“I wondered where you were,” said Lissa.
Natalie looked back and forth between us, suddenly seeming a little embarrassed to be right between the best-friends dream team. She shifted uncomfortably and tucked some messy hair behind her ear. “Well . . . I should go find Daddy. I’ll see you back in the room.”
“See you,” said Lissa. “And thanks.”
Natalie hurried off.
“Does she really call him ‘
Daddy
’?”
Lissa cut me a look. “Leave her alone. She’s nice.”
“She is, actually. I heard what she said, and as much as I hate to admit it, there was nothing there I could really make fun of. It was all true.” I paused. “I’ll kill her, you know. The queen, not Natalie. Screw the guardians. I’ll do it. She can’t get away with that.”
“God, Rose! Don’t say that. They’ll arrest you for treason. Just let it go.”
“Let it go? After what she said to you? In front of everyone?”
She didn’t answer or even look at me. Instead, she toyed absentmindedly with the branches of a scraggly bush that had gone dormant for the winter. There was a vulnerable look about her that I recognized—and feared.
“Hey.” I lowered my voice. “Don’t look like that. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, okay? Don’t let this get you down. Don’t do anything you shouldn’t.”
She glanced back up at me. “It’s going to happen again, isn’t it?” she whispered. Her hand, still clutching the tree, began to tremble.
“Not if you don’t let it.” I tried to look at her wrists without being too obvious. “You haven’t? . . .”
“No.” She shook her head and blinked back tears. “I haven’t wanted to. I was upset after the fox, but it’s been okay. I like the coasting thing. I miss seeing you, but everything’s been all right. I like . . .” She paused.
I could hear the word forming in her mind.
“Christian.”
“I wish you couldn’t do that. Or wouldn’t.”
“Sorry. Do I need to give you the Christian’s-a-psychopathic-loser talk again?”
“I think I’ve got it memorized after the last ten times,” she muttered.
I started to launch into number eleven when I heard the sound of laughter and the clatter of high heels on stone. Mia walked toward us with a few friends in tow but no Aaron. Immediately, my defenses snapped on.
Internally, Lissa was still shaken over the queen’s comments. Sorrow and humiliation were swirling inside of her. She felt embarrassed over what others must think of her now and kept thinking about how her family would have hated her for running away. I didn’t believe that, but it felt real to her, and her dark emotions churned and churned. She was
not
okay, no matter how casual she’d just tried to act, and I was worried she might do something reckless. Mia was the last person she needed to see right now.
“What do you want?” I demanded.
Mia smiled haughtily at Lissa and ignored me, taking a few steps forward. “Just wanted to know what it’s like to be
so
important and
so
royal. You must be so excited that the queen talked to you.” Giggles surfaced from the gathering group.
“You’re standing too close.” I stepped between them, and Mia flinched a little, possibly still worried I might break her arm. “And hey, at least the queen knew her name, which is more than I can say for you and your wannabe-royal act.
Or
your parents.”
I could see the pain that caused her. Man, she wanted to be royal so badly. “At least I
see
my parents,” she retorted. “At least I know who they both are. God only knows who your father is. And your mom’s one of the most famous guardians around, but she couldn’t care less about you either. Everyone knows she never visits. Probably was glad when you were gone. If she even
noticed
.”
That hurt. I clenched my teeth. “Yeah, well, at least she’s famous. She really does advise royals and nobles. She doesn’t clean up after them.”
I heard one of her friends snicker behind her. Mia opened her mouth, no doubt to unleash one of the many retorts she’d had to accumulate since the story started going around, when the lightbulb suddenly went off in her head.
“It was
you
,” she said, eyes wide. “Someone told me Jesse’d started it, but he couldn’t have known anything about me. He got it from you. When you
slept
with him.”
Now she was really starting to piss me off. “I didn’t sleep with him.”
Mia pointed at Lissa and glared back at me. “So that’s it, huh? You do her dirty work because she’s too pathetic to do it herself. You aren’t always going to be able to protect her,” she warned. “
You
aren’t safe either.”
