I did not appreciate having my own tactics used against me.
“Jane asked that you deliver it to me by Thursday,” Tina added. “Anyone within a hundred-mile radius, please.”
I was fuming by the time I reached my room. I sat down at my computer, pulled up Google Maps, and was surprised at the number of my old “friends” in the Lexington area. I came up with a list of about a dozen vampires who would exsanguinate their own mothers for a free Netflix membership, and I included the last date of contact with each of them, none of which was in the past three years. And then I wrote Jane an e-mail explaining—in very clear terms—that while I had complied with her request, I did not appreciate being asked to “name names.” I finished just in time to dart across campus to my world literature class.
I may have cheated a little bit and used my vampire speed to cross the expansive campus in a few minutes, but my professor, Dr. Venger, locked the classroom door two minutes before the start time. If you didn’t get through the door before that deadline, you were out of luck.
I loved Dr. Venger.
I slid behind my desk at precisely ten P.M., joining my motley crew of classmates. It surprised me at first that the class included as many human students as undead ones, but it turned out that humans didn’t like waking up at dawn any more than vampires did. Human students were signing up for the classes meant for vampire students in droves, meaning that class schedules for the entire campus were shifting away from the dreaded eight A.M. openers to a more nocturnal arrangement. I wasn’t sure the faculty liked it, but it did lead to students on both sides of the life line spending time together, which made the administration happy.
Cowed by Dr. Venger’s no-nonsense classroom management, the other students quietly filed into their seats and organized their desks. Small, white-haired, and wizened, Dr. Venger walked into the room and up to the podium and began his lecture on The Epic of Gilgamesh without so much as a greeting to the class.
I toyed with the pen I kept tucked into the front pocket of my bag. I had not yet embraced hiding behind laptops and pretending that I was taking notes like my fellow students. But my mind wandered during Dr. Venger’s lecture. I’d responded to Jane’s request with more vitriol than I normally would, even for a Jane-related situation. My gut was still churning with anger and insult and . . . anxiety? I rarely felt anxious. Was it because of my difficulty finding my footing on campus, the possibility of lasting “correction” from the Council? Was it Jamie’s distraction and distance? Or was I just bored with pretending to be a harmless domesticated vampire, having done so to some extent since I’d met Jamie?
Sometime during these gloomy contemplations, I’d focused on the young vampire sitting next to me and stared. And I was still staring. And he seemed to realize I was staring, because he was staring back.
This was what it felt like to be Jane Jameson-Nightengale, socially awkward and ill-prepared to interact with others.
I shuddered.
He wasn’t unpleasant-looking. Late teens to early twenties, with all the markers of the undead: pale, pearlescent skin and bright, expressive, compelling brown eyes. He was also thin, with sandy-brown hair and a trimmed goatee. The eyes were further framed by a pair of thick black glasses, an affectation completely unnecessary to beings with super-vision. He was wearing skinny jeans, a red plaid shirt, and a matching bow tie. I had to wonder whether this was the fashion of his time or he was trying to be ironic like so many of the hipsters on campus.
He smiled, white fangs gleaming, and turned his attention back to Dr. Venger. He took careful notes on the lecture, on a page labeled “Kenton Ridgely” at the top right corner. Each point the professor made was bulleted, with subpoints and Kenton’s own notations about where he might look up further information. He was actually paying attention. In class. Despite the optometric pretentions, I kind of liked this vampire. He was sitting in this class to learn. Did he realize how that set him apart from so many of our peers? So many of these children were wasting their parents’ money, using these four years as stalling time before they had to grow up and face the real world. Even