Schuyler smiled, feeling braver now that she had backup. “It’s hard to do. It’s like pretending global warming doesn’t exist.” She would pay for that comment later, she knew. There would be pebbles in her breakfast cereal. Black tar on her sheets. Or the newest inconvenience—the disappearance of yet another of her swiftly dwindling possessions. Already she was missing her mother’s locket, her leather gloves, and a beloved dog-eared copy of Kafka’s The Trial, inscribed on the first page with the initials “J. F.”
Schuyler would be the first to admit that the second guest bedroom in the Forces’ mansion (the first remained reserved for visiting dignitaries) was hardly the cupboard under the stairs. Her room was beautifully decorated and sumptuously appointed with everything a girl could want: a four-poster queen-size bed with a pillowy duvet, closets full of designer clothes, a high-end entertainment center, dozens of toys for Beauty, her bloodhound, and a new featherlight MacBook Air. But if her new home was rich in material gifts, it lacked the charm of the old one.
She missed her old room, with its Mountain Dew–yellow walls and rickety desk. She missed the dusty shrouded living room. She missed Hattie and Julius, who had been with the family since she was an infant. She missed her grandfather, of course. But most of all, she missed her freedom.
“You okay?” Bliss asked, nudging her. Schuyler had returned from Venice with a new address and an unexpected ally. While she and Bliss had always been friendly, now they were almost inseparable.
“Yeah. I’m used to it. I could take her in a cage fight.” Schuyler smiled. Seeing Bliss at school was one of the small reprieves of happiness that Duchesne afforded.
She took the winding back stairs, following the stream of people heading in the same direction, when out of the corner of her eye she saw the barest flicker and knew. It was him. She didn’t have to look to know he was among the crowd of students walking the opposite way. She could always sense him, as if her nerves were fine-tuned antennae receptors that picked up whenever he was near. Maybe it was the vampire in her, giving her the ability to tell when another was close by, or maybe it had nothing to do with her otherworldly powers at all.
Jack.
His eyes were focused straight ahead, as if he never even saw her, never registered her presence. His sleek blond hair, the same translucent shade as his sister’s, was slicked back from his proud forehead; and unlike the other boys around him, dressed in varying degrees of sloppiness, he looked regal in a blazer and tie. He was so handsome it was hard for Schuyler to breathe. But just as at the town house—Schuyler refused to call it home—Jack ignored her.
She snuck one more glance his way and then hurried up the stairs. Class had already started when she arrived. Schuyler tried to be as unobtrusive as possible as she walked, out of habit, toward the back seats by the window. Oliver Hazard-Perry was seated there, bent over his notebook.
But she caught herself just in time and moved across the room to sit next to the clanging radiator, without saying hello to her best friend.
Charles Force had made it clear: now that she was under his roof, she would have to follow his rules. The first rule was that Schuyler was forbidden to see her grandfather. The animosity between Charles and Lawrence ran deep, and not only because Lawrence had displaced Charles’s position in the Conclave.
“I don’t want him filling your head with lies,” Charles had told her. “He may rule the Coven, but he has no power in my house. If you disobey me, I promise you will regret it.”
The second rule of living at the Forces’ was that she was forbidden to associate with Oliver. Charles had been apoplectic when he’d discovered that Schuyler had made Oliver (her designated Conduit) her human familiar. “First of all, you are much too young. Secondly, it is anathema. Distasteful. Conduits are servants. They are not—they do not fulfill the services of familiars. You must take a new human immediately and sever all relations with this boy.”
If pressed, she would grudgingly admit that Charles was probably right. Oliver was her best friend, and she had marked him as her own, had taken his blood into hers, and there had been consequences to her actions. Sometimes she wished they could go back to the way they were before everything became so complicated.
Schuyler had no idea why Charles would care whom she made her familiar anyway, since the Forces had done away with the old-fashioned practice of keeping human Conduits. But she followed the rules to the letter. As far as anyone could see, she had absolutely no contact with Lawrence, and had refrained from performing the Sacred Kiss with Oliver.
There were so many things in her new life that she could and couldn’t do.
But there were some places where the rules did not apply. Somewhere that Charles had no power. Somewhere Schuyler could be free.
That’s what secret hiding places were for.
TWO