When we finished, he led me through an offensive exercise where I could use any makeshift weapons I could find to attack him. To my surprise, I managed to land a few blows on him, although they seemed to do me more damage than him. The impacts always made
me
stagger back, but he never budged. It still didn’t stop me from attacking and attacking, fighting with an almost blind rage. I didn’t know who I really fought in those moments: Mia or Jesse or Ralf. Maybe all of them.
Dimitri finally called a break. We carried the equipment we’d used on the field and returned everything to the supply room. While putting it away, he glanced at me and did a double take.
“Your hands.” He swore in Russian. I could recognize it by now, but he refused to teach me what any of it meant. “Where are your gloves?”
I looked down at my hands. They’d suffered for weeks, and today had only made them worse. The cold had turned the skin raw and chapped, and some parts were actually bleeding a little. My blisters swelled. “Don’t have any. Never needed them in Portland.”
He swore again and beckoned me to a chair while he retrieved a first-aid kit. Wiping away the blood with a wet cloth, he told me gruffly, “We’ll get you some.”
I looked down at my destroyed hands as he worked. “This is only the start, isn’t it?”
“Of what?”
“Me. Turning into Alberta. Her . . . and all the other female guardians. They’re all leathery and stuff. Fighting and training and always being outdoors—they aren’t pretty anymore.” I paused. “This . . . this life. It destroys them. Their looks, I mean.”
He hesitated for a moment and looked up from my hands. Those warm brown eyes surveyed me, and something tightened in my chest. Damn it. I had to stop feeling this way around him. “It won’t happen to
you
. You’re too . . .” He groped for the right word, and I mentally substituted all sorts of possibilities.
Goddesslike. Scorchingly sexy.
Giving up, he simply said, “It won’t happen to you.”
He turned his attention back to my hands. Did he . . . did he think I was
pretty
? I never doubted the reaction I caused among guys my own age, but with him, I didn’t know. The tightening in my chest increased.
“It happened to my mom. She used to be beautiful. I guess she still is, sort of. But not the way she used to be.” Bitterly, I added, “Haven’t seen her in a while. She could look completely different for all I know.”
“You don’t like your mother,” he observed.
“You noticed that, huh?”
“You barely know her.”
“That’s the point. She abandoned me. She left me to be raised by the Academy.”
When he finished cleaning my open wounds, he found a jar of salve and began rubbing it into the rough parts of my skin. I sort of got lost in the feel of his hands massaging mine.
“You say that . . . but what else should she have done? I know you want to be a guardian. I know how much it means to you. Do you think she feels any differently? Do you think she should have quit to raise you when you’d spend most of your life here anyway?”
I didn’t like having reasonable arguments thrown at me. “Are you saying I’m a hypocrite?”
“I’m just saying maybe you shouldn’t be so hard on her. She’s a very respected dhampir woman. She’s set you on the path to be the same.”
“It wouldn’t kill her to visit more,” I muttered. “But I guess you’re right. A little. It could have been worse, I suppose. I could have been raised with blood whores.”
Dimitri looked up. “I was raised in a dhampir commune. They aren’t as bad as you think.”
“Oh.” I suddenly felt stupid. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s all right.” He focused his attention back on my hands.
“So, did you, like, have family there? Grow up with them?”
He nodded. “My mother and two sisters. I didn’t see them much after I went to school, but we still keep in touch. Mostly, the communities are about family. There’s a lot of love there, no matter what stories you’ve heard.”
My bitterness returned, and I glanced down to hide my glare. Dimitri had had a happier family life with his disgraced mother and relatives than I’d had with my “respected” guardian mother. He most certainly knew his mother better than I knew mine.
“Yeah, but . . . isn’t it weird? Aren’t there a lot of Moroi men visiting to, you know? . . .”
His hands rubbed circles into mine. “Sometimes.”
There was something dangerous in his tone, something that told me this was an unwelcome topic. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up something bad. . . .”
“Actually . . . you probably wouldn’t think it’s bad,” he said after almost a minute had passed. A tight smile formed on his lips. “You don’t know your father, do you?”
