"I'll be strong," I promised.
"I know you'll try, honey. That's all we can ask."
What did she mean by that? I didn't know, and I should've asked. But I couldn't. The future was rushing toward me too quickly, and I felt as tired as if I'd been awake for days. I closed my eyes tightly as I pressed my face into my pillow and longed for the forgetfulness of sleep.
* * *
Even before I opened my eyes the next morning, I could tell the difference.
Every sense was sharper. I could feel almost every thread in the sheets against my skin, and I heard not only my parents talking in the front room but sounds from several floors below us—Professor Iwerebon yelling at someone who was trying to sneak in after a night of partying, footsteps on the stone floors, a leaky faucet somewhere. If I'd tried, I might have been able to count the leaves rustling in the tree outside. When I opened my eyes, the daylight was almost blinding.
At first I thought my parents must have been wrong. I'd become a true vampire overnight, and that meant that Lucas was—
No. My heart was still beating. While I lived, Lucas lived. I couldn't die and complete my transformation into a vampire until I had taken a life.
But if that was the case, what was happening to me?
During breakfast, Dad explained. "You're feeling the first hints of what it's going to be like when you change. You drank blood from a human being; now you know how it affects you. It gets even more powerful later."
"I hate it." I was squinting against the light in our kitchen. Even the oatmeal Mom had given me tasted overpoweringly strong; it was like I could sense the root and the stalk and the dirt of where the oats had come from. My morning glass of blood, on the other hand, had never been blander. I'd always thought it tasted good, but now I realized it was a pale imitation of what I was supposed to be drinking. "How do you take this?"
"It's not always as vivid as it feels at first. For you, today, it will probably wear off in another hour or two." Mom patted my shoulder. She had her glass of blood in her other hand, apparently satisfied with it. "As for later—well, you get used to the reactions after a while. Good thing, too. Otherwise none of us would ever get any sleep."
My head was already pounding from the stimulation. I'd never had more than a half a beer in my life, but I suspected this was a lot like a hangover. "I'd rather not get used to it, thanks."
"Bianca." Dad's voice was sharp with the anger he hadn't shown last night. Even Mom looked surprised. "Never let me hear you talk like that again."
"Dad—I just meant—"
"You have a destiny, Bianca. You were born to be a vampire. You've never questioned that before, and I don't intend for you to start now. Am I clear?" He grabbed his glass and stalked out of the room.
"Clear," I said feebly to the space where he'd been.
By the time I went downstairs in jeans and my pale-yellow hoodie, my senses were already going back to normal. In some ways, I felt relieved. The brightness and din had nearly overwhelmed me, and at least I didn't have to hear Courtney bitching about her hair anymore. Yet I felt a kind of loss, too. What had been my normal world now felt strangely quiet and far away.
All that really mattered was that I felt better and could visit Lucas. After what had happened, I knew he couldn't possibly be up and around, but at least I could visit him in Mrs. Bethany's apartment. He'd be so horrified, waking up there, and who knew what story Mrs. Bethany had told him?
Even thinking about that made my body tense up, as if anticipating a blow. Mom swore that Lucas wouldn't remember, but how could that be true? I hadn't thought about it at the time, but I realized that my bite had to have hurt like hell. He would have been shocked and angry and probably frightened, too. I knew I should hope that he'd forgotten it all, but then I would wonder if he'd forgotten our kisses, too. Regardless, it was time to face what I'd done.
I set out across the grounds, ignoring the few students playing rugby on the far corner of the lawn, though I saw some of them glancing in my direction and heard some vaguely dirty laughter. Courtney had been talking, no doubt; probably every vampire in the school knew what I'd done. Ashamed and angry, I hurried toward the carriage house—and stopped mid-step as I saw Lucas walking toward me. He recognized me and raised one hand, almost bashful.
I wanted to run away. Lucas deserved better than that, so I would have to overcome my shame. Forcing myself to go toward him, I called, "Lucas? Are you okay?"
"Yeah." The leaves crunched under his feet as we finally met. "Jesus, what happened?"
My mouth felt dry. "Didn't they tell you?"
"They told me, but—a crossbar hit me in the head? Seriously?" His cheeks were flushed with embarrassment, and he almost seemed angry—at the gazebo or gravity or something. I'd seen Lucas lose his cool before, but I'd never seen him like this. "Gashed my neck open on the stupid cast-iron railing—that has got to be about the lamest—I'm just hacked off something had to get in the way while I was kissing you for the first time."
Somebody bolder would've kissed Lucas again right then. I just gaped at him. He looked fine, basically. Lucas was still pale, and a thick white bandage covered the side of his neck, but otherwise it could have been any other day. In the distance, I could see that a few people were watching us curiously. I tried to ignore the fact that we had an audience.
"I thought—I mean, I guess—" Before I could get any more incoherent, I quickly said, "At first I thought you fainted. Sometimes I have that effect on guys. It's too intense. They can't take it."
