Evernight

Patrice raised her hand first. “You said that most electronic devices can establish wireless connections now. But it doesn’t seem like this one does.”

“Very good, Patrice.” When Mr. Yee praised her, Patrice shot me a grateful smile. I’d talked her through the whole idea of wireless communications a few times. “This limitation is one of the few design flaws of the iPod. Subsequent models are likely to incorporate some form of wireless connection, and, of course, there’s also the iPhone—which we’ll cover next week.”

“If the information inside the iPod actually re-creates the song,” Balthazar said thoughtfully, “then the sound quality would depend completely on what kind of speakers or headphones you used. Right?”

“Mostly, yes. There are superior recording formats, but any casual listener and even some pros wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, as long as the iPod was hooked up to a superior audio system. Anyone else?” Mr. Yee looked around the room and then sighed. “Yes, Ranulf?”

“What spirits animate this box?”

“We’ve been over this.” Putting his hands on Ranulf’s desk, Mr. Yee slowly said, “No spirits animate any of the machines we’ve studied in class. Or will study, moving forward. In fact, no spirits animate any machines at all. Is that finally clear?”

Ranulf nodded slowly but didn’t look convinced. He wore his brown hair in a bowl haircut and had an open, guileless face. After a moment, he ventured, “What about the spirits of the metal from which this box is made?”

Mr. Yee slumped, as if defeated. “Is there anyone from the medieval period who might be able to help Ranulf with the transition here?” Genevieve nodded and went to his side.

“God, it’s not that hard—it’s just, like, a turbo Walkman or something.” Courtney shot Ranulf a skeptical glare. She was one of the few at Evernight who never seemed to have lost touch with the modern world; as far as I could tell, Courtney had mostly come here to socialize. Worse luck for the rest of us. I sighed and went back to creating a new playlist with my favorite songs for Lucas. Modern Technology really was too easy for me.

Weirdly, the place where it was hardest to forget the trouble lurking just beneath the surface was English class. Our folklore studies were behind us, and now we were making a review of the classics and digging into Jane Austen, one of my favorites. I thought there was no way I could go wrong there. Mrs. Bethany’s class was like some mirror universe for literature, someplace where everything got turned on its head, including me. Even books I’d read before and knew inside out became strange in her classroom, as if they’d been translated into some rough, guttural foreign language. But Pride and Prejudice—that would be different. Or so I thought.

“Charlotte Lucas is desperate.” I’d actually raised my hand, volunteering to get called on. Why did I ever think that was a good idea? “In that day and age, if women didn’t get married, they were, well, nobody. They could never have money or homes of their own. If they didn’t want to be a burden on their parents for forever, they had to marry.” I couldn’t believe I needed to tell her that.

“Interesting,” Mrs. Bethany said. “Interesting” was her synonym for “wrong.” I started to sweat. She walked in a slow circle around the room, and the afternoon sunlight glinted on the gold brooch at the throat of her frilly lace blouse. I could see the grooves in her long, thick nails. “Tell me, was Jane Austen married?”

“No.”

“She was proposed to, once. Her family was quite clear on that point in their various memoirs. A man of means offered his hand in marriage to Jane Austen, but she refused him. Did she have to get married, Miss Olivier?”

“Well, no, but she was a writer. Her books would’ve made—”

“Less money than you might think.” Mrs. Bethany was pleased I’d walked into her trap. Only now did I see that the folklore section of our reading had been to teach the vampires how twenty-first-century society thought about the supernatural, and that the classics were ways of studying how attitudes were different between their histories and now. “The Austen family was not especially wealthy. Whereas the Lucases—were they poor?”

“No,” Courtney piped up. Since she was no longer bothering to put me down, I figured she was doing it to get Balthazar to look at her. Since the ball, she’d renewed her efforts to win him over, but as far as I could tell, he was still unmoved. Courtney continued, “The father is Sir William Lucas, the only member of the gentry in town. They’re wealthy enough that Charlotte doesn’t have to marry anybody, not if she doesn’t really want to.”

“Do you think she really wants to marry Mr. Collins?” I retorted. “He’s a pompous idiot.”

Courtney shrugged. “She wants to be married, and he’s a means to an end.”

Mrs. Bethany nodded approvingly. “So, Charlotte is merely using Mr. Collins. She believes she is acting from necessity; he believes that he is acting from love, or at least the proper regard for a potential wife. Mr. Collins is honest. Charlotte is not.” I thought about the lies I’d told Lucas, gripping the edges of my notebook so hard that the crisp paper edges seemed to slice into my fingertips. Mrs. Bethany must’ve known what I was feeling, because she continued, “Doesn’t the deceived man deserve our pity instead of our scorn?”

I wished I could sink into the floor.

Then Balthazar gave me an encouraging smile, the way he used to, and I knew that even if we weren’t hanging out any longer, at least we were still friends. In fact, none of the Evernight types were looking down their noses at me like they used to. Even if I wasn’t really a vampire yet, I’d proved something to them. Maybe I was “in the club.”

In some ways, it felt like I’d gotten away with something—that I’d pulled off a trick of some kind—closed my eyes and said abracadabra and turned the whole world upside down. When I was holding hands with Lucas, laughing after class at one of his jokes, I could believe that everything was going to be better from now on.

That wasn’t true, though. It couldn’t be true as long as I was deceiving Lucas.

Before, I’d never thought of keeping my family’s secret from Lucas as lying; I’d been taught to keep that secret since I was a tiny child, drinking blood from the butcher shop out of my bottle. Now I knew how close I’d come to hurting him, and my secret didn’t seem innocent any longer.

Lucas and I kissed constantly—all the time, before breakfast in the morning, as we went to our different dorm areas at night, and basically pretty much any other time we could be alone together for an instant. However, I always stopped us before we got carried away. Sometimes I wanted more, and I could tell Lucas did too from the way he watched me, paying attention to how I moved or the way my fingers wrapped around his wrist. He never pushed me, though. When I lay alone at night, my fantasies became even wilder and more desperate. Now I knew what Lucas’s mouth felt like on mine, and I could imagine his touch against my bare skin with a clarity that startled me.

But when I had those fantasies now, the same image always bubbled up: my teeth sinking into Lucas’s throat.

There were times I thought I would do anything to taste Lucas’s blood again. That was when I was the most frightened.