Empty threats. I leaned forward, making my voice as menacing as possible. In my current mood, it wasn’t difficult. “Yeah? Try and touch me now and find out.”
I hoped she would. I wanted her to. We didn’t need her messed-up vendetta in our lives just now. She was a distraction—one I very much wanted to punch right now.
Looking past her, I saw Dimitri move out into the garden, eyes searching for something—or someone. I had a pretty good idea who it was. When he saw me, he strode forward, shifting his attention when he noticed the crowd gathered around us. Guardians can smell a fight a mile away. Of course, a six-year-old could have smelled this fight.
Dimitri stood beside me and crossed his arms. “Everything all right?”
“Sure thing, Guardian Belikov.” I smiled as I said it, but I was furious. Raging, even. This whole Mia confrontation had only made Lissa feel worse. “We were just swapping family stories. Ever heard Mia’s? It’s
fascinating
.”
“Come on,” said Mia to her followers. She led them off, but not before she’d given me one last, chilling look. I didn’t need to read her mind to know what it said. This wasn’t over. She was going to try to get one or both of us back. Fine. Bring it on, Mia.
“I’m supposed to take you back to your dorm,” Dimitri told me drily. “You weren’t about to just start a fight, were you?”
“Of course not,” I said, my eyes still staring at the empty doorway Mia had disappeared through. “I don’t start fights where people can see them.”
“Rose,” groaned Lissa.
“Let’s go. Good night, Princess.”
He turned, but I didn’t move. “You going to be okay, Liss?”
She nodded. “I’m fine.”
It was such a lie, I couldn’t believe she had the nerve to try to put it past me. I didn’t need the bond to see tears shining in her eyes. We should never have come back to this place, I realized bleakly.
“Liss ...”
She gave me a small, sad smile and nodded in Dimitri’s direction. “I told you, I’m fine. You’ve got to go.”
Reluctantly, I followed him. He led me out toward the other side of the garden. “We may need to add an extra training on self-control,” he noted.
“I have plenty of self contr—hey!”
I stopped talking as I saw Christian slip past us, moving down the path we’d just come from. I hadn’t seen him at the reception, but if Kirova had released me to come tonight, I suppose she would have done the same for him.
“You going to see Lissa?” I demanded, shifting my Mia rage to him.
He stuffed his hands into his pockets and gave me that look of bad-boy indifference. “What if I am?”
“Rose, this isn’t the time,” said Dimitri.
But it was
so
the time. Lissa had ignored my warnings about Christian for weeks. It was time to go to the source and stop their ridiculous flirtation once and for all.
“Why don’t you just leave her alone? Are you so messed up and desperate for attention that you can’t tell when someone doesn’t like you?” He scowled. “You’re some crazy stalker, and she knows it. She’s told me all about your weird obsession—how you’re always hanging out in the attic together, how you set Ralf on fire to impress her. She thinks you’re a freak, but she’s too nice to say anything.”
His face had paled, and something dark churned in his eyes. “But
you
aren’t too nice?”
“No. Not when I feel sorry for someone.”
“Enough,” said Dimitri, steering me away.
“Thanks for ‘helping,’ then,” snapped Christian, his voice dripping with animosity.
“No problem,” I called back over my shoulder.
When we’d gone a little ways, I stole a glance behind me and saw Christian standing just outside the garden. He’d stopped walking and now stood staring down the path that led to Lissa in the courtyard. Shadows covered his face as he thought, and then, after a few moments, he turned around and headed back toward the Moroi dorms.
TWELVE
S
LEEP CAME RELUCTANTLY THAT NIGHT, and I tossed and turned for a long time before finally going under.
An hour or so later, I sat up in bed, trying to relax and sort out the emotions coming to me. Lissa. Scared and upset. Unstable. The night’s events suddenly came rushing back to me as I went through what could be bothering her. The queen humiliating her. Mia. Maybe even Christian—he could have found her for all I knew.
Yet . . . none of those was the problem right now. Buried within her, there was something else. Something terribly wrong.