Lucas laughed. The sound was sort of hollow, but he was laughing. It was really okay; he really didn't know a thing. Relieved, I put my arms around him and hugged him tight. Lucas held me, too, and for a few moments we stood there, wrapped in each other, and I could pretend nothing had gone wrong at all.
His hair gleamed like bronze in the sunlight, and I breathed in the scent of him, so much like the woods that surrounded us. It felt so good, the knowledge that he was mine—I could hold him like this, out in the open, because we belonged to each other now. And every second we touched, the memories became stronger: kissing him, feeling his hands on my back, the salty softness of his skin between my teeth and hot blood gushing into my mouth.
Mine.
Now I knew what my mother had meant. Biting a human wasn't as simple as taking a sip from a glass. When I drank Lucas's blood, he became a part of me—and I became a part of him. We were bound now, in ways I couldn't control and Lucas could never understand.
Did that make the way he held me less real? I closed my eyes tightly and hoped it didn't. It was too late to do anything else.
"Bianca?" he murmured into my hair.
"Yeah?"
"Last night—I just fell into the railing like that? Mrs. Bethany told me how it went down, but it seems to me—Well, I don't remember any of it. But you do? You remember?"
His old suspicions about Evernight must've been kicking in again. The obvious thing to do was say yes. I couldn't bring myself to do it; it was one lie too many. "Kind of. I mean, it was all really confusing, and I—I guess I panicked. It's all kind of a blur, if you want to know the truth."
That was the worst dodge imaginable, but to my astonishment, Lucas seemed to believe it. He relaxed in my arms and nodded, like he understood everything now. "I'll never let you down again. I promise."
"You never let me down, Lucas. You never could." Guilt crushed me, and I clung to him more tightly. "I won't let you down either."
I'll keep you safe from every danger, I swore. Even from myself.
Chapter Nine
After that, it seemed as if I lived in two worlds at once. In one of them, Lucas and I were finally together. That felt like the place I'd always wanted to be my whole life. In the other, I was a liar who didn't deserve to be with Lucas or anyone.
"It just seems weird to me." Lucas's whisper was pitched low, so that it wouldn't carry through the library.
"What seems weird?"
Luc
as glanced around before he answered me, to make sure nobody would overhear. He needn't have worried. We sat in one of the far archways, one lined with hand-bound books a couple of centuries old—one of the most private corners of the school. "That neither of us really remembers that night."
"You got hurt." When in doubt, I stuck to the story that Mrs. Bethany had come up with. Lucas didn't wholly buy it yet, but in time he would. He had to. Everything depended on that. "Lots of times, people forget what happened just before they got hurt. It makes sense, doesn't it? That iron scrollwork is sharp."
"I've kissed girls before…" His words trailed off as he saw the look on my face. "Nobody like you. Nobody even close to you."
I ducked my head to hide my embarrassed smile.
Lucas continued, "Anyway, it doesn't make me pass out. Not ever. You are a seriously great kisser—trust me on that—but not even you could make me black out."
"That's not why you passed out," I suggested, pretending that I really wanted to go back to reading the gardening book I'd found; the only reason I'd picked it up in the first place was some lingering curiosity about what the flower was that I'd glimpsed in my dream months before. "You passed out because this huge iron bar whacked you in the head. Hello."
"That doesn't explain why you don't remember."
"You know I have some problems with anxiety, right? I freak out sometimes. When we first met, I was in the middle of a huge freak-out. Huge! There are parts of my great escape that I don't remember very well either. When you got hit in the head, I probably freaked out again. I mean, you could've been killed." That part, at least, was close to the truth. "No wonder I was scared."
"There's no bump on my head. Just a bruise, like I fell or something."
"We put an ice pack on it. We took care of you."
Unconvinced, Lucas said, "Still doesn't make sense."
"I don't know why you're still thinking about this." Even saying that made me a liar again, and worse than before. Sticking to the story was something that I had to do for Lucas's own protection, because if Mrs. Bethany ever realized that he knew something was up, she might—might—oh, I didn't know what she might do, but I suspected it wouldn't be good. But telling Lucas that he was wrong to have doubts, that the good and sensible questions he had about Evernight and his memory lapse that night were just foolishness—that was worse. That was asking Lucas to doubt himself, and I didn't want to do that. I now knew how bad it felt, doubting yourself. "Please, Lucas, let it go."
Lucas slowly nodded. "We'll talk about it some other time."
When he dropped the subject and stopped worrying about the night of the Autumn Ball, our time together was wonderful. Almost perfect. We studied together in the library or in my mother's classroom, sometimes with Vic or Raquel along. We ate lunch together on the grounds, sandwiches wrapped in brown bags and stuffed into our coat pockets. I daydreamed about him during class, rousing myself from my happy stupor only as often as I had to in order to keep from flunking out. On the days when we had chemistry together, we walked to and from Iwerebon's room, side by side. Other days, he found me as soon as classes were over, as if he'd been thinking about me even more than I'd been thinking about him.