I shook my head. “No. All I know he is he must have had wicked cool hair.”
Dimitri glanced up, and his eyes swept me. “Yes. He must have.” Returning to my hands, he said carefully, “I knew mine.”
I froze. “Really? Most Moroi guys don’t stay—I mean, some do, but you know, usually they just—”
“Well, he liked my mother.” He didn’t say “liked” in a nice way. “And he visited her a lot. He’s my sisters’ father too. But when he came . . . well, he didn’t treat my mother very well. He did some horrible things.”
“Like . . .” I hesitated. This was Dimitri’s mother we were talking about. I didn’t know how far I could go. “Blood-whore things?”
“Like beating-her-up kinds of things,” he replied flatly.
He’d finished the bandages but was still holding my hands. I don’t even know if he noticed. I certainly did. His were warm and large, with long and graceful fingers. Fingers that might have played the piano in another life.
“Oh God,” I said. How horrible. I tightened my hands in his. He squeezed back. “That’s horrible. And she . . . she just let it happen?”
“She did.” The corner of his mouth turned up into a sly, sad smile. “But I didn’t.”
Excitement surged through me. “Tell me,
tell me
you beat the crap out of him.”
His smile grew. “I did.”
“Wow.” I hadn’t thought Dimitri could be any cooler, but I was wrong. “You beat up your dad. I mean, that’s really horrible . . . what happened. But,
wow
. You really are a god.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Uh, nothing.” Hastily, I tried to change the subject. “How old were you?”
He still seemed to be puzzling out the god comment. “Thirteen.”
Whoa. Definitely a god. “You beat up your dad when you were
thirteen
?”
“It wasn’t that hard. I was stronger than he was, almost as tall. I couldn’t let him keep doing that. He had to learn that being royal and Moroi doesn’t mean you can do anything you want to other people—even blood whores.”
I stared. I couldn’t believe he’d just said that about his mother. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
Pieces clicked into place for me. “That’s why you got so upset about Jesse, isn’t it? He was another royal, trying to take advantage of a dhampir girl.”
Dimitri averted his eyes. “I got upset over that for a lot of reasons. After all, you were breaking the rules, and . . .”
He didn’t finish, but he looked back into my eyes in a way that made warmth build between us.
Thinking about Jesse soon darkened my mood, unfortunately. I looked down. “I know you heard what people are saying, that I—”
“I know it’s not true,” he interrupted.
His immediate, certain answer surprised me, and I stupidly found myself questioning it. “Yeah, but how do you—”
“Because I know you,” he replied firmly. “I know your character. I know you’re going to be a great guardian.”
His confidence made that warm feeling return. “I’m glad someone does. Everyone else thinks I’m totally irresponsible.”
“With the way you worry more about Lissa than yourself . . .” He shook his head. “No. You understand your responsibilities better than guardians twice your age. You’ll do what you have to do to succeed.”
I thought about that. “I don’t know if I can do everything I have to do.”
He did that cool one-eyebrow thing.
“I don’t want to cut my hair,” I explained.
He looked puzzled. “You don’t have to cut your hair. It’s not required.”
“All the other guardian women do. They show off their tattoos.”
Unexpectedly, he released my hands and leaned forward. Slowly, he reached out and held a lock of my hair, twisting it around one finger thoughtfully. I froze, and for a moment, there was nothing going on in the world except him touching my hair. He let my hair go, looking a little surprised—and embarrassed—at what he’d done.
“Don’t cut it,” he said gruffly.
Somehow, I remembered how to talk again. “But no one’ll see my tattoos if I don’t.”
He moved toward the doorway, a small smile playing over his lips. “Wear it up.”
FOURTEEN
I
CONTINUED SPYING ON LISSA over the next couple of days, feeling mildly guilty each time. She’d always hated it when I did by accident, and now I did it on purpose.
