“Doesn’t sound like much evidence.” Kate, unconvinced, gunned the motor and sped out down a frontage road that led us out of the city area. “You never ran into the supernatural before, and you put it together from no more than that?”

“Bianca’s hiding part of the truth because she’s trying not to scare you,” Lucas said. “She was the one who helped me after this happened.” He then carefully pulled open the neck of his shirt. There, still dark pink against his skin, were the scars left from my second bite.

“Oh, my God.” Immediately Kate reached across me to touch Lucas’s arm. So she really was a mom after all, even if she didn’t always show it. “We knew this could happen—we knew it—but I told myself it wouldn’t.”

Lucas ducked away, abashed. “Mom. I’m fine.”

“You got away. How did you manage it?”

“I killed one of them—a vampire called Erich, one who had been threatening other human students. We got into an altercation. He had the worst of it. That’s really all there is to say.”

Lucas’s talent at lying was easier to admire when I wasn’t the one he was lying to. Of course, the genius of it was that Lucas wasn’t actually making any of it up. Every word he’d said to his mother was factually true. He’d simply unfolded those facts in a way that led his mother to believe in an alternate sequence of events, one in which Erich had bitten him and I was the sweet, savvy, totally normal girl who had helped him recover afterward.

“You’ve seen what we’re up against.” Kate spoke to me more respectfully than before. Anybody who had helped her son was apparently okay in her eyes. She never looked away from the road as she sped over the badly paved streets, steering us into a smaller suburb, one that looked older and fairly run-down. “This is dangerous work, and you’re not ready for it, but I realize that we have a responsibility to keep you safe. If that demon Mrs. Bethany realizes that you’re helping a member of Black Cross, your life won’t be worth a dime.”

I’d always known that Mrs. Bethany would do a lot to protect her secrets, but I still couldn’t quite believe that she would be willing to kill, much less kill me.

“All that time, all that risk, and what was it for? Because I don’t guess you managed to figure out the big secret after all,” Kate said to Lucas. “Seems like the kind of thing you would’ve mentioned in one of your reports, if you had.”

Wearily, Lucas shook his head. “I didn’t get it. So cut me some slack, okay?”

“Secret?” I wondered if maybe it was something my parents might have mentioned. If I could help Lucas, if there was information I could reveal that wouldn’t hurt my parents or Balthazar, I would do it. “What were you trying to find out at Evernight?”

“This is the first year they ever let humans in like regular students. The Black Cross fighter who got in before, the handful of other humans over the years—those were special cases, exceptions the Evernight vampires made to get their hands on a lot of money and avoid attention. Whatever they’re up to now is different. They let in at least thirty humans. Why did it change?”

Mrs. Bethany had said that “new students” were allowed into Evernight so that we could get a broader perspective upon the world. In reality, that was the last thing she really wanted. Yes, the students were there to learn more about the world, but Mrs. Bethany had another agenda—and for that agenda, having human students at Evernight was a risk. Raquel understood that something was wrong, if not exactly what, and Lucas’s example spoke for itself. The vampires were also forced to hide what they were in one of the few places on earth where they could’ve expected to relax and be themselves. Only a powerful motive could lead Mrs. Bethany to permit such a thing—but what? “I don’t know,” I admitted.

“How could you?” Kate shrugged as she took us down a shady lane. The houses on this street all looked shabby, and one or two of them appeared to be abandoned. She pulled into what appeared to be the rear driveway of one of the abandoned buildings, though I realized quickly it wasn’t a home. It was an old-fashioned meetinghouse, the kind nearly every town in New England possessed, though nobody had held a meeting here for decades at least. The white paint was chipped and water-stained, and at least half the windows were broken. “Just the fact that you kept your head after you learned about the bloodsuckers is more than most people could manage. Lucas is a pro. If he couldn’t figure it out, they buried that secret deep.”

“A pro, huh?” Lucas grinned as we got out of the truck. I got the sense that his mother didn’t praise him much, but he ate it up when she did.

She nodded, and I saw for the first time that her smile and Lucas’s looked a lot alike. “A pro who’s already back on the clock, I’m afraid. We’ve got work to do.”

I wondered what she meant by that. “On the clock?”

Kate caught herself. “I don’t mean you. Bianca. You’ve done enough, and I’m always in your debt. Always. Helping Lucas in that slime pit—maybe saving his life—” She smiled at me as we walked to the back door of the meetinghouse. “I’m not going to repay that by sending you into danger. You’ll stay here. Stay safe. We’ll take care of everything else.”

“By ‘we’ you mean—”

“Black Cross.”

With that, Kate turned the key in the lock and tugged the door open. We stepped into darkness, and I felt a queasy shiver of unease, but my eyes adjusted quickly, allowing me to glimpse the scene inside. Almost a dozen people were gathered together in a long, narrow rectangular room with a wooden floor so old the boards had shrunk enough to separate. A few old benches still lined the walls, the wood so soft and old it peeled. Weapons were laid out upon each bench, as if for an inventory: knives, stakes, and even hatchets. The people inside were a motley crew, each as different from the other as they could be: tall and short; fat, skinny, and muscular; dressed in a dozen different kinds of everyday clothes. A tall black girl who looked no older than Lucas wore an oversized hoodie, and she stood next to an old man with short silvery hair who wore a baggy gray cardigan and reading glasses that dangled from a brown cord. The only thing they all had in common was the way each sighed in relief when they recognized Lucas.