I’ll be thinking about you.” We kissed each other tenderly before I reluc-tantly opened the truck door and climbed out.
On the way home, Balthazar and I didn’t say anything to each other at first until we’d driven almost all the way back to Evernight Academy.
It wasn’t an awkward silence, exactly; I was preoccupied with my own concerns and could tell that Balthazar was, too. Finally I ventured, “Did you learn a lot? From Lucas’s notes, I mean.”
“Not nearly enough. But I know that Charity’s revisiting the towns in this area—the places she remembers. She does that sometimes, but it never makes her happy. It’s like she hates those places for having changed while she stays the same.”
“You can find her, then.” I rubbed my hands together, still chilled from the wintery cold. “You can figure out where she’ll be.” Balthazar kept his eyes on the road as he flicked on the car’s heater.
“I can narrow it down. But there’s no pattern—never has been, with Charity.”
“Still, it’s a place to start.”
“Always looking at the bright side.” The corner of his mouth lifted in an unwilling smile. “Yeah. It’s a place to start.” After we pulled up in the lot on the far edge of the grounds, I opened my car door to get out, but Balthazar didn’t move at first. I hesitated.
“Thanks,” I said. “For tonight. It meant a lot.” Balthazar lifted his hand to my face. He didn’t touch me, but his fingertips were close to my mouth. “Your lips are swollen.”
“Huh?” Now that he mentioned it, my mouth did feel puffy and sore.
I realized it was from the hungry kisses Lucas and I had shared. “Oh.
Does it look—is it too—”
“It’s fine,” Balthazar said lightly. His eyes were shadowed. “Anyone who noticed would assume you’d been kissing me.” Fortunately, I didn’t have much time to brood over the separation between me and Lucas. Finals week approached, and the humdrum tasks of papers and exams demanded their due. In some ways, burying myself in schoolwork was a comfort.
My dark mood lingered, no matter how many essays I wrote for Mrs.
Bethany or how many calculus practice exams I took. Nobody really noticed though, because the entire school remained on edge. Though the window in the great hall had been repaired—again with clear glass in-174
stead of stained—it remained deserted, even on rainy days when the on-ly alternative was a cramped dorm room. Rumors spread, becoming more absurd by the day.
“I heard that the haunting is part of a voodoo curse,” Courtney proc-laimed one day from her shower. I was washing my hair a couple of stalls down. “Voodoo is totally and completely real, and some loser dro-pout from last semester decided to curse this place by ruining the best party of the year for all the cool people.”
I would’ve liked to tell Courtney just how stupid she was being, but I didn’t really have a better explanation yet.
As finals week began and the tensions increased, I realized one curious element of the school’s fears about the ghost, something I wouldn’t have expected: The vampires were the ones who were most afraid. The human kids were on edge, too, but they mostly seemed to take it in stride.
That didn’t make sense to me. Okay, vampires might be more likely to understand that the wraiths were real and appreciate the potential danger. But I hadn’t heard any of the human students scoffing at the idea of ghosts—not that anybody could doubt something supernatural was going on after what happened at the Autumn Ball.
“Isn’t it sort of weird,” I ventured one day while Vic and I were studying together in the library, “how more people aren’t freaking out?”
“About exams? Trust me, I’m freaking.”
“No, not exams. About the—the thing. You know.”
“The ghost?” Vic didn’t even look up from his anatomy textbook.
“Yeah, the ghost. You’re really casual about living in a haunted house.”
“I’ve always lived in a haunted house.” Vic shrugged. “I got over the creepy part a long time ago.”
“Wait, what?” It had never occurred to me that Vic might know more about wraiths than any vampire at Evernight. “Your house is haunted by a wrai—a ghost?”
“Yeah, the cold spot in the attic. Classic spectral activity—lowered temperature, weird sounds, and the way you just feel somebody watching you even though nobody else is there. Everybody in my family always knew about it. I had a sleepover every Halloween that was, if I say so myself, the coolest party of the year. Every year.” As I gaped at him, Vic started to laugh. “Lots of people here have seen the same thing.”
“The ghost in your house?”
“The ghosts in their houses. Or their schools, or you know that new girl Clementine? She swears her grandma had a haunted car. Like Chris-tine from Stephen King, right? I would love to try driving that thing.”