Lissa shrugged and headed in that direction. "Why not?"
I followed reluctantly. Natalie was nice but also one of the most uninteresting people I knew. Most royals at the school enjoyed a kind of celebrity status, but Natalie had never fit in with that crowd. She was too plain, too uninterested in the politics of the Academy, and too clueless to really navigate them anyway.
Natalie's friends eyed us with a quiet curiosity, but she didn't hold back. She threw her arms around us. Like Lissa, she had jade-green eyes, but her hair was jet black, like Victor's had been before his disease grayed it.
"You're back! I knew you would be! Everyone said you were gone forever, but I never believed that. I knew you couldn't stay away. Why'd you go? There are so many stories about why you left!" Lissa and I exchanged glances as Natalie prattled on. "Camille said one of you got pregnant and went off to have an abortion, but I knew that couldn't be true. Someone else said you went off to hang out with Rose's mom, but I figured Ms. Kirova and Daddy wouldn't have been so upset if you'd turned up there. Did you know we might get to be roommates? I was talking to..."
On and on she chatted, flashing her fangs as she spoke. I smiled politely, letting Lissa deal with the onslaught until Natalie asked a dangerous question.
"What'd you do for blood, Lissa?"
The table regarded us questioningly. Lissa froze, but I immediately jumped in, the lie coming effortlessly to my lips.
"Oh, it's easy. There are a lot of humans who want to do it."
"Really?" asked one of Natalie's friends, wide-eyed.
"Yup. You find 'em at parties and stuff. They're all looking for a fix from something, and they don't really get that a vampire's doing it: most are already so wasted they don't remember anyway." My already vague details dried up, so I simply shrugged in as cool and confident a way as I could manage. It wasn't like any of them knew any better. "Like I said, it's easy. Almost easier than with our own feeders."
Natalie accepted this and than launched into some other topic. Lissa shot me a grateful look.
Ignoring the conversation again, I took in the old faces, trying to figure out who was hanging out with whom and how power had shifted within the school. Mason, sitting with a group of novices, caught my eye, and I smiled. Near him, a group of Moroi royals sat, laughing over something. Aaron and the blond girl sat there too.
"Hey, Natalie," I said, turning around and cutting her off. She didn't seem to notice or mind. "Who's Aaron's new girlfriend?"
"Huh? Oh. Mia Rinaldi." Seeing my blank look, she asked, "Don't you remember her?"
"Should I? Was she here when we left?"
"She's always been here," said Natalie. "She's only a year younger than us."
I shot a questioning look at Lissa, who only shrugged.
"Why is she so pissed off at us?" I asked. "Neither of us know her."
"I don't know," answered Natalie. "Maybe she's jealous about Aaron. She wasn't much of anybody when you guys left. She got really popular really fast. She isn't royal or anything, but once she started dating Aaron, she - "
"Okay, thanks," I interrupted. "It doesn't really - "
My eyes lifted up from Natalie's face to Jesse Zeklos's, just as he passed by our table. Ah, Jesse. I'd forgotten about him. I liked flirting with Mason and some of the other novices, but Jesse was in an entirely different category. You flirted with the other guys simply for the sake of flirting. You flirted with Jesse in the hopes of getting semi-naked with him. He was a royal Moroi, and he was so hot, he should have worn a warning: flammable sign. He met my eyes and grinned.
"Hey Rose, welcome back. You still breaking hearts?"
"Are you volunteering?"
His grin widened. "Let's hang out sometime and find out. If you ever get parole."
He kept walking, and I watched him admiringly. Natalie and her friends stared at me in awe. I might not be a god in the Dimitri sense, but with this group, Lissa and I were gods - or at least former gods - of another nature.
"Oh my gawd," exclaimed one girl. I didn't remember her name. "That was Jesse."
"Yes," I said, smiling. "It certainly was."
"I wish I looked like you," she added with a sigh.
Their eyes fell on me. Technically, I was half-Moroi, but my looks were human. I'd blended in well with humans during our time away, so much so that I'd barely thought about my appearance at all. Here, among the slim and small-chested Moroi girls, certain features - meaning my larger br**sts and more defined h*ps - stood out. I knew I was pretty, but to Moroi boys, my body was more than just pretty: it was sexy in a risqué way. Dhampirs were an exotic conquest, a novelty all Moroi guys wanted to "try."