Betrayals

Still Life with MSG.

I ached to draw something, anything, but as soon as I settled down with a pad of paper the urge left me. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t been sketching furiously. My dreams were Technicolor weird, but they didn’t push me to scribble. I just felt itchy, like I was waiting for something to happen.

It was loud. The walls reflected a hundred conversations going on, and the occasional hijinks. A bunch of teenage boys in a lunchroom is a recipe for trouble most of the time. The wulfen had their tables, the djamphir theirs, usually in prime spots, like right off the end of the line or near the exit to the infirmary. Even here there were cliques.

Nobody sat at my table. A few of them tried, but I wasn’t really interested in talking and they drifted away. It was like being the new girl all over again every damn day. Irving had tried to say something to me earlier, but I’d just put my head down and walked off. I still felt bad over making him lose his shit in front of everyone. It was embarrassing. What on earth could I say?

I wasn’t used to being such a failure at everything. And Jesus, I wasn’t looking to make new bosom buddies. Why bother? I mean, something was bound to come up. It always did.

I’d never been at any school longer than three months. Not since Gran died.

Dylan kept saying I was important, but none of the teachers would make any time for anything useful, like combat training. The only time I did my katas in the sparring chapel there was a whispering audience, and that was horrible. I was used to Dad just watching quietly, maybe offering a suggestion when I finished. Now a tide of whispers followed me everywhere.

So I did my tai chi in my room once or twice, but even that didn’t help. The calm and grace that always used to wait for me if I just did the movements long enough was gone. Everything that used to make it okay enough to cope with was just not working.

I just sat there, feeling the eyes on me. I hate that feeling.

Irving was sitting two tables away. He kept glancing over, and he finally put his palms on the table and made as if to stand up. But then he dropped back down and looked at his tray.

Graves pulled out the chair next to me. “Hey, kid.”

“Hey.” I dropped Mom’s locket against my chest as if it had stung me, looked up and grinned. It felt strange on my face, but then the happiness caught up with me and it turned more natural. Relief burst behind my breastbone like a mortar shell. “How was your morning? Evening? Whatever.”

He set his tray down, dropped into the chair. “Full of new information. You know some brain-damaged vampires can’t cross running water or major interstates? And the most common type of poltergeist feeds almost exclusively on the bioelectricity of teenage girls.” He wagged his unibrow at me, nobody had held him down and plucked at the caterpillar crossing his forehead yet. I thought about saying something about it, decided not to for the hundredth time. His green eyes burned, and it wasn’t just my imagination. His face was different. Less baby, more sharpness.

He was looking more like a wulfen now.

“Yeah, I knew about that. The poltergeist, I mean. There was this one time, in backwoods Louisiana…” The sentence died. I didn’t want to think about that. Dad had held the girl down while I did the taking-apart-the- poltergeist thing, with salt water and Gran’s rowan wand. The thing had hurled all sorts of small household items at both of us, clipping Dad a good one on the head with a teacup before I’d remembered to circle the bed the girl was tied to, cutting off the poltergeist’s access to her. Weakening it enough for me to tear it apart.

Dad hadn’t said a single thing about that, he didn’t need to. I kicked myself all over for that one.

And here they were wanting to put me in boring, normal, remedial classes. Jesus.

Graves snapped his fingers. He had two lattes in paper cups, and handed me one of them. “Earth to Dru. You wanna tell me about it?”

“Not really.” I hunched my shoulders. “I didn’t know that about nosferatu. Brain damage?”

“We did this experiment with holy water today and slides of tissue, big fun. If I get a good grade in the basics, I can start doing computer modeling for vampire migrations. Put my math mojo to good use.” His eyes lit up, and he sucked at his latte before casting a shrewd glance over my tray. “Want a burger?”

He got to do real classwork while I was stuck in civics. I shrugged. “Not that hungry. I wish I could see who’s doing all the cooking.”

He nodded, in that way that told me he understood completely. “Yeah, I can’t even smell anything through that cloud stuff. It’s why I try to stick to fried instead of baked or boiled. Can’t quite handle the raw meat yet. But I found out something interesting.” The corner of his mouth curled up into one of his bitter little smiles. “Come on. Ask me.”

The unwilling grin on my face just wouldn’t go away. “Okay, I’m asking. What did you find out?”

“The kids here are troublemakers from wulfen families. Mommy and Daddy Wulfen pack the boys off to Scholas. The girls stay home and are taught to fight by their parents. Isn’t that interesting?”

Wulfen girls get to stay home. So there is more than one Schola. That answered those questions, at least. “Why are the troublemakers sent here? Is this, like, a reform school?”

He brightened again, like I’d handed him exactly the right question. “Yeah, sort of. Tight discipline, tough love, all that. But there’s something else. It’s not just the troublemakers, but all boys get sent to Scholas. It’s the treaty. An agreement between the ruling wulfen packs and thedjamphir running the Order. The Order’s not the only ones out there fighting, but they are the official ones, and they’ve a big infrastructure in place to keep the kids safe while they’re being trained, and they promise to support the ruling wulfen families as long as they send a quota of their boys every year. They call it the Tithe.”

Well, that answers that. “Are there djamphir families?”

“Some djamphir marry or shack up with normal girls. Most of them live incognito because of the vampire-hunting teams, and a lot of them only stick around long enough to find out if the girl breeds more djamphir. Sometimes they don’t. You really should come to class, Dru.”

Eww. There’s a word for guys like that. “Uh-huh. When they put me into classes that are as cool as yours, I will.” I took a cautious sip of the latte. It was a little too hot, but okay. It wasn’t like Dad’s coffee.

I almost flinched. There it was again.

“So how are you doing?” Graves picked up a burger and took a massive bite. Settled into chewing. It was the same thing he asked me every mealtime.

Every mealtime he was here instead of off running with his new friends, that is.

Across the room, a shoving match erupted between a dark-haired djamphir and a tall, skinny wulf. The noise changed for a minute, growls and yips running under the surface of the crowd roar, and a wulf teacher, leather pants, a Kiss T-shirt, and muttonchop whiskers that looked odd on his unlined face, stepped in, sending the wulfen one direction and the djamphir boy another. The djamphir boy waited until the wulf teacher’s back was turned, then made a nasty gesture to all and sundry.

I’d kind of expected that kids who knew about the Real World wouldn’t act like jock dipwads.

Guess I was wrong.

I let out a sharp breath I hadn’t been aware of holding. “Fine.” I set the paper cup down. “Wanna go for a walk?”

Graves swallowed hastily. “I’ve got sparring after this. It’s hell. I never knew I could get so sore.”

“Sparring practice, huh?” They would teach him to fight. No problem. But nobody had time for me. “What are they teaching you?”

He shrugged. “Shanks is teaching me some basic stuff. He says I’ve got to get over that afraid-of-getting-hit thing. He also says I’d better train hard, because when I go all loco it’s going to be training that saves me.”

“Shanks?”