“Okay, tell me this suggestion I won’t like.”
“Let’s ask my parents.”
“You were right about my not liking it.” Lucas ran his hands through his hair, like he wanted to rip it from its roots in frustration. “Just…tell them? Tell the vampires what’s wrong with me?”
“Stop thinking of them as ‘vampires’ and think of them as my parents.” I knew it would take Lucas a while to make this transition, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to push. He’d learned to see me for myself, given time. Eventually he could do the same for Mom and Dad. “They’ll hear you out, and if they can help, they will.” Lucas shook his head. “If they’re going to be mad at someone, that’s going to be me. I’m the one who bit you again and started all this.”
“Then we shouldn’t get you into trouble.”
“If you need help, then that’s what’s important. Nothing else.” I faced him squarely. “Think about it, Lucas. Once they know, we can talk openly. Get answers to all your questions and mine, too. If you’re destined to be a vampire—”
He shuddered. “We don’t know that.”
“If, I said. You need to know all about us, don’t you? Even the history and powers that I don’t know about yet. We could learn all about it together.” And perhaps Lucas would like what he heard and decide to join me as a vampire forever. I could hope, couldn’t I? “Once you’re one of us—in whatever way—then they can talk to you openly. You can ask whatever you want. And maybe this will make my parents realize that I’m old enough to hear the whole truth now. We won’t be confused or lost anymore. We’ll learn what we need to learn; we’ll learn everything. Don’t you see?”
Lucas froze. For the first time, he seemed to understand what I’d been saying—that whatever had happened to him would, in some way, let him become a part of Evernight. Despite his dislike of the school, I sensed that he wanted to know more about it, so much so that it surprised us both. Maybe Lucas needed to belong to something after all.
Or maybe he was starting to think about becoming a vampire and staying with me forever.
“Don’t ask me to do this,” Lucas said quietly. “Don’t give me that chance.”
“Are you afraid you’ll like what you hear?” I challenged him.
Lucas didn’t answer. Finally, slowly, he nodded. “Let’s talk to them now.”
I’d predicted that Mom and Dad would be upset with me, but I hadn’t guessed the half of it. First Mom read me the riot act about ignoring all their warnings. Then Dad wanted to know just what Lucas was thinking taking a young girl to the top of the north tower alone.
“I’m almost seventeen!” I shouted at one point. “You keep telling me to make mature decisions, and when I make one, you yell at me!”
“Mature decisions!” My father was so outraged that I half expected him to grow fangs any second. “You reveal all our secrets because you like a boy and you want to talk about mature decisions? You are on thin ice, young lady.”
“Adrian, calm down.” Mom put both her hands on his shoulders. I thought she was sticking up for me until she added, “If Bianca wants to spend the next thousand years looking too young to get a job or rent a car or do any of the basic things that make life manageable, then we can’t really stop her.”
“That’s not what I want!” I couldn’t even imagine getting carded for all eternity. “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t change. Okay?”
Dad retorted, “You came damn close to it, and you know it.”
“I don’t know that at all! You never explained to me what would happen if I bit a human and didn’t kill him! You never explained to me what humans would or wouldn’t know the next day! There’s a whole lot you never explained to me, and now I finally realize how stupid you’ve kept me all these years!”
“Excuse us for not knowing exactly how to handle this! There’s only a handful of vampire babies born a century. It’s not like we had anybody to turn to for advice, you know.” Mom looked mad enough to pull her hair out. “But, yeah, Bianca, at this point, I agree with you. Clearly, somewhere, we screwed up. If we hadn’t, you’d be behaving sensibly now instead of carrying on like this!”
From his place on my parents’ couch, where he had been forcefully told to remain, Lucas attempted to defend me. “This is mostly my fault—”
“You keep quiet.” Dad’s glare could have melted metal. “I intend to have a long talk with you later.”
Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, Mom said, “We’ll have to tell Mrs. Bethany.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Lucas’s eyes opened wide. “Mom, no!”
“Your mother is right.” Dad stalked toward the doorway. “You’ve told a human the secret of Evernight. We have to explain that to Mrs. Bethany, which you should have realized from the start.”
As the door slammed shut behind him, Mom added, more quietly, “Our secrets protect us, Bianca. Someday you’ll understand that.”
It felt like I would never understand any of this. I sank down beside Lucas on the sofa, so that at least we’d be together when the boom fell. All three of us sat in sullen silence for several minutes, until footsteps began to echo on the stone staircase outside. The sound made me shiver. Mrs. Bethany was near.
She swept in as if she owned the place and the rest of us were merely intruders. My father, behind her, might as well have been her shadow. Lavender fragrance followed her, changing the space subtly from ours to hers. Her dark eyes focused instantly on Lucas, who faced her steadily but said nothing.
“So much for your promised self-control, Miss Olivier.” Her long skirts brushed along the floor as she stepped closer. Tonight she wore a silver bar pin at the collar of her blouse, so bright that the light glinted off it. Her long fingernails were painted the darkest imaginable purple, but it didn’t hide the deep grooves in each nail. “I suspected it would come to this sooner or later. Sooner it is.”
“This isn’t Bianca’s fault,” Lucas said. “It’s mine.”
“How very gallant of you, Mr. Ross. But I think it’s rather obvious who was the active party here.” She tugged his collar open, a weirdly intimate gesture from a teacher toward a student. Lucas tensed, and I thought that if she actually put her hand on his neck, he might snap. His temper had frayed from less. Instead, she merely glanced at the pink scars left after two weeks. “You’ve been bitten twice by a vampire. Do you know what that means?”
“How could he?” I asked. “He didn’t even know vampires were real until a couple of months ago.”
Mrs. Bethany sighed. “Remind me to go over the concept of the ‘rhetorical question’ in class. As I was saying, Mr. Ross, you are now marked as one of our own.”
“Marked,” Lucas repeated. “You mean, as Bianca’s?”
“The change is subtle at first.” She paced slowly around Lucas, studying him from head to toe. “I sense it now, but only because you called my attention to it. As time goes on, however, the change will become more pronounced. The other vampires around you will notice. Eventually they will be unable to ignore it. You have surrendered to a vampire, and more than once. That has brought you to the very brink of being changed into one of us.”