“You know who put me here?” I asked. “Are they in trouble?”
“Of course not,” he said. “They did the right thing. Though I preferred the old way of letting new vampires run amok and learn through experience, it’s so much harder nowadays, with everyone taking video of every exciting incident. It would be too hard to cover up. But one day…”
He rubbed his hands together gleefully, a faraway look in his eyes.
“What?” I asked. “You’ll let new vampires murder the entire human population?”
Mr. Ravenwood shook his head, shaking himself from his sick reverie. “The point is, I know everything. And that which I don’t know, I make it my business to learn. Knowledge is power, after all.”
I decided to go for the direct approach, asking what I needed to know before wasting any more of our time. “Are you going to kill me?”
Ravenwood chuckled again, cocking his head to one side and studying me like a bacterium under his microscope. “Now, why would I do that?”
“Hmm, let’s see,” I said. “Maybe because you already tried.”
“Yes, but now you’re alive and one of us,” he said. “I don’t make a habit of killing my own kind, lamb. A matter I hear we agree upon.”
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
“Well, you’re locked in the incubation chamber,” he said. “That’s what I like to call it. It’s where the newly evolved wrestle their way into the superior beings they were created to be.”
“And?”
“And if you were out killing humans, whom you still see as your kind, then we wouldn’t be so alike,” Mr. Ravenwood said.
“You’re not going to kill me?” I asked, eyeing the wooden chair at my desk. I was strong enough to smash it on the floor if I wanted, and over the summer, I’d learned that vampires were as sensitive to wood as the legends made them out to be. Not only could we be killed with a stake to the heart, but even a splinter was super painful. An injury caused by wood was the only one that wouldn’t heal on its own.
“Why would I kill you?” Mr. Ravenwood asked again. “You’re one of my flock now.”
“We’re going in circles here,” I said. “Just give me a straight answer.”
“I’m not planning on it,” he said, stepping inside and pulling the door closed behind him.
“Then what do you want?” I asked, still on guard. “And stop with the sheep metaphors already.”
He glared at me, almost pouting, like I’d taken away the fun by refusing to be toyed with. His voice was icy and businesslike when he spoke. “When you joined our superior race, you fell under my jurisdiction. I’m a council member, so you answer to me.”
“Somehow, I don’t think I’m going to like that.”
“I don’t ask you to like it,” Mr. Ravenwood snapped. “But you are what you are, and there are rules for our people that we all must obey.”
“Yeah, see, obedience isn’t my strong suit,” I said with an apologetic shrug.
“It doesn’t have to be,” he said. “But you still have to do it. Like all the superior beings at Ravenwood, you’ll answer to me if you want to stay there. You’ll report back to me with all the goings-on of those in attendance.”
“So you can eradicate the wolves,” I said. “You forget, I’m also a werewolf.”
“Impossible,” Ravenwood said with a dismissive gesture. “You’re one of us. And yes, we’ll finish eradicating the puppy plague, but that’s not a major concern anymore. We’ve all but succeeded in that.”
“Right,” I said, deciding not to press the issue. If he didn’t think I was a werewolf, I wasn’t going to hand him more information about me than he already had. “Now you’re going to wipe out humans.”
“Well, we can’t eradicate them entirely,” Ravenwood said. “We all must eat.”
“And how is my spying for you going to accomplish that?”
“That’s for me to worry about,” he said. “I only came to see how you were progressing. I prefer not to witness the savagery of the newly-evolved.”
“Right. You’d rather let them devastate humanity where you don’t have to see it.” I couldn’t imagine Mr. Ravenwood as the pathetic, ravenous beast I’ve been for the past few months. In fact, if he hadn’t bitten me, I wouldn’t be able to imagine him doing something so primitive as eating. It was impossible to believe he was once what I was, that he’d gone through this the way I had, and Amy, and even Viktor and Svana. He was so inhuman it was hard to imagine that he’d ever been human at all.
“Of course not,” Mr. Ravenwood said. “Not yet. One day, we’ll evolve enough humans at once, and it won’t matter that we expose our true natures to them. At that point, it will be too late for them. Until then, I wouldn’t want to have to clean up the mess you left behind.”
“So, I just have to spy on the students, and I’ll get to keep going to Ravenwood?”
“No,” Mr. Ravenwood said. “If you want to continue attending, you’ll need to tell me more than that. You’re a seer, Timberlyn. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to have passed down to us through your blood. So you, my changeling lamb, will need to report back to me with your dreams as well.”
Well, that should be easy enough. I could always lie about those.
“Deal,” I said. “So, I can go back to Ravenwood?”
“I don’t see why not,” Mr. Ravenwood said.
I knew I was staying near the enemy, that he wanted to keep me here so I’d be right under his nose the whole time, but where else would I go? If
