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She didn’t recognize the phone number that had sent the other message, but her eyes widened as she read it:
Skye, I did some investigating last night. The vampire presence in your town may be more dangerous than I previously thought. Don’t panic—there’s no reason they should be after you. But be cautious. I’ll be staying around a while looking into this. Stay safe, and good luck on the first day of school.
Some interesting facts there:
That was Balthazar’s number. (Add to contacts—clicked.)
Balthazar was the kind of guy who used totally correct spelling and punctuation even when he was texting, which was sort of bizarrely hot. She was in serious trouble if commas could get her going.
Not only had she not imagined the vampire attack, but she also apparently had to look out for a whole infestation in town or something like that. Not good.
Balthazar was going to be sticking around, for reasons scary enough that she shouldn’t have felt a small thrill at the idea.
Last and most depressing of all: She had to go to school.
She started to rise, grabbing for the old clothes she kept nearby for her morning muck out of the stables—only to recall that she hadn’t put them out. Their neighbor Mrs. Lefler mucked the stables now, in exchange for ample riding time on Eb. They’d set up that arrangement last fall, when she made the heartbreaking choice to leave Eb at home instead of bringing him to the Evernight stables; at the time, she’d thought Mom and Dad might take some comfort from riding him.
Well, that hadn’t worked at all, and now that one simple task—which, though gross and tiring, had anchored her world most mornings of her life since age twelve—was gone. And it was a really bad sign of how much fun you weren’t having when you actually missed shoveling horse poo.
Skye groaned and covered her head with her pillow. Better to face a vampire attack than Darby Glen High.
She’d thought the first day back at Darby Glen would be bad. It turned out she’d been too optimistic.
Someone she’d barely known (Kristin? Kirsten?) back in middle school hardly glanced at Skye as she said, “Looks like someone got kicked out of her snob school. Back down with the little people? Must suck.”
“My school … burned down,” Skye said, figuring that was as close as she could get to “it was destroyed in a ghost apocalypse” without sounding like a crazy person. But then she realized, too late, that correcting that assumption made the rest seem true—like she looked down on Darby Glen High and the kids who went there. Did everyone else think that? Probably.
Every hallway was hung with composite portraits of different graduating classes, and she happened to glance up just as she went by Dakota’s senior year. There he was in his tux, grinning and unaware. He’d been the same age then that she was now. For the first time she realized that, eventually, she’d be older than Dakota had been when he died.
(I’m catching up! she used to joke with him on her birthdays, when she was briefly three years younger than him instead of four. See, I’m getting closer! It wasn’t funny anymore.)
Skye quickly looked away, pushing Dakota to the back of her mind.
Then she had a bottom locker with a cranky lock. Just great. After struggling with it for what seemed like five straight minutes, she wrenched it open, piled in all her books except for her first two subjects, and stood up to see Craig Weathers.
Her boyfriend for more than two years, until he’d dumped her three months ago.
With his arm around his new girlfriend, Britnee Fong.
The girl he’d dumped Skye for.
Skye felt like a bucket of cold water had been dumped over her head—both shocked and humiliated, the two forces combining to freeze her in place. Craig looked amazing, as always: tall and slim, with full lips and gorgeous eyes, his dark skin warm against the white sweater he wore beneath his letter jacket. Every inch of him was familiar to her—too familiar. It was Britnee who surprised her, someone who’d moved here after Skye had gone to Evernight and whose Facebook profile photos were all, frustratingly, pictures of her cat.
And Britnee was even cuter than she’d dreaded: stylish boho clothes, a pixie haircut that framed her face perfectly, and the same chunky-heeled boots Skye had been secretly coveting for weeks. She was a little heavier than Skye had imagined her being, but the pounds had gone to all the right places, boobs and butt—a girl might complain about the weight there, but a guy never would.
It would’ve been bad enough even if she’d been able to duck away before they saw her, but she wasn’t. Craig stopped in his tracks, and Britnee looked up at him in confusion before staring at Skye and saying, “Ohhhh.” Like it hadn’t occurred to either of them that she’d be showing up today. The gossip mill in Darby Glen must have fallen down on the job for once.
Craig smiled at her, a stiff imitation of his usual handsome grin. “Skye. Hey.”
“Hey.” She shunted the books over to her hip and looked past him, down the hall, trying to make it clear that there was somewhere else she had to be. As in anywhere else that was not here.
“Um, hi? I’m Britnee?” Just great. Britnee Fong was one of those girls who pronounced every single sentence like it was a question. Proof positive that she was both irritating and an airhead. “I’ve heard lots of awesome things about you?”
Oh, so Craig made sure to compliment his ex-girlfriend to his new girlfriend. Super classy. “That’s nice. See you later.” Skye stalked past them toward her first class, or at least where she thought her first class was. The buzzing in her head that was half anger, half pain muted the noise in the hallway around her.
At least you’re safe here, she told herself, thinking back to last night in the snow and the vampire’s strange smile as he’d watched her. It wasn’t exactly comforting.
Her first class was the Colonial History Honors Seminar, which meant that would be her homeroom, too. She tried to orient herself within the school building, but the sheer boringness of it struck her all over again. After two and a half years at Evernight Academy—with its centuries-old stone building, stained-glass windows, carved wood banisters, and arched ceilings—Skye found Darby Glen High so ugly that she wondered if it had been built this way on purpose, as a kind of punishment for its students. Cinder block walls with murals that hadn’t been painted recently or well, lockers the color of asphalt that somehow looked like they belonged in a jail more than a school, drop ceilings and harsh fluorescent light: Every single bit of it was depressing.
