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“Tell me exactly what she looked like.”
“I just did!”
“Bianca.” His voice broke. “Please.”
I couldn’t ignore his desperation. Slowly I closed my eyes and tried to remember exactly what it had been like as I walked arm in arm with the vampire through the city square. I described her youthful heart-shaped face, her dark eyes, and the wheat color of her hair. Balthazar’s face didn’t change until I mentioned the port-wine mark on her throat. At that moment, his jaw dropped slightly, and he whispered, “She’s back.”
“Wait—you know her?”
He nodded, but slowly, and he could no longer meet my eyes. Balthazar looked so dazed and so miserable that my anger at him vanished instantly.
“Balthazar, who was that?”
“Charity.”
The name instantly conjured up the memory: last Christmas, Balthazar and I walking through the snow past holly bushes as he told me about the life he’d lost long ago. He had mentioned then the person that he missed the most.
“Charity. You mean—your sister?” I’d thought he was telling me his deepest secrets on that snowy walk, but he had been holding something back. He hadn’t hinted that his beloved sister had been turned into a vampire with him. “That was her?”
Balthazar didn’t answer me. I thought perhaps he couldn’t. As he started to walk away from me, with slow, stumbling steps, he roughly said, “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Okay. I promise.” Belatedly, I remembered that I had a secret, too. “You won’t tell either, will you?”
He didn’t say yes or no, but I knew he wouldn’t talk to anybody about what either of us had learned tonight. For a long time I watched him go, too numbed with astonishment and the sudden ebbing of fear to do anything else. Then I took a deep breath and ran back to school, trying to think of ways to describe to Raquel a meteor shower I hadn’t actually seen.
Raquel bought my story hook, line, and sinker. She didn’t even ask that many questions, which was a relief but, weirdly, a little disappointing. In fact, I was pretty sure I’d gotten away with it completely until Sunday night dinner with my parents, when Mom idly asked me where I’d been Saturday afternoon—they’d looked for me. I blurted out the first excuse I could think of, which was distantly related to the truth.
It turned out to be the worst excuse I could think of, because my parents loved it.
“Walking in the woods with Balthazar, hm?” Dad made a show of all his questions, which made Mom laugh. He laid on a bit of his long-faded English accent, Sherlock-Holmes style, for comic effect. “Now, what would a young lady be doing speaking to Balthazar More until all hours of the evening?”
“We were hardly out until all hours.” I spread butter on my roll, eagerly helping myself to the meal my parents had prepared. The blood was even more welcome than the food. I’d had to go without for half the weekend, so I drank glass after glass. “It’s personal, okay? Please don’t ask him about it or anything.”
“All right,” Mom said soothingly. “It’s just good to have you home.”
When I raised my head from my plate to look at Mom and Dad, they were both smiling at me so warmly—so gratefully—that it was all I could do not to hug them close and apologize for ever, ever lying to them. But I stayed where I was. The memory of Lucas was enough to convince me that some secrets were worth keeping.
Within a few weeks, I’d get to see Lucas again. I’d already worn all our old memories threadbare, imagining myself in them over and over again. Now I had new memories, kisses and laughter I could remember for the first time, and it was like falling in love all over again. During the next few days, I should’ve been on cloud nine.
But one question loomed overhead as dark and threatening as storm clouds—Would Balthazar tell? I knew he wanted to keep Charity a secret, but Mrs. Bethany would have known Charity back when she attended Evernight Academy. How secret could his sister be? Add how much Balthazar hated Lucas, and I wasn’t sure that our pact of secrecy would hold for very long.
I studied Balthazar’s face every day: in English, while Mrs. Bethany described Macbeth’s motives; in fencing, as he dueled with the professor to show the rest of us how it was really done; or in the halls, as we walked past each other. He never looked back at me. He never seemed to look at anyone any longer. The guy who was always the first to say hello or hold the door open for others was the guy who was now steering his way through the school corridors like a blind man, his path uncertain and his eyes blank.
“That guy is totally cracked out,” Vic said one day, as we walked past Balthazar in the great hall.
“I don’t think he’s on anything.”
“I didn’t mean, for real. If he was cracked out for real, he’d probably be having more fun, right?” Vic shrugged. “Balty looks like he’s not having any fun. He looks like he never had any. Like he wouldn’t know fun if it started dancing around yelling ‘I’m fun’ in his face.”
It took me a couple of seconds to process that. “He does look sad, doesn’t he?”
“Doesn’t look good, that’s for sure.” Vic brushed his mop of sandy bangs from his forehead, then snapped his fingers. “Hey, I’ll invite him to my next classic DVD screener. We’re doing a Matrix/Fight Club double feature about awesome leather coats and the evils of the corporate hegemony. You think he’d like that?”
“Who wouldn’t?” I resolved to look up hegemony in the dictionary. Once I’d thought that Vic wasn’t a very bright guy, but I’d learned better. Oblivious to details as he often was, he knew more about more subjects than virtually any of my other friends.
I cared about Balthazar as a friend, and that made it hard enough to watch him when he was so obviously miserable. But I would be lying if I claimed that the main reason I was frightened was because I was worried for him. I was too selfish for that. Every time I saw him so lost and strung out, I couldn’t help thinking, He’s going to tell.
Balthazar’s funereal gloom, and his silence, lasted for more than a week, until the first day of driver’s ed.
