he saw it, and turned to face his would-be attacker. Probably it was some younger vampire guy, only at Evernight for a few laughs, ready to turn into a killer again the first time he felt like it—like Erich, that jerk who’d stalked Raquel during our first year here. Lucas would be able to handle somebody like that easily, I knew.
But when the attacker appeared, it was somebody Lucas couldn’t handle. Somebody I couldn’t handle.
It was my mother.
Mom stood in front of him, fists at her sides, eyes wild. “Is it true? Tell me.” Her voice shook. “I want you to look me in the face and tell me it’s true.”
Lucas looked like he’d been punched in the gut. As he opened his mouth to answer, though, Balthazar pushed his way to their side and grabbed Mom’s arm. “Not here,” he said quietly.
Mom didn’t even turn her head, like she couldn’t see or hear Balthazar, but after a moment she nodded and stalked toward one of the staircases. It was like she was daring Lucas not to follow her, but he did. Balthazar started to come, too, but Mom shot him a look that froze him in place on the stairs.
She led him into a small office on the second floor. I went along, although I desperately didn’t want to hear what I knew had to come next.
As soon as he’d shut the door behind them, Mom said again, “Tell me it’s true, Lucas.”
“It’s true,” Lucas said. He looked deader than he had the night after he’d been killed. “Bianca died.”
My mother stumbled backward, like she’d been spun so hard she was dizzy. Her face crumpled into tears. “She was supposed to live forever,” she whispered. “Bianca was going to be our little girl forever.”
“Mrs. Olivier, I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry? Sorry? You convince our daughter to leave her home and her parents and forsake the immortality that’s rightfully hers—her birthright—and she dies, she’s gone forever, and the only thing you can say is sorry?”
“That’s all I can say!” Lucas shouted. “There aren’t words for this! I would’ve died for her. I tried to. I failed. I hate myself for it, and if I could take it back I would, but . . . but . . .” His voice choked on a sob. He steeled himself and managed to say, “If you want to kill me, I won’t stop you. I won’t even blame you.”
My mother shook her head. Tears streaked her face, and a few caramel-colored strands of hair stuck to her flushed cheeks. “If you hate yourself as much as you say—if you loved her a tenth as much as we loved her—then you deserve immortality. You deserve to live forever, so you can suffer forever.”
Lucas was crying, too, but he never turned his head away, steeling himself to keep meeting my mother’s eyes. It was more than I could do.
This wasn’t Lucas’s fault. It was mine.
For one second I considered appearing in the room. If Mom saw that something of me lived on, maybe she wouldn’t hurt so badly. But at that moment, I was too ashamed of having hurt her to show my face.
“This isn’t over,” Mom said. She pushed blindly past Lucas into the hallway. He slumped into the nearest chair. I wanted to take form and comfort him, but I had the feeling that seeing me as a ghost wouldn’t be that comforting for Lucas right now.
And there was something else I had to do.
I followed my mother along the corridors. She wiped at her cheeks but otherwise didn’t try to disguise the fact that she’d been sobbing. Several of the students, both vampire and human, gave her curious glances, but she didn’t seem to care.
We went up the winding stone stairs of the south tower, all the way to my family’s apartment. My father lay on the sofa, his arms wrapped around himself and his eyes dull. He didn’t look at my mother as she walked in. Dad had put on one of his old records—one I recognized, one with Henry Mancini songs that I had liked a lot when I was a child. Audrey Hepburn was singing “Moon River.”
“It’s true,” Mom said in a small voice.
“I know. I think—I think I knew a long time ago. Just didn’t want to . . .” Dad shut his eyes tightly, like he was closing out Mom and memory and the whole rest of the world.
My mother stretched on the sofa beside him, taking him into her arms. As she bowed her cheek against his dark red hair, his shoulders began to shake with heavy sobs.
I couldn’t take it anymore. No matter how ashamed I felt, no matter how hard it would be, it couldn’t be worse than hearing them suffer. It was time for me to appear to them, to reveal what had happened.
But as I gathered myself together to take form, even as I struggled to find the right words to say first, my mother choked out, “May God damn the wraiths.”
I froze.
“It’s their fault,” she continued. “What happened to her is their fault.”
Dad cuddled her closer. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”
“I hate them. I hate them all. As long as I’m on this earth, I’ll never stop hating them…” Her voice ebbed into sobs again.
They hated the wraiths, for having had a hold on me, for haunting Evernight, for merely existing. If I appeared, they wouldn’t think of me as their little girl anymore. I would just be a monster. The way Lucas had been nothing but a monster to Kate.
I’d never known how much I needed their love for me until I’d lost it.
So I didn’t appear to them. How could I? I would only have made it worse for them and for me, as impossible as it seemed that anything, ever, could be worse than that moment. Compared to this, dying had been easy. But I remained there for a long time, watching them weep. I deserved to see it.
They cried themselves to sleep, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. For a while I drifted through my old room. Apparently most of my family’s stuff had made it through the fire, because many of my things remained there. Klimt’s The Kiss still hung on one wall, shining, ideal lovers that, in my mind, symbolized Lucas and me.
We’ll get back to that place, I thought. We’ll find a way.
I flowed through the window, not bothering about the frost, until I sat beside my old friend the gargoyle again. His stone wings were the same color as the gray autumn nightfall.
“Remember that time we talked here?”
Startled, I turned to see Maxie sitting next to me—actually a few inches off the windowsill, but once you were a ghost, gravity didn’t matter so much. She was smiling like this was the greatest day ever.
“Maxie, what are you doing here?”
“Uh, saying hello? Like the last time we met here. You figured out how to fog up the glass so I could write on it. That was when I decided maybe you weren’t terminally stupid.”
I’d fogged the glass with my breath—a trick I’d never be able to perform again. “Don’t take this personally, but honestly, I can’t do the banter thing right now.”
“Stop
