But I still couldn’t forget how sad she was. “I never thought I’d be grateful for my childhood, but poor Vivian. I know she’s crazy and a killer, but she’s never had anyone. Ever. I wish there was some way I could help her, you know?”
“I know. But you’ve got to remember she was raised by faeries. Everything she tells you is probably a lie.”
I smiled wanly, but I knew he was wrong. You couldn’t fake that kind of pain and loneliness. He didn’t understand—he’d always had someone. I wondered what I would be like if I had been raised by faeries. It made me shudder.
“So, umm, were you planning on spending the rest of the night in here?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
I narrowed my eyes, trying not to smile. “In your dreams.”
He laughed. “Well then, let me go to sleep so I can get back to them.”
Shaking my head, I leaned in and kissed him quickly on the lips, then, already missing him, went back to my room. I wouldn’t have minded spending the night in there, but I wanted to take it slow and figured sleeping in the same bed wasn’t a really smart idea. After all, I’d seen it time and time again on Easton Heights—when the couples hooked up too soon it never ended well. Plus, I didn’t think his dad would like it very much and I wasn’t about to push my luck.
It took a long time for me to fall asleep again.
The next morning Lend went to school. I stayed home, like I did most days, to work on my schoolwork and study for the SATs. It was so bizarre I wanted to laugh. While Vivian and her faeries plotted my destruction, I sat at the counter memorizing vocabulary words. Normal was stranger than paranormal sometimes.
“How’s it going?” David asked, fixing himself a sandwich for lunch.
“I have a question if you’ve got a minute.”
“It’s been a long time since I studied for that thing, but I’ll try to help.”
“Oh, no, not about the test. I was just wondering, kind of worrying actually. About faeries. How do they find you? I mean, like if some of the IPCA faeries were looking for me, would they know where I was?”
“I don’t think so. I know if faeries have some sort of connection, something of yours, usually an important possession or part of your body”—he saw my eyes widen and smiled—“like hair, or a finger or toe, they can always find you. And if you call them, of course. But if you mean just know where you are, no. They do have ways of finding people. If, for example, they know your full name, then it would be simple.”
I frowned. I didn’t know my real full name. I was pretty sure IPCA didn’t, either, and Vivian’s faeries wouldn’t. Then I remembered what Reth had said about telling me my name someday. A cold chill settled between my shoulder blades. That must have been why he always seemed to know exactly where I was in the Center. “Any other ways?”
“If faeries really wanted to find you, they probably could. Which means they already would have.”
He smiled. “I’ve already worried about all this for you and I don’t think it’s an issue. You’re safe from IPCA here.”
I nodded, wishing it was IPCA I was afraid of. No, I was worried about much worse things. I grabbed another slice of bread and shoved it in my pocket. I wanted to stay here, wanted this happy life to go on forever.
Something told me slices of bread weren’t going to be enough.
DON’T MUSS THE MAKEUP
A rianna was studying my hair, deep in thought. Her face lit up. “I’ve got it! Remember Cheyenne in the masquerade episode?”
“Oh, my gosh! That’s perfect! You’re a genius!”
She smirked. “I know. Best episode ever, right?”
“Seriously.” I watched in the mirror as Arianna put in hot rollers. I had never seen a vamp in a mirror before. Turns out they do have reflections, but, just like in sunlight, their glamours don’t quite transfer all the way. You can’t see the corpse underneath, but you can tell that something is wrong.
No wonder they don’t like mirrors; I’d hate to see myself that way. Arianna avoided looking at the mirror, constantly shifting so that she wouldn’t be facing it.
I’ll admit the idea of her hands on my hair—her glamoured corpse hands—still bothered me a little bit. But I was trying to get over it. After all, things were a lot more complicated than they used to be. It was no longer see vamp, stun vamp, tag vamp. Now it was ponder the philosophical implications of people who had immortality forced upon them, doomed to hang onto the coattails of humanity while having almost none left themselves. Man, no wonder they drank blood.
When the rollers were removed, my hair fell down my back in loose, tumbling curls. Taking a crystal-covered barrette, she pulled a piece back from my face on one side in a slight braid, clipping it in place. “Perfect.” She smiled. I had to agree. The style was simple but showed off my hair, which was definitely one of my best features.
“You are an artist.”
“Oh, I know. Now for your makeup.”
The girl-bonding time with Arianna really made me miss Lish. Not that she would have been able to participate, what with the whole mermaid-underwater thing, but she would have liked to see it. As
Arianna applied dark, dramatic eyeliner and fussed over which shade of eye shadow to use, I wondered about what Cresseda had said when we’d first talked. She asked me to return Lish to them.
But how could I? She was dead; she was gone.
“Oh, my gosh.” Things clicked into place—how could I not have seen it before?
“I know, huh? You never knew you could be this hot,” Arianna answered smugly.
“Oh, yeah, you’re amazing,” I said, covering. As good as I looked (and, really, I looked good), it wasn’t anything compared to what I had just realized. I needed to talk to Lend right now.
I stood, but Arianna pushed me back down in the chair. “Not done yet, your lips are still naked.” It was all I could do to sit still as she applied a rosy lipstick hue with a hint of shimmer. “Okay. You are perfection. I’m a genius.”
“Thanks!” I smiled at her before I sprinted upstairs. Arianna laughed at what she assumed was my impatience to get into my dress.
“Lend!” I burst through his door. He looked up, surprised. Still in basketball shorts and a plain Tshirt, he was lying on his stomach on the bed, sketching. I stopped and frowned. “Aren’t you going to get ready?”
He laughed. “Remove clothes, put on tux. Should take all of two minutes. You look hot though.”
“Listen, I figured it out!” I sat down on the end of his bed.
“Figured what out?” He pushed himself up to sit across from me.
“The poem thing! I know what it means!” Why hadn’t I thought about it more? I’d been so stupid!
His eyebrows went up. “Really?”
“Yeah! Okay, so ‘eyes like streams of melting snow,’ duh. Then the ‘cold with the things she does not know,’ well, if she’s like me she’s cold all the time, right? Things we don’t know, I’m not sure about.” There were a lot of things Vivian didn’t know that left her feeling cold and alone. “Anyway, ‘Heaven above and Hell beneath,’ that’s Earth, where we’re all stuck. I mean, like the faeries are.
But then ‘liquid flames to hide her grief,’ that’s what the souls or energy look like—liquid, golden flames. And she takes them because they make her feel warm, like she’s not alone anymore. But then the last part—‘death, death, death with no release’? It’s not about how she’s killing paranormals! Remember what your mom said, about giving Lish back to them? Vivian’s not just killing them, she’s taking their souls and keeping them. They’re stuck inside her, swirling around. So she’s killed them, but their souls are trapped!” I was tripping over my words, talking so fast to get it all out before I forgot anything. “Lish and Jacques and everyone else, their souls haven’t been released —they’ve just been stolen!”
His eyes widened. “It makes sense.”
“So do you think—What if we could get the souls out? Do you think that would mean—Could Lish come back? To life?”
He frowned. “I don’t know. Those bodies, they were dead. Even immortal bodies can die if it happens the right way.”
“Oh.” My shoulders slumped. I really thought that I had figured it out, thought I could get Lish back. In those last few minutes, it felt like I already had her. And now I’d lost her again.