No, I didn’t think he could guess. Not really. The dream I’d been trying to push away for weeks

came back, all ash and smoke and terror.

Don’t let the nosferatu bite.

I sat there. A horrible shape was rising up out of the bottom of my mind, like a body you know isn’t

human under a sheet. I pushed it away, but it wouldn’t go. There was only one thing that would explain all of this, explain everything I’d seen.

The Schola was silent, but I heard the wind outside. It was a soft spring breeze, and I wanted to

yank the window open and leap out. I wanted to run. I hadn’t really been outside since I got here,

and it bugged me. I needed some fresh air.

Right after I threw up everything I ever thought of eating.

“She wanted me to hate you.” I sounded about five years old. “I . . . she looked at me like she wanted to know something.”

“She did want to know, Dru. She wanted to know what you remembered. She wanted to know what

you saw—”

I didn’t see. I heard. I was only five! “Shut up.” The latte dropped out of my hand and plopped on

the hardwood floor. It sloshed but stayed miraculously upright. “Shut up.” I even clapped my hands

over my ears. “Shut up shut up shut up!”

He grabbed my wrists, and I got a good faceful of that apple-pie smell. For some reason it broke everything inside me, and the world went white-fuzzy for a few seconds. When it came back I’d

somehow ended up on the floor, my knees still jolting from landing hard, and I was hitting

Christophe wildly. Not even any weight behind the strikes, just flailing.

“Shut up!” I screamed. I kept screaming it, even though he wasn’t saying anything. He was just letting me hit him, deflecting the blows when they threatened to get near his face. When I paused for

breath he didn’t try to make me stop. He just kept letting me hit him, and when I stopped and bowed

forward under the weight of it, he folded me in his arms and stroked my hair while I sobbed.

It wasn’t just the horrible thought in my head. It was everything. It was Gran and my dad and the

dreams and the locket, the wulfen and the vampires and Sergej and my mother. It was Graves gone

and the attacks and the uncertainty and that horrible hole inside my chest cracking open and bleeding. You can only shove shit under your bed for so long before it starts moving around and wanting

to get out.

You can only cope for so long before everything breaks. And if he was going to handle something,

if I wasn’t alone, it meant I could break. It meant I didn’t have to keep everything bottled up so

tight.