leading to the west class wing instead of the other branch going to the infirmary and library. The trays were red plastic, bunged-up and warped. The plates were white industrial china, the silverware stamped steel.

I missed my kitchen. I missed my dishes, even the mismatched ones, and Mom’s black-and-white cow- shaped cookie jar. I missed my mattress, my clothes, and my CDs, and all Dad’s weapons. I’d spent all morning, evening, whatever, hanging out in front of the armory, making excuses to stand in front of the counter and breathe in the smell of metal and gun oil. I missed the boxes and my truck and everything.

I even missed cooking, and goddamn, I never thought that would happen. The food here wasn’t bad, but it was job-lot industrial, and I could never see anyone in the kitchen. Just indistinct shapes through a cloud bank, like the fog that rose out of the forest every night. It said something about my life lately, that a screen of shifting steam that dispensed food was only moderately weird to me.

The food was set out on steam tables right in front of the weird wall of vapor. Pasta and salads and desserts. Burgers and pizza and fries for the younger ones, or the ones who liked to eat like real teenagers. Raw and rare meat for the wulfen, including livers and other stuff I didn’t look too closely at. There were also boxes and mini bottles of wine, but I stayed away from those.

Today it was bow-tie pasta in a cream sauce, with prosciutto and peas. Salad with fresh tomatoes and your choice of dressing. Garlic bread that wasn’t half-bad. Only it just sat there on the plate, congealing. There was a carton of chocolate milk, and an energy drink in a blue can. The blue of the can against the red of the tray, the white of the plate, the green specks of peas, if I had my colored pencils, I’d draw the whole shebang and call it