“Timberlyn Brink,” Mr. Ravenwood said, tapping a closed folder on the desk in front of him. “Come and have a chat with us.”
Viktor squeezed my hand again before releasing it.
“What do I tell him?” I hissed.
“Tell him whatever he wants to hear,” Viktor whispered, so quietly I wasn’t sure I’d heard him. “And make sure it’s the truth.”
“Good luck,” Svana said, giving me an encouraging smile. “He might be intimidating, but you’ll get used to it.”
I walked past her on wooden legs, approaching the vampires at the long desks. They were all older, too old to attend the academy. I avoided looking at Imani, one of the vampires who had killed me, and her companion, a blond man with eerily pale eyes and skin who looked like he might be attempting to turn albino. He’d helped drain me, too.
Mr. Ravenwood stood, his figure tall and slim and imposing. “Timberlyn, I’m sure you remember Imani and Alfred,” he said, gesturing to their desk, then the next one. “Liza and James.”
All four of them had a strange, otherworldly beauty, one that radiated from them—even extra-pale Alfred. Mr. Ravenwood himself was quite handsome aside from his teeth. Or if, you know, you didn’t mind yellowed fangs.
“My lambs,” he said, spreading an arm wide to encompass the students on all the benches. “This is Timberlyn, the newest member of our elite, superior force. She has some very special gifts, which we only became aware of recently, though we’ve been keeping tabs on her for years. She must be protected on this campus and taken in by one and all. I expect nothing but glowing reports from her about your welcoming behavior.”
I stood rooted to the spot, not sure what to say. I wasn’t an attention whore. I’d only ever wanted a handful of friends. I didn’t need popularity or power, as I’d learned the year before. I sure as hell didn’t need someone who might as well have been all of our dads telling the other kids to be nice and play with me. I’d gone through the ‘new girl’ thing when I started at Ravenwood, where a teacher had made me stand up and say my name, then told everyone to welcome me.
Not my thing.
I didn’t need to stand out and feel special. The only gifts I’d ever cultivated were art and scathing comebacks, and both were best served by quiet, unobtrusive situations.
“Today, Timberlyn is going to show us what she can do,” Mr. Ravenwood went on. “And you’ll all see how special she is.”
What? I was? Well, hell. I definitely hadn’t prepared myself for this.
Mr. Ravenwood smiled greedily at me, his dark eyes shining with excitement as he waited for me to say something. I cleared my throat. “Um… What exactly do you want me to do?” I asked, lowering my voice and hoping the others couldn’t hear me, though I was pretty sure they could anyway.
“Tell us about your dreams this week.”
I glanced at the others and then back to him. Imani and Albino Albert leaned forward, watching me with the same fevered anticipation as Mr. Ravenwood.
“Okay,” I said slowly, my heart hammering in my chest. I wiped my hands on my skirt, my mind racing through the possibilities. I didn’t remember any dreams except for the one about Lindy, and I didn’t see how that one could mean anything. Then I realized that maybe to Mr. Ravenwood, it would. Maybe he was exactly what I’d always needed—someone to decipher dreams that meant nothing to me, that confused me and kept me up all night. If he could tell me what my dreams about Lindy meant, I was here for that.
I quickly went over the dream with him, filling in every detail I could remember.
When I finished, Mr. Ravenwood leaned across the desk, his gaze fixed on me. “Was it my baby?”
“What? No,” I said, shaking my head. Mr. Ravenwood had to be hundreds of years old, and Lindy was my age. What kind of sicko was he? Besides that, he’d already told me he didn’t like babies, that he hadn’t wanted to take care of me as a baby. But as I stared back at his expectant face, I realized this was what he wanted to hear.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “I’ve heard of dhampirs all my life, but I had begun to believe it was only a myth. But this…”
“I guess it could have been,” I said, my heart hammering even louder. Because I knew it wasn’t his baby she was pregnant with in the dream. I’d answered impulsively, but that didn’t make it less true. I knew instinctually that it wasn’t. And when I thought about whose baby it was, my mind flashed to the other beings I’d dreamed of along with Lindy all those years—the wolves.
Fuck.
That’s why I’d dreamed of her even before I met her. Why she came back to me over and over. It had meant something after all. But Lindy wasn’t the answer to Mr. Ravenwood’s puzzle. She was the answer to Mr. Wolf’s.
Chapter Seven
“I need to talk to you.”
I stood in front of the Wolf boys’ table a week later, having been unable to catch them for days at a time. I didn’t have any classes with them this year except art with Donovan, and they’d been out the entire first week of school after the first morning. When you weren’t really in school to take classes, apparently it
