I couldn’t stay cooped up in the room. It was like sitting in a prison cell. So I would go to class.
Classes were a special kind of hell. I’d sit there and think, He lied to me. Or even better, Someone here wants to kill me. It would knock every other thought out of my head, stamp on it a few times, and I’d lose track of everything the teacher was saying. Dibs hung out with me at breakfast and lunch, but he didn’t say much. He had all he could handle just sitting still and sometimes forcing out a hello. The kid’s shyness was just short of terminal.
Nobody else talked to me except Graves. And he hardly talked at all. At least, not about anything important. It was all, We went running through the park this or Shanks took us shopping that or I heard about this guy in sparring, guess what he did? the other.
I made noises, nodded, and tried to look interested. Then the gong would go off inside my head.
He lied to me. Or Someone here wants to kill me. Maybe in this very room. And I would stare off into the distance, because I was afraid to start examining everyone around for signs of murderous intent. It wasn’t like I could even tell how old any of them were. They could have all been ancient and I wouldn’t know, would I?
I don’t know why I felt so betrayed, really. Christophe was part vampire, after all. Like everyone else here who might want me dead.
Like me.
The taint doesn’t wash out. I found out that much in the increasingly useful two-hour span that was history class. No matter how far back in the family tree the sucker is, it still makes the kids djamphir
They get the aspect, the speed, the strength, and the hunger. And they’re all boys, except for the one-in-a-thousand girl. Who rarely ever reaches adulthood, because the suckers find them before they bloom and drink them dry, getting a big old jolt of power from it.
Nice, huh? I was just special all over the place. Me and Anna. Were there more? There could be.
I might not be so special.
It also occurred to me that the wulfen were probably my best bet of surviving. They couldn’t want me dead, really. Right? Because I didn’t matter either way to them unless they were working for Sergej too.
There was no way of knowing for sure. Which meant the wulfen weren’t that great of a bet after all.
I had no way of getting out of here. Not for a while.
Graves didn’t want to hang out that much, and what could I do? Just follow the werewolves around until they took pity on me? What if some of them had a reason, God only knew what, for hating me?
And did I even dare to figure out how to sneak down to the boathouse?
I was in history class, again, sitting on one end of the couch. The doors had been replaced and the halls repaired, but you could still see the white gouges in the paneling and the carpet was a glaring mismatch, the only patches of new flooring in the whole school. The renovated bits smelled like formaldehyde, and I pulled my knees up, resting the pad of paper on them. The doodle unreeled under my pencil, long narrow arches and stone walls. I shaded in each block of rock, the grass forcing up through flagstones, and worked all around a huge blank spot in the middle of the page.
Graves perched next to me, and the kid he called Shanks, dark emo-boy hair brushed sideways across his forehead and hanging in his chocolate eyes, bony wrists sticking out from under his sleeves, engineer boots, and a sideways smile, leaned forward on his other side, elbows braced on his knees. Irving had settled himself on the floor, knees up and arms circling them. Other than that, everyone gave me a wide berth. Even Dibs acted like he didn’t know me in class.
I caught Graves and the Shanks kid exchanging pointed looks, usually every time Irving opened his mouth.
Right now Blondie the teacher was droning on about basic rules for interaction between djamphir and wulfen. I filled in another block of shading.
“Djamphir are trained for tactics and wulfen are trained for logistics. This plays to the particular strength of both. Wulfen lack a djamphir’s sensitivity to nosferat infestation, and djamphir lack the peculiar qualities of consensus and cooperation that come naturally to wulfen. Each is half of a balanced equation, and it was only when we started cooperating that we began to be able to clear entire territories and hold them.”
“What happened before?” Graves wanted to know.
Blondie’s teeth peeped out from behind his lips. Very white, but his aspect was nowhere to be found. “Before? We died. We were very close to being eradicated completely, and it was war on wulfen whenever the nosferatu felt like it. Those who weren’t taken were killed, or they lived by the leave of the Blood Princes only. As the Broken.”
That perked my ears up. Broken to his will, Christophe whispered inside my head.
I looked up from the paper. “Broken? What does that mean?”
I immediately felt stupid. It was probably not the best thing to ask in a room full of wulfen. They might be, you know, offended.
Oh jeez. A slight rustle went through the room. Shanks hunched his shoulders and settled back on the couch.
“Anyone want to answer that?” Blondie turned in a full circle, taking in the faces all around him. No? Well, I’ll go ahead then. ‘Breaking’ a human being, even a djamphir, is easy. Sleep deprivation, temporary lack of protein, a constant stream of propaganda, it’s called brainwashing, and it’s very simple to do. Doing it to a werwulf, or a skinchanger like Mr. Graves here, is harder, because of their resistance to both physical damage and persuasion.”
“They’re stubborn,” Irving said, sotto voce, and another ripple ran through the room. It might’ve sounded like laughter if you weren’t listening too closely.