Chapter Eighteen
Chapter
Eighteen
Aliz is sleeping in her coffin. I hear her turn, from time to time, restless inside her box. My stomach clenches, hunger and thirst telling me to get out of bed, but I’m too scared to move, too aware of what I’ve done.
Why did I hug her?
Why did I wrap my arms around a vampire and feel safe in her embrace? Why did I feel comfort when she, in turn, pulled me closer?
What am I doing?
It’s as if my soul is slipping from my body.
Four years of hard work being undone by a single vampire.
But as much as I tell myself that the softness I feel for her isn’t real, my thoughts don’t matter.
All that matters is the ache in my chest, reminding me over and over of what happened in the dream.
I killed her. And all because of the garlic in my blood. And even though it was just a dream, a part of me knows it might happen. The dean said she won’t have to compel me, that I’ll be the one to ask her to bite me. And if that happens, Aliz will die.
I hold up the pill as I wait for my coffee to finish dripping.
I know I’m going to make things worse if I stop taking the allicin.
My blood will smell the way it did before.
But Aliz’s dying features are engraved in the back of my mind, far too vivid.
I can’t risk my freedom. I can’t risk her life, either.
I toss the pill into the closest bin and toss with it the persona I’ve built over the last three weeks.
Cassie, with her dull-smelling blood, will vanish as soon as the allicin leaves my system.
I look at the pill jar, with a false label reading Vitamix B12.
There are countless red tablets inside. All of them deadly.
This is a terrible idea.
I almost toss the entire jar into the bin, but my last thread of common sense stops me.
At lunch, I’m distracted, my head buzzing. The Silverbirch vampires are hosting a blood party. A formal one. I’ve only been to a couple of formal parties before, but they always tend to be bloodier. And Penny is sending up another hunter. What if they see my mark?
I dig my nails into my palms, staring down at my still unfinished map.
“What are you drawing?” Julia asks, her voice pulling me out of my spiralling thoughts.
I slam my notebook shut. “Random sketches, that’s all,” I say, and across from me, Ife furrows her brows. I glance back at Julia, and she has a sketchbook open, as always. Once again, she’s drawing a Tube station, crowded with faceless people. “How are your murals going?” I ask.
“Terribly,” she says.
“Nonsense,” Stephan butts in. “You have to show us them.”
“When they’re finished,” Julia says, a hint of colour staining her pale cheeks.
Ife looks at me from across the table, and then back at Julia.
“Has Julia freaked you out with her paintings yet?” Ife asks, lowering her voice. Julia elbows her, affronted.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you still have the sketch of Snowy?” Ife asks, and Julia, whose neck is flushed a deep pink, reaches into her bag, drawing out an old and very thick sketchbook.
She leafs through it, opening on a page with a black background, a white rabbit at the centre, and beady red eyes.
I glance at the sketch, and then look at Ife, whose features have stilled.
I’m unsure why Julia is showing it to me until Ife says, “Julia drew this last year. This is Snowy, a bunny I had growing up. I accidentally killed it when I was ten, when I had no control of my thirst. Not the nicest memory.” Her eyes seem heavier than usual as she stares at it wistfully.
“Here’s the strange thing, Cassie. I’d forgotten about Snowy.
At some point I pushed the memory aside, wrapped it up and shoved it into some deep cupboard in the back of my brain.
And then, last year, Julia showed me this sketch, and everything came back to me. ”
“Wow,” I whisper and look up at Julia. The Convert vampire seems increasingly uncomfortable, and finally snaps her sketchbook shut. “But could that not be a coincidence?” I ask. “Looks like a pretty ordinary rabbit.”
“No,” Ife says. “It even has a black spot on its tail, just like Snowy did.” Her expression remains melancholic.
“I think of it as the end of innocence. You’d think that growing up in a vampire household, I’d have been aware of what I was.
But that was the first time I realised I was truly…
” She doesn’t utter the last word, but I can see it in her eyes. A monster.
I stare at Julia again, waiting for her to explain.
After a heavy sigh, she says: “I’m not very good at gifts, so I figured I could give Ife an illustration for her birthday.
I had different ideas, but for some reason, this is the one that stood out.
My drawings changed after I was converted.
I always considered myself a creative person, but that creativity used to depend on what my eyes could see.
