“I can’t stop thinking about Emma,” I confessed. “I think not all is what it seems. Do you think it’s possible she was alive when they took her?”
“Aye,” he said quietly. “It’s possible.”
I gasped. I’d expected subterfuge. Backpedaling. Question dodging. What I hadn’t expected was this honesty. Though that was the thing about Carden—he’d been honest with me from the start. Those times when there was something he couldn’t share, he’d simply tell me he couldn’t tell me. “What do you know?”
“I avoid Alcántara,” he said, “and for the moment, he leaves me be as well. But I do know this: If your friend once lived, surely she lives no longer. That is the only thing I can say with certainty.”
To have had such hope and then lose it again…I felt rudderless, at sea. I couldn’t begin to imagine what a wreck I’d be if it weren’t for Carden to lean on.
I told myself Emma was truly at peace. I thought it’d ease something in my mind, but instead it had the opposite effect. I needed to know what happened, exactly. What happened to all the girls. Exactly.
“But what…how—?” I couldn’t finish. Yasuo knew something. Something that plagued him. Something that haunted him so much he wanted me to pay for it.
Carden took my chin and tilted my face to his, peering deeply at me. “What more troubles you?”
I couldn’t explain about Yasuo, not completely. I wouldn’t put it past Carden to seek out and snap the necks of every Trainee who’d ever crossed me, and I wasn’t ready to give up on my friend yet. So instead I just shrugged.
“I must know,” he pressed. “Why this despair?”
“Why not despair?”
“Ah, but I have a thousand reasons why not.” He got that look in his eye—that hungry, wicked guy look that made my belly quiver. He brought his mouth a whisper away from mine, hovered for an exquisitely taut moment, then darted in to steal a hard, fast kiss. “There. That is one reason why not to despair. Shall I enumerate further?” He kissed along my cheek. “Work my way through the list?” He kissed the outer corner of one eye and then the other. “It’s a long one.”
His thousand possibilities exploded like a starburst in my mind, cascading down, setting my body alight, weakening my knees. I hadn’t known possibilities until Carden.
My skin buzzed. For now, all else was forgotten. I reached up, standing on tiptoe, stretching my body along his, ready to make our way down this mysterious list, when I heard a door open down the hall. I froze. It was probably just some girl going to the bathroom, but still, instinct was strong, and I held my breath, waiting for our Proctor—lovingly nicknamed Killer Kenzie—to come and bang on the door and flay me for having a guy in the room.
He read my mind. “There’s no need to fear when you’re with me.”
“But curfew.” I mouthed the words almost silently. Because, yeah, Kenzie was a Guidon and there probably wasn’t that much to fear from her where Carden was concerned. It was the other vampires I worried about. “It’s soon.”
“Aye.” He gently laced his fingers through the sensitive hair at the nape of my neck. “We have little time.” His other hand took my waist. It felt broad and sure. “I’ll not waste it.” He pulled me closer.
Kissed me.
Vampires, curfew, old friends, and new enemies…it all fell away. When he parted from me, it took me a moment to gather myself. To catch my breath.
The guy could kiss.
He said nothing. Carden merely let those eyes bore into me, a promise of more and later.
The intensity made me oddly shy. I had to fill the silence. “So you could tell I was sad?”
“Indeed. Now will you tell me why?”
I remained wary of confessing my concerns about Yasuo, but I had no such qualms about his pals. Rob, in particular, flashed into my head, how he’d slammed my tray down. How stupid I’d felt tugging at the thing. He might as well have had me pinned to that table. I’d have been just as frozen in place.
“I’m weaker than the guys,” I confessed. “I’ll always be the weaker one.”
He sighed, thinking. After a moment, he said, “There’s a difference between strength and power.”
My warm and fuzzy mood of a moment ago was fading fast. “Are we doing the speaking-in-riddles thing again?”
But he didn’t take the bait. For once, Carden’s expression remained dead serious as he met mine.
“All right,” I said, considering his words in earnest. “I’ll bite. Strength is different from power. I still don’t have either.”
“Don’t you? Strength is physical. But power…power is strategy. Control. The capacity to act. Power is mental.” He shot me a sly smile. “Aren’t you the one who’s always saying how your mental faculties are superior?”
