Despite the wind, my own red hair hung long and motionless, untouched, unreal. “Why aren’t you in there?”
“Mrs. Bethany gave me an exemption this go-round. Said she’d try to find a way to explain to the vampire students and teachers to leave me the hell alone without tipping off the humans. Me walking into a pack of vampires before she gives the hands-off speech—no way am I doing that unarmed.”
“She handled it better than I would’ve thought,” I said. “I guess Mrs. Bethany takes the sanctuary thing here seriously.”
Lucas shrugged. “She claims she’s got my back, but all the same, I’m glad Ranulf sneaked our weapons up here in his trunk.”
“Why not yours?”
“If Mrs. Bethany doesn’t search mine, she’s a fool. And that lady’s no fool.”
I studied his face, reading the emotions he was trying to hide. “You’re not frightened of the vampires. You never have been. It’s being around the human students that gets to you.”
He grimaced. “I can’t look at Vic without thinking— Bianca, I would’ve killed him. Vic. One of the best friends I’ve ever had. I’d have slaughtered him just to eat.”
“Is that why you won’t be alone with him?” When he shot me a look, I added, “Yeah, I noticed.”
“No, you didn’t,” Lucas said quietly. “It’s not just me. It’s Vic, too. He finds ways to avoid being alone with me.” I could hear the pain in his voice.
I put my arms around him; maybe it wasn’t a real embrace, but I could feel him next to me and knew he’d take some comfort from it. “He’ll trust you again. It’s just going to take some time.”
“How long will it be before I trust myself?”
There was no answer to that. I said the only thing I could: “I love you.”
“And I love you. That’s why I’m going to make this work. I have to.”
* * *
Just like Lucas was learning to be a vampire for my sake, I was learning to be a ghost for his. This meant I had to get the hang of this haunting thing.
I had the basics down: going invisible, appearing in my mist form and, when I had my bracelet or my brooch, becoming solid and lifelike once more. Moving from place to place required some concentration, but it could be done.
Haunting Evernight Academy, though—that was going to be a lot tougher. I’d need to figure out where I could travel in the hallways and where I couldn’t. Leaving trails of frost around wherever I went would tip off the other students and teachers about a ghost, and while I wasn’t sure they could do anything about it but scream, I didn’t intend to find out.
It was scary, to think about the myriad ways this could go wrong. But holding back meant leaving Lucas alone, and that was something I couldn’t do.
As he walked into the school, I followed. The heavy wooden doors were simple enough to slip through, maybe because they, like me, had once been alive. Once again, I entered the Ever-night Academy great hall. Dozens of students milled around, each wearing the uniform sweater with the school crest: a shield emblazoned with two ravens on either side of a sword. To my surprise, a wave of nostalgia swept through me. Maybe I hadn’t often been happy at Evernight—but sometimes I had. This was where I’d fallen in love and made so many good friends. This was where I’d lived.
My happiness lasted only a moment, though, as I focused once more on Lucas. Nobody attacked him, or said anything to him, which had to count as a positive sign; apparently Mrs. Bethany’s speech had done the trick. But if nobody planned on killing Lucas, nobody planned on forgiving and forgetting either. Every vampire student stared at him with undisguised loathing. Lucas didn’t slow down—he wasn’t a guy to crumple because of a little glaring—but that didn’t mean he liked it.
We encouraged him to come here because we wanted him to feel comfortable being a vampire, I thought. How can that happen if everybody else rejects him?
Every time he walked past a human student, his whole body went tense; I could see it in the set of his shoulders and the lines of his face. But he determinedly didn’t look directly at them, and his steps never slowed. His resolve was as strong as his hunger, at least for now.
Lucas kept going, heading toward the north tower where the guys roomed. I stayed with him. A few flakes of ice crystallized on the windowsill nearest me, and hurriedly I floated higher, closer to the ceiling. Until I learned how to avoid creating frost, it might be better for me to stay up high, where at least nobody was likely to see it.
The crowd began murmuring, as though there were some commotion. I glanced back and saw that the students were parting—that someone was shoving them aside to get closer to Lucas. Apparently Mrs. Bethany hadn’t managed to calm everybody down.
I folded myself tightly in a corner. Lucas cocked his head, hearing the danger before he saw it, and turned to face his would-be attacker. Probably it was some younger vampire guy, only at Evernight for a few laughs, ready to turn into a killer again the first time he felt like it—like Erich, that jerk who’d stalked Raquel during our first year here. Lucas would be able to handle somebody like that easily, I knew.
But when the attacker appeared, it was somebody Lucas couldn’t handle. Somebody I couldn’t handle.
It was my mother.
Mom stood in front of him, fists at her sides, eyes wild. “Is it true? Tell me.” Her voice shook. “I want you to look me in the face and tell me it’s true.”
Lucas looked like he’d been punched in the gut. As he opened his mouth to answer, though, Balthazar pushed his way to their side and grabbed Mom’s arm. “Not here,” he said quietly.
Mom didn’t even turn her head, like she couldn’t see or hear Balthazar, but after a moment she nodded and stalked toward one of the staircases. It was like she was daring Lucas not to follow her, but he did. Balthazar started to come, too, but Mom shot him a look that froze him in place on the stairs.
She led him into a small office on the second floor. I went along, although I desperately didn’t want to hear what I knew had to come next.
As soon as he’d shut the door behind them, Mom said again, “Tell me it’s true, Lucas.”
“It’s true,” Lucas said. He looked deader than he had the night after he’d been killed. “Bianca died.”
My mother stumbled backward, like she’d been spun so hard she was dizzy. Her face crumpled into tears. “She was supposed to live forever,” she whispered. “Bianca was going to be our little girl forever.”
“Mrs. Olivier, I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry? Sorry? You convince our daughter to leave her home and her parents and forsake the immortality that’s rightfully hers—her birthright—and she dies, she’s gone forever, and the only thing you can say is sorry?”
“That’s all I can say!” Lucas shouted. “There aren’t words for this! I would’ve died for her. I tried to. I failed. I hate myself for it, and if I could take it back I would, but . . . but . . .” His voice choked on a sob. He steeled himself and managed to say, “If you want to kill me, I won’t stop you. I won’t even blame you.”
My mother shook her head. Tears streaked her face, and a few caramel-colored strands of hair stuck to her flushed cheeks. “If you hate yourself as much as you say—if you loved her a tenth as much as we loved her—then you deserve immortality. You deserve to live forever, so you can suffer forever.”
Lucas was crying, too, but he never turned his head away, steeling himself to keep meeting my mother’s eyes. It was more than I could do.
This wasn’t Lucas’s fault. It was mine.
For one second I considered appearing in the room. If Mom saw