Betrayals

CHAPTER 3

The cafeteria was a long, narrow space, every railing and molding made of dark wood. The walls were stone and half paneled with heavy, age-varnished oak, but the floor was garish blue linoleum.

Both were chipped and worn from hard use. The tables and the squeaking plastic chairs could have been in any high school in America.

I sat alone near the exit to the halls leading to the west class wing instead of the other branch going to the infirmary and library. The trays were red plastic, bunged-up and warped. The plates were white industrial china, the silverware stamped steel.

I missed my kitchen. I missed my dishes, even the mismatched ones, and Mom’s black-and-white cow-shaped cookie jar. I missed my mattress, my clothes, and my CDs, and all Dad’s weapons. I’d spent all morning, evening, whatever, hanging out in front of the armory, making excuses to stand in front of the counter and breathe in the smell of metal and gun oil. I missed the boxes and my truck and everything.

I even missed cooking, and goddamn, I never thought that would happen. The food here wasn’t bad, but it was job-lot industrial, and I could never see anyone in the kitchen. Just indistinct shapes through a cloud bank, like the fog that rose out of the forest every night. It said something about my life lately, that a screen of shifting steam that dispensed food was only moderately weird to me.

The food was set out on steam tables right in front of the weird wall of vapor. Pasta and salads and desserts. Burgers and pizza and fries for the younger ones, or the ones who liked to eat like real teenagers. Raw and rare meat for the wulfen, including livers and other stuff I didn’t look too closely at. There were also boxes and mini bottles of wine, but I stayed away from those.

Today it was bow-tie pasta in a cream sauce, with prosciutto and peas. Salad with fresh tomatoes and your choice of dressing. Garlic bread that wasn’t half-bad. Only it just sat there on the plate, congealing. There was a carton of chocolate milk, and an energy drink in a blue can. The blue of the can against the red of the tray, the white of the plate, the green specks of peas, if I had my colored pencils, I’d draw the whole shebang and call it Still Life with MSG.

I ached to draw something, anything, but as soon as I settled down with a pad of paper the urge left me. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t been sketching furiously. My dreams were Technicolor weird, but they didn’t push me to scribble. I just felt itchy, like I was waiting for something to happen.

It was loud. The walls reflected a hundred conversations going on, and the occasional hijinks. A bunch of teenage boys in a lunchroom is a recipe for trouble most of the time. The wulfen had their tables, the djamphir theirs, usually in prime spots, like right off the end of the line or near the exit to the infirmary. Even here there were cliques.

Nobody sat at my table. A few of them tried, but I wasn’t really interested in talking and they drifted away. It was like being the new girl all over again every damn day. Irving had tried to say something to me earlier, but I’d just put my head down and walked off. I still felt bad over making him lose his shit in front of everyone. It was embarrassing. What on earth could I say?

I wasn’t used to being such a failure at everything. And Jesus, I wasn’t looking to make new bosom buddies. Why bother? I mean, something was bound to come up. It always did.

I’d never been at any school longer than three months. Not since Gran died.

Dylan kept saying I was important, but none of the teachers would make any time for anything useful, like combat training. The only time I did my katas in the sparring chapel there was a whispering audience, and that was horrible. I was used to Dad just watching quietly, maybe offering a suggestion when I finished. Now a tide of whispers followed me everywhere.

So I did my tai chi in my room once or twice, but even that didn’t help. The calm and grace that always used to wait for me if I just did the movements long enough was gone. Everything that used to make it okay enough to cope with was just not working.

I just sat there, feeling the eyes on me. I hate that feeling.

Irving was sitting two tables away. He kept glancing over, and he finally put his palms on the table and made as if to stand up. But then he dropped back down and looked at his tray.

Graves pulled out the chair next to me. “Hey, kid.”

“Hey.” I dropped Mom’s locket against my chest as if it had stung me, looked up and grinned. It felt strange on my face, but then the happiness caught up with me and it turned more natural. Relief burst behind my breastbone like a mortar shell. “How was your morning? Evening? Whatever.”

He set his tray down, dropped into the chair. “Full of new information. You know some brain-damaged vampires can’t cross running water or major interstates? And the most common type of poltergeist feeds almost exclusively on the bioelectricity of teenage girls.” He wagged his unibrow at me, nobody had held him down and plucked at the caterpillar crossing his forehead yet. I thought about saying something about it, decided not to for the hundredth time. His green eyes burned, and it wasn’t just my imagination. His face was different. Less baby, more sharpness.

He was looking more like a wulfen now.

“Yeah, I knew about that. The poltergeist, I mean. There was this one time, in backwoods Louisiana…” The sentence died. I didn’t want to think about that. Dad had held the girl down while I did the taking-apart-the-poltergeist thing, with salt water and Gran’s rowan wand. The thing had hurled all sorts of small household items at both of us, clipping Dad a good one on the head with a teacup before I’d remembered to circle the bed the girl was tied to, cutting off the poltergeist’s access to her. Weakening it enough for me to tear it apart.

