Stargazer

“Bianca—”

“Go away. Just go.”

“I’m not leaving you alone here.”

“Balthazar will be back with the car any second.” Lucas’s expression hardened. “I guess Balthazar takes real good care of you. Don’t need my help anymore.”

“No.” My voice broke on the word, but he believed me anyway.

“Fine.” Lucas stalked off into the darkness. He walked the opposite direction from Charity, so I knew he wasn’t on the hunt, but he vanished into the dark as quickly as she had. I was alone.

Did we just break up? Did I just dump Lucas?

I thought so, but I wasn’t sure. Somehow not knowing for absolute sure made it even worse. But we hadn’t figured out where or how to see each other again—which meant I might not ever be able to find him again. If he didn’t come after me, we’d never see each other after tonight. I leaned against the minivan and started to cry. Then I thought it was incredibly petty of me, crying over my breakup while Courtney was lying dead at my feet, but that only made me sob harder.

It seemed like eternity before Balthazar pulled up in the car, though really it couldn’t have been even ten minutes. He saw me crying and said, “It didn’t end well, I guess.” I shook my head. “It’s okay. Get in the car, Bianca. I’ll see to Courtney.”

Balthazar rolled up Courtney’s body in an old blanket that must have been in the trunk, which was where he put her. I didn’t watch; I sat in the passenger seat and bawled. By the time he was done cleaning up the area and locking the trunk, the worst of my sobbing had passed. Tears still rolled down my cheeks, but I felt numb inside.

When he got in the car, I whispered, “What are we going to do?”

“We’ll have to drive into the countryside and build a fire.” He cast an uncertain glance at me. “Lucas was right about the frozen ground.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Balthazar started the car. I looked behind us at the house where Courtney’s family was still celebrating a birthday party. As we drove away, I could see their silhouettes in the windows. They were dancing.

Chapter Eighteen

“THANK GOD WE’RE FINALLY SEEING SIGNS OF spring,” Raquel said, opening our window to let in the breeze. “If I’d woken up one more morning and seen icicles, I swear I would’ve stabbed somebody with one.”

“Can you not talk about stabbing people, please?” I was curled on my bed, in the same pajamas I’d worn all weekend, flipping through one of Raquel’s back issues of Wired. It wasn’t very good reading—by this point she’d cannibalized virtually all the pictures for her art projects—

but then, I wasn’t really concentrating.

Raquel pushed the magazine down so we were face-to-face. “Remember earlier this year?” she said, more quietly than before. “When I was the one hiding in this room, and you were the one who snapped me out of it? Well, take that and reverse it.”

“I don’t need to be snapped out of anything.”

“Bianca, get real. For the last month, you’ve been like some kind of zombie.”

Vampire, not zombie, I thought. That made me smile just a little. “I just need some time to—get my head together. Okay?”

“A couple of days, sure. A couple of weeks, even. But this? This has been going on for almost a month. Even your head should be together by now.” Raquel stood up and yanked my blanket off the bed. “Get up.

Shower. You smell like funk.”

“I only skipped one day,” I grumbled.

“I don’t care how long it took the funk to get here. I only know there’s funk in my room, and it’s got to go.”

I didn’t actually think I smelled bad; Raquel was just desperate to get me to move. So I moved, obediently taking my shower and returning to find Raquel remaking my bed—even though she hardly ever made her own. She’d hidden the magazines. “I made some tuna salad,” she said as she snapped one of the sheets. “For lunch, we can have a picnic out on the grounds. Maybe ask Balthazar, Vic, and Ranulf. What do you say?”

“You want to have a picnic?” She shrugged. I said, “You are really, really not acting like yourself.”

“Neither are you,” Raquel pointed out. “Until we get things back to normal, I’m stuck being the perky one. I kind of hate being the perky one. So can you snap out of it already and come to the picnic?”

“Okay.” I’d have to eat sometime. Though blood was becoming a bigger part of my diet all the time, I still needed food.

“So, are you ever going to tell me what’s bugging you?”

“Probably not.” How could I tell her that I was upset over losing Lucas? As far as she knew, I’d lost Lucas almost a year ago—not last month. “Raquel, it’s not that I don’t trust you. I just—I don’t want to say any of it out loud. Like, I don’t even want to hear myself speaking the words.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s just get you outside.”

The five of us had our picnic lunch (Balthazar and Ranulf both chew-ing very carefully) on the grounds. One of Vic’s tie-dyed blankets served as our tablecloth, and we mostly made small talk about midterms and school gossip. Balthazar sat close by, our arms sometimes touching, and his presence reassured me.

Only once did the conversation swerve into dangerous territory. As Vic shook more potato chips onto his plate, he said, “Hey, nobody ever heard anything else about Courtney?”