Afterlife

Seeing realization dawn on my face, Lucas nodded. His expression had become truly grim. “I’ve already screwed things up so badly that you died,” he said. “No way am I ever going back to the one place where that situation could get even worse.”

What else could we do, though? I forced myself to be brave. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Don’t ask me to go there without you. I couldn’t take it.” Lucas said it simply, like it was obvious; if he was parted from me, the thin tether of will that kept him going would snap.

“You’re going to Evernight Academy, and I’m going with you.”

“Bianca, no. It’s too dangerous.”

“Lucas, yes.” He always wanted to protect me against every risk, but it was time for a reality check. “Is it more dangerous than my being a vampire in a Black Cross cell? I made it through that, and I’ll make it through this. Besides, there are wraiths who managed to be at Evernight without being destroyed by Mrs. Bethany. Maxie’s one of them. It can be done. At least I know to be careful.”

Lucas didn’t look convinced. “We could do something else. Lock me up someplace until I—”

“Until you stop wanting blood?” I kept my voice low, to soften the impact of my next words. “That’s not going to happen. And I’m not turning you into a prisoner in some basement somewhere. I’m telling you, we can do this. We can because we have to.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I don’t either, but I’ll be all right. You’ll have a structure there, a blood supply, other vampires who can help teach you how to handle this. Ranulf and Balthazar will go with you,” I promised. “And Vic’s going back, too, remember?”

His dark green eyes widened, and I knew that Vic wasn’t a source of comfort for him; he wasn’t a friend. He was prey.

Hurriedly, I added, “You’ll be able to be around Vic while others are there to help you. Eventually it’s going to seem easy.”

Lucas stared down at the floor, and I hated myself for being so glib, so casual. Maybe he would learn to bear it, but it would never be easy. It didn’t help either of us for me to pretend that it could.

I remembered what Balthazar had said, about vampires walking into a fire rather than going on. Lucas knew better than most how to destroy a vampire’s body.

“Okay. It won’t be easy,” I said. “It never has been. And that’s never kept us apart.”

He held out his arms, and I ran into them. Already his embrace had cooled, but it was still Lucas, still us.

Into my hair, Lucas whispered, “Will I only see you in my dreams?”

“As long as you have my brooch, I can get to you.”

He frowned, then pulled the brooch from his back pocket. The Whitby jet flower, ornately carved, had been a gift from him to me when we were first dating. He’d taken it with him when he went into the fight, to die; that was the only thing that had allowed me to reach him. “Why the brooch?”

“Things that wraiths bonded to strongly in life, meaningful things—like this brooch, or my bracelet, or the gargoyle outside the window of my old room—well, we can use them to travel. They’re like stops on a subway line; I can travel to them, just sort of appear wherever they are. The coral bracelet and the jet brooch are especially powerful, because they’re made out of materials that were once living creatures.” I closed his hand around the brooch. “So as long as you keep this with you, I’ll always be able to find you. See, you’ll still have a way to make sure I’m safe.”

“Evernight,” he said. “Okay.” I could tell I hadn’t convinced him as much as worn him down. He remained more frightened for me than for himself. But we truly had no other place to turn.

We hugged again, more tightly this time. How badly I wanted to believe that Lucas had found a reason to hope. Even as we embraced, though, I could tell he was looking over my shoulder, staring at the blood.

Chapter Five

“REST,” I SAID AS WE STEPPED INTO ONE OF THE hotel rooms in downtown Philadelphia that Balthazar had paid for. It was ridiculously luxurious, with white cotton quilts on high platform beds—too clean for undead creatures smeared with dried blood. “We both need to rest.”

“Can you sleep?” Lucas asked. He’d eaten again on the way over, several pints, and now had the half-dazed look that I recognized as a result of overfeeding—like Mom and Dad on Thanksgiving. We’d had to give him as much as he could take; it was the only way to ensure he could get through the hotel lobby without snapping. Soon he’d crash.

“I’m not sure ghosts need to sleep. Sometimes I need to sort of . . . fade out, I guess. But it’s not quite the same thing.”

“Where do you go? When you fade out.”

I shrugged. There was so much I still didn’t know about my new wraith nature. “Someplace I can get back from. That’s the only thing that matters.”