Once I became a vampire, all my ideas became somewhat random, almost like intrusive thoughts. ”
“Oh,” Ife says, swiftly moving from the topic of Julia’s conversion. “I almost forgot! The venue for this year’s Halloween Ball has been announced. It’ll be in the hunting lodge!”
“How will they hold a ball in a lodge?” I ask.
“The university calls it a lodge,” Julia says. “I suppose ‘hunting palace’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.”
“Haven’t you heard of it?” Ife asks me, mistaking my silence for confusion. “The Halloween Ball is a Tynahine staple.”
I shake my head. The last thing I can think of right now are silly parties. Or balls.
“I was allowed to attend last year,” Stephan says. “Even though I wasn’t a student yet.”
“This year is going to be perfect,” Ife says. “Did you know we’re going to have a blood moon on the thirty-first?”
“Blood moon?” I ask.
“It’s a lunar eclipse. The full moon will look red. Like blood.”
The full moon. Ever so slowly, the deadline creeps up on me. We’ve got less than three weeks to find the library. But hopefully, come this Halloween Ball, I will be free of the mark already.
My last Integration class finishes at seven, and I head back to my room. When I open the door, someone is sitting on the coffin.
Someone that is not Aliz.
My muscles tense as I recognise her.
Elia.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, leaving the door open, giving myself a way to escape.
She tilts her head, that same cool and unnerving smile I saw from her last night appearing on her lips. “Just waiting on Aliz,” she says. “She was supposed to have been here already.”
“You have a key to our room?” I ask, putting my bag down on my bed.
Aliz never mentioned this. No one is supposed to be allowed in here.
Then I see what’s in her hands. A small glass jar, metal cap unscrewed.
The label says they’re vitamin supplements, but the contents are a vampire’s cyanide.
I stop breathing as she shakes a pill into her hands.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Oh, are these yours?” she asks, lifting the jar, scrutinizing it. Does she know what they are? How did she even find them? “Vampires can take supplements. And I happen to be running low on B12.”
If she had rummaged through my case, if she had found my weapons, there is no way that she would be this calm. Her legs are crossed, a flowy white dress hitting the top of her tan boots. Her pink coat lies beside her, and she lifts the pill to her lips.
“Don’t!” I shout, and she stops, blinking before the pill touches her tongue.
“Why?” she asks, tilting her head back, pinning me with her hooded eyes.
“That pill is—”
Before I can say it, she slips it into her mouth.
I rush to her, knocking the glass jar out of her hands, red pills scattering everywhere. But I’m too late. Her throat bobs as she swallows her death.
Elia leans down, face level with mine. She looks like she’s about to say something, but then I hear Aliz outside, carefully pushing the still-open door.
“You’re here!” Elia sings, looking at Aliz.
I wait for Elia’s body to react. For her to choke, the way Aliz did in my dream.
Cough, collapse, die. But instead, Elia jumps down from the coffin, crushing my garlic supplements beneath the stiletto heels of her boots.
She reaches for Aliz and kisses her as though I’m not in the room.
“Uh…” Aliz pulls back, looks at me, and then at the mess on the floor. “What’s going on?”
“Your roommate got angry. Just because I wanted one of her vitamins!” The cool voice she was using with me moments ago has climbed up an octave, making her sound younger, childish, even. How is she still alive?
“What did I tell you about coming into my room?” Aliz says, irritated. I know I should be brushing the pills up now, but I can’t wrap my head around Elia not dying. “Look what you’ve done,” Aliz adds, crouching down. Just before she can start scooping the stray pills up, I shout:
“It’s garlic!”
Aliz freezes. Her hands draw back instinctively, and she gawks at me, confused.
“Garlic?” Elia draws the word out.
Aliz, in turn, doesn’t say anything, she simply stares down at the floor. At a semester’s worth of garlic supplements.
It’s over.
They’ve figured it out.
“Why would you bring garlic into a university full of vampires, Cassie Smith?” Elia asks. How is she still breathing? The look in Aliz’s eyes doesn’t go beyond confusion, but I know it will shift, any second now, to an accusation. And then what?
“To hide the scent of my blood.” The truth slips from me like a silver dagger, falling from my sleeve before a kill. My words catch them both off guard, and Aliz’s shock seems exacerbated.
Elia takes a step towards me, lowering her voice. “And why must you hide your scent?” she asks, close enough that I can smell the rosewater in her hair.
I swallow, taking a step back, hitting the desk. “It has a strong fragrance.” The kind that will drive a vampire mad with thirst. “Type-S,” I say.