I lay in the center of the bed, on top of the covers, with the envelope clutched to my chest—the answer we had been waiting weeks for, our last hope, already rumpled from each time I had opened it to read the reply once more.

Through the open bedroom door, in a bathroom down the hall, I could hear Reg and Sal admiring their work.

“I bet you used a straight edge back in your day,” Sal said. “Classier, but not as clean as an electric shave.”

Reg sighed. “I’m sad to see it go, but Poe will probably like this better.”

They were only a few yards away, but they sounded like they were in another time and place entirely.

I sat up, my hands making fists around the envelope, and I tried to connect the message inside to the voices down the hall. How could they read it and just go on acting as if nothing had happened, when everything had happened?

I flattened the envelope in my lap—pitch-black paper addressed with beautiful white script, from the Clan of Shadow to Charlotte and Reginald. Pulling the equally black fold of paper from inside the envelope, I spread the page open and read it one more time—in the same lovely white script, a single word in the center of the page.

No.

I crushed the paper between my hands and folded my body over it, collapsing forward onto the bed, where I cried until I soaked the comforter and fell asleep in a puddle of mortal tears.

Seventeen

Does This Dress Make Me Look Mortal?

“It’s never been done, Charlie.”

“That doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

“It means it’s highly unlikely and ill-advised,” Reg said.

“You are ill-advised to keep disagreeing with me.” I kicked at the dirt road, spraying rocks and dust at Reg to drive my threat home.

We were on the now-familiar path to school, but today the walk felt somehow like a death march, and the school more of a prison. Every clan had turned their back on us: Blood, Bone, Starlight, and Shadow. Without a clan representative to sponsor our appeal, we could be trapped in these mortal bodies forever, and Reg was just kind of meh about the whole thing, which was really pissing me off.

“You’re overreacting,” he said now, stepping neatly around the little tornado of dirt I’d created. “There’s no need to take drastic measures. We can always write to the Elder Seat, request an appeal without a sponsor. It doesn’t hurt to try. But to subvert the council entirely . . .”

I threw up my hands. “I’m just saying we could speed up this process by going directly to the Ancients. They outrank the Elders, right?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Reg said. “But there are reasons vampires are governed by our Elders instead of the very oldest among us. The Ancients are . . . unpredictable.”