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“Lucas is not a part of my life.” The words sounded so final. “Balthazar’s been really good to me.”
“How little you appreciate what you have.” Mrs. Bethany walked away from me, her heels clicking on the floor. “You may leave.”
“Balthazar and I—we can still go this weekend, right?” Her gaze raked sharply over me. “I see no reason to change my earlier decision,” she said. “For now.”
From this moment on, I realized, any trip I took away from the Evernight campus might be my last.
Amherst seemed unnaturally quiet. Midterms, I guessed, or just a chill keeping the college students in their dorms.
The first time I had come to the town square, the streets had been filled with celebrating kids, the music and lights an echo of the jubilation I’d felt knowing that Lucas was near. Now the streets were still and dark, and uncertainty shadowed my mood.
“Charity just—came up to you here?” Balthazar walked by my side, his long coat billowing slightly in the wind. “Picked you out of a huge crowd?”
“She knew I was a vampire, of course.”
“With you it’s not that easy to tell, not yet.” I glanced at him. Silhouetted as he was by the streetlights, Balthazar’s expression was difficult to read. “Does that mean I’m becoming, well, more vampire?”
“It might mean that Charity is becoming more perceptive. That her senses are sharper.” After a pause, he continued, “That happens sometimes, when we consume more human blood.”
“You think she might have—that she’s—”
“It’s possible to drink without killing. You know that as well as anyone.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes. Then Balthazar stopped walking and turned around. When I did the same, I realized that we’d been followed.
“Lucas?” I took a couple of steps toward him. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, wearing an old canvas coat too thin for the weather. His eyes looked both distant and sort of sad—the way he used to look at me at Evernight in the early days before he was willing to risk our being together. I’d forgotten that he had fought our attraction in the beginning. “How long have you been following us?”
“Just long enough to remind Balthazar here what I can do.” Lucas smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
Balthazar didn’t smile at all. “We should split up for this. If Charity sees us together again, I’ll never get another chance to talk to her.”
Lucas would’ve liked to protest, I could tell. Quickly I said, “We’ll split up. Balthazar can head toward the neighborhoods you’ve seen her in, I’ll stick to the square, and you can keep checking the main roads out of town.”
“I’m on my own tonight, huh?” Lucas shrugged. “Sure. Why not?
Sounds like a plan.”
He walked away from us without another word. We hadn’t even touched.
“He’s upset,” Balthazar said quietly. “Maybe you should go after him.”
I wanted to. Something inside me pulled toward Lucas, but I resisted.
“We have a plan. We’ll stick to it. If we don’t find some sign of her tribe in a couple of hours, maybe we can drive to one of the other nearby towns.”
Balthazar turned up the collar of his coat. “Thanks. I appreciate it.” Within a few seconds, he, too, was gone.
That left me alone. I didn’t really expect Charity to seek me out again, not when both her brother and her enemy were available. So while I walked up and down the street, shivering from the cold and casting the occasional wistful glance at a nearby coffeehouse, I had time to evaluate what was going on.
Lucas was angry with me. It couldn’t be about Balthazar—could it?
There wasn’t any reason for him to be jealous. Even as I thought that, I remembered how close together we’d been walking when Lucas called out to us. My cheeks flushed, and I pushed the memory away. No, it couldn’t be that, I decided. Lucas had been even more hot-tempered than usual lately. So who knew why he might decide to get upset? It could be anything. And maybe I was tired of him taking out his moods on me.
Just as I was working myself into a real rage, a flash of gold down the street caught my attention. Long, dark blond hair—something familiar in her walk—
Charity?
But it wasn’t. It was Courtney.
Courtney was walking along the sidewalk at the far end of the square, headed toward the cozy residential neighborhood I’d seen on my last time here. The clothes she wore seemed very odd, for her: old jeans, a baggy black sweater, and a gray trench coat. I was reminded of the silly way I’d dressed for my own amateurish attempts at burglary just before school started.
