Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #25)(49)

“She looks different these days, huh?” I asked once we were out of earshot.

“Yeah. I know you said she’s been worse, but it was something else seeing it.”

“And this was one of her good nights.”

“God, Ollie, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Don’t. She’s here, and we’re here, and we’re just going to keep getting through.”

We stopped when we got to the door of my car. “It was nice to see you tonight,” Will said. “How about we go for a drive tomorrow? We can go back to that place in the woods.”

Well, it wasn’t a candlelit dinner, but for now that was fine. I could take it. Especially given how much I’d enjoyed the last time we went to the woods, a few days before. “Yeah. All right. Lock it in.”

He studied me, and all at once I got what he meant about wishing he could peek inside someone’s mind.

“Can’t wait.”



“What was this, exactly?”

Mr. Theo stood over Will’s desk, holding up the pile of essays he’d marked over the break. He didn’t look angry as much as exasperated. I watched from across the class. The biweekly installment of Will vs. Mr. Theo was like tuning in to a soap opera you’d been following for months. It was trashy, but the dialogue was quick, and the drama was high, and you couldn’t quite look away even if you had more important things to be doing.

Will cocked his head to one side. “Looks like my essay to me. You asked us to hand them in before Winter break, don’t you remember?”

Matt snickered at the back of the classroom.

“I asked for an essay on symbolism and literary techniques. You gave me an essay on how Lord of the Flies is an allegory for Trump’s America.”

“An allegory is a technique! You said so yourself, sir, just last lesson.”

“One technique, in an essay that was supposed to discuss four at a minimum. And it quite clearly isn’t one of the techniques the author employed to tell his story, as Lord of the Flies was written approximately a century ago.”

Will glanced over his shoulder at Matt and smirked. “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Theo, maybe this Golding guy was telepathic.”

“You mean clairvoyant. Will, if you want to use a homework task as an outlet for a political rant, there are many appropriate subjects. As it stands, English lit is not one of them. Rewrite it. Get it back to me Monday.”

“Someone’s a republican,” Will muttered over the lunch bell, not quietly enough so that he couldn’t be heard. Mr. Theo chose to ignore it.

Will shot me the briefest look as he went off with Matt. Maybe to see if I was laughing, or shaking my head. Honestly, I was kind of doing both.

I headed to the cafeteria more slowly, drifting along while I thought about the drive Will and I were going to take after school. Having something like that to look forward to made the days seem so much faster.

“Niamh’s been keeping a secret,” Juliette said in a singsong voice when I finally sat down at the lunch table.

Niamh looked up, alarmed. “Not now.”

“Why not?”

“Darnell’s gonna be here in, like, thirty seconds.”

“So spit it out.”

Niamh half-stood in her chair to eye the basketball guys, who were still filling their trays, then she sat abruptly and splayed her hands out on the table. “Okay. So we stop talking about this as soon as the guys get here, but I got signed by Enchantée Models. I found out in first period.”

“What?” I asked.

“Ho-lee shit, Niamh,” Lara said. “For real?”

“Yes, for real. An agency for real wanted me.” There was an edge to her voice, but Lara didn’t rise to the challenge. She just lifted her root beer in a one-sided toast.

“And they have strong ties in New York,” Niamh went on, “so they said I might get a casting up there sometime.”

“Niamh, that’s amazing,” I said.

Niamh was mostly looking at Lara, though. I’d thought that bad blood was behind them, but apparently not quite yet. If Niamh was looking for an apology, though, I wasn’t sure if she’d get one. “Also,” she said, “I’ve decided I’m not going to diet for it.”

Lara met her eyes now. I mean, she wasn’t dumb. She got the point. But she just waited for Niamh to go on.

“I didn’t tell you guys because I didn’t really know how to bring it up, but I found out a little while ago I have polycystic ovary syndrome,” Niamh said. “I was getting really sick, and I wasn’t losing weight even when I was exercising a ton, so I ate a lot less, and it made me really exhausted. And PCOS can make you feel exhausted to begin with, so I was making the problem worse by over-dieting.”

“Oh, Niamh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Juliette said. “How did you know? Like, did you get tested because you couldn’t lose weight?”

“No. I got tested because I kept skipping … periods.” She lowered her voice, and her eyes flashed toward me as she said it. Her mouth twisted, and I realized she was embarrassed to talk about this with me there. I wasn’t sure if I should be looking away like I hadn’t heard, or something, but I decided that’d be significantly weirder and settled for nodding. “Like, I’d get it one month, then the next few it’d disappear. And obviously I couldn’t be pregnant. But Mom has it, too, so she had a hunch. Turns out she was right.”