Dad hadn’t said a single thing about that, he didn’t need to. I kicked myself all over for that one.

And here they were wanting to put me in boring, normal, remedial classes. Jesus.

Graves snapped his fingers. He had two lattes in paper cups, and handed me one of them. “Earth to Dru. You wanna tell me about it?”

“Not really.” I hunched my shoulders. “I didn’t know that about nosferatu. Brain damage?”

“We did this experiment with holy water today and slides of tissue, big fun. If I get a good grade in the basics, I can start doing computer modeling for vampire migrations. Put my math mojo to good use.” His eyes lit up, and he sucked at his latte before casting a shrewd glance over my tray. “Want a burger?”

He got to do real classwork while I was stuck in civics. I shrugged. “Not that hungry. I wish I could see who’s doing all the cooking.”

He nodded, in that way that told me he understood completely. “Yeah, I can’t even smell anything through that cloud stuff. It’s why I try to stick to fried instead of baked or boiled. Can’t quite handle the raw meat yet. But I found out something interesting.” The corner of his mouth curled up into one of his bitter little smiles. “Come on. Ask me.”

The unwilling grin on my face just wouldn’t go away. “Okay, I’m asking. What did you find out?”

“The kids here are troublemakers from wulfen families. Mommy and Daddy Wulfen pack the boys off to Scholas. The girls stay home and are taught to fight by their parents. Isn’t that interesting?”

Wulfen girls get to stay home. So there is more than one Schola. That answered those questions, at least. “Why are the troublemakers sent here? Is this, like, a reform school?”

He brightened again, like I’d handed him exactly the right question. “Yeah, sort of. Tight discipline, tough love, all that. But there’s something else. It’s not just the troublemakers, but all boys get sent to Scholas. It’s the treaty. An agreement between the ruling wulfen packs and thedjamphir running the Order. The Order’s not the only ones out there fighting, but they are the official ones, and they’ve a big infrastructure in place to keep the kids safe while they’re being trained, and they promise to support the ruling wulfen families as long as they send a quota of their boys every year. They call it the Tithe.”

Well, that answers that. “Are there djamphir families?”

“Some djamphir marry or shack up with normal girls. Most of them live incognito because of the vampire-hunting teams, and a lot of them only stick around long enough to find out if the girl breeds more djamphir. Sometimes they don’t. You really should come to class, Dru.”

Eww. There’s a word for guys like that. “Uh-huh. When they put me into classes that are as cool as yours, I will.” I took a cautious sip of the latte. It was a little too hot, but okay. It wasn’t like Dad’s coffee.

I almost flinched. There it was again.

“So how are you doing?” Graves picked up a burger and took a massive bite. Settled into chewing. It was the same thing he asked me every mealtime.

Every mealtime he was here instead of off running with his new friends, that is.

Across the room, a shoving match erupted between a dark-haired djamphir and a tall, skinny wulf. The noise changed for a minute, growls and yips running under the surface of the crowd roar, and a wulf teacher, leather pants, a Kiss T-shirt, and muttonchop whiskers that looked odd on his unlined face, stepped in, sending the wulfen one direction and the djamphir boy another. The djamphir boy waited until the wulf teacher’s back was turned, then made a nasty gesture to all and sundry.

I’d kind of expected that kids who knew about the Real World wouldn’t act like jock dipwads.

Guess I was wrong.

I let out a sharp breath I hadn’t been aware of holding. “Fine.” I set the paper cup down. “Wanna go for a walk?”

Graves swallowed hastily. “I’ve got sparring after this. It’s hell. I never knew I could get so sore.”

“Sparring practice, huh?” They would teach him to fight. No problem. But nobody had time for me. “What are they teaching you?”

He shrugged. “Shanks is teaching me some basic stuff. He says I’ve got to get over that afraid-of-getting-hit thing. He also says I’d better train hard, because when I go all loco it’s going to be training that saves me.”

“Shanks?”

His hair flopped over his face as he nodded. “Bobby. That’s his nickname, he’s tall, especially when he changes. Grasshopper legs.”

“Oh.” Aren’t you just making friends all over. “You going out again after classes?”

“Yeah, we’re going running. There’s going to be a full moon in a couple weeks; some of the kids are going to do their first Change. If I do my parkour practice right—”

“Parkour. That’s a funny word.” I said it for the hundredth time, and watched him grin for the hundredth time.

His eyes really lit up. He actually looked happy. “You’d really like it. Freerunning is awesome. And once they teach you how to fall and leap and stuff, it’s super easy.”

“But just for wulfen?”

Another shrug. “You could come along. Some of the djamphir do it too. The practice, not the actual runs.”