“I do not.” I gave him a little shove. But the lightbulb had gone off over my head. We’d discussed this once before. He’d told me how I wasn’t helpless, but I thought he’d referred only to physical power. I’d listened, but I hadn’t heard.
“Do they have power over you,” he mused, “or is it merely that you allow it to be so? Power is a thing to be given or taken away. When, unthinking, you do as Hugo asks, you give him power.”
“I can’t just hop on the next boat out of here,” I protested. I felt a stab, remembering my friend and former roommate, Mei-Ling. She had hopped on a boat out of here—I knew because I’d put her on it. “I need to play the game.”
“I know,” he said gently. “I’d be on that boat with you if I could. But trust me, love. I know better than anyone. Power is the game.”
For a few minutes, he just held me. I became aware of his thumb rubbing circles along my side. “You do realize your melancholy isn’t the only reason I’m here.”
A switch flicked in my body, giving me that wiggly, lit-up feeling again. I tried my best womanly voice. “It’s not?”
He pushed away from me with a grin. “No, dove. And it’s not that either.”
“Wait? What’s the other reason?” It was a struggle to concentrate.
He pulled completely away now. “Do you truly not know?” He wore a bemused smile that made him look suddenly boyish. It gave me a pang of sadness for the innocent he’d once been, for the innocence in him I’d never see.
I stared, thinking hard, but pulled a total blank. Slowly, I shook my head.
“What day is it?” he asked.
“It’s January….Oh.” My birthday. Suddenly my eyes burned and my vision blurred. I didn’t blink. If there were tears in my eyes, I’d refuse to let them spill. I wouldn’t cry in front of Carden like some mopey adolescent.
And yet.
I was touched beyond reason. Today was my eighteenth birthday, and somehow he’d known.
“You were born today, were you not?”
“How’d you know?”
He grinned, wicked Carden once more. “I have ways.”
I gave a quick scrub to my eyes, anxious to put a chirpy face on it. “The whole all-powerful, omniscient thing really seems to work for you.”
He barked a laugh, and I hushed him. The walls had ears. Maybe the other Initiates weren’t a threat, but there were secret vampire sympathies that were.
“I simply make it my business to know about you,” he added in a lowered voice.
“Eighteen. Hey, I can vote. Or be recruited. Oh wait,” I added, fighting my returning melancholy with an attempt at humor. “I already was recruited. I’m boots-on-the-ground in the vampire army.” I stepped away, blithely asking, “So what’d you get me?”
He pulled something from the pocket of his coat.
“Wait,” I said, taken aback. “I was kidding. You really got me something?”
“Naturally.” He waved the little parcel before me. It was rectangular and wrapped in plain paper.
“But you just gave me something. For Christmas.” I stared at the package like he was offering me a bomb. I didn’t get a lot of presents, and this marked the second one from Carden. The first had been the awesomest throwing star ever, with a bird’s wing etched along the steel, though it was unsettling how I’d become the girl whom guys wooed with weaponry. “You’ve already given me so much,” I added dumbly, my mind going to all those emotional places I didn’t like to think about.
It appeared I was crushing pretty hard on my ancient Scottish vampire.
“Do you not want it?” He faked like he was going to tuck it back in his pocket.
“No.” I snatched it from him. “I want. I want.” The thing had some heft to it, and I could feel the spine of a book through the coarse paper. “Can I open it?”
He raised a brow, apparently an ancient Scottish way of saying duh. “Would you rather I did?”
I shot him a look that made him grin, and forget the gift, just the fact that I could make Carden McCloud grin sent warm tendrils of contentment through my veins. I sat on the bed, and he sat beside me, the bed sinking under his weight.
I carefully unfolded the paper. I’d keep it. I’d keep and treasure all of it.
“Oh. A dictionary.” It was a basic Old Norse dictionary. Standard issue. In fact, I already had a copy, only mine was paperback, and this one was an awkward hardback in what looked like an older, outdated edition. I gave him a look that I feared was more like a mask than a smile. “Thanks.”
He grinned. “For someone so lethal, you are remarkably polite.” He took the book from my hands and turned to the back flap. Looking closer, I could see the binding wasn’t paper; rather, it had more of a leathery sheen. He picked at the corner, and it took a moment for him to get purchase with his short nails. “When will you remember? Things aren’t always as they seem.”
