“I’m sorry.” I squeezed her arm, but she ever so subtly flinched away.
This Mei-Ling was remarkably steady for someone who’d seen her boyfriend killed, was abducted, taken to an island in the middle of the sea, and learned about the existence of vampires all in the space of, what, a few days? She might look like a sip of water, but she had an inner strength—that was for sure.
“So, Mei-Ling.” I leaned my elbows on the table, acting casual. “Did you have other hobbies in New York? Like martial arts or something?” Because why else would they have brought her here?
She gave me a frown. “Because I’m Chinese American?”
I put my hands up in surrender. “Because most girls here have some experience with kicking ass, and you don’t strike me as the shotgun type.”
Her frown cleared. “I’m not supposed to go to gym class. I need to be careful of my hands.”
My eyes flicked to those hands, with long, graceful fingers that I could picture flitting over piano keys or across violin strings. If she was this calm on her first day at a vampire training academy, I imagined she’d have been cold steel on a symphony stage.
She picked up her glass and drank the blood—that right there explained at least some of her composure. The drink brought a false sense of calm that, after enough doses, eventually became real calm. They must’ve been dosing her from the get-go.
Such careful treatment on the part of the vampires—it was baffling.
I studied her. If it weren’t for the extra consideration on their part, she’d obviously not survive. It wasn’t that Mei looked weak. She had the stiffest upper lip I’d ever seen. No, it was more that she looked tended. Cared for. Loved.
She didn’t want to be here, but not in the same way that we didn’t want to be here. So many of us Acari didn’t want to be anywhere. If she were a musical prodigy, she obviously worked hard and had a competitive edge. But there was another sort of edge that was lacking. It was the one that’d been shoved, starved, stymied, and slapped into the rest of us in our lives before Eyja næturinnar.
So what was her deal? I wanted to keep her talking. “Have you met her yet? Kenzie, I mean. Blond bob? Kinda reminds me of an American Girl doll.”
Yas snorted. “If American Girl dolls wore catsuits and carried sai knives.”
My eyes lit. “Is that what those things are called?” Our new Proctor’s weapon of choice was a pair of daggers, each one flanked by two sharp, short spikes. They looked like something you might see wielded by some manga badass.
Yasuo made a little hissing noise, slowly sweeping his hands in front of his face like a ninja. “So desu ne,” he informed me in Japanese.
The guy had been born in Japan and prided himself on knowing his native weaponry. And I had to give him credit. He was one of the only people who’d respected the power of my throwing stars—and known their true name, shuriken—before I’d even learned to use them.
Still, I couldn’t let Yasuo get too smug. I nudged him. “Okay, sensei. Cool your jets.”
“You’re welcome, grasshopper.”
“Hush. Both of you.” Emma silenced us in her North Dakota prairie girl way. She was the only person I’d ever met who was capable of using the word hush without irony. I think it was because she could do things like skin a wild animal with just three flicks of her Buck knife. She turned her attention to Mei. “What classes are you taking?”
My roommate pulled a neatly folded paper from her jacket pocket.
“Hey, you finally got that syllabus you’ve been wanting.” My attempt at humor fell flat, so I just I leaned in to study her schedule. It was a weird one.
SCI 101
Intro to Phenomena
TTh 9–12
Tracer Judge
IND
Independent Study in Combat
MWF 9–12
Watcher Angel
IND