He nodded wearily. Through the thin hotel walls, I could hear Balthazar roughly throwing down his gear in the next room. We’d decided to spend the last days before the new semester in the hotel because Vic’s parents were due to return from Italy. He was going to be in enough trouble about the torn-up front lawn without his mom and dad discovering an infestation of vampires in the basement.

Besides, we needed to give Vic some more space. He and Lucas hadn’t come face-to-face since the attack, by their mutual agreement. It was obvious that Vic was trying hard to come to terms, but it was just as obviously going to take a while.

“Why do vampires need sleep? Doesn’t make much sense.” Lucas kicked off his boots and slid out of his jeans. Now that he wore only his boxers and a T-shirt, I could see that his whole body had taken on the sculpted beauty of the vampire. The tee outlined every broad muscle of his chest.

Although I had lost my mortal body, I could still feel desire.

I turned off one of the side lamps nearer the window and pulled shut the heavy drapes that would keep out the morning sun. Lucas had fed recently enough that sunlight wouldn’t hurt him, but he’d probably hate the glare. “My mom used to say that she thought it was more of a habit than anything else, like the body keeps on doing what it knows it should do. See how you’ve started breathing again? You won’t stop, even when you’re sound asleep.”

“Though I’ll never need air again.” Lucas said it as a joke, but it fell flat. I could tell he’d just realized that he’d never feel the relief of a good, deep breath, or a heartfelt sigh.

He collapsed into bed, sinking back gratefully into the feather-plump pillows. Probably he could have fallen asleep within seconds, but I had different ideas.

Maybe Lucas’s ravenous blood hunger could be channeled into other things. Other needs. Where being ravenous wouldn’t be a problem—quite the opposite, actually.

Carefully, I tried shimmying out of the cloud-patterned pajama bottoms. They weren’t so much actual clothes as they were the memory of clothes, so I wasn’t sure whether or not they’d come off.

They would. The pajamas crumpled to the floor and just sort of vanished. I hoped they’d come back—but later. Ideally, I wouldn’t want them for a while.

Lucas raised an eyebrow.

As I slipped into the bed beside him, he smiled a little—the first sign of real pleasure I’d seen from him since his resurrection. “Does this still work?” he murmured. “You and me?”

“Let’s find out.”

He pulled me down into his arms; we were cold against each other now, but it was natural to him and to me, to what we had become. Delicate lines of frost laced the sheets around us as our lips met gently. For the first moment, Lucas was so unsure— of his reactions, of mine—that I felt unbearably tender toward him. Like all I wanted to do was wrap myself around him like a blanket and shelter him from everything we’d been through.

His mouth opened beneath mine as he tangled his fingers in my hair. The only thing I wore now was the coral bracelet that would keep me solid, make this possible.

We made it, I thought. Every complication we faced seemed to have faded away. We’re back where we began. Death couldn’t take this away from us.

Our kisses intensified and deepened. Lucas’s hands were still his hands, strong and familiar. He touched me the same way. I felt pleasure differently now—softer, more diffuse and yet allencompassing—but it was no less for having changed. And as I grew surer, passion building between us, it seemed as though my joy in him flowed through us both.

He rolled me onto my back, but then his expression changed. I saw his fangs, understood, and smiled. I felt the urge to bite, too—not as strongly, now that I no longer needed blood, but sex and fangs would always go together for me.

“It’s okay,” I whispered against his throat, between kisses. “You can be hungry for this. You can have this.”

“Yes,” he said roughly. His green eyes bored into me, a desperate plea.

“Do you need to drink?” I arched against him and let my head fall back, exposing my throat. Lucas breathed in, a hard gasp. “Drink from me.”

With a growl, he sank his teeth into my flesh. I felt again the real pain of having a body, and that alone was its own kind of pleasure. My hands gripped him tightly around the back, surrendering to his hunger —

—until he shoved himself away from me, shouting out in pain.

“Lucas?” I sat upright, clutching the sheet to me. “Lucas, what’s wrong?”

“It burns!”

