Dimitri must have felt the same way. "What happened?" he asked.
"I-I don't know." I felt like I was trying to wake up, like I'd been asleep for two days. I needed to remember something.
Lissa. Something with Lissa.
My head felt funny. Not pain or dizziness, but...the voice, I realized. The voice urging me toward Dimitri was gone. That wasn't to say I didn't want him anymore because hey, seeing him there in those sexy pajama bottoms, with that brown hair spilling over the side of face was pretty fine. But I no longer had that outside influence pushing me to him. Weird.
He frowned, no longer turned on. After several moments of thought, he reached over and picked up the necklace. The instant his fingers touched it, I saw desire sweep over him again. He slid his other hand onto my hip, and suddenly, that burning lust slammed back into me. My stomach went queasy while my skin started to prickle and grow warm again. My breathing became heavy. His lips moved toward mine again.
Some inner part of me fought through.
"Lissa," I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut. "I have to tell you something about Lissa. But I can't...remember...I feel so strange..."
"I know." Still holding onto me, he rested his cheek against my forehead. "There's something...something here..." He pulled his face away, and I opened my eyes. "This necklace. That's the one Prince Victor gave you?"
I nodded and could see the sluggish thought process trying to wake up behind his eyes. Taking a deep breath, he removed his hand from my hip and pushed himself away.
"What are you doing?" I exclaimed. "Come back..."
He looked like he wanted to - very badly - but instead he climbed out of the bed. He and the necklace moved away from me. I felt like he'd ripped part of me away, but at the same time, I had that startling sensation of waking up, like I could think clearly once more without my body making all the decisions.
On the other hand, Dimitri still wore a look of animal passion on him, and it seemed to take a great deal of effort for him to walk across the room. He reached the window and managed to open it one-handed. Cold air blasted in, and I rubbed my hands over my arms for warmth.
"What are you going to - ?" The answer hit me, and I sprang out of bed, just as the necklace flew out the window. "No! Do you know how much that must have - ?"
The necklace disappeared, and I no longer felt like I was waking up. I was awake. Painfully, startlingly so.
I took in my surroundings. Dimitri's room. Me naked. The rumpled bed.
But all that was nothing compared to what hit me next.
"Lissa!" I gasped out. It all came back, the memories and the emotions. And, in fact, her held-back emotions suddenly poured into me - at staggering levels. More terror. Intense terror. Those feelings wanted to suck me back into her body, but I couldn't let them. Not quite yet. I fought against her, needing to stay here. With the words coming out in a rush, I told Dimitri everything that had happened.
He was in motion before I finished, putting on clothes and looking every bit like a badass god. Ordering me to get dressed, he tossed me a sweatshirt with Cyrillic writing on it to wear over the skimpy dress.
I had a hard time following him downstairs; he made no effort to slow for me this time. Calls were made when we got there. Orders shouted. Before long, I ended up in the guardians' main office with him. Kirova and other teachers were there. Most of the campus's guardians. Everyone seemed to speak at once. All the while, I felt Lissa's fear, felt her moving farther and farther away.
I yelled at them to hurry up and do something, but no one except Dimitri would believe my story about her abduction until someone retrieved Christian from the chapel and then verified Lissa really wasn't on campus.
Christian staggered in, supported by two guardians. Dr. Olendzki appeared shortly thereafter, checking him out and wiping blood away from the back of his head.
Finally, I thought, something would happen.
"How many Strigoi were there?" one of the guardians asked me.
"How in the world did they get in?" muttered someone else.
I stared. "Wh - ? There weren't any Strigoi."
Several sets of eyes stared at me. "Who else would have taken her?" asked Ms. Kirova primly. "You must have seen it wrong through the...vision."
"No. I'm positive. It was...they were...guardians."
"She's right," mumbled Christian, still under the doctor's ministrations. He winced as she did something to the back of his head. "Guardians."
"That's impossible," someone said.
"They weren't school guardians." I rubbed my forehead, fighting hard to keep from leaving the conversation and going back to Lissa. My irritation grew. "Will you guys get moving? She's getting farther away!"
"You're saying a group of privately retained guardians came in and kidnapped her?" The tone in Kirova's voice implied I was playing some kind of joke.