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“I’m sorry?” Skye said.
“You and Craig and Britnee? I saw that standoff in the hallway. It was like a shoot-out in a Western or something.”
It wasn’t any of this girl’s business, but the description made Skye smile a little despite herself. She’d needed a smile today. “Craig and I used to go out. He dumped me for her. We just hadn’t seen each other since, is all.”
“Oh, so you’re Skye.” The girl nodded, as if satisfied. Obviously the Darby Glen gossip mill wasn’t totally out of commission after all. “Well, I’m Madison Findley. We just moved here last summer. Listen, if you ever need anybody to run interference between you and your ex, or that fat cow he’s with, just let me know.”
Britnee was no cow, but Madison was just trying to make her feel better, Skye figured—and she did, a little. “Thanks.”
The chatter in the room stilled as their teacher came in—a man at least six and a half feet tall, and seemingly nearly as wide. His bristly beard created the illusion that his jaw jutted out like a bulldog’s. His dark eyes swept the room like a SWAT team member’s laser sight for a rifle.
On the board, the teacher wrote his name: STERLING LOVEJOY.
He was so intimidating that nobody laughed at that name. Nobody even smirked. This was not a guy you wanted to catch you in the act of texting.
After that, the normal humdrum high school crap got started, and Skye felt herself relaxing a little bit, particularly when it turned out that she knew exactly nobody in her calculus class and could sit in the back, enjoying the relief of solitude.
Okay, so, Craig and Britnee were in her homeroom. She didn’t have to sit near them or talk to them, and she already had a new friend to distract her, so that was all right. Maybe she’d get lucky and they wouldn’t be in any other classes with her. Some people had it in their heads that she was a snob, but they’d probably forget about that soon enough. Probably.
Anyway, high school wouldn’t last forever. Sometimes it seemed like it would, but watching her first high school crumble into destruction had made it clear to Skye just how temporary all that stuff was. Five and a half months: She could do it.
If she could just not be attacked by any more vampires.
When the bell rang for third period, she checked her schedule to remind herself what came next: human anatomy/sex ed with Ms. Loos. Skye thought sourly that she’d already educated herself about sex, for all the good it did her, but whatever. Then she walked in to see that Craig and Britnee were both in this class, too.
Fantastic. She’d have to listen to sex ed lectures while watching the only guy she’d ever had sex with flirt with the girl he was ha**ng s*x with now.
But only after class began did Skye realize the worst of it.
“We’re moving into more sensitive subjects now,” Ms. Loos said. She was sort of attractive, at least for a teacher, with her blond hair and her leopard-print skirt, and she perched on the edge of her desk like she didn’t know it would make the guys stare at her legs. “I’ve had most of you all year, and I know you’re mature students. So I’m calling on all of you to be on your best behavior.”
The janitor walks in, his face gray, his eyes unfocused. Something’s horribly wrong, but he doesn’t realize it yet. He only thinks he’s tired—tired of cleaning up after stupid kids, tired of pushing around that broom, tired down to his bones.
Stop it, Skye told herself. It’s not real; you know it’s not real!
But his death already surrounded her.
Pain lashes through him, snaking out from his chest down his leg, along his arm. He opens his mouth to scream, but his lungs won’t take in air. Suffocation hurts. The blood vessels in his eyes are starting to burst.
“You, in the back?” Ms. Loos stared at Skye, who realized the entire class was staring right along with her. She’d clutched the top of her desk as if it were a life preserver in a stormy sea, and the janitor’s dying agonies still washed over her. She could see him, crumpling to his knees behind Ms. Loos, there and yet not there. “Is there a problem?”
Skye swallowed hard, attempting to keep her attention on the here and now. “No, ma’am.”
Ms. Loos folded her arms, the hint of a smile around her dark-lined lips. “If you find the subject of sex distressing, come and talk with me later, mmm-kay?” A few people in the class giggled, and Skye turned red. She couldn’t help feeling like Ms. Loos was more interested in making a joke at her expense than offering help. Fabulous.
She also couldn’t help noticing that Craig was now staring at the floor. Did he think he’d ruined her for ha**ng s*x with anybody else?
And did any of that matter while this man was dying, right there in the classroom?
Skye closed her eyes tightly, then opened them again. The janitor had vanished. His death hadn’t lasted that long.
But she was going to have to relive it every single time she came into this room, which was going to be every single morning.
Five and a half months suddenly seemed longer than it ever had before.
As Ms. Loos kept talking, Skye let her mind wander far away from school, all the way back home to her stable. She imagined the way Balthazar had looked in the lantern light, how he had been there to protect her when she needed him most. Then her imagination traveled even further back, to Evernight in the days when she thought it was more or less normal, and Balthazar was her favorite eye candy as he walked down the hall. In the days when she had this other, better life, and she was just another teenage girl.
The days she’d never see again.
