"Nice to meet you," she said, her voice thick.
Okay, this wasn't so bad. I could handle this. So she had eaten someone. She didn't seem to want to--
She plunged her snout into my hair and took a deep shuddering breath.
A warm string of drool dripped from her open maw onto my bare shoulder.
I forced myself to stay very calm, and after a moment, she released me.
Giving a bashful shrug, she said, "Sorry. Werewolf thing."
"Hey, no problem," I said, even though all I could think was, Slobber!
Werewolf slobber! On my skin!
"See you around!" she called after me as I hurried past her.
"Yeah, sure thing!" I said over my shoulder.
When I reached my room, I dashed over to my desk and pulled out a handful of tissues. "Ugh, ugh, ugh!" I moaned, scrubbing at my shoulder.
Once I was de-drooled, I flipped on my lamp to search for some hand sanitizer.
I remembered Jenna, and turned to look at her bed. "Oh, sor--"
Jenna was sitting up in bed, a bag of blood pressed against her mouth.
Her eyes were bright red.
"Sorry," I finished weakly. "About the lamp."
Jenna lowered the bag, a smear of blood on her chin. "Midnight snack.
I . . . I figured you wouldn't be back for a while," she said softly. The red slowly faded from her eyes.
"It's fine," I said, sagging into my desk chair. My stomach was turning over, but I wasn't about to let Jenna know it. I remembered Archer's words:
You're at Hecate now.
And man, had tonight proved that.
"Believe it or not, it's not the weirdest thing I've seen this evening."
She wiped her chin with the back of her hand, still not meeting my eyes.
"So did you join their coven?"
"Oh, heck no," I said.
She did look at me then, obviously surprised. "Why not?"
I rubbed my eyes. I was suddenly really tired. "It's just not my thing."
"Probably because you're not an evil bimbo."
"Yeah, I think my lack of evil bimbo-ness was the death knell. Then I watched a shifter fight with some faeries--Oh, by the way, what the heck is a
Seelie?"
"The Seelie Court? It's a group of good faeries who use white magic."
"I would hate to see the bad guys, then," I muttered.
Jenna nodded toward the tissues in my hand. "What's up with that?"
"Huh? Oh, right. After the faerie fight, a werewolf smelled my hair and drooled all over me. It's been quite a night."
"And then you came back to your room to watch a vampire chowing down," Jenna said. Her tone was light, but she was twisting her Electric
Raspberry comforter in her hands.
"Don't worry about it," I said. "Hey, werewolves gotta drool, vampires gotta eat. . . ."
She laughed before picking up the blood bag and shyly asking, "Do you mind if I . . ."
My stomach clenched again, but I made myself smile and said, "Knock yourself out."
I flopped back on my bed. "They were pretty ticked off at me."
Jenna stopped slurping. "Who?"
"The coven. They said I needed their protection against social ruin because of, uh . . ."
"Because I'm your roommate?"
I sat up. "Yeah, that was part of it. But they also said something about my dad."
"Huh," Jenna said thoughtfully. "Who's your dad?"
I lay back down, pushing my pillow under my head. "Just a regular warlock, as far as I know. James Atherton."
"Never heard of him," Jenna said. "But then I'm always out of the loop. So you think Elodie and those girls are mad at you?"
I remembered Elodie's hard eyes. "Oh yeah," I said softly.
Suddenly Jenna burst out laughing.
"What?"
She shook her head, her pink stripe falling in front of one eye. "Just thinking. Man, Sophie, it's only your first day and you've already befriended the school outcast, pissed off the most popular girls at Hecate, and developed a full-blown thing for the hottest guy. If you can manage to get detention tomorrow, you'll be like, legendary."
By Jenna's definition, it took me a week and a half to become legendary. The first week went smoothly, all things considered. For one thing, the classes were ridiculously simple. They mostly seemed to be excuses for our teachers to talk us to death. Even Lord Byron, whose class
I'd been really excited about, turned out to be a major snoozefest. When he wasn't waxing poetic on his own awesomeness, he was sulking behind his desk and telling us all to shut up--although there were a few days when he let us take long walks around the pond to "be one with nature." That was kind of fun.
I'd hoped for classes on how to do spells, but according to Jenna, those classes were only taught at the "real" Prodigium schools, the fancy places where powerful Prodigium sent their kids. Since Hecate was technically a reformatory school, we were stuck learning about witch hunts in the sixteenth century and things like that. Lame.
The one bright spot was that Jenna was in almost all of my classes.
"They don't have any special vampire classes," she'd explained. "So last year they just gave me the same schedule as Holly. Guess they decided to do the same thing this year."
The only class Jenna didn't have with me was P.E., or as they called it at Hecate, "Defense." It was on my schedule every other week, so I was halfway into my second week at Hecate before I went.
"Why is it only every other week?" I asked Jenna that morning. "All our other classes meet every day."
I was pulling on my truly heinous Hecate-blue P.E. uniform, which consisted of bright blue cotton pants and a slightly-too-tight-for-comfort blue T-shirt with "HH" printed in swirly white script just above my left boob.
"Because," Jenna answered, "if you had Defense every day, or even every week, you'd be in the hospital."
So I wasn't feeling exactly confident as I headed down to the converted greenhouse they used as a gym.
It was maybe a quarter of a mile from the main house, but by the time
I'd walked thirty feet, I was soaked in sweat. I wasn't stupid: I'd known that
Georgia was hot, and I'd lived in hot places before. But those places, like
Arizona and Texas, didn't have this kind of heat, the kind that seemed to suck all the will to live from me. This was a wet kind of heat that made you feel like mildew must be growing on your skin.
"Sophie!"
I turned and saw Chaston, Anna, and Elodie walking toward me. They looked amazing in the fugly gym uniforms. Shocker.
However, when they got closer, I saw that they too were sweating, which made me feel better. The three of them were in several of my classes, but they hadn't spoken to me since the first night. I wondered what was up with them now.
"Hey," I said casually, as they caught up with me. "What now?
Coming to warn me of my impending death at the hands of fluffy bunnies?
Or shoot lightning bolts at me?"
Chaston laughed, and to my utter surprise, looped her arm through mine. "Look, Sophie, we were talking, and we feel really bad about the other night. So you don't want to join our coven. No biggie!"
"Yeah," Anna added, coming up on my other side. "We overreacted."
"You think?" I said.
"We're trying to apologize," Elodie added, walking backward in front of us. I really, really hoped she'd walk into a tree. "I was talking to Archer, and he said you were all right."
"Really?" I asked before I could stop myself.
Great, Sophie, I thought. Way to be cool.
"Yeah, and he told me you didn't know anything about Prodigium.
Said it was kind of pathetic, actually."
I tried to smile, but there was something dark and sharp twisting in my stomach that was making it a little difficult. "Huh."