In an attempt to be tactful, I shifted my books to one side so she could sit next to me at the table and began, “You know, I used to cut hair for my friends in my hometown—”

“I know my hair looks crappy.” Raquel didn’t even look at me as her backpack thudded onto the floor. “And, no, I don’t want you or anybody to fix it for me. I hope it looks crappy. Then maybe he won’t keep looking at me.”

“Who? Erich?” Lucas said, immediately tense.

Raquel sank into her seat. “Who do you think? Yeah, Erich.”

Until then, I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t the only one Erich was staring at. I’d interrupted Erich in the middle of a hunt; he’d made up his mind to drink Raquel’s blood, maybe—maybe even to hurt her. Most vampires never killed, Mom and Dad said. Was Erich the exception to that rule?

Surely not, I thought. Mrs. Bethany wouldn’t let anybody like that in Evernight.

As Lucas quickly changed the subject, asking Raquel for a copy of the study sheets for my dad’s biology class, I looked at him and felt, once again, the surge of longing—of possessiveness—that I always knew in his presence. Mine, I thought. I always want you to be mine.

I’d always thought that was emotion talking, but maybe it was something else. Maybe that need to claim someone else was part of being a vampire and therefore more powerful than any human longing.

Erich certainly didn’t care about Raquel the way I did for Lucas, but if he felt one-tenth as much possessiveness toward her as I did toward Lucas—

—then there was no way Erich was done with Raquel yet.

That night, in the bathroom, I ran into Raquel again. She was shaking the sleeping pills I’d recommended into her palm—four or five of them. “Watch it,” I said. “You don’t want to take too many.”

Raquel’s face was bleak. “And never wake up again? Doesn’t sound that awful to me.” She sighed. “Trust me, Bianca, this isn’t nearly enough to kill anybody.”

“It’s more than you need to sleep.”

“Not with the sounds on the roof.” She popped the pills into her mouth, then bent over to gulp a couple of swallows of water directly from the cold tap of the sink. After wiping her face with the back of her hand, Raquel continued, “They’re still there. Louder now, I think. All the time. And I’m not imagining them.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “I believe you.”

It was just something to say, but Raquel’s eyes got wide. “You do?” Her voice was no more than a whisper. “Really? You’re not just saying it?”

“Really, I believe you.”

To my shock, Raquel’s eyes teared up. She quickly blinked them away, but I knew what I’d seen. “Nobody ever believed me, before.”

I stepped a little closer. “Believed you about what?”

She shook her head, refusing to answer. But as she walked past me to go to her own room, she touched my arm—just for a moment. From Raquel, that was almost like a bear hug. I had no idea what troubled her in her past, but I knew that Erich had her spooked. Probably he had no intention of actually hurting her, but he seemed like the kind of guy who would enjoy making her afraid.

That, at least, I could do something about.

Later that evening, well after curfew, I got up and slipped into jeans, sneakers, and my warm black sweater. My black knit cap slipped over my head and hid my red hair. Briefly I considered painting black smudges across my cheeks and nose, like cat burglars do in the movies, but I decided that was overkill.

“Going out for a snack?” Patrice mumbled into her pillow. “The squirrels are hibernating. Easy meal.”

“I’m just looking around,” I insisted, but Patrice was already asleep again.

The night air was cold when I lifted myself onto the windowsill, but my dark gloves and sweater kept me from shivering. Once I’d balanced myself on the tree branch, I began stretching my arms to catch the higher limbs, then bracing my feet against the bark of the trunk to find purchase. Some branches creaked from my weight, but nothing broke. Within a few minutes, I had made it to the roof.

The roof of the lower part of the building, I mean. A few feet away, the south tower reached up toward the night sky; if I craned my neck, I could even make out the darkened windows of my parents’ apartment. Across the way was the vast north tower. Between was the shingled roof of the main building—not a single flat surface, but one that sloped at different angles, reflecting the fact that the school had been built slowly, over centuries, and not every new addition perfectly matched the rest. It looked a little like a stormy sea with waves that jutted up and down, all of them gleaming blue-black in the moonlight.

Gritting my teeth, I crawled up the slope nearest me and made sure to move as quietly as I could. If anybody was out for a snack, it wouldn’t matter if they saw me or not. However, if anybody was up here for another reason, I wanted the advantage of surprise.

I was scared to death, even though I kept telling myself that there was really no reason to be afraid. I knew that I was no good at confrontations; when challenged, I usually wanted to curl up into a ball. Still, somebody had to stand up for Raquel, and it looked like I was the only one who could. So I ignored the butterflies in my stomach and told myself to deal.

I tried to imagine the layout of the rooms below, doing my best to figure out where Raquel’s room would be. She was well down the hall from me. The room I shared with Patrice was below the south tower, but Raquel wouldn’t have that same luxury. No, somebody could stand right on top of her room, only a few feet above her sleeping head.