"Face it," Lucas whispered to me one Sunday afternoon when I'd invited him up to my parents' apartment. (They had tactfully greeted us, then let us hang out in my room for the rest of the day.) We lay together on the floor, not touching but close beside each other, staring up at the Klimt print. "I don't know anything about art."
"You don't have to know anything about it. You just have to look at it and say what you feel."
"I'm not so great at saying what I feel."
"Yeah, I noticed. Just give it a try, okay?"
"Well, okay." He thought about it long and hard, staring up at The Kiss all the while. "I guess—I guess I like the way he's holding her face in his hands. Like she's the one thing in the world that makes him happy, that really belongs to him."
"Do you really see that in the painting? To me he looks—strong, I guess." The man in The Kiss certainly looked in control of the situation to me; the swooning woman seemed to like it that way, at least for the moment.
Lucas turned to me, and I let my head loll to one side so that we were face-to-face. The way that he looked at me—intent, serious, filled with longing—made me hold my breath. He said only, "Trust me. I know I got that one right."
We kissed each other, and then Dad picked the perfect moment to call us for our dinner. Parental timing is uncanny. They made the most of dinner, even eating food and acting like they enjoyed it.
Being close to Lucas meant that I had less time to be with my other friends, though I wished it didn't. Balthazar was still as kind as ever, always greeting me in the hallway and nodding to Lucas, as though Lucas were his pal and not someone who had nearly tackled him the night of the Autumn Ball. But his eyes were sad, and I knew that I'd hurt Balthazar by not giving him a chance.
Raquel was lonely, too. Even though we invited her along for study nights sometimes, she and I never shared lunch anymore. She hadn't made any other friends that I knew of. Lucas and I had a half-baked idea of setting her up with Vic, but the two of them simply didn't click. They hung out together with us and had fun, but that was that.
I apologized to her once for spending less time with her, but she blew it off. "You're in love. That makes you actually kind of boring to people who aren't in love. You know, the sane ones."
"I'm not boring," I protested. "At least not more than I was before."
Raquel responded by clasping her hands together and looking up at the library ceiling with her eyes slightly unfocused. "Did you know that Lucas likes sunshine? He does! Flowers and bunny rabbits, too. Now let me tell you all about the fascinating laces in Lucas's fascinating shoes."
"Shut up." I swatted her shoulder, and she laughed. Still, I felt the odd distance between us. "I don't mean to leave you alone."
"You don't. We're cool." Raquel opened her biology textbook, obviously ready to drop the subject.
Carefully, I said, "You seem okay with Lucas."
She shrugged and didn't look up from her book. "Sure. Shouldn't I be?"
"Just—some of the stuff we talked about before—it's not a problem. Really." Raquel had been so sure that Lucas might attack me, never realizing that it was the other way around. "I want you to see him for who he is."
"A fabulous, wonderful guy who loves sunshine and barfs roses." Raquel was joking but not quite joking. When she met my eyes at last, she sighed. "He seems okay."
I knew I wouldn't get any further with her that day, so I changed the subject.
While my best friend at Evernight wasn't thrilled that I was with Lucas, a lot of my worst enemies thought it was a great idea. They were actually glad I'd bitten him.
"I knew you'd get with the program eventually," Courtney said to me in Modern Technology, the one class no human students had been enrolled in. "You're a born vampire. That's, like, super-rare and powerful and stuff. There was no way you could stay an enormous loser forever."
"Wow, thanks, Courtney," I said flatly. "Can we talk about something else?"
"Don't see why you're all weird about it." Erich gave me a smarmy grin while he fiddled with the day's assignment, an iPod. "I mean, I figure any guy as greasy as Lucas Ross has an aftertaste, but hey, fresh blood is fresh blood."
"We should all get to snack sometimes," Gwen insisted. "Hello, this school now comes complete with a walking buffet, and nobody gets to take a bite?" A few people mumbled agreement.
"Everyone pay attention," demanded Mr. Yee, our teacher. Like all other teachers at Evernight, he was an extremely powerful vampire—one who had remained part of the world for a very long time and yet retained his edge. Mr. Yee wasn't especially old; he'd told us that he'd died in the 1880s. But his strength and authority radiated from him almost as powerfully as they did from Mrs. Bethany. That was why each of the students, even those centuries older than him, gave him resp
ect. At his command, we all fell silent. "You've had a few minutes with the iPods now. Your first questions?"
Patrice raised her hand first. "You said that most electronic devices can establish wireless connections now. But it doesn't seem like this one does."
"Very good, Patrice." When Mr. Yee praised her, Patrice shot me a grateful smile. I'd talked her through the whole idea of wireless communications a few times. "This limitation is one of the few design flaws of the iPod. Subsequent models are likely to incorporate some form of wireless connection, and, of course, there's also the iPhone—which we'll cover next week."
"If the information inside the iPod actually re-creates the song," Balthazar said thoughtfully, "then the sound quality would depend completely on what kind of speakers or headphones you used. Right?"