I climbed out of bed, dressed hastily, and considered my options. I had a third-floor room now—way too high to climb down from, particularly since I had no Ms. Karp to patch me up this time. I would never be able to sneak out of the main hall. That only left going through the “appropriate” channels.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
One of the matrons who supervised my hall looked up from her chair. She sat stationed at the end of the hall, near the stairs going down. During the day, that stairwell had loose supervision. At night, we might as well have been in jail.
I crossed my arms. “I need to see Dim—Guardian Belikov.”
“It’s late.”
“It’s an emergency.”
She looked me up and down. “You seem okay to me.”
“You’re going to be in so much trouble tomorrow when everyone finds out you stopped me from reporting what I know.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s private guardian stuff.”
I gave her as hard a stare as I could manage. It must have worked, because she finally stood up and pulled out a cell phone. She called someone—Dimitri, I hoped—but murmured too low for me to hear. We waited several minutes, and then the door leading to the stairs opened. Dimitri appeared, fully dressed and alert, though I felt pretty sure we’d pulled him out of bed.
He took one look at me. “Lissa.”
I nodded.
Without another word, he turned around and started back down the stairs. I followed. We walked across the quad in silence, toward the imposing Moroi dorm. It was “night” for the vampires, which meant it was daytime for the rest of the world. Mid-afternoon sun shone with a cold, golden light on us. The human genes in me welcomed it and always sort of regretted how Moroi light sensitivity forced us to live in darkness most of the time.
Lissa’s hall matron gaped when we appeared, but Dimitri was too intimidating to oppose. “She’s in the bathroom,” I told them. When the matron started to follow me inside, I wouldn’t let her. “She’s too upset. Let me talk to her alone first.”
Dimitri considered. “Yes. Give them a minute.”
I pushed the door open.
“Liss?”
A soft sound, like a sob, came from within. I walked down five stalls and found the only one closed. I knocked softly.
“Let me in,” I said, hoping I sounded calm and strong.
I heard a sniffle, and a few moments later, the door unlatched. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. Lissa stood before me . . .
... covered in blood.
Horrified, I squelched a scream and almost called for help. Looking more closely, I saw that a lot of the blood wasn’t actually coming from her. It was smeared on her, like it had been on her hands and she’d rubbed her face. She sank to the floor, and I followed, kneeling before her.
“Are you okay?” I whispered. “What happened?”
She only shook her head, but I saw her face crumple as more tears spilled from her eyes. I took her hands.
“Come on. Let’s get you cleaned—”
I stopped. She
was
bleeding after all. Perfect lines crossed her wrists, not near any crucial veins, but enough to leave wet, red tracks across her skin. She hadn’t hit her veins when she did this; death hadn’t been her goal. She met my eyes.
“I’m sorry. . . . I didn’t mean . . . Please don’t let them know . . .” she sobbed. “When I saw
it
, I freaked out.” She nodded toward her wrists. “This just happened before I could stop. I was upset. . . .”
“It’s okay,” I said automatically, wondering what “it” was. “Come on.”
I heard a knock on the door. “Rose?”
“Just a sec,” I called back.
I took her to the sink and rinsed the blood off her wrists. Grabbing the first-aid kit, I hastily put some Band-Aids on the cuts. The bleeding had already slowed.
“We’re coming in,” the matron called.
I jerked off my hoodie sweatshirt and quickly handed it to Lissa. She had just pulled it on when Dimitri and the matron entered. He raced to our sides in an instant, and I realized that in hiding Lissa’s wrists, I’d forgotten the blood on her face.
“It’s not mine,” she said quickly, seeing his expression. “It . . . it’s the rabbit. . . .”
Dimitri assessed her, and I hoped he wouldn’t look at her wrists. When he seemed satisfied she had no gaping wounds, he asked, “What rabbit?” I was wondering the same thing.
With shaking hands, she pointed at the trash can. “I cleaned it up. So Natalie wouldn’t see.”
Dimitri and I both walked over and peered into the can. I pulled myself away immediately, swallowing back my stomach’s need to throw up. I don’t know how Lissa knew it was a rabbit. All I could see was blood. Blood and blood-soaked paper towels. Globs of gore I couldn’t identify. The smell was horrible.