Steadily, I watched as she reintegrated herself into the royal power players one by one. She couldn’t do group compulsion, but catching one person alone was just as effective, if slower. And really, a lot didn’t need to be compelled to start hanging out with her again. Many weren’t as shallow as they seemed; they remembered Lissa and liked her for who she was. They flocked to her, and now, a month and a half after our return to the Academy, it was like she’d never left at all. And during this rise to fame, she advocated for me and rallied against Mia and Jesse.
One morning, I tuned into her while she was getting ready for breakfast. She’d spent the last twenty minutes blow-drying and straightening her hair, something she hadn’t done in a while. Natalie, sitting on the bed in their room, watched the process with curiosity. When Lissa moved on to makeup, Natalie finally spoke.
“Hey, we’re going to watch a movie in Erin’s room after school. You going to come?” I’d always made jokes about Natalie being boring, but her friend Erin had the personality of dry wall.
“Can’t. I’m going to help Camille bleach Carly’s hair.”
“You sure spend a lot of time with them now.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Lissa dabbed mascara across her lashes, instantly making her eyes look bigger.
“I thought you didn’t like them anymore.”
“I changed my mind.”
“They sure seem to like you a lot now. I mean, not that anyone wouldn’t like you, but once you came back and didn’t talk to them, they seemed okay ignoring you too. I heard them talking about you a lot. I guess that’s not surprising, because they’re Mia’s friends too, but isn’t it weird how much they like you now? Like, I hear them always waiting to see what you want to do before they make plans and stuff. And a bunch of them are defending Rose now, which is
really
crazy. Not that I believe any of that stuff about her, but I never would have thought it was possible—”
Underneath Natalie’s rambling was the seed of suspicion, and Lissa picked up on it. Natalie probably never would have dreamed of compulsion, but Lissa couldn’t risk innocent questions turning into something more. “You know what?” she interrupted. “Maybe I will swing by Erin’s after all. I bet Carly’s hair won’t take that long.”
The offer derailed Natalie’s train of thought. “Really? Oh wow, that would be great. She was telling me how sad she was that you’re not around as much anymore, and I told her . . .”
On it went. Lissa continued her compulsion and return to popularity. I watched it all quietly, always worrying, even though her efforts were starting to reduce the stares and gossip about me.
“This is going to backfire,” I whispered to her in church one day. “Someone’s going to start wondering and asking questions.”
“Stop being so melodramatic. Power shifts all the time around here.”
“Not like this.”
“You don’t think my winning personality could do this on its own?”
“Of course I do, but if Christian spotted
it
right away, then someone else will—”
My words were interrupted when two guys farther down the pew suddenly exploded into snickers. Glancing up, I saw them looking right at me, not even bothering to hide their smirks.
Looking away, I tried to ignore them, suddenly hoping the priest would start up soon. But Lissa returned their looks, and a sudden fierceness flashed across her face. She didn’t say a word, but their smiles grew smaller under her heavy gaze.
“Tell her you’re sorry,” she told them. “And make sure she believes it.”
A moment later, they practically fell all over themselves apologizing to me and begging for forgiveness. I couldn’t believe it. She’d used compulsion in public—in church, of all places.
And
on two people at the same time.
They finally exhausted their supply of apologies, but Lissa wasn’t finished.
“That’s the
best
you can do?” she snapped.
Their eyes widened in alarm, both terrified that they’d angered her.
“Liss,” I said quickly, touching her arm. “It’s okay. I, uh, accept their apologies.”
Her face still radiated disapproval, but she finally nodded. The guys slumped in relief.
Yikes. I’d never felt so relieved to have a service start. Through the bond, I felt a sort of dark satisfaction coming from Lissa. It was uncharacteristic for her, and I didn’t like it.
Needing to distract myself from her troubling behavior, I studied other people as I so often did. Nearby, Christian openly watched Lissa, a troubled look on his face. When he saw me, he scowled and turned away.
Dimitri sat in the back as usual, for once not scanning every corner for danger. His attention was turned inward, his expression almost pained. I still didn’t know why he came to church. He always seemed to be wrestling with something.
In the front, the priest was talking about St. Vladimir again.