Chapter Eighteen #2
Elia picks up the half empty jar from the floor, and I wring my hands together, heart pounding in my chest. They can both feel it.
I can’t lie to them. Elia touches my chin, and I tense.
“What does your blood type have to do with you keeping poison in a room you share with a vampire?” she asks, her crystal-blue eyes turning a shade darker, leaning towards crimson.
“Back off,” Aliz snaps, her voice sharper than I’ve ever heard before. “She’s telling the truth,” Aliz says, and then meets my gaze. “You’ve been taking these pills, right?”
“I have.” Pins and needles run up my legs as I think of what else I can say, without revealing the truth. Because God knows what they’ll do to me if they find out I’m a hunter. “I can get my blood tested if you don’t believe me. I wasn’t planning on poisoning you.”
“I believe you. But you should pick these up,” Aliz says, her voice cautious. “And you might need to dust them off a little before taking them.”
I stare at Elia, still alive.
“What are you doing here?” Aliz finally asks Elia, as I get down on my knees between them, picking up the scattered pills.
“Just wanted to remind you of our date,” Elia says.
“You could have texted,” Aliz says, uncomfortable. I ignore the jealousy clouding my thoughts. Somehow this new emotion makes the mark’s symptoms worse, as though I can feel each individual line, all the way from my neck down to my waist. I bite my lip as I try to stop myself from scratching at it.
“Pick me up tonight,” Elia says, and just like that, she’s gone. But she clearly wasn’t here to see Aliz.
She was here to see me. And only now that it’s over do I see how deliberate that was.
Taking poison just to show me she’s immune.
Does she know I’m a hunter? I glance at my side of the room.
Nothing aside from my garlic supplements is out of place.
But if she knows I’m a hunter, why hasn’t she told Aliz?
“Don’t worry, I’ll have Faust change the lock.” Just as I start scratching my neck, Aliz crouches down next to me. She presses her hand to my skin, the itch vanishing. “I’d help you clean up, but, uh, I think I should be careful.”
“Definitely.”
“Do you really have Type-S blood?” she asks.
“I do,” I say. Aliz’s hand remains against my skin, but she doesn’t hide her hurt expression now that Elia is gone. Last night she said she was glad I didn’t have a strong scent, and I didn’t correct her. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I say, the words awkward on my tongue. “I know I should have.”
“I assumed you trusted me,” she says, not looking me in the eye. She draws her hand away from my neck. “But I get it. I’m a vampire.”
“My blood’s caused me problems in the past,” I say. “Do you remember—” My voice trembles. This is a bad idea, I think, but I better prepare her. “Do you remember asking about my perfume?”
Aliz blinks, frowning. “Perfume?”
Of course she doesn’t. Aliz hasn’t obsessed over every conversation we’ve ever had the way I have. “The day I arrived,” I whisper. “You said the room smelled nice.”
Her lips part. Her gaze searches mine. “That was your blood?” she asks.
“That’s what you initially thought, wasn’t it?”
Aliz lifts my wrist to her nose, just as she did last night. “You don’t smell like garlic.”
“I know. The pills don’t have a scent.”
As she lowers my arm, something in her features changes.
She stares at my wrist, grip tight. Her eyes are on the exact spot where the bite mark from Inverness was.
When Aliz healed my neck, the bite vanished along with Jannet’s wound.
But she must have seen it again while I was naked, seen it enough to recognise it.
“You’ve been taking garlic since you first came here?” she asks. I know what she’s thinking.
And I know I’m risking everything by saying this, but I need to gain her trust back.
“A vampire bit me in Inverness,” I say, voice low, hands shaking.
What am I doing? Aliz’s face, which till now had a frown, slackens, her eyes wide.
“I saw him compelling a girl in a pub, and after I confronted him”—I turn my wrist—“he bit me.”
Aliz doesn’t say anything.
My breathing shortens. My eyes burn, lower lip trembling as I try to figure out how to explain this in a way that won’t let her see me for what I truly am.
“Did he—” The next word seems too thick for her throat, and when she finally squeezes it out, it’s in a whisper. “Did he die?”
I swallow hard and nod. The fact I’ve killed is a disgusting side of me I hoped she’d never see, but she’ll understand, won’t she? He. Bit. Me. It’s not my fault.
“The garlic killed him?”
The room is far too quiet. The garlic would have killed him. Slowly. First, his lungs would have shut off, and as the garlic spread, his body would have decomposed. But it didn’t. I drove a stake through his chest.
Vampires can tell when we’re lying. I nod again, and hope she believes me.
Aliz cups my cheek.
“I won’t tell anyone,” she whispers. “Just—” She rubs the spot where the bite mark used to be. “Promise me you’ll never do anything so stupid again. You could have died.”
I meet her gaze, stunned. Her eyes are not disgusted. Instead, there’s nothing there but worry. The garlic pills are still scattered around us, like speckles of blood. “You really won’t tell anyone?” I ask.
“I won’t tell anyone about your…involvement,” she says. “But I must tell Faust that a vampire was compelling people in Inverness. Rogue vampires seldom work alone.”
I nod, my shoulders relaxing. Nocth already knows what I am, so even if Aliz tells him that I was attacked, he won’t do anything.
Plus, he’s the one who told Penny about those vampires.
I pick up the remaining garlic pills. I skipped the first one already.
Soon it’ll leave my system. But based on how calm she is, that hasn’t happened yet.
“I also…” she starts, “I also had a dream.”
