I gave Lucas the wide-eyed look that means, Shut up, will you? He looked appropriately apologetic. Obviously, he’d nearly said you guys went underground—in other words, he had come close to referring to me as a vampire in front of Dana and Raquel. It had been only a slip of the tongue, but that was all it would take.

Luckily, neither Dana nor Raquel had caught it. Raquel said, “So vampires fooled everybody into not believing in them. That meant they could move more freely—and that Black Cross wouldn’t be as powerful anymore. Right?”

“You got it, smarty-pants.” Dana frowned at the road ahead of us. “Damn, but Kate’s got a lead foot. Does she want us all to get speeding tickets? We can’t break formation!”

Lucas pretended he didn’t hear her bitching about his mother. “Anyway, we don’t get big grants from the crown anymore. There are people who know what we do. Some of those people have money. They keep us afloat. That’s pretty much how it is.”

I imagined Lucas as the figure he might have been in the Middle Ages—resplendent in a suit of armor, honored for his hard work and bravery with feasts in the greatest courts in the land. Then I realized how much he would’ve hated that, dressing up and making nice at fancy parties.

No, I decided, he belongs right here, right now. With me.

“Hey,” Dana said. “At eleven o’clock. Check it out.”

Then I saw what she was calling our attention to: the shape of Evernight Academy on the horizon.

We weren’t that close. Evernight was far from any highway, and Kate and Eduardo weren’t foolhardy enough to drag us onto Mrs. Bethany’s turf again. But Evernight had a distinctive silhouette, since it was an enormous Gothic building with towers high up in the hills of Massachusetts. Even at this distance, with the school no more than a craggy outline, we recognized it. We were far enough away that the damage from the fire was invisible. It was as if Black Cross had failed to touch the school at all.

“Still standing,” Dana said. “Dammit.”

“We’ll get it someday.” Raquel flattened one hand against her window, like she wanted to punch through the glass and knock the school down herself.

I thought of my mother and father, and it occurred to me that maybe they were nearby. This moment, right now, was possibly as close as I would ever be to my parents again.

I’d become so angry with them during my last days at Evernight. They had never told me that the wraiths played a role in my birth, or that they might be coming for me someday because of that. For a year I’d been literally haunted by ghosts that seemed to think they owned me, and I still didn’t know what that might mean. My parents had also refused to tell me if I had any choice other than becoming a full vampire someday. After meeting some of the vampires who truly were insane killers, I’d decided to try to find out whether it was possible for me to live out a normal life as a human being.

I still don’t know the truth. What’s going to happen to me? Not having any answers was so terrifying that I tried not to think about it, but dark uncertainty tugged at me nearly all the time now.

Yet as I looked up at the school, both my fear and my anger faded. I remembered only how loving Mom and Dad were and how close we’d been not that long ago. So many things had happened to me just in the past couple of days, and none of it seemed entirely real if I couldn’t tell my parents about it. I felt a powerful, almost overwhelming urge to leap out of the van and run toward Evernight, calling for them.

But I knew I could never go back to the ways things were before. So much had changed. I’d been forced to choose a side, and I’d chosen humanity, life—and Lucas.

Lucas caught a lock of my hair between his fingers, gently testing whether or not I needed comfort. I leaned my head against his shoulder, and for a while we rode on without anybody talking, only the music playing. Every mile marker we passed reminded me of how far we had come from the last home I’d had and the person I used to be.

We stopped to get gasoline and take bathroom breaks occasionally, but we took a longer rest only once during the drive, for lunch.

While Dana and Raquel joined the horde of people crowding into a fast-food Mexican place, Lucas and I begged off to walk to a diner down the street. Of course we wanted a few minutes alone, but even more than I needed to be with Lucas, I needed to eat—more specifically, to drink.

The first thing Lucas said when we were walking away from the crowd along the side of the road, sort of alone at last, was, “How hungry are you?”

“So hungry I can hear your heart beating.” And it seemed to me I could taste Lucas’s blood on my tongue. Probably better not to mention that. The sunlight bore down on me hard, harsh now that I’d been without blood for several days. I’d never done without for so long before.

“You think the diner—maybe the raw meat would have some blood, we could sneak back there—”

“That wouldn’t be enough. Besides, I know what to do.” I stood still, watching the swaying grass beside the highway, which lashed back and forth in the currents of passing cars. A robin pecked at the dirt, searching for worms amid the bottle caps and cigarette butts.

“Bianca?”

I could see nothing but the robin and think of nothing but its blood. Bird’s blood is thin, but it’s hot.

“Don’t watch,” I whispered. My jaw ached. My fangs slid into my mouth, sharp points scraping against my lips and tongue. Though we stood in the brilliant sunshine, everything around me seemed to go dark, as though the robin were in a spotlight, moving in slow motion.