I shut my eyes again. Loosened my legs and slid under the un-water’s surface. It closed over me like a dream, like a balm, and the heat worked in toward my bones. Only there was a coldness inside me, too deep for it to reach. A freeze that wasn’t physical.
He’s dead, Dru. You know who did it. You know why.
Or did I? I knew Dad had been expecting to come back. He had to have been, there was no way he would leave me in a house all alone for good. He’d always come back for me, sooner or later.
Well, he had come back. Just not alive. I’d shot a zombie in my living room, and it had been my father.
Christ. Of all the things that will fuck a kid up, that has got to have a category all its own.
I knew who had killed him and turned him into a zombie. The same person Christophe and Dylan and everyone else said killed my mother.
Sergej. The nosferat who looked like yet another teenager, with oily black curls and eyes that could swallow you whole. The same sucker who had tried to kill me. The reason why I was stuck inside the complex that was the Schola, barely even going outside to walk in the barren leafless winter gardens. I could go outside, but not without someone showing up to stare at me.
Standing guard. Because Sergej, or another nosferat like him, might come back. He was a big wheel among the suckers, the closest thing to a king that they had, and he knew I was alive.
I shuddered all over. My lungs burned. The not-water fizzed around me, heat burrowing in through my muscles, soothing and healing. My face gave one last heave of red pain and subsided. The shuddering got worse as I floated, and for a moment I thought of opening my mouth and letting the stuff in the tubs rush in, coating everything down to the back of my tongue and—
I surfaced in a rushing splash. The stuff dribbled away from my hair, slicked my face, crackled as it hit open air, and instantly formed a weird, wax-white coating over every inch of my exposed skin.
Rinsing it out of my hair would take ten minutes in the shower.
I blinked away the clinging on my eyelashes and inhaled, mouth gaping open to take in a deep wallop of steamy air.
White light hit my eyes, scoured through the mishmash inside my head. My breathing deepened, evened out, with a hitching at the end of each exhale.
Underneath the weird white paraffinlike coating of whatever was in the baths, the tears were hot and oily. They slicked my cheeks, but there was nobody around to see. Or to hear.
I settled back onto the stone seat, drew my knees up so I could hug them, and sobbed. Then I went up to my stupid room and cried some more, until dawn came up through a pall of cloud and I finally fell into a thin, troubled sleep.
CHAPTER 3
The cafeteria was a long, narrow space, every railing and molding made of dark wood. The walls were stone and half paneled with heavy, age-varnished oak, but the floor was garish blue linoleum.
Both were chipped and worn from hard use. The tables and the squeaking plastic chairs could have been in any high school in America.
I sat alone near the exit to the halls leading to the west class wing instead of the other branch going to the infirmary and library. The trays were red plastic, bunged-up and warped. The plates were white industrial china, the silverware stamped steel.
I missed my kitchen. I missed my dishes, even the mismatched ones, and Mom’s black-and-white cow-shaped cookie jar. I missed my mattress, my clothes, and my CDs, and all Dad’s weapons. I’d spent all morning, evening, whatever, hanging out in front of the armory, making excuses to stand in front of the counter and breathe in the smell of metal and gun oil. I missed the boxes and my truck and everything.
I even missed cooking, and goddamn, I never thought that would happen. The food here wasn’t bad, but it was job-lot industrial, and I could never see anyone in the kitchen. Just indistinct shapes through a cloud bank, like the fog that rose out of the forest every night. It said something about my life lately, that a screen of shifting steam that dispensed food was only moderately weird to me.
The food was set out on steam tables right in front of the weird wall of vapor. Pasta and salads and desserts. Burgers and pizza and fries for the younger ones, or the ones who liked to eat like real teenagers. Raw and rare meat for the wulfen, including livers and other stuff I didn’t look too closely at. There were also boxes and mini bottles of wine, but I stayed away from those.
Today it was bow-tie pasta in a cream sauce, with prosciutto and peas. Salad with fresh tomatoes and your choice of dressing. Garlic bread that wasn’t half-bad. Only it just sat there on the plate, congealing. There was a carton of chocolate milk, and an energy drink in a blue can. The blue of the can against the red of the tray, the white of the plate, the green specks of peas, if I had my colored pencils, I’d draw the whole shebang and call it Still Life with MSG.
I ached to draw something, anything, but as soon as I settled down with a pad of paper the urge left me. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t been sketching furiously. My dreams were Technicolor weird, but they didn’t push me to scribble. I just felt itchy, like I was waiting for something to happen.
It was loud. The walls reflected a hundred conversations going on, and the occasional hijinks. A bunch of teenage boys in a lunchroom is a recipe for trouble most of the time. The wulfen had their tables, the djamphir theirs, usually in prime spots, like right off the end of the line or near the exit to the infirmary. Even here there were cliques.
Nobody sat at my table. A few of them tried, but I wasn’t really interested in talking and they drifted away. It was like being the new girl all over again every damn day. Irving had tried to say something to me earlier, but I’d just put my head down and walked off. I still felt bad over making him lose his shit in front of everyone. It was embarrassing. What on earth could I say?