I shrugged. Took another french fry. “I was just wondering where all the money comes from. This isn’t a cheap operation they’ve got going. I wonder if the other schools are bigger. Which still leaves the question of how they pay for this.”
Graves studied me sideways for a moment. That adult look was back, as if he was listening to a song I couldn’t quite hear. “That’s true. I thought about that too. Want me to see if I can find out?”
“Sure.” Another fry, and another bite of burger and sip of latte. “Can I come with you? To sparring?”
His pause was long enough that I knew what he’d say. Probably not a good idea, Dru.
I wanted to hear him say it, anyway. The bubbling ball of acid inside my chest swelled another few notches. “Why?”
He hunched his shoulders. It was no good, he wasn’t as birdlike-thin as he’d been a couple of weeks ago, before he’d gotten bit. He couldn’t look small anymore. “No offense, but you like to pick fights too much. And I hate having a chick see me get my ass handed to me. It’s a guy thing.”
My face felt funny, so I let my hair fall down between us, curtaining my expression. Long hair is good for some things. And since we weren’t in Midwest Podunk anymore, my hair had actually been behaving. Go figure. “This chick could hand your ass to you, you know.”
“One of the teachers would jump me or throw me out of here if we got into it, Dru. Let’s not.”
“They wouldn’t throw you out. I’d leave too.” I’d go just about anywhere to get out of here. But I couldn’t, could I. Not with the vampire king looking for me, right?
“We’d both end up dead.” He sounded uncharacteristically serious, and his free hand came up, touched his opposite shoulder. Right where he’d been bitten. He rubbed at it a little, as if it still hurt.
“Please, Dru. Let’s not do this, okay?”
I dropped the burger. It splatted down on the plate and I pushed my chair back. My lips were greasy. Chewed food sat in my stomach like a bowling ball. “Fine. Let’s not. Have fun at sparring.”
“Dru—”
But I got up, shoved my chair back under the table, and fled. When he came by my room later, I kept the door closed and locked. He knocked for a while, but then he went away. And I sat there on the bed, fingering my mother’s locket and wondering how much longer I was going to be trapped here.
CHAPTER 4
Tap. Taptap. Tap. I turned over restlessly. Sleep retreated like a cat, on soft little feet. I didn’t want it to go, clutched at it with dreaming fingers. I had been dreaming of something important, a warning, owl wings brushing the air around me.
The bed was wide and deep and soft, a maple four-poster with filmy, dusty blue curtains drawn back. The whole room was blue, from the indigo velvet quilt cover to the pale-sky wallpaper figured with gold crosses, to the tinted varnish on the seven bookcases and the heavy cobalt velvet drapes. The rug was sapphire, and thick enough to lose dimes in even though it was older than me.
The window behind it didn’t have iron bars, because it opened onto a little private garden completely enclosed by high, blank walls, three stories down, with a barred door I could reach only by going out my door, making three turns, and going down two flights of stairs.
A lot of effort to spend if I wanted to walk outside into a raw, blustery little plot of ground with gravel paths and leafless, pinched-looking things that might have been rosebushes, in spring, that is.
If I really, truly wanted to wander around thorny stabbing vines under a gray sky.
Instead of bars, there were heavy iron shutters, with little hearts and crosses punched out in even rows marching down their lengths.
I left those open. When they were closed, the entire room got still and, well, dead.
My eyes opened slowly. The warning retreated. Had it been Gran? Whoever it was was trying to tell me something very important.
Taptaptap. Tap. Taptap.
A cool bath of dread started at my scalp and slid down the rest of me. The sound was familiar, fingers drumming impatiently on glass. Memory mixed with dreaming, conspired to pull me under as the pillow turned hard and hot against my cheek.
There was a zombie at my back door. Its eyes swung up, and they were blue, the whites already clouding with the egg-rot of death. Its jaw was a mess of meat and frozen blood; something had eaten half its face. Its fingertips, already worn down to bony nubs, scraped against the window.
Flesh hung in strips from its hand, and my stomach turned over hard. Black mist rose at the corners of my vision, and the funny rushing sound in my head sounded like a jet plane taking off.
I’d know that zombie anywhere. Even if he was dead and mangled, his eyes were the same.
Blue as winter ice, fringed with pale lashes.
The zombie’s gaze locked with mine. It cocked its head like it had just heard a faraway noise.
I let out a dry barking sound and my back hit the wall next to the hallway, smacking my hip against a stack of boxes.
Dad bunched up his rotting fist, the meat chewed away from finger bones by something I didn’t want to imagine or even think about, and punched his way through the window.
I sat straight up, gasping for air, fighting free of the heavy blankets. Threadbare sateen sheets slid sweat-slick against my skin, turned into wet fingers clutching me at hip and ankle. My fists balled up and I hit nothing but air, the scream dying in my throat. The soft brush of feather-muffled wings filled the room for a moment, but Gran’s owl, the bird that had sat on her windowsill while she died, the bird that had warned me of danger and led me to Dad’s truck a week and a half ago, didn’t show up.