“I know, I know.” His hand on my arm was reassuring, and I hated that he had to comfort me while he was so scared and uncomfortable himself. “I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around this.”

“That makes two of us.”

Why hadn’t I realized until now how little I understood about the hard facts of being a vampire? It never seemed like anything I had to question, before. Maybe my parents weren’t willfully hiding the truth from me; maybe they were simply waiting until I was ready. It hit me that this might’ve been the real reason they’d insisted I attend Evernight Academy. They could have been trying to prepare me to learn the entire truth.

If that were the case, they’d get their wish. “I’ll try and find something out. There must be books in the library. Or I could ask someone who wouldn’t get suspicious—Patrice, maybe. Balthazar would tell me, I know, but he’d figure out that I bit you again. He might not tell my parents, but he might, if he thought it was for our own good.”

“Don’t take any risks,” Lucas said. “We’ll figure this out somehow.”

Learning that truth proved harder than I thought.

“See how easy it is?” Patrice was so happy that I’d asked her to teach me the art of the pedicure, you would’ve thought I was paying her for private tutoring. “Tomorrow we’ll switch to a color more suitable to your skin tone. That coral looks a bit sickly.”

“Oh, great. I mean, that would be great.” I hadn’t counted on having to repaint my toenails for the rest of the school year, but if I could learn something useful, it would be worth it. I began, “It must have been difficult keeping things up in the old days, before, like, nail polish remover and stuff like that.”

“Well, we didn’t have nail polish to remove. But grooming was a challenge. Talcum powder helped a lot.” Patrice sighed, a soft smile on her lips. “Florida water. Scented sachets, too, and perfume on little handkerchiefs that you could tuck in the bosom of your dress.”

“And that drew the guys in?” When she nodded, I pushed it a little further. “So you could, well, bite them?”

“Sometimes.” Her face changed then, shifting into an expression I’d hardly ever seen on Patrice’s face: anger. “The men I met weren’t beaus, you know. They were bidders. Buyers. The balls I went to before the War Between the States were octoroon balls—You don’t even know what those are, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Girls like me—who were part white and part black, pale enough for plantation owners to consider pleasing—a lot of us were sent to live in New Orleans, and we were brought up as proper young ladies. You could almost forget you were a slave.” Patrice stared down at her half-painted toenails, three of which gleamed wetly. “Then, when you got old enough, you could go to octoroon balls so that white men could look you over and buy you from your owner, as a kind of concubine.”

“Patrice, that’s horrible.” I’d never even heard of anything so disgusting.

She simply tossed her head and said airily, “I was changed the night before my first ball. So I went through the entire social season, drinking from man after man. They thought they would use me, but I used them instead. Then I ran away.”

This was the first time Patrice had ever shared anything with me—at least, anything real. I would’ve liked to let her keep talking, so that she could reveal more about her past, but I had to change the subject for Lucas’s sake. “Did you ever drink from the same guy more than once?”

“Hmmm?” Patrice seemed to be coming back from a great distance. “Oh, yes. Beauregard. Fat. Self-satisfied. He could lose two pints and not even feel it, which came in handy.”

“Did anything happen to Beauregard?”

“On the last night of the social season, he fell from his horse and broke his neck. Maybe it’s because he was light-headed from blood loss, but probably he was just drunk. Do you think plum works with my skin tone?”

“Plum looks great on you.”

And just like that, it was over. The open door between us was shut again, and Patrice was again cocooned in her silks and perfumes, safe from having to look at the harshness of her past. I knew I couldn’t ask again without making her suspicious, so the entire conversation had been useless.

And the library? Worse than useless. You would think a library in a vampire school would have some books about vampires, right? But no. The only volumes they had were horror novels (shelved in the Humor section) and serious studies of folklore, more fiction than fact, like the ones we’d read in Mrs. Bethany’s class. Apparently there weren’t any books written by vampires for vampires. As I leaned my head back against a row of encyclopedias, sighing in frustration, I wondered if maybe I ought to break into the market someday. That helped with my potential career choices but not so much with Lucas’s situation.

Fortunately, Lucas felt better in a couple of days. His enhanced senses dulled slower than mine had, but they did eventually get back to normal, so that wasn’t a problem any longer. But there were other changes, too—ones that were harder to understand that felt even more familiar to me.

“Look at this,” Lucas said, as we walked out on the edge of the grounds the weekend after. As I watched, he jumped for the lowest branch of a nearby pine and grabbed it, hanging easily from the branches. Then, slowly, he pushed his legs upward, changing his grip on the branch as he pulled himself up and up, curling around the branch and finally stretching into a handstand, his feet up straight above his head.