Stargazer

Blinking, I stared at the window for a couple of seconds, like she would magically reappear in the same place. She didn’t. I walked forward to try to get a better view, saw a flicker of motion, and jumped, startled—but I realized it was my own reflection in the glass.

Well, that was stupid. You just panicked at the sight of your own face.

That wasn’t my face.

But it had to have been. If any new students had arrived today, I would’ve known, and Evernight was so isolated that it was impossible to imagine any stranger wandering by. My over-active imagination had gotten the better of me again; it must have been my reflection. It wasn’t even that cold in here, once I thought about it.

Once I’d stopped shaking, I crept upstairs into the small apartment my parents and I shared over the summer, at the very top of Evernight’s south tower. Fortunately, they were sound asleep; I could hear Mom’s snoring as I tiptoed down the hallway. If Dad could sleep through that, he could sleep through a hurricane.

I still felt creeped out by what I’d seen downstairs, and being soaked to the skin didn’t improve my mood. None of that bothered me as much as the fact that I’d failed. My big bad burglary attempt had come to nothing.

It wasn’t like I could do anything about the human students at Evernight. Mrs. Bethany wasn’t going to stop admitting them just because I said so. Besides, I had to admit that she’d protected them, policing the vampire students to ensure they didn’t take even one sip of blood.

But knowing Lucas had made me aware of how little I understood the existence of vampires, even though I’d been born into that world. He’d made me see everything in a different way, made me more likely to ask questions and need answers. Even if I never saw Lucas again, I knew he’d given me a gift by awakening me to the larger, darker reality. No longer would I take anything around me for granted.

After I stripped off my wet clothes and curled up beneath the covers, I closed my eyes and remembered my favorite picture, Klimt’s The Kiss. I tried to imagine that the lovers in the painting were Lucas and I, that it was his face so close to mine, and that I could feel his breath on my cheek. Lucas and I hadn’t seen each other in almost six months.

That was when he’d been forced to escape Evernight because his true identity—as a Black Cross hunter of vampires—had been revealed.

I still didn’t know how to handle the fact that Lucas belonged to a group of people dedicated to destroying my kind. Nor was I sure how Lucas felt about the fact that I was a vampire, something he hadn’t realized until after we’d fallen in love. Neither of us had chosen what we were. In retrospect, it seemed inevitable that we would be torn apart. And yet I still believed, down deep, that we were destined to be together.

Hugging my pillow to my chest, I told myself, At least soon you won’t have so much time to miss him. Soon school will start again, and then you’ll be busier.

Wait. Am I reduced to HOPING for school to start?

Somehow, I have discovered a whole new level of pathetic.

Chapter Two

ON THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, NOT LONG AFTER dawn, the procession began.

The first few students arrived on foot. They stepped out of the woods, simply dressed, usually with just a single bag slung over one shoulder. I think some of them had walked all night. Their eyes searched the school hungrily as they came closer, as though hoping they would immediately be granted the answers they sought. Even before I saw the first familiar face—Ranulf, who was more than a thousand years old and didn’t understand the modern era a bit—I knew who the students in this group were. These were the lost ones, the oldest vampires. They didn’t make trouble for anyone; they sank into the background, studying, listening, trying to compensate for the centuries they’d missed.

Lucas had slipped in among these last year. I remembered the way he’d appeared from the fog in his long black coat. Even though I knew better, I kept searching the face of each student who arrived on foot, wishing I could see his face again.

At breakfast time, the cars started to arrive. I was watching from the hallway of the classroom area, just a couple of stories up, so I could see the ornaments on the hoods: Jaguar, Lexus, Bentley. There were little Italian sports cars and SUVs big enough for the sports cars to park in. I could tell that these were the human students, because none of them came alone. Most of them had their parents with them, with a few younger brothers and sisters along for the ride. I even recognized Clementine Nichols, who had a light-brown ponytail and freckles across her nose. To my surprise, Mrs. Bethany met most of them in the courtyard, holding out her hand as graciously as a queen receiving courtiers. She seemed to want to talk to the parents, and she smiled warmly at them as though they were making friends for life. I knew she was faking it, but I had to hand it to her—she was good. As for the human students, the longer they hung out in the courtyard and stared up at Evernight Academy’s forbidding stone towers, the more their smiles faded.

“There you are.”

I turned from the scene below to see my father, who had pried himself out of bed early for the occasion. He wore a suit and tie, like a professor should, but his rumpled, dark red hair revealed more of his true personality. “Yeah,” I said, smiling at him. “I just wanted to see what was going on, I guess.”

“Looking for your friends?” My father’s eyes twinkled as he stood by my side and peered out the window. “Or scoping out new guys?”

“Dad.”