As he stumbled from the bed, clutching at his throat, he choked and then spat. Silver wraith blood shimmered on the floor briefly before it faded. I smelled smoke and snapped on the bedside light; on the carpet I could see a couple of faint singe marks. Then I realized the sheets were scorched too—coffee-colored drops from where my blood had fallen. I put my hand to the wound at my throat, but it was already closing. The skin knitted beneath my fingertips, a ticklish sensation.

For a few seconds, we just stared at each other. The only thing I could think of to say was, “Now we know why vampires don’t drink wraiths’ blood.”

“Yeah.” Lucas winced when he spoke, and his voice was hoarse. I realized that his lips, tongue, and throat remained scorched. As a vampire, he’d heal quickly, but not instantly. Every place we touched was just a source of pain for him now.

Maybe he saw the pity in my eyes, because he turned his head. “We should sleep.” He yanked back the covers on the other hotel bed.

“Lucas—it doesn’t always have to involve blood drinking. You remember that.”

“I know.” He lay down in the other bed, heavily, as though he could no longer support his body. “We’ll—we’ll figure it out.”

Though I wanted to argue, I knew this wasn’t the time. I simply shut off the light again and slid back beneath the covers, cold and lonely in the big bed. After a couple of seconds, it felt pointless to remain solid, so I took off my bracelet and dissolved into the blue, misty void by myself.

So much for thinking death couldn’t take anything from us.

“Last chance to change your mind,” I said a few days later, as Lucas bundled up his few possessions early on the morning of the first day of school. For a moment I regretted the joke; it would be disastrous if Lucas did change his mind, because we didn’t have a Plan B.

But Lucas attempted to roll with it. “Always meant to get a diploma someday. I guess after death counts as someday, huh?” He tried to smile for me, but it didn’t go far. “Does it feel weird? Not going?”

That was the first time I realized I’d died as an eleventh-grade dropout. “Yeah, kinda.”

These days hadn’t been easy for us. We had to keep over-feeding Lucas blood, and he mostly refused to leave the room. I’d memorized the hotel maids’ schedule, so we could make sure Lucas avoided them. Lucas still thought Evernight was too much of a risk for me, and I wasn’t sure I disagreed. But what other options did we have?

The dawn light brightened the edges of the hotel window shade as Lucas shrugged on the uniform sweater—Balthazar had ordered supplies for them both online. He’d gotten a little taller and a lot more muscular since he’d been an Evernight student, so the sweater was a bit tight, but in a good way. “You look great,” I said. “Reminds me of when we met.”

“When I tried to save you from the vampires.” Lucas paused, then stepped closer to me and put his hand on my cheek. “You know the only reason I’m doing this is so I can come back to you. Be decent enough for you, know how to act. You get that, right?”

“I do.”

“And you’re going to be careful, right? You won’t take any chances at Evernight?”

“I’ll be very careful.” I took his hand in mine and kissed his palm. Then I removed my coral and silver bracelet, going half-transparent as it dropped into Lucas’s fingers. “Take this with you. I’ll get it there.”

“You don’t want it with you? Just in case? You can’t afford to lose this thing, and your brooch is already in my bag.”

“It’s not like I can take it myself,” I pointed out. “When I go incorporeal to travel, nothing physical can travel with me. Besides, it couldn’t be anywhere safer than with you.” I folded his hand around the bracelet.

He leaned forward, as though to kiss me. Now that I was incorporeal—a soft shadow of blue mist in the vague shape of my body—our lips couldn’t touch. But a little of Lucas passed through me, a faint cool tickle that made me shiver, just where our kiss would have been.

Just as I began to smile, though, there was a rap on the door: Balthazar. Time to go.

* * *

After they’d begun the long drive from Philadelphia, I prepared for my own journey. Maxie had told me that wraiths remained bonded to certain places and things that had been meaningful to us during our lifetimes. We could always travel to them, no matter how far away we might be. I wasn’t sure what every single one of those places was yet, though I had ideas: the old maple tree in Arrowwood where I’d liked to play as a child, the theater where Lucas and I had gone on our first date, and perhaps the wine cellar where we’d lived our final weeks. Those were just theories, though.

The only place I knew I could travel was the first place I’d gone, by accident: Evernight Academy, specifically the gargoyle that had perched outside my bedroom.

