And even lovelier with her hair done up like that. Tendrils floated around her elegantly made-up face—done with magic, Mina knew, because Anaya had sent her a note about it the other day.If you want me to show you how I did it, it had said. And for just a moment Mina had thought how nice that would be. To be able to rely on her friend instead of her enemy.
But of course you couldn’t kill a vampire with eye shadow.
And even if you could, Mina was pretty sure Anaya wouldn’t be able to teach her. It wasn’t the mechanics of spellcasting that she had a problem with. It was feeling things she barely wanted or understood, apparently.
But she pushed all of that aside to focus on her friend. “I didn’t even know we were all invited. Let alone given dresses like this,” Anaya said, as she bustled excitedly into the room. She snatched up the red silk on Mina’s bed, already cooing over it, while Mina’s heart sunk over something she didn’t even know how to explain.
I think you’ve been invited to make sure I come, just so he can do something horrible to me, she thought sadly, at her friend’s back. But of course, she couldn’t say that. She couldn’t ruin it for Anaya. And doubly so when there was a good chance it wasn’t true. Maybe someone thought Anaya was as lovely and magical as Harker thought she was awful and ordinary, and they desperately wanted her to be there.
It was possible.
She was clever and beautiful.
“It’s the least you deserve,” she said.
Then slipped out of her sweater and skirt, ready to try on a dress.
Chapter Fourteen
She knew from various books and talk about the school that balls were always held in a place called the arboretum. Though it wasn’t really an arboretum at all. It was just a building, a little way past the lake, with a huge domed glass ceiling that you could see before you made out a single other thing. It gleamed in the dying light, like a diamond.
Anaya squeezed her arm on glimpsing it.
“I’ll never understand how a place can be so rotten and so glorious, all at the same time,” she said, as they made their way up the winding, cobbled path to the building. Though Mina thought her friend did understand, only too well. Money and power made things pretty. It surrounded them on all sides—in the hovering lights that bloomed as darkness sank over them, in the sound of flight above their heads, in the ripples on the lake as iridescent things stirred beneath the depths.
But it couldn’t mask the looks they got from the students around them.
The ones who were dressed in ethereal gauzy wisps, or black-tie dinner jackets types of things, and saw Mina and Anaya for what they were. Imposters, dressed in clothes that didn’t go with some theme they hadn’t even known. That they could never have known, because he hadn’t said. He had given her a dress that fitlike a glove and shoes that felt like walking on air. All of it beautiful enough to convince her that this would be okay.
But of course, it was the wrong kind of beauty.
It was lush and gothic, instead of fine and elegant.
“Maybe we should go back,” she said, just before they got to the great glass doors that led in. Close enough that she could hear music—that thin, high, haunting melody she sometimes heard around the dorms—and smell food even more mouthwatering than anything the dining hall came up with. Clouds of sugar, fruits that weren’t from this earth, meat from creatures she couldn’t imagine.
But still so removed from it all that it felt impossible.
“Oh, let them stare. The only reason they’re doing it is because you look incredible. They’re used to seeing you in brown sacks, and now you’re swanning in like a vampire’s bride,” Anaya said. Well meant, of course. But it just made Mina’s stomach sink even further than it already had.
She thought of his hand on her cheek.
The gleam of his razor-sharp teeth.
“Don’t say that,” she said.
Much to Anaya’s puzzlement.
“But it’s true. Francis Ford Coppola could have directed you.”
“Anaya, I think I should tell you something. Something really important.”
“You don’t have to. I know you and the king of this place have something going on. I know that you’re scared of it. I know it doesn’t feel real. But I’m pretty sure it is. In fact, I’m pretty sure he’s obsessed with you,” her friend said, so full of surety that it cracked Mina’s heart to hear it. She turned her head and lookedinto Anaya’s soft eyes, so sweetly accepting. Maybe even happy for her.
And didn’t know how to say the way things really were.
“What makes you think that?” she asked instead.
But Anaya just looked past her, into the ballroom.
