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“We should have guns.” That was Balthazar. “To deal with situations like this.”
“We have only been forced to confront ‘situations like this’ twice in more than two hundred years.” Mrs. Bethany, icier than ever. “Our abilities are usually more than sufficient to deal with humans. Or do you not feel up to the task, Mr. More?”
Lucas is a vampire hunter. Lucas came here to kill people like my parents. He told me to distrust them; he probably thought they stole me as a baby. He tried to drive a wedge between us. I thought he was just being rude, but maybe he was really going to kill them after all.
“I can handle myself,” Balthazar said. “But it’s possible that Lucas has armed himself as well. He’s Black Cross. There’s no way he came here unprepared. Somewhere on campus, he’s got a stash of supplies. You can bet that includes weapons.”
We went up the stairs of the north tower together, and he protested the entire way. I thought it was because Lucas was scared of me, scared of vampires, but that wasn’t it at all. Even when we were making out on the floor, he asked for us to be together again somewhere else.
“The room at the top of the north tower.” My voice sounded so strange, hardly like mine at all. “That’s where it is.”
Mrs. Bethany drew herself up. “You knew about this?”
“No. It’s just a hunch.”
“Let’s check it out.” Balthazar held out his hand to help me up. “Come on.”
The room didn’t look any different to me than it had when Lucas and I were up there together. Mrs. Bethany closed her eyes for a moment in dismay. “The records room. If he’s been up here, he’s read almost all of our history. The hiding places of so many of us—now, Black Cross knows.”
“A lot of these records are decades out of date,” Dad reasoned. “The more recent years are in the computer.”
“He broke into that, too, I think,” I said, remembering the day I’d found Lucas sneaking out of Mrs. Bethany’s carriage house office.
Mrs. Bethany whirled on me, her temper clearly at the breaking point. “You saw that Lucas Ross was breaking rules, yet you never warned anyone in authority. You let a member of Black Cross run rampant at Evernight for months on end, Miss Olivier. Don’t think I’ll forget this.”
Whenever she spoke to me like that, I usually cringed. This time, I shot back, “You’re the one who admitted him in the first place!”
After that, nobody said anything for a second. I’d spoken only to defend myself, but I realized that Mrs. Bethany had screwed up—really, seriously screwed up—and her attempt to pin the blame on me had just failed.
Instead of strangling me, Mrs. Bethany stiffly turned back to searching the room. “Open every box. Look in every closet and in the rafters. I want to know everything Mr. Ross kept up here.”
Memories of Lucas and I together nearly overwhelmed me, but I concentrated on one moment in particular. When we’d first come into this room, Lucas had immediately taken a seat atop the long trunk against the nearby wall. I’d thought he just wanted to sit down, but maybe he’d done that for a different reason: to keep me from opening it.
Balthazar followed my eyes. He didn’t say anything out loud, but he raised one eyebrow, questioning. I nodded, and he went to the trunk and opened its lid. I couldn’t see what was inside, but my mother gasped and Professor Iwerebon swore beneath his breath. “What is it?” I asked.
Mrs. Bethany stepped closer and peered down into the trunk. Her face remained imperiously cool as she bent her knees and picked up a skull.
I screamed, then immediately felt stupid for doing so. “That’s got to be really old. I mean, look at it.”
“When we die, our bodies decompose rather rapidly, Miss Olivier.” Mrs. Bethany kept turning the skull that way and this. “To be precise, they decompose to the stage they should have reached since the time of human death. Though the flesh is gone, a few scraps of skin remain—which suggests this skull belonged to a vampire who died decades ago, perhaps even a century.”
“Erich,” Balthazar said suddenly. “He said once that he died in World War I. Lucas and Erich always had it in for each other. If Lucas lured him up here, and Erich had no idea that he was dealing with a Black Cross hunter, then it would’ve been no contest.”
“Not if Lucas had one of these.” My father had opened another box nearby, from which he lifted a huge knife—no, a machete. “This thing could make quick work of any of us.”
Balthazar gave a low whistle as he looked at the blade. “Those two used to fight, but Erich always got the better of Lucas. Either Lucas threw the fights on purpose, or he knew if he showed what he could really do, we might have caught on.”
I protested, “I thought Erich ran away.” Surely that had to be the truth. Lucas and Erich had fought, but Lucas couldn’t have killed him.
“We all thought that, but we were all wrong.” Mrs. Bethany let Erich’s skull drop unceremoniously back into the trunk. “Keep searching.”
The others did as she said. Trembling, I stepped closer to the trunk to look inside. There lay a jumble of bones, a dusty Evernight uniform, and, in the corner, a tan hoop. With a jolt I realized it was Raquel’s leather bracelet, the one that had been missing. Lucas wouldn’t have stolen it. No, Erich had taken it, and he’d had it on him when he died.
When Lucas killed him.
“Bianca? Honey?” My mother came to my side. She wore jeans and boots; normally she refused to dress in what she still thought of as men’s clothes, but to catch Lucas, she’d made an exception. “You should go to our apartment. You don’t need to see any more of this.”
“Go to the apartment and do what? Read a nice book? Listen to records? I don’t think so.”
