Page 109 of Bone Year

“Your hair is charming, and you smell like a distillery. Bed.”

“On my way.”

We escape past her. Draven and Malric are giving their names as we pass. I don’t look at them.

We push through the doors onto the frigid courtyard, and Ellavee turns and walks backward a few steps so she can smile at them through the closing gap.

“Thanks so much for the chaperoning,” she calls, sweet as honey. “Couldn’t have made it through a tunnel without two full-grown vampires.”

“Ellavee,” Lux hisses, laughing.

“I’m being polite.”

“You’re being feral.”

“Politely feral.”

We cross the courtyard arm-in-arm again. The snow has thickened. My head is still swimming, but the cold is doing useful work in sobering me up a bit.

“Okay,” Lux says once we are alone, “I’m going to ask, and you’re going to tell me the truth, because you’ve been weird all night and not just drunk-weird. Senna wasn’t even your lead, and every time someone says her name, you look like you got punched in the stomach. Did you have some secret friendship we didn’t know about?”

I walk another few steps.

“I didn’t really know her, not the way you’re both looking at me like I did.”

“That’s not why we’re looking at you like that,” Ellavee says.

I swallow. The cold burns the inside of my nose.

“I saw Malric with her once earlier this year outside the dorms, late. He had her pinned against a wall, and she…wasn’t right. I don’t know if he was trying to bite her or sleep with her or both. He was drunk and trying to force himself on her. I pulled him off her, and she took off running.”

Neither of them speaks for a long moment. Our boots crunch through the snow.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Lux asks.

“Because I didn’t think she’d want anyone to know, and I didn’t even know who she was until we were assigned leads our first day in the patient wards.”

“That’s why she was staring at you. I remember thinking it was odd,” Ellavee says.

“Yes.”

“So you think Malric wanted to get back at her or something?” Lux asks.

“Maybe, I don’t know. The body was drained of blood and Malric showed up tonight with what looked like scratch marks on his neck.” I chew on my bottom lip, not liking the idea of Malric or Draven being killers. I know there are other vampires in this school, but Malric is a known threat. “I’m just saying, what else drains a person?”

“Well,” Lux says slowly, “technically quite a lot of twisted creatures can drain a body. Certain hollowfolk for sure can. There’s a thing in the northern bogs my father talks about that I can never remember the name of⁠—”

“On school grounds?”

“That’s the part, isn’t it?” Lux’s pace slows a little. “If it was a twisted creature, it came from somewhere. And if it came from somewhere on the grounds, it came from somewhere they haven’t told us about.”

Ellavee tilts her head. “Or somewhere they have.”

We walk in silence for a stride.

“Lux,” I say, “what do you mean by that?”

“You’ve never wondered why we’re not allowed on the tenth floor of the patient wards?”