“Beautiful and delicate.” She turned her back on me.
Great. “My advice, best change your name. What’s Chinese for ruthless and savage?”
She ignored the question. Was she in shock? I thought she’d been crying when I came in, but she seemed utterly emotionless now. I watched her long fingers repeatedly smooth the sheets, the nervous gesture the only thing telling me she was in there somewhere.
I could not deal with this right now. I had to sort out my bond with Carden.
Carden. My breath caught, just remembering the feel of him.
I fisted my hands and shook them out again. I needed to get ahold of myself. There was no way I could function in this place with all the obsessing I was doing. I had to figure this bond out before someone figured me out. Which meant I couldn’t trust anybody in the meantime. Especially not a new roommate who could be in my face—and maybe even in my stuff—24-7.
I looked at her, trying to figure out how to go about laying down the ground rules, and took a step closer. Was she even sixteen? “How old are you?”
“I just turned fifteen.”
“Damn.” No wonder she was proving hard to read. She must’ve come from a seriously messed-up place to land here so young. “So you were in, what, ninth grade?”
“I just started at the performing arts school,” she said in answer. “My parents relocated to Long Island so I could go.”
“Fancy.” How I would’ve loved parents who supported me. What a different world I’d live in now. “Does that mean you’re some sort of prodigy?”
To my surprise, she nodded. I wanted to snark that I was smart, too. On this island, special meant nothing. Special got you a shooter of blood and a knife in the back.
“I’m a violinist,” she said, “but I can play a lot of things.”
Was that why the vampires had placed her with me? Put the musical genius in with the genius-genius? Because my room wasn’t the only one with a sudden vacancy. “Well, now you’re an Acari. Fights to the death seem to be the only performing art we’ve got going around here.”
She gave me a flat look. “When do we receive our syllabus?”
“Our syllabus?” I choked back a little laugh.
“Yes.” She looked at me like I was a moron. “Otherwise, how will I know where I need to go?”
Oh God, the poor thing was being serious. She had no clue what she’d agreed to, and it dismayed me. “Don’t worry—they’ll let you know. The vamps go for drama. They’ll probably slide some ancient piece of parchment under the door at some ungodly hour, and if you can parse the old-school calligraphy, that’ll be your syllabus.”
I watched her riffle through her stack of books, even though I was sure she’d done plenty of riffling before I came in. What weapon had she been assigned? Because surely there was a weapon hidden in one of her dresser drawers.
Would Mei-Ling be a threat to me? Maybe smother me in my sleep? Most important, would she find out about me and Carden and narc on me?
I had no clue, and knew I needed to get one fast. I rested my foot on my desk chair to unlace my boots and kick them off. “So why’d you wanna up and leave your fancy new school for a place like this?”
“I didn’t want to leave,” she said.
“Wait.” Surely I misheard. The vampires recruited us onto the island. Maybe they sometimes used little hypnotic tricks to persuade us, or seduced us with fancy private jets and hot Tracers, but they didn’t resort to outright kidnapping. “Back it up. What do you mean, you didn’t want to leave? You’re here, aren’t you?”
Her jaw tightened. “He made me. He killed my boyfriend and said if I didn’t go with him he’d kill my parents and my sister, too.”
I could say that I sat on the chair, but it was more like my knees gave out. I dropped. Thankfully, the seat was there to halt the progression of my butt onto the floor. “You didn’t come of your own will?”
“I tried to fight back, but he was too large.” Her expression changed, and she looked at me like I’d just told her I drowned kittens as a hobby. “Why? Did you?”
“Yeah.” Her tone had put me on the defensive. “The guy was pretty persuasive, though.” I thought back to that day—Ronan, sexy Ronan, in a Florida parking lot. He’d used his hypnotic touch to help convince me. But honestly, the guy was so good-looking and my world had been such crap, it hadn’t taken much.
I bristled at the memory. Suddenly, I felt eager to explain this to Mei-Ling and her judgmental eyes. “I had no place else to go. I had nothing but thirty bucks in my checking account and an abusive dad waiting for me at home.”
She gave me a look that said she didn’t fully understand me, and worse, that she found me pathetic. My defenses locked even more firmly into place.
It made me think with cold reason. “Hold on.” She was brought in against her will—which Tracer would do such a thing? “You said he made you come. He who?”