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And yet, some primal instinct in the back of my mind warned me to be very, very careful. I held still, expectantly, and I watched.
The chatter exploded again, but this time a broad laugh pealed above the din. I stood on my tiptoes to see. It was Mimi.
Headmaster Fournier grew still as stone and just as cold. His eyes swept the crowd—dancing over me for one chilling moment—and then rested on Mimi. “Do I amuse you?”
“Yeah,” she said in that tone of bored outrage that bad girls have perfected through the ages.
“Then please”—he stretched his hand out, beckoning—“come join me. . . . ” He raised his eyebrows, waiting for her name.
“Mimi. ” She’d thrust her jaw out, holding her mouth open on the word as though too annoyed even to shut it.
“Girls, make way for your fellow student. ” He spoke in an indulgent tone of voice that scared me more than the word vampire had. It was the sound of an adult ready to give someone a good lesson.
Everyone had enough sense to clear a path for her, and almost comically fast. Mimi, though, wasn’t so bright. Her hackles were up like a pit bull on the offensive, looking ready to tell this guy a thing or two. Sneering, she strode to the platform. It was smooth and level, like a gigantic granite tabletop.
Distantly, I wondered if Mimi wasn’t justified in her reaction. Maybe I should be doing something other than just standing there. I mean, the guy just told us they were vampires.
The in-flight refreshment. I frowned, remembering the buzz it’d made me feel. Mimi had thrown it all up, but had the rest of us been drugged into obedience? Was I still drugged now? Should I be outraged, too?
I thought of Ronan. Did this mean he thought he was a vampire? I recalled his features. He hadn’t seemed particularly pale, and I definitely would’ve noticed fangs.
If I could’ve smirked without attracting attention, I would have. What sort of Goth freak world had I landed in? I peered at Fournier, trying to sneak a peek at his teeth, wondering if these guys actually went so far as to file them into points.
But then a dreadful sort of uncertainty niggled at the back of my mind as I remembered the very real feeling I got when Ronan looked at me, when he touched me. It was like he’d hypnotized me, and though I didn’t believe in magic, he sure did seem to have some sort of crazy hypno-hoodoo up his sleeves.
Mimi reached the stone, and Fournier took her hand, guiding her up the last steps and onto the stage. When he spoke again, it was gently and only to her. It felt like we were spying on an intimate moment. “As I was saying, we are Vampire. ”
She pulled her hand from his and scanned the crowd, shaking her head in disgust. “I seen some effed-up shit in Miami, pero esta casa de putas? Count me out, man. ”
The next part happened so fast, at first my brain didn’t register what my eyes were seeing. And even when I got what I saw, it took me a few heartbeats to get it get it. I stared, frozen from the inside out.
Mimi hung limply in the headmaster’s arms. Because he’d just shredded her belly up the middle.
He grinned at us with bloody lips, and I spotted one inhumanly long, razor-sharp tooth as it caught on the corner of his mouth.
A few heartbeats of silence, and then the girls began to scream.
Not me, though. I’d weathered casual cruelty before. It was random and merciless, and I knew not to court it. I forced my breath to draw in, then out. I imagined myself being as inconspicuous as possible.
Eyja nœturinnar. It was an island of darkness. And Ronan was right. I would fit in here.
Because if I didn’t, I’d die.
CHAPTER EIGHT
So, okayyy. Vampires.
I stomped my boots, urging the blood to flow in my feet. The temperature had continued to drop, and just standing there outside wasn’t helping matters.
Were there other vampires hiding in the crowd? I looked around, feeling in equal parts the absurdity and the horror. Never would I ever have thought I’d be considering their existence. I mean, really—vampires?
But if the scene with Mimi had been any indication, it seemed there was a good chance that exist they d
id. I supposed in a universe that fostered everything from black holes to hostile, mutating bacteria, vampires actually seemed like a pretty pedestrian phenomenon.
I wondered how many of the myths were true. Could vampires be killed? Were they undead? Could something really live forever?
I remembered the strain of 250-million-year-old bacteria that was found in a cavern in New Mexico. And then I thought of the extinct things—the dead things—that have simply been coaxed back to life, thanks to DNA technology.
