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Despite our efforts to keep Raquel busy, she remained haunted. Whatever fears she’d always carried within her had been magnified by Erich’s harassment. I knew that she wasn’t sleeping at night because of the dark circles under her eyes, and one day she came to the library with her hair freshly hacked off—obviously something she’d done herself, and not very carefully either.
In an attempt to be tactful, I shifted my books to one side so she could sit next to me at the table and began, “You know, I used to cut hair for my friends in my hometown—”
“I know my hair looks crappy.” Raquel didn’t even look at me as her backpack thudded onto the floor. “And, no, I don’t want you or anybody to fix it for me. I hope it looks crappy. Then maybe he won’t keep looking at me.”
“Who? Erich?” Lucas said, immediately tense.
Raquel sank into her seat. “Who do you think? Yeah, Erich.”
Until then, I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t the only one Erich was staring at. I’d interrupted Erich in the middle of a hunt; he’d made up his mind to drink Raquel’s blood, maybe—maybe even to hurt her. Most vampires never killed, Mom and Dad said. Was Erich the exception to that rule?
Surely not, I thought. Mrs. Bethany wouldn’t let anybody like that in Evernight.
As Lucas quickly changed the subject, asking Raquel for a copy of the study sheets for my dad’s biology class, I looked at him and felt, once again, the surge of longing—of possessiveness—that I always knew in his presence. Mine, I thought. I always want you to be mine.
I’d always thought that was emotion talking, but maybe it was something else. Maybe that need to claim someone else was part of being a vampire and therefore more powerful than any human longing.
Erich certainly didn’t care about Raquel the way I did for Lucas, but if he felt one-tenth as much possessiveness toward her as I did toward Lucas—
—then there was no way Erich was done with Raquel yet.
That night, in the bathroom, I ran into Raquel again. She was shaking the sleeping pills I’d recommended into her palm—four or five of them. “Watch it,” I said. “You don’t want to take too many.”
Raquel’s face was bleak. “And never wake up again? Doesn’t sound that awful to me.” She sighed. “Trust me, Bianca, this isn’t nearly enough to kill anybody.”
“It’s more than you need to sleep.”
“Not with the sounds on the roof.” She popped the pills into her mouth, then bent over to gulp a couple of swallows of water directly from the cold tap of the sink. After wiping her face with the back of her hand, Raquel continued, “They’re still there. Louder now, I think. All the time. And I’m not imagining them.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “I believe you.”
It was just something to say, but Raquel’s eyes got wide. “You do?” Her voice was no more than a whisper. “Really? You’re not just saying it?”
“Really, I believe you.”
To my shock, Raquel’s eyes teared up. She quickly blinked them away, but I knew what I’d seen. “Nobody ever believed me, before.”
I stepped a little closer. “Believed you about what?”
She shook her head, refusing to answer. But as she walked past me to go to her own room, she touched my arm—just for a moment. From Raquel, that was almost like a bear hug. I had no idea what troubled her in her past, but I knew that Erich had her spooked. Probably he had no intention of actually hurting her, but he seemed like the kind of guy who would enjoy making her afraid.
night, after Raquel went to bed, I went to see Mrs. Bethany in her carriage house office. Given her disdainful attitude toward me, I’d assumed she would doubt my word, but she didn’t. “We’ll see to this,” she said. “You are dismissed.”
I hesitated. “That’s it?”
“Do you think you should be allowed to discuss his punishment? To mete it out, perhaps?” She arched one eyebrow. “I know how to keep discipline at my own school, Miss Olivier. Or would you like to write another essay as a reminder?”
“I just meant, what are we going to tell everybody? They’ll want to know what happened to Raquel.” Already I could envision Lucas’s handsome face, maybe questioning again if something strange was at work within Evernight. “She’ll tell people it was Erich. We’ll just have to say he was playing a practical joke or something, right?”
“That sounds reasonable.” Why did she look so amused? I realized the reason when Mrs. Bethany added, “You’re becoming quite adept in deception, Miss Olivier. Progress at last.”
I was afraid she might be right.
Chapter Ten
THE FIRST SNOWFALL OF WINTER DISAPPOINTED us all—only an inch and a half, just enough to melt into ice and slick the sidewalks. The countryside appeared patchy and dull, yellow-brown hills spotted with watery clumps of snow. Outside the bedroom window of my turret room, the gargoyle wore beads of frozen water over his scales and wings. It wasn’t enough snow to play in or even to enjoy looking at.
“Suits me,” Patrice said, artfully draping an acid-green muffler around her neck just so. “I’m glad we’re getting more sunshine.”
