Jealousy

Me, I get it right before someone tries to kill me, when an old friend is going to show up, or when the serious weird is about to happen. If I weren’t so busy trying to stand up straight and look a little less scruffy, I might have been laying odds with myself over which one I was looking at now.

“Of course.” Bruce said it the way adults do when they really mean, No, are you stupid?

Now that was interesting. It was tug-of-war in here, and I was the rope. How long had she been here, the only girl in a school full of boys? And looking like that, she probably had a really great time with it. Things were probably so easy for her.

It was enough to make you want to hate someone. As if I didn’t already feel like she was fingernails on chalkboard.

Hiro’s chair scraped against the floor as he pushed it further back. I took that as my cue to get moving, and the taste of wax-rotted oranges flooded my tongue as I stepped away from the chair at the head of the table.

I stopped just once, my gaze still locking with Anna’s. Her cheeks had turned pink. A spark of crimson fired in the back of her pupils and snuffed itself out just as quickly.

I got going again.

Walking down the side of the table was uncomfortable, to say the least. I hate being stared at. And by the time I got down to the end, Anna had folded her arms and was standing right in the doorway, framed by the shabby, plush textures of the study.

Which presented an interesting choice. Did I slide right past her, hunching my shoulders and being the good little nerd, or did I say fuck it and call her on this cheerleader bullshit? I seriously had to pee, and she was top of the heap here at the Schola.

But Anna hadn’t told anyone here about me. What kind of secret was I, for her? Was she “protecting” me? Even though the vampires had found me after all?

She wanted me to hate Christophe, too. Why?

More questions. And I had half a second to decide what I was going to do.

I squared my shoulders, tilted my chin up, suppressed a bacon-smelling burp, and walked straight for her. Hiro made a graceful, blurring movement, and before I knew it he was somehow in front of me. Anna stepped aside, smart as you please, and I sailed past her like I was on a parade float.

“Dru.”

I looked over my shoulder. The thought—I turned my back on her—made my skin tingle with awareness. Like waiting for the slap of a paper sign taped to the back. Or the prick of a knife blade sliding through cloth.

Anna leaned against the open door, just like an illustration in a fashion magazine. Perfect, poreless, and with a sweetly poisonous smile. Another nasty, tiny little thought struggled in the back of my head, then drowned in the need to find a bathroom really, really quick.

“What?” As in, What do you want now?

“Welcome to the Schola Prima, sister.” Her glossy mouth quirked up at one corner, a half-smile that held no warmth. “We’re going to be great friends.”

If she was aiming for sarcasm, she was doing a pisspoor job of it. “Yeah. Great to be here.” I didn’t have to work to sound snide. “I wonder who’s going to try to kill me next.”

I followed Hiro’s narrow back through the hall, and the uncarved door shut behind us with a dry little click.

“That was unwise.” He avoided the chairs with an ease that spoke of long habit and led me through the mahogany door, and I had the sudden sense that I was in an air lock. No windows in here, no sunlight coming in. Just the fire and electric lights, and when the study closed itself up behind me, there was no air moving.

You’d think djamphir would want all the daylight they could get.

“What?” I really, really wanted to find a toilet. Next time I drank coffee, it wasn’t going to be by the gallon. And good luck getting any sleep for awhile. My heart was pounding, both from caffeine and from the persistent idea that I was somehow in some kind of danger.

It was ridiculous. Here was where I should have been safest, with a bunch of djamphir and werwulfen trained or training to fight the suckers off. And the Council were the bosses of the Order, right? And the Order wanted me alive because I was girl djamphir. Rare enough that there were only Anna and me, and Christophe telling me I was precious.

“Anna is . . . difficult. She is the head of the Council, head of the Order, the only svetocha we’ve managed to save for years upon years. She’s used to a certain amount of deference.” One shoulder lifted and dropped, a shrug. “You have friends here. But still . . . be careful.”

Be careful about what? “I’m always careful,” I mumbled. The soft wingbeats receded, and the taste of breakfast fought with wax oranges over my tongue. “Well, nearly always.”

“Be more than careful, then, Milady Anderson.” The huge iron-bound door ghosted open as soon as Hiro got near it. “Be vigilant.”

I could have asked him what he meant, but my bladder was about to explode. And I had a funny feeling I wouldn’t get anything but cryptic Christophe-style answers out of him anyway. So I nodded, tried not to notice how relieved Benjamin looked or the thundercloud on Graves’s face, and got the hell out of there.

* * *

“Standing out in the goddamn hall with half-vampires. Jesus.” Graves stalked to my window. It was a bright sunny day, early enough in the morning for birds to be singing, and in the garden my room overlooked, everything was green with springtime. “Supercilious bastards. What took you so long?”

“I had to tell the whole story.” I headed straight for the bathroom. Tiled in deep blue with brass fixtures and a tub deep enough to drown a werwulf in, it was acres of uneasy space. I almost wanted to turn on the faucet to drown out the Grand Canyon echo of a severely abused bladder.

A few minutes later and several pounds lighter, I dug in my battered black messenger bag for a comb and came out to find him lying across my bed, fingers laced behind his head and the curtains mostly drawn.

The room was twice as big as the one at the other Schola, and in blue as well. Carpet you could lose quarters in, empty bookshelves with a few antique brass knickknacks—one of them was a small brass tortoise heavy enough to chuck at an intruder if you didn’t mind killing someone by tchotchke—but no marble busts, thank God. The bed was king-size, princess-and-pea deep, and in a weird frame swathed with blue gauze. It looked like a fairy was going to choke to death in there at any second.

There was a high-end computer I hadn’t bothered to turn on yet and three credit cards lying in paper sleeves on the rosewood desk next to the keyboard, all registered to Sunrise Ltd. A typed sheet with the address and a mail-stop number, as if I was living in an apartment or something. A walk-in closet the size of the Titanic, completely empty. All the clothes I’d gotten at the other Schola were gone, and if there hadn’t been a small stackable washer and dryer tucked in a separate closet here I don’t know what I’d’ve done. As it was, wearing the same jeans and T-shirt was getting old.

“I think we should get a couple sleeping bags.” I dropped down on the bed next to him. “Have you seen Shanks yet?”

“I can find him. If you want him. What do you want sleeping bags for? Got a nice bed right here.” He stared up at the ceiling, green eyes half-closed and his expression halfway between angry and constipated. “What happened? Who was that girl?”

Which answered one question. Anna had walked right by him. Where was her set of bodyguards? “That’s Anna. Another svetocha.” I almost tacked an Edgar onto the end of the sentence, decided at the last second not to. It probably wasn’t wise to tease him right now. Though I wouldn’t have minded a laugh or two, he didn’t look in the mood to chuckle.

He glared at the ceiling, anger winning out. “I thought you were the only one.”

What could I say? So did I, and then I couldn’t tell you. “They kind of keep her a secret so the vampires don’t attack, I guess.”

Graves snorted. “Yeah, the same way they keep you a secret? Don’t tell me you fell for that.”

Now that I was lying down, the bed seemed really, really comfortable. My nerves were twitching and jumping