“A dream?” The change of subject is like whiplash, but I’m grateful for it. At least until she keeps talking.
“You told me that I died in yours,” she says. She gets up and sits on my bed, looking down at me as I scoop up the remaining garlic pills. Her white hair is a mess, a few loose strands falling over her brows. Her lips are slightly red. But the lipstick isn’t hers. “That explains it,” she says.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
She doesn’t look me in the eye. I feel as though she’s searching for words, afraid, as I am, to say the wrong thing.
Then she walks over to her side of the room, searching her desk for a notebook.
She hands it to me. “When I woke up, I wrote what happened in my dream, to make sure I didn’t forget.
” She clears her throat. “Tell me if it’s anything like yours. ”
I stare down at the page, dread settling in my stomach. Aliz’s handwriting looks like something out of a calligraphy manual. But I can’t exactly appreciate it as I take in what she’s written.
So thirsty I felt my throat was on fire. Cassie was scared. Behind my sister’s palace: maze, crows, statues, rosebush.
I tried to compel her but it didn’t work. I caught her, she kissed me. I asked if I could bite her and her blood was like lava, my lungs were aflame, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t heal.
She staked me?
The notebook falls to the floor, and I feel nauseous as I take it in.
My throat is dry. She’s waiting for an answer, but when I look at her, I can tell that my expression alone has answered her question.
“It’s the same,” I say. I touch the mark on my neck, digging my nails into it.
“The dean said we would both experience symptoms. Maybe the dream—”
“You should also write yours down,” she says.
“If it happens again, I mean.” She felt the stake.
Does she know what I am? Just as I start to panic, Aliz crouches down next to me.
“It was only a dream, Cassie,” she says.
Her hand cups my cheek, and just like last night, when I hugged her, it feels far too comfortable.
I swallow hard. “I know,” I say.
Suddenly, a realisation hits me. “Does that maze exist?” I ask. Aliz frowns, nodding.
“It’s by my sister’s old palace. The hunting lodge, as Tynahine calls it,” she says. Her hand drops from my cheek, my skin suddenly cold. That is where most students believe Aliz lives, so it shouldn’t surprise me that it was her sister’s.
“What if your sister’s library is in the hunting lodge?”
“That would be easy and convenient,” Aliz says. “But it’s not there. I looked already.”
“I want to look again,” I say, handing her back her notebook. “We can go after class.”
“I can’t.” Her voice is tight. I lean against her coffin, unsure what’s going through her mind. “I can’t be alone with you.”
“We’re alone right now,” I say.
She stares at the floor. “I’ve spent the day thinking of nothing else but you,” she whispers, and her words latch onto me, twisting my sanity.
“I thought the feeling would subside if I saw you, but instead…” She stares at me, and my chest tightens as I guess what she’s going to say next.
As I recognise the thirst lurking in her eyes. “I want you even more.”
My skin burns, waiting, each second spent apart from her like a thorn digging deeper and deeper.
I want her, too. “Being apart might make it worse,” I whisper, pushing her words away, not allowing myself to cling to them.
She doesn’t mean it. She doesn’t feel that way.
Not really. She’s a vampire, I remind myself.
As if I still care about that small technicality.
“Maybe.” She looks at her polished shoes. “But I don’t trust myself. You’ll be safer if we’re apart.”
“I’m not scared of you.”
She stares up at me, gaze hard. “You were scared in the dream.”
Aliz was there for me when I woke up. She indulged me with an embrace, told me I was safe. Meanwhile, when Aliz woke from her own nightmare, she was alone. “I’ll search alone, then,” I say, my chest tight.
“Don’t go to the hunting lodge,” she says. “It’s too far from campus. Anything could be lurking out there.”
“Like what, a vampire?” I ask, and she shakes her head.
“Funny,” she says, reaching over to pinch me. “Please, Cassie,” she adds, her fingers lingering on my skin. I spot a stray garlic pill and put it into the jar, screwing the cap tight. “I’ll take you there once I’m a bit less…thirsty.”
The word makes me jolt, and I take a step back from her. These are the symptoms Nocth told us about. “What makes you think your thirst will decrease?” I ask. “The dean said the symptoms would only get worse.”
“There must be a few remedies for thirst in the library,” she says, her cheeks gaining colour. “There has to be something. And once I’ve figured that out, we’ll go to my sister’s palace.”
I can go, anyway. She can’t stop me. But for some reason, I decide to listen to her. “I’ll keep searching in the tunnels,” I say, and Aliz nods, relieved. “But if I don’t find anything in the next few days, I’m going to the palace, with or without you.”
“I’ll go to the Palau Collection, then,” she says.
“And will you be picking up books or girls?”
“Jealous, are we?” she asks, cocking her head to the side.
“Unbearably so,” I reply, which makes her smirk harden into a thin line. “We need to keep each other updated, so you should give me your number.” I draw out my phone and hand it to her.
“You only had to ask, Cassie,” she says, quickly typing it.
“I’m quite literally asking,” I say. She makes another face, disappointed by my reaction.
Never in a million years did I expect to have an Astra in my list of contacts.
I don’t waste time, getting ready to spend the next few hours down in the tunnels. “Good luck,” she says, just as I’m about to open the door.
I turn to look at her. She’s leaning on her coffin; a strand of her white hair has fallen over her brows.
She brushes it away. I want you, she said just a minute ago.
I know it’s just the thirst speaking. I know it’s not real.
I know I shouldn’t believe it. But I’ve never wanted to hear anything as much as that before.
“You, too,” I say as I leave our room.