Jealousy

Benjamin leaned forward, peering around the corner. A pair of dark eyes under spike-dagger auburn hair, the bridge of his nose just visible. “You’re not dressed.” His tone wavered between shock and disapproval, with a healthy dose of primness mixed in. “You’ve been in there like that the whole time?”

“I’m perfectly dressed.” But my jaw kept wanting to clench, muscles locking down with the chill. I shivered, hugged myself. Graves’s sweater rucked up against my ribs. “All my bits are covered.”

“You’ll catch your death of cold,” he muttered, and glanced at Graves. “Come, let’s get you back to your room. You’ll want to change.”

“What for?” Even shifting my weight was agonizing. A heavy werwulf on your lap makes for some damn painful walking afterward. “It’s daytime, right?” Meaning, We should all get some sleep.

“A message arrived just after you went to bed. You’re due in front of the Council in an hour.” Benjamin said it like it pained him. “Alone. To answer questions about Reynard and your escapes from Sergej.”

“What?” But I wasn’t really surprised. They’d debriefed everyone except me already, including Graves, who refused to talk about the whole thing even with me. Right now he was watching Benjamin closely, long-fingered hands dangling. It occurred to me that Graves had been trying to sleep right outside my door.

The djamphir had the rooms all around mine. Just in case. But Graves was loup-garou. Not werwulf, not vampire. Something different. And he obviously wasn’t going to stay in the dorms like they wanted him to.

I tried catching his eye, but he was still staring at Benjamin like there was something stuck on the djamphir’s face. Being surrounded by teenage-looking boys that could be older than your parents gets really weird after a while. You start noticing little things, like how someone moves or goes still, and it shouts their age more effectively than the clues everyone normal wears on their skin.

Benjamin didn’t really feel that old. Older, sure, but not as old as Dylan.

God, was I going to have another day of painful thoughts jumping me every time I relaxed? The obvious solution—to just not relax—was kind of sucking.

“The Council,” he said patiently. “They run the Prima and every other Schola and, by extension, the Order. They’re very interested in you.” Behind him, I heard the slight unsound of the rest of them. Three more boys: two blonds, and a mouse-haired thin kid with a weird crooked smile. “We’ll wait outside. But you’d better get dressed. They’re formal.”

I wished Graves would look at me. But he just stood there, glaring out from under his hair. I’m sure he could have painted fuck off on his forehead and it would have been more subtle. “Okay. All I’ve got is jeans.” Like, one pair of jeans. And this sweater and the hoodie, taking turns.

Benjamin swallowed whatever he was going to say. My legs quit running with iron-tipped needles and steadied. I stepped cautiously out into the hall, between the loup-garou and the djamphir, and wished I could stay back in the cell.

At least with Ash I knew what was going on. Sort of. Maybe.

Silence stretched between us. They had to move so I could close the door, but nobody seemed much inclined to. The mousy kid with the crooked smile—Leon, I remembered with an effort—glanced back over his shoulder, a quick lizardlike flick of his head.

“I guess we’d better close this up, then,” I finally said. “You guys’ll have to move.”

Benjamin stepped forward and I retreated, almost running into Graves. The door was shut and locked in a trice, and Benjamin handed me the key. “You should probably keep this. Since you’re down here every night anyway.”

He said it like he was disappointed.

I felt my chin rising stubbornly, what Gran called that’s a look like a mule. “He’s better.” At least Ash wasn’t throwing himself against the walls. As much.

“He’s Broken.” But Benjamin stepped back, forestalling the same old argument. “To your room, then.”

It sounded like an order, but I didn’t argue. I didn’t have much argue in me.

It was a miracle. But like all miracles, it had a nasty side.

CHAPTER THREE

This is the Schola Prima, the biggest and oldest one in North America: shafts of sunlight falling between velvet curtains to gently brush mellow hardwood floors; priceless antique carpets; more velvet draperies in red, blue, hunter green; marble pedestals holding busts of good-looking teenagers—fighters and diplomats you won’t find in any history book because they’re djamphir. Which meant they fought and made diplomatic agreements with things the rest of the world didn’t think existed.

Beeswax, lemon polish, smell of old wood and dry stone. And the exhalation of a school—something halfway between janitorial cleansers and the oily aroma of lots of kids breathing the same air for a long time. There was an uneasy coexistence between the two—the age, and the youth. Any war was over long ago, and the only thing left was a truce where the parties only glared at each other out of habit.

Benjamin paced in front of me, Leon slightly behind and to my left. Graves, his face damp from a splashing of cold water, kept close by my right. It was like being the center of an amoeba. The other two were behind me, and if there’s anything guaranteed to unsettle a girl, it’s teenage djamphir drifting in her wake and staring at her back. Not that I ever caught them staring, but after being the new girl in a million schools across America, you get the sense of being looked at.

I’d call it having eyes in the back of your head. But I’ve seen that, and it’s disgusting. There was this one place in the Oklahoma panhandle—called Wail, if you can believe it—where the guy who ran the general store had an eye in the back of his shaved and tattooed skull. His front eyes were brown, and the behind eye was blue. It wept a thin red trickle on cold days.

He kept his cowboy hat on a lot.

People came from miles around to visit. They brought things to pay for what he could do, like providing hexes or potions. The thing he liked most as payment was the part of the body he had an extra of.

He fried them. Said they were crunchy and salty, good with mustard.

I shivered. I’d drawn eyes for weeks afterward, doodling them on margins and shading in the irises until Dad got that look that said I probably shouldn’t.

“You okay?” Graves muttered without his lips moving.

“Just thinking. About eyes.”

His shoulders hunched a little under the usual black coat. He wore that thing everywhere. It was kind of comforting. “I know what you mean.”

The familiar weight settled on me. I don’t think you do. Opened my mouth to tell him, shut it. He’d already been introduced to more than his fair share of the Real World. When Ash’s teeth had punctured his skin, they’d stolen his old life. Never mind that it was a life Graves hadn’t wanted. It was still my fault.

“I mean,” he continued a little louder, “could it be any more obvious that they’re watching you? And we can’t trust any of them.”

Benjamin inhaled sharply.

“The way I figure, about the only ones we can trust are wulfen.” Graves stuffed his hands in his pockets, striding alongside me with long grasshopper legs. “Until we know who the traitor is.”

Christophe knows. I pressed my lips together over the secret. I used to spend so much time alone while Dad was gone, and I’d wished to have other people around so hard. I’d hardly been alone since I got here. The chaos at the front door of the Schola had turned into a face-off between the wulfen boys with me and the djamphir boys trying to figure out what to do with me, until finally someone had sent someone somewhere with a message. Orders came back while I stood on the front steps in the weak sunshine, feeling cold, dirty, and very, very exposed.

Two minutes later Benjamin and his crew had shown up to take me to the room and hadn’t left me since. I could shut the door and be by myself, kind of, if I didn’t have the weird sense that the air itself was listening to