And now she was missing god only knew how much of her blood.
She even wondered if she was still losing it. She put her hand to her throat gingerly, expecting something horrible. A gory mess, blood fountaining over fingers like it had over his lips. Then jerked her hand away when she encountered nothing of the sort. The skin there felt slightly uneven, true. It felt sore.
But it was dry and smooth.
Which was good, in one way. It meant she wasn’t going to drop dead, or need a visit to the infirmary that she wouldn’t be able to fully explain. However, in another, it seemed bad. It suggested things she very much did not like. She stood on legs that didn’t want to hold her up and staggered to the table she had used the night before. Flicked frantically through pages until she found chapters on vampires.
The one that said how they were made.
A person, even one imbued with magic and with a strong connection to the Underneath, cannot be infected by a vampiric bite; a vampire can only be born to the Underneath or made by their magics,she read and sagged against the bookcase after she had. She breathed freely for the first time in what felt like an age. She wasn’t going to become a bloodsucking creature of the night.
She was safe.
Or at least as safe as anyone could be when their mortal enemy was a vampire.Once he’s licked his many wounds, he’s going to be coming for you even harder, she thought, as she let herself sink into one of the chairs around the table.
And that only meant one thing:
She had to come for him before he could.
She didn’t know where or how he would make his move. And when she first saw him again across the quad, laughing with friends as if he was just the same as them—a glowing golden boy, fat with family money and as smug as you like—it honestly seemed like no move was even being planned. He seemed oblivious to her. Like he was just going to bluster through the whole business.
It never happened, his boisterous laugh seemed to say.
And then his friends turned to watch two people firing warning shots at each other from their wands, and Harker St. James did not turn with them at all. He saw them looking at something other than him, and he seized the opportunity. He let his gaze slide to the left, to where she sat, on the bench beneath the willow tree.
As if he didn’t even need to search for her.
He simply knew exactly where she was, at all times.
Once they have a taste for certain blood, it will call out to them, she had read in one of the books she had checked out. But what it hadn’t said was exactly how that would feel. What it would be like to experience someone’s eyes always on you, drawn to you, to sense their presence like a second shadow, so close to smothering you at all times...
She had thought she was prepared after a few days of research and gathering supplies and making plans. But even so, bearing it proved difficult. She had to walk to class perfectly calmly, like she wasn’t constantly aware of the predicament she was in. Like there was no predicament at all.
Even when she could have sworn she felt his hand reaching for her. Sometimes the air would stir behind her, and her hair would seem to lift in a way that couldn’t quite be explained by a breeze or by the rush of the crowd in the foyer, and then there would be a kind of coolness on the nape of her neck.
Almost a caress but not quite, not quite.
It chilled her more than any truly tender touch would have done. Sometimes she almost froze to feel it. Others, she felt like she needed to frantically bat it away. And the more times it happened, the worse it got. On the sixth day of him not making his move, that cold touch almost made her scream, as she walked into the lecture on the Underneath that Professor Hargreaves was giving.
But she bit it back.
She kept walking, eyes forward. She had to, for a number of very good reasons: like the fact that Anaya was already obviously and frighteningly suspicious. And the there was how important it seemed to appear helpless and oblivious, if she truly wanted to get the better of Harker. And finally, and most simply—it was just the most normal feeling tack to take. It meant she got to bean ordinary student, learning things she desperately wanted to know, instead of someone who’d been elbow deep in someone’s guts, and gotten bitten, and was now being hunted by a psychotic vampire.
This way, she figured, she could hear what Hargreaves was going to say.
And god, she really wanted that. The woman was fierce about the rules and realities of that shadowy place and how they impacted the world above.We cannot afford to play fast and loose with the divide between the two, she had written, in a paper Mina had found in one of her full-daylight but still frantic forays back to the library. And now she had questions.
So she took her seat in the lecture hall with her back to the wall, and waited for the Professor to arrive.
Though god, it seemed like an age until she did, with Harker sitting three seats in front of her.
By the time the woman swept in, Mina felt as if she was on the verge of bursting. Like before, when she’d sat next to Harker—but worse, so much worse. Now it wasn’t just mutual loathing or some beef he had with people who didn’t fit in. It was blood and secrets and shadowy things.
She had to dig her fingernails into her palms just to stay in her seat.
The pain was excruciating by the time the professor started her lecture.
But it felt worth it.The history, purpose, and characteristics of the Underneath, she had put on the chalkboard. Only she hadn’t written the wordUnderneath. She’d called it by the name the beings that lived there did. The one Mina had seen herself in the books she’d taken from the library.