“Graves! Hey, Graves!” someone shouted, and he looked up. A curly-headed wulf yelled something across the lunchroom, and Graves whipped him the bird almost faster than the eye could follow. A tide of growling swirled through the room, but it subsided as Graves looked steadily at the wulf in question, his green eyes narrowing.

Back in the Dakotas, Goth Boy would never have done that. He’d been on the bottom of the food chain, same as me. But now, he was actually, sort of, kind of… well, popular. Or at least getting there. It helped that he was loup-garou, all of the benefits of being wulfen without the crazy part. He didn’t get seven feet tall and hairy like an overgrown toupee. Christophe had said it would make him a “prince” here.

And Graves was all over it in a big way.

I stared back down at my tray. Nothing on it looked even remotely edible anymore, so I took another gulp of my latte. It splashed in my stomach, gurgled a bit, and subsided. “What was that?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. They like to tease.”

“About…?” About you sitting next to the Typhoid Female?

“Nothing, Dru. Here.” He scooted my tray away and slid a small plate off his, setting it in front of me. A burger, a mound of fries. “It’s hot. Eat.”

I picked up a fry. He had packets of ketchup, too, and squeezed one out on his plate. We lapsed into silence, a bubble of companionable quiet almost deep enough to swallow the empty chairs ranked along the sides of our table.

Maybe I had some sort of social plague. Besides, I didn’t want to talk. Except to Graves, and there was really nothing to say.

I found out I was hungry after all. He’d even dumped pickles on the burger and left off the onions.

He must’ve been sure I’d eat. “Thanks.”

“Hey, no problem. First one’s free.”

I dredged up another unwilling smile. “This isn’t the first burger you’ve gotten me.”

“Won’t be the last, either. It’s the first one I’ve gotten you today, so just eat, all right? I’ve got a half hour before I have to be down to get my ass beat up. So talk to me. You get anything ordered to your room finally?”

“Nope.” The clothes I was wearing now had shown up in packages with a post office box number on them, a number different than the mail stop on the info sheet in my room. I’d written it down and stashed it in my bag, information like that might be useful later. Someone had guessed at my sizes and done a handy job of it. And the wulfen had taken Graves into town, there was something close by, even though this place sat on a few acres of Sticksville, to get kitted out.

But not me. They couldn’t have anyone knowing about a girl up here at this school.

I wondered where all the money came from, then decided maybe I didn’t want to know. I had a roll of cash in my battered black canvas bag, and it’s usually no big trick to get more.

But still. I’d never had to get more on my own before. I knew how, sure. But Dad had always been there, and—

“Hello? Earth to Dru?” Graves waved a broad, long-fingered hand in front of my face. “Whatcha thinking? It must be deep.”

I shrugged. Took another french fry. “I was just wondering where all the money comes from. This isn’t a cheap operation they’ve got going. I wonder if the other schools are bigger. Which still leaves the question of how they pay for this.”

Graves studied me sideways for a moment. That adult look was back, as if he was listening to a song I couldn’t quite hear. “That’s true. I thought about that too. Want me to see if I can find out?”

“Sure.” Another fry, and another bite of burger and sip of latte. “Can I come with you? To sparring?”

His pause was long enough that I knew what he’d say. Probably not a good idea, Dru.

I wanted to hear him say it, anyway. The bubbling ball of acid inside my chest swelled another few notches. “Why?”

He hunched his shoulders. It was no good, he wasn’t as birdlike-thin as he’d been a couple of weeks ago, before he’d gotten bit. He couldn’t look small anymore. “No offense, but you like to pick fights too much. And I hate having a chick see me get my ass handed to me. It’s a guy thing.”

My face felt funny, so I let my hair fall down between us, curtaining my expression. Long hair is good for some things. And since we weren’t in Midwest Podunk anymore, my hair had actually been behaving. Go figure. “This chick could hand your ass to you, you know.”

“One of the teachers would jump me or throw me out of here if we got into it, Dru. Let’s not.”

“They wouldn’t throw you out. I’d leave too.” I’d go just about anywhere to get out of here. But I couldn’t, could I. Not with the vampire king looking for me, right?

“We’d both end up dead.” He sounded uncharacteristically serious, and his free hand came up, touched his opposite shoulder. Right where he’d been bitten. He rubbed at it a little, as if it still hurt.

“Please, Dru. Let’s not do this, okay?”

I dropped the burger. It splatted down on the plate and I pushed my chair back. My lips were greasy. Chewed food sat in my stomach like a bowling ball. “Fine. Let’s not. Have fun at sparring.”

“Dru—”

But I got up, shoved my chair back under the table, and fled. When he came by my room later, I kept the door closed and locked. He knocked for a while, but then he went away. And I sat there on the bed, fingering my mother’s locket and wondering how much longer I was going to be trapped here.