CHAPTER 2
Adrian
“DON’T TAKE THIS THE WRONG WAY, but you look like crap.”
I lifted my head from the table and squinted one eye open. Even with sunglasses on—indoors—the light was still almost too much for the pounding in my head. “Really?” I said. “There’s a right way to take that?”
Rowena Clark fixed me with an imperious look that was so like something Sydney might have done. It caused a lurch in my chest. “You can take it constructively.” Rowena’s nose wrinkled. “This is a hangover, right? Because, I mean, that implies you were sober at one point. And from the gin factory I can smell, I’m not so sure.”
“I’m sober. Mostly.” I dared to take off the sunglasses to get a better look at her. “Your hair’s blue.”
“Teal,” she corrected, touching it self-consciously. “And you saw it two days ago.”
“Did I?” Two days ago would’ve been our last mixed media class here at Carlton College. I could barely remember two hours ago. “Well. It’s possible I actually wasn’t so sober then. But it looks nice,” I added, hoping that would spare me some disapproval. It didn’t.
In truth, my sober days at school were about fifty-fifty lately. Considering I was making it to class at all, though, I thought I deserved some credit. When Sydney had left—no, been taken—I hadn’t wanted to come here. I hadn’t wanted to go anywhere or do anything that wasn’t finding her. I’d curled up in my bed for days, waiting and reaching out to her through the world of dreams with spirit. Only I hadn’t connected. No matter what time of day I tried, I never seemed to find her asleep. It made no sense. No one could stay awake that long. Drunk people were hard to connect to since alcohol dampened spirit’s effects and blocked the mind, but somehow I doubted she and her Alchemist captors were having nonstop cocktail parties.
I might have doubted myself and my own abilities, especially after I’d used medication to turn spirit off for a while. But my magic had eventually come back in full force, and I’d had no difficulties reaching out to others in their dreams. Maybe I was inept at a lot of other things in life, but I was still hands down the most skilled dream-walking spirit user I knew. The problem was, I only knew a few other spirit users, period, so there wasn’t a lot of advice I could get on why I wasn’t reaching Sydney. All Moroi vampires use some sort of elemental magic. Most specialize in one of the four physical elements: earth, air, water, or fire. Only a handful of us use spirit, and there’s no well-documented history of it like there is of the other elements. There were a lot of theories, but no one knew for sure why I wasn’t reaching Sydney.
My professor’s assistant dropped a stack of stapled papers in front of me and an identical one in front of Rowena, jarring me out of my thoughts. “What’s this?”
“Um, your final exam,” said Rowena, rolling her eyes. “Let me guess. You don’t remember this either? Or me offering to study with you?”
“Must have been an off day for me,” I muttered, flipping uneasily through the pages.
Rowena’s chastising expression turned to one of compassion, but whatever else she might have said was swallowed by our professor’s orders to be quiet and get to work. I stared at the exam and wondered if I could fake my way through it. Part of what had dragged me out of bed and back to college was knowing how much education meant to Sydney. She’d always been envious of the opportunity I had, an opportunity her controlling asshole dad had denied her. When I’d realized that I couldn’t find her right away—and believe me, I’d tried plenty of mundane ways, along with the magical ones—I’d resolved to myself that I’d carry on and do what she would have wanted: finish this semester at college.
Admittedly, I hadn’t been the most dedicated of students. Since most of my classes were introductory art ones, my professors were usually good about giving credit as long as you turned something in. That was lucky for me because “something” was probably the nicest description for some of the crap pieces I’d created recently. I’d maintained a passing grade—barely—but this exam might do me in. These questions were all or nothing, right or wrong. I couldn’t just half-ass a drawing or painting and count on points for effort.
As I began making my best attempts at answering questions on contour drawing and deconstructed landscapes, I felt the dark edges of depression pulling me down. And it wasn’t just because I was likely going to fail the class. I was also going to fail Sydney and her high expectations of me. But really, what was one class when I’d already failed her in so many other ways? If our roles had been reversed, she probably would’ve found me by now. She was smarter and more resourceful. She could’ve done the extraordinary. I couldn’t even handle the ordinary.
