I shudder, guilt clawing up my chest like a wild animal. She hugs me again, and it’s too comfortable. I wrap my arms around her, breathing her in, and despite telling myself over and over that it is wrong, that I shouldn’t feel like this, it feels right.It’s just the mark,I think, holding her tight.
Chapter
Eighteen
Aliz is sleeping in her coffin. I hear her turn, from time to time, restless inside her box. My stomach clenches, hunger and thirst telling me to get out of bed, but I’m too scared to move, too aware of what I’ve done.
Why did Ihugher?
Why did I wrap my arms around avampireand feel safe in her embrace? Why did I feel comfort when she, in turn, pulled me closer?
What am I doing?
It’s as if my soul is slipping from my body. Four years of hard work being undone by a single vampire. But as much as I tell myself that the softness I feel for her isn’t real, my thoughts don’t matter. All that matters is the ache in my chest, reminding me over and over of what happened in the dream.
I killed her. And all because of the garlic in my blood. And even though it was just a dream, a part of me knows it might happen. The dean said she won’t have to compel me, that I’ll be the one to ask her to bite me. And if that happens, Aliz will die.
I hold upthe pill as I wait for my coffee to finish dripping. I know I’m going to make things worse if I stop taking the allicin. My blood will smell the way it did before. But Aliz’s dying features are engraved in the back of my mind, far too vivid. I can’t risk my freedom. I can’t risk her life, either.
I toss the pill into the closest bin and toss with it the persona I’ve built over the last three weeks. Cassie, with her dull-smelling blood, will vanish as soon as the allicin leaves my system. I look at the pill jar, with a false label readingVitamix B12. There are countless red tablets inside. All of them deadly.
This is a terrible idea.
I almost toss the entire jar into the bin, but my last thread of common sense stopsme.
At lunch, I’m distracted, my head buzzing. The Silverbirch vampires are hosting a blood party. A formal one. I’ve only been to a couple offormalparties before, but they always tend to be bloodier. And Penny is sending up another hunter. What if they see my mark?
I dig my nails into my palms, staring down at my still unfinished map.
“What are you drawing?” Julia asks, her voice pulling me out of my spiralling thoughts.
I slam my notebook shut. “Random sketches, that’s all,” I say, and across from me, Ife furrows her brows. I glance back at Julia, and she has a sketchbook open, as always. Once again, she’s drawing a Tube station, crowded with faceless people. “How are your murals going?” I ask.
“Terribly,” she says.
“Nonsense,” Stephan butts in. “You have to show us them.”
“When they’re finished,” Julia says, a hint of colour staining her pale cheeks.
Ife looks at me from across the table, and then back at Julia.
“Has Julia freaked you out with her paintings yet?” Ife asks, lowering her voice. Julia elbows her, affronted.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you still have the sketch of Snowy?” Ife asks, and Julia, whose neck is flushed a deep pink, reaches into her bag, drawing out an old and very thick sketchbook. She leafs through it, opening on a page with a black background, a white rabbit at the centre, and beady red eyes. I glance at the sketch, and then look at Ife, whose features have stilled.
I’m unsure why Julia is showing it to me until Ife says, “Julia drew this last year. This is Snowy, a bunny I had growing up. I accidentally killed it when I was ten, when I had no control of my thirst. Not the nicest memory.” Her eyes seem heavier than usual as she stares at it wistfully. “Here’s the strange thing, Cassie. I’d forgotten about Snowy. At some point I pushed the memory aside, wrapped it up and shoved it into some deep cupboard in the back of my brain. And then, last year, Julia showed me this sketch, and everything came back to me.”
“Wow,” I whisper and look up at Julia. The Convert vampire seems increasingly uncomfortable, and finally snaps her sketchbook shut. “But could that not be a coincidence?” I ask. “Looks like a pretty ordinary rabbit.”
“No,” Ife says. “It even has a black spot on its tail, just like Snowy did.” Her expression remains melancholic. “I think of it as the end of innocence. You’d think that growing up in a vampire household, I’d have been aware of what I was. But that was the first time I realised I was truly…” She doesn’t utter the last word, but I can see it in her eyes.A monster.
I stare at Julia again, waiting for her to explain. After a heavy sigh, she says: “I’m not very good at gifts, so I figured I could give Ife an illustration for her birthday. I had different ideas, but for some reason, this is the one that stood out. My drawings changed after I was converted. I always considered myself a creative person, but that creativity used to depend on what my eyes could see. Once I became a vampire, all my ideas became somewhat random, almost like intrusive thoughts.”
“Oh,” Ife says, swiftly moving from the topic of Julia’s conversion.“I almost forgot! The venue for this year’s Halloween Ball has been announced. It’ll be in the hunting lodge!”
“How will they hold aballin a lodge?” I ask.