I drifted into foggy darkness, and at first the sensation was deliciously like sleep, so tempting. But my mind remained focused on the gargoyle. I’d spent so much time looking at his gap-fanged grin that I could picture him perfectly: stony claws, hunched back, pointy wings. Briefly I imagined the way the stone had felt beneath my hands, cold and hard—

Then I could feel it.

The world clarified around me. I perched atop the gargoyle, which would’ve been massively uncomfortable if I’d been alive but was fine now that I could float when I wanted. Curlicues of frost streaked across the windows, heralding the presence of a wraith.

Would my parents see it? They had the first time I’d accidentally come here. Instead of realizing it was me, though, they’d freaked out, believing the frost came from yet another of the ghosts that had invaded Evernight.

Not invaded, I reminded myself. Drawn here, because of the students. Brought here specifically by Mrs. Bethany. I had to remain on my guard.

I heard nothing from the apartment. Probably my parents were downstairs, helping Mrs. Bethany welcome the students. Looking downward, I could see that the first few people had already begun to arrive. Mostly humans at this point, too noisy and too happy—but every once in a while silent, dark-clad figures would sweep through the crowd as though they belonged here more than anyone else. They did belong here more; they were the vampires.

Quickly I shimmered along the side of the building, invisible except for the trails of frost I left behind. At first I just wanted to get a better view, but then I realized: Something felt odd about the school.

Well, big surprise. Evernight Academy was pretty much made of odd. This was different, though, something I had never sensed before—as if, in places, the school was pushing back at me, trying to keep me out. Probably it was something only the wraiths could feel. In those places, I felt as though I was being watched right through the walls. Curious, I whisked along the side of the building, leaving trails of frost on the windows in my wake. Although there were places I could get into the school, there were places that I couldn’t. And one place—the area at the very top of the south tower, right above my parents’ apartment—felt shut off to me completely, in a way that gave me cold shivers.

So don’t go there, I told myself. It’s not like you’ve ever had a single reason to go up there before. As long as you can get in anywhere in the building, you can get to Lucas. Nothing else matters.

However, the knowledge of that strange forbidding energy made me uneasy. I darted downward again, the better to get away from it, and to watch the arrivals, which was what I needed to be paying attention to anyway.

As I focused again on the group, I saw my first familiar face and felt a warm glow of happiness that could’ve been a smile. Patrice!

Patrice Deveraux, my roommate during my first year at Evernight, stepped out of a lean gray Lexus. Her tailored version of the school uniform made her look sophisticated and trim, even in a kilt and sweater, and her hair now bounced with its natural curl, a thick dark halo that suited her. She’d skipped last year to have fun in Scandinavia with her new guy, but one or the other of them must have broken it off—probably Patrice, who seemed to think of men primarily as fashion accessories.

Despite her obsessions with appearances and luxury, Patrice had a fundamental grit that made me like her. Sort of to my surprise, she’d tried to reach out to me during the summer after I’d run away, proving that she wasn’t as thoughtless as she could sometimes seem. It made me happy to remember that not every vampire at Evernight Academy was sinister and forbidding. Besides, this was the first time I’d seen her since I’d died. I wished I could have said hello, but of course that was impossible.

Just before Patrice stepped inside, she paused at the door and looked upward, directly at where I was hovering. Could she see me? I realized quickly that she couldn’t, but the coincidence was striking. Patrice hesitated a second longer before readjusting her sunglasses and going inside.

A few more familiar faces began to appear, both vampire and human, mostly people I hadn’t known too well but had shared classes with and spoken to from time to time. A couple of teachers, too—both Mr. Yee and Professor Iwerebon mingled among the newcomers, saying hello to parents. I looked for my mother and father, half in dread, half in hope, but they didn’t make an appearance. Among the human students, I didn’t see any old friends but recognized a few faces—like Clementine Nichols, whose ticket to Evernight had been her family’s haunted car, and Skye Tierney, Raquel’s sophomore-year lab partner. Raquel had said Skye was “good people, basically.” Coming from Raquel, who hated most people on principle until they gave her a reason to feel otherwise, that was high praise.

