“I’ve dealt with rougher,” I lied. She didn’t know the half of it, and there was no way she could, not as an ordinary human. I knew she thought Sydney had broken up with me, and it killed me to see Rowena’s pity. I could hardly correct her, though. “And I’ll definitely get in touch, so you’d better sit by your phone. See you around, Ro.”
She gave me a half-hearted wave as I walked off toward the nearest campus bus stop. It wasn’t that far away, but I found myself sweating by the time I reached it. It was May in Palm Springs, and our fleeting spring was being trampled into the ground by summer’s hot and sweltering approach. I popped the sunglasses back on as I waited and tried to ignore the hipster couple smoking beside me. Cigarettes, at least, were one vice I hadn’t returned to since Sydney went away, but it was hard sometimes. Very hard.
To distract myself, I opened up my bag and peered inside at a small statue of a golden dragon. I rested my hand on his back, feeling his tiny scales. No artist could’ve created such a perfect work of art because he wasn’t actually a sculpture. He was a real dragon—well, a callistana, to be precise, which was a type of benign demon—that Sydney had summoned. He’d bonded to her and to me, but only she had the ability to transform him between living and frozen forms. Unfortunately for Hopper here, he’d been trapped in this state when she was abducted, meaning he was stuck in it. According to Sydney’s magical mentor, Jackie Terwilliger, Hopper was technically still alive but living a pretty miserable existence without food and activity. I took him everywhere I went and didn’t know if contact with me meant anything to him. What he really needed was Sydney, and I couldn’t blame him. I needed her too.
I’d been telling Rowena the truth: I was sober now. And that was by design. The long bus ride ahead gave me the perfect opportunity to seek Sydney. Even though I no longer tried to reach out to her in dreams as voraciously as I once had, I still made a point to sober up a few times a day and search. As soon as the bus was moving and I was settled into my seat, I drew upon the spirit magic within me, exalting briefly in the glorious way it made me feel. It was a double-edged joy, though, one that was tempered by the knowledge that spirit was slowly driving me insane.
Insane is such an ugly word, a voice in my head said. Think of it as obtaining a new look at reality.
I winced. The voice in my head wasn’t my conscience or anything like that. It was my dead Aunt Tatiana, former queen of the Moroi. Or, well, it was spirit making me hallucinate her voice. I used to hear her when my mood dropped to particularly low places. Now, ever since Sydney had left, this phantom Aunt Tatiana had become a recurring companion. The bright side—if you could even look at it that way—was that some of the bipolar side effects of spirit had become less frequent. It was as though spirit’s madness had shifted form. Was it better to have mental conversations with an imagined deceased relative than to be subject to wildly dramatic mood swings? I honestly wasn’t sure.
Go away, I told her. You aren’t real. Besides, it’s time to look for Sydney.
Once I’d connected with the magic, I stretched my senses out, searching for Sydney—the person I knew better than anyone else on this earth. Finding someone asleep whom I knew only a little would’ve been easy. Finding her—if she were asleep—would’ve been effortless. But I made no contact and eventually let go of the magic. She either wasn’t asleep or was still blocked from me. Defeated once again, I found a flask of vodka in my bag and settled in on it as I waited out the ride to Vista Azul.
I was pleasantly buzzed, cut off from my magic but not from my heartache, when I arrived at Amberwood Preparatory School. Classes had just finished for the afternoon, and students in stylish uniforms were moving back and forth between the buildings, off to study or make out or whatever it was high school kids did near the end of term. I walked to the girls’ dorm and then waited outside for Jill Mastrano Dragomir to find me.
Whereas Rowena had only guessed at what was troubling me, Jill knew exactly what my problems were. This was because fifteen-year-old Jill had the “benefit” of being able to see into my mind. Last year, she’d been targeted by assassins wanting to dethrone her sister, who happened to be queen of the Moroi and a good friend of mine. Technically, those assassins had succeeded, but I’d brought Jill back through more of spirit’s extraordinary abilities. That feat of healing had taken a huge toll on me and also forged a psychic bond that let Jill know my thoughts and feelings. I knew my recent bout of depression and binge drinking had been hard on her—though at least the drinking numbed out the bond some days. If Sydney had been around, she would’ve scolded me for being selfish and not thinking of Jill’s feelings. But Sydney wasn’t around. The weight of responsibility rested on me alone, and I wasn’t strong enough to shoulder it, it seemed.
Three campus shuttle buses came and went, and Jill wasn’t on any of them. This was our usual day of the week to get together, and I’d made sure to keep up with that, even if I couldn’t keep up with anything else. I took out my phone and texted her: Hey, I’m here. Everything okay?
No answer came, and a prickle of worry started to go through me. After the assassination attempt, Jill had been sent here to hide among humans in Palm Springs because a desert was no place that either our kind or the Strigoi—evil, undead vampires—wanted to be. The Alchemists—a secret society of humans hell-bent on keeping humans and vampires away from each other—had sent Sydney as a liaison to make sure things went smoothly. The Alchemists had wanted to make sure the Moroi didn’t plunge into civil war, and Sydney had done a good job of helping Jill through all sorts of ups and downs. Where Sydney had failed, however, was in getting romantically involved with a vampire. That kind of went against the Alchemists’ operating procedure of humans and vampires keeping apart from each other, and the Alchemists had responded brutally and efficiently.
Even after Sydney had left and her stiff-faced replacement, Maura, had come, things had remained relatively calm for Jill. There’d been no sign of danger from any source, and we even had indications that she could return to mainstream Moroi society once her school year finished next month. This kind of disappearance was out of character, and when I didn’t get a text response from her, I sent one to Eddie Castile.
Whereas Jill and I were Moroi, he was a dhampir—a race born of mixed human and vampire blood. His kind trained to be our defenders, and he was one of the best. Unfortunately, his formidable battle skills hadn’t been enough when Sydney had tricked him into splitting up from her when the Alchemists had come after her. She’d done it to save him, sacrificing herself, and he couldn’t get over that. That humiliation had killed the kindling romance between him and Jill because he no longer felt he was worthy of a Moroi princess. He still dutifully served as her bodyguard, however, and I knew that if anything had happened to her, he’d be the first to know.
But Eddie didn’t answer my text either, and neither did the other two dhampirs serving undercover as her protectors. That was weird, but I tried to reassure myself that radio silence from all of them probably meant they’d gotten distracted together and were fine. Jill would show up soon.
The sun was bothering me again, so I walked around the building and found another bench that was out of the way and shaded by palm trees. I made myself comfortable on it and soon fell asleep, helped by both staying out late at the bar last night and by finishing off my vodka flask. A murmur of voices woke me later, and I saw that the sun had moved considerably in the sky above me. Also above me were Jill and Eddie’s faces, along with our friends Angeline, Trey, and Neil.