I turned in the exam an hour later and hoped I hadn’t just wasted an entire semester in the process. Rowena had finished early and was waiting for me outside the classroom. “You want to get something to eat?” she asked. “My treat.”
“No thanks. I’ve got to go meet my cousin.”
Rowena regarded me warily. “You aren’t driving yourself, are you?”
“I’m sober now, thank you very much,” I told her. “But if it makes you feel better, no, I’m taking the bus.”
“Then I guess this is it, huh? Last day of class.”
I supposed it was, I realized with a start. I had a couple other classes, but this was my only one with her. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again,” I said valiantly.
“I hope so,” she said, eyes filled with concern. “You’ve got my number. Or at least you used to. I’ll be around this summer. Give me and Cassie a call if you want to hang out … or if there’s anything you want to talk about. … I know you’ve had some rough things to deal with lately. …”
“I’ve dealt with rougher,” I lied. She didn’t know the half of it, and there was no way she could, not as an ordinary human. I knew she thought Sydney had broken up with me, and it killed me to see Rowena’s pity. I could hardly correct her, though. “And I’ll definitely get in touch, so you’d better sit by your phone. See you around, Ro.”
She gave me a half-hearted wave as I walked off toward the nearest campus bus stop. It wasn’t that far away, but I found myself sweating by the time I reached it. It was May in Palm Springs, and our fleeting spring was being trampled into the ground by summer’s hot and sweltering approach. I popped the sunglasses back on as I waited and tried to ignore the hipster couple smoking beside me. Cigarettes, at least, were one vice I hadn’t returned to since Sydney went away, but it was hard sometimes. Very hard.
To distract myself, I opened up my bag and peered inside at a small statue of a golden dragon. I rested my hand on his back, feeling his tiny scales. No artist could’ve created such a perfect work of art because he wasn’t actually a sculpture. He was a real dragon—well, a callistana, to be precise, which was a type of benign demon—that Sydney had summoned. He’d bonded to her and to me, but only she had the ability to transform him between living and frozen forms. Unfortunately for Hopper here, he’d been trapped in this state when she was abducted, meaning he was stuck in it. According to Sydney’s magical mentor, Jackie Terwilliger, Hopper was technically still alive but living a pretty miserable existence without food and activity. I took him everywhere I went and didn’t know if contact with me meant anything to him. What he really needed was Sydney, and I couldn’t blame him. I needed her too.
I’d been telling Rowena the truth: I was sober now. And that was by design. The long bus ride ahead gave me the perfect opportunity to seek Sydney. Even though I no longer tried to reach out to her in dreams as voraciously as I once had, I still made a point to sober up a few times a day and search. As soon as the bus was moving and I was settled into my seat, I drew upon the spirit magic within me, exalting briefly in the glorious way it made me feel. It was a double-edged joy, though, one that was tempered by the knowledge that spirit was slowly driving me insane.
Insane is such an ugly word, a voice in my head said. Think of it as obtaining a new look at reality.
I winced. The voice in my head wasn’t my conscience or anything like that. It was my dead Aunt Tatiana, former queen of the Moroi. Or, well, it was spirit making me hallucinate her voice. I used to hear her when my mood dropped to particularly low places. Now, ever since Sydney had left, this phantom Aunt Tatiana had become a recurring companion. The bright side—if you could even look at it that way—was that some of the bipolar side effects of spirit had become less frequent. It was as though spirit’s madness had shifted form. Was it better to have mental conversations with an imagined deceased relative than to be subject to wildly dramatic mood swings? I honestly wasn’t sure.
Go away, I told her. You aren’t real. Besides, it’s time to look for Sydney.
Once I’d connected with the magic, I stretched my senses out, searching for Sydney—the person I knew better than anyone else on this earth. Finding someone asleep whom I knew only a little would’ve been easy. Finding her—if she were asleep—would’ve been effortless. But I made no contact and eventually let go of the magic. She either wasn’t asleep or was still blocked from me. Defeated once again, I found a flask of vodka in my bag and settled in on it as I waited out the ride to Vista Azul.