And yet I never tried to have a real conversation with her, or with a lot of these people. How could I never ask Clementine what it was like to have a haunted car? I should’ve reached out to people more often. I’d never been incredibly outgoing, but death made me feel lonelier, somehow.

The Woodsons’ car finally showed up, and Vic and Ranulf both emerged. Each of them wore the regulation uniform, but Vic had on a Phillies cap, as usual—and to my delight, Ranulf wore one as well.

“How very striking.” Mrs. Bethany swept out of the school, as if she could sense deviations from protocol at a distance. “Mr. Woodson, your sartorial influence on Mr. White is both profound and unfortunate.”

“We’ll take them off before class,” Vic promised, edging around her. “Absolutely.”

“See that you do.”

Mrs. Bethany watched them go, her sharp eyes following them like a hawk follows prey. She looked darkly beautiful with her thick hair piled atop her head and her long fingernails painted crimson. But the only thing I could think about was the last time I’d seen her—during the raid she’d led on Black Cross’s New York headquarters. She’d killed Lucas’s stepfather in front of my eyes without hesitating. The headmistress of Evernight enforced her idea of the law, absolutely, whether seeking revenge for a Black Cross attack or regulating the school dress code. I wondered if those things were any different for her, or whether it was all just a matter of rules.

That was what Balthazar seemed to think. I wasn’t sure, though. Lucas and I had met because, two years before, Mrs. Bethany had suddenly changed the rules of Evernight Academy in order to allow human students to enroll—without informing those humans that they would be surrounded by vampires, of course. Each of those many human students had connections, one way or another, to ghosts. She’d been hunting the wraiths—creatures like me—for reasons we had yet to learn. Mrs. Bethany was complicated in ways I couldn’t pretend to fathom.

But I had to hope she would play by the rules today, at least, because I recognized the car that Balthazar had rented coming up the long gravel drive.

When Balthazar stepped out, several of the students— vampire and human—smiled at him; he’d always been effortlessly popular, trusted by everyone. But when Lucas got out of the passenger seat, the vampires’ smiles vanished, replaced by expressions of pure loathing.

The ones who had been here two years ago knew that Lucas had been Black Cross—that he had first come to Evernight to spy on them, and that he had been raised to kill vampires on sight. All of them would have heard how narrowly he had escaped Mrs. Bethany when he’d been discovered. The fact that Lucas had been changed into a vampire, something they had to sense instantly, didn’t diminish their hatred in the slightest.

The only vampire who didn’t gape in shock and fury was Mrs. Bethany. She stepped forward smoothly, her long black skirt swirling around her, to face Lucas. Her expression was unreadable as she stared into his eyes.

Could he bring himself to do it? His face betrayed his confusion and doubt, and who could blame him? To ask for the vampires’ protection—to declare himself one of them at last— was a kind of second death for him. The death of who he had been, his whole life.

But he didn’t have much other choice.

Lucas took a deep breath. “I call upon the sanctuary of Ever-night.”

Chaos followed. Several of the vampire students tried to protest, either to Balthazar, who refused to be baited, or Mrs. Bethany, who ignored them as she stood entirely still amid the din. The human students, of course, had no idea what was going on or why this new guy was so despised by a lot of the student body; understandably, they were suspicious of him already.

Lucas stood his ground, though I could see how he longed to lash back, and how his dark green eyes sometimes followed one of the human students a little too long. Mrs. Bethany studied him, her eyes searching, until she gestured for him to follow her and walked toward the edge of the campus—toward the carriage house where she lived.

As Balthazar watched them go, a space widening around him as he was shunned by the other vampire students, I willed myself to his side and whispered, “How do you think she’s taking it?”

He jumped, then hissed, “You scared me.”

“From now on, take it for granted that I’m around.”

“Even when I’m in the shower?”

“You wish.”

After a glance from side to side, making certain that nobody realized he was talking to “himself,” he murmured, “I think if she were going to turn him away, she would’ve done it immediately. But she never would, Bianca. Trust me.”

Despite everything he’d done for Lucas since his turning, I wasn’t ready to totally trust Balthazar again yet. He was the guy who’d led Lucas to his death—the person who had gotten Lucas into this situation to start with. Wasn’t he?