“Wouldn’t you be?” Dibs piped up. “He’s dangerous. Just look at his kill record. He’s never wanted to make himself liked, either.”
“Well, people have been calling him a traitor for a long time, but never to his face.” Shanks shrugged. He’d picked most of the leaves out of his hair. “And he did bring her in. I know Juan’s cousin, I talked to him last week during phonetime. When Christophe was tryin’ to save your asses, someone was tryin’ to kill him. The battle-group got a directive to kill a nosferat, and he didn’t realize it wasn’t a wampyr but Christophe until the guy had held off every one of them and had plenty of chances to kill “im but didn’t, and he was djamphir to boot. And he fucked up you-know-who but good, to rescue her.”
A hot flush went through me. Did they know about Christophe and Sergej? And now that I’d gotten some sleep and run until I was close to a cardiac arrest, I felt like I was thinking clearly. If Dylan thought Anna was right, why would he be telling me Christophe was going to train me? If he didn’t, why did he stay quiet when she accused him?
Why did he say he was on my side? And what was Anna’s whole game with the file and the pictures of the house my mother had died in front of?
I didn’t remember enough about the night Mom died. I didn’t want to remember about that night. I was five years old, for chrissake.
I tried working it out again inside my head. Christophe said Dylan was loyal. I’d carried that note between them like a message, and Dylan was supposed to find me if there was another vampire attack. But I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, even Dylan, that I’d seen Christophe.
That didn’t make sense either. But I’d been so confused from the heat of Christophe’s body against mine….
Don’t think about that, Dru. Jesus. But what else was there to think of? The single blond hair caught on my nightstand? Other secrets, other lies, all pressing down on me?
“Something’s off,” another wulfen said. “They just watch her. And then there was the other night.”
“Yeah.” Graves leaned forward next to me. He still hadn’t taken his coat off, and I understood why. It was chilly in the classroom, especially with sweat drying on my skin. “Nobody came to pick her up from the classroom and get her to her room. Isn’t that a little suspicious, given how they’re watching her?”
I stared at the cracked chalkboard. How long had it been since I’d seen an actual chalkboard?
Most schools had whiteboards nowadays. “Dylan said he didn’t know who was supposed to be watching me. The duty roster disappeared, and—” I stopped short. I could have gone on, but I was taking Dylan’s word for an awful lot, and I couldn’t say any more without explaining the whole Anna thing.
I was pretty sure talking about another svetocha wasn’t a good idea, if she was supposed to be a big secret.
But it didn’t look like I was such a big secret, maybe. Had Ash killed every sucker there? If they were from Sergej and none of them came back, he wouldn’t know for sure I was here, unless the traitor, whoever it was, could manage to tell him. Or a sucker could survive the next attack and go tell him.
The pieces fit together inside my head. Christophe must have realized this, it was why he was coming back to get me out.
It was anyone’s guess whether he’d get back in time. My mouth was dry and my heart was still thumping along.
“Shit.” Shanks rubbed at his chin. “I didn’t know that.” His dark eyes rested on me for a long moment. “That true?”
I nodded. “Someone was supposed to come and get me, or the teacher’s supposed to take me to my room. That’s what happened every other time. But that time Blondie vanished as soon as class was out. And nobody else came.”
“Blondie?” Someone chuckled. “Oh wow.”
“Kruger.” Shanks didn’t look amused. “And his helpful lectures. So how did you get out of there?”
“I saw…” The usual habit of keeping the woo-woo a secret made me pause. I plunged ahead.
This, at least, was one secret I could get off my chest. “I saw an owl. My grandmother’s owl. Whenever there’s trouble, it shows up and tells me to get out.” I took a deep breath. “And so I ran. But when I was outside… I saw a wulfen.”
“Who?” Shanks could really bore a hole in someone with those eyes. He leaned forward, tense and expectant, like I was going to produce something he could chase down and bite.
“His name’s Ash. He’s got a streak on his head—”
“He’s a Broken,” someone supplied. “The last Silverhead. You-know-who’s wulf.”
Shanks waved a hand. “Yeah, I know about the Silverhead. You saw him?”
“I didn’t just see him. He killed the suckers chasing me. He was pretty beat up afterward. He sniffed me, but he didn’t hurt me.” It wasn’t coming out right. “I mean—”
“He sniffed you?” They were peppering me with questions now, one after another.
“How did he sniff you?”
“How close was he?”
“Was he bleeding?”
Shanks held up a hand. “Slow down, everyone. Jesus. First things first, okay?” He looked at me speculatively for a long, tense-ticking twenty seconds. “Dru.” It was the first time he’d said my name without sneering. “Do you have any idea why you’re here and not at the main Schola? Or even a big Schola?”
“The main…” I sounded as blank as I must’ve looked. “Isn’t this, like, a main Schola? A big one?”
“Shit, no.” He laughed, and some of the other older boys did too. It wasn’t nice laughter, but it wasn’t pointed at me, either. “This is like reform school. We’re the troublemakers, the retards. The actual Schola for this district, the first Schola ever made, is in the Big Apple. Down over the state line. I wondered why you were way the hell out here.”
Oh. “Nobody…” It made sense now. And of course Anna would have been coming from a bigger city, right? It was all over her.
“Nobody said to your face that you were on the short bus?” He shrugged. “That’s interesting. But you shouldn’t trust what they tell you even if they open up their mouths. Nosferatu lie, and half-vamps are right behind them sometimes. We’re just dumb muscle and they’re supplying the tactics, they say. So they get to order us around.”
“But we’re surviving now,” Dibs piped up. “Not like it was. My grandfather told me about the Dark Times. They aren’t so far away.” A murmur of assent greeted the words.
“Dark Times, man.” Another dark wulfen shuddered. “At least we’re not slaves now.”
“Yeah, well.” Shanks shrugged. “They still treat us like shit even if they don’t murder and enslave us. It’s not a huge step up, but I’ll take it. Most of the time.”
“That always bothered me,” I had to tell Graves. “The way Christophe treated you.” The other, more tremendous secret swelled behind my ribs. I pushed it down. Tell nobody, he’d said. And they didn’t need to know I was leaving soon anyway, did they?
Graves shook his head, black hair falling in his glowing eyes. The restlessness in him was evident. “This really isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“Patience,” a lean lanky wulf with broad shoulders and a blond buzz-cut said. His hair wasn’t long enough for me to stare at him. “This is how consensus works.”
“What exactly are we discussing here?” I wanted to know. I was tired of stumbling around and having people drop information on me. I wanted to do something.
Shanks held up a finger. “You’re at a small satellite full of delinquents instead of the main Schola. Could be to throw people off the scent, but—” another finger “Ash knows you’re here. Which means you-know-who could know. He killed the nosferatu who attacked last time, but we don’t know if he killed all of them.” One more finger, the nail chewed all the way down. “They’re lying to you about a whole hell of a lot, and refusing to train you.”