Wicked After Midnight(12)
“Why did you never say? And why did you hate it so?”
I scowled behind my hand, but her confusion was genuine.
It was easy to forget that Cherie had grown up poor and freezing in the forests of Freesia after her family fell out of favor with the Tsarina. To her, the caravan was a life of warmth and security. And I had taken that from her when I decided to leave. Breathing in the scent of her hair, I felt a rush of love for the first person who’d reached out to me when I arrived in Criminy’s caravan, naked and confused and newly blood-hungry. She’d hugged me and taken me in like a lost kitten, teaching me how to drink blood from vials without staining my clothes and showing me how to line my eyes with kohl like the other girls. When I looked at her, I saw only my dear friend, the closest thing I’d ever had to a sister. Golden curls, eyes too innocent for a Bludwoman, pink cheeks, and an upturned nose. She looked like an American Girl doll, not a well-disguised wolf.
But to her, the University of Ruin represented untold wealth and opportunity. Most likely, no one in her entire family had ever been to university, much less a woman. I would have to keep reminding myself, before we landed in Paris, that women in Sang didn’t have the sort of freedom I had known back home in Greenville, South Carolina. I hadn’t spoken much of my life before Sang, it was true. But I owed her a better explanation for why I’d forced her to join me on a risky adventure.
“I never told you because I wanted a clean start, wanted to forget how I ended up here. Earth is different. Safer. I guess I thought that once I left home and got to a new city for college, everything would be different. That I would make friends and get a boyfriend and do well in my classes without really trying and that a degree in art history would actually get me a job. I thought life would be as pretty as it looked in the brochures, in the advertisements. I thought that just getting away from my parents would suddenly make everything better.”
“It didn’t?”
“Nope. Kind of the opposite. It just made me more depressed and alone.”
The Pinky gentleman across the carriage watched our whispered closeness with an unhealthy fascination, a creepy gleam growing behind his spectacles. My instinct was to flash my fangs at him and hiss, but that would get us thrown off the carriage, if not killed. Instead, I pulled my head away from Cherie and locked eyes with the older man. After a few moments of my intense glaring, he cleared his throat juicily and looked away. The prim nursemaid beside him sniffed in disdain and sidled closer to her charge, a girl of about seventeen. The girl gave us an innocent, hopeful smile, which I was sure Cherie would return behind closed lips. We might have looked her age, but we were probably ten years older. There were benefits to being bludded, after all.
“Well, I think it’s important that we—”
I never found out what was important. Two sharp thuds outside set the bludmares screaming as the scent of fire reached my sensitive nose. Cherie’s head whipped around, her eyes wide and alert. The coach shuddered with sudden violence, throwing us against each other and the walls. Flames caught at the curtains, black smoke rolling into the stuffy, airless space. The gentleman who’d ogled us earlier threw open the door and froze before tumbling out onto the ground, a flaming arrow lodged in his jabot.
I leaped out, tugging Cherie behind me, trying to make sense of the chaos, while the young girl behind us clutched at her nurse with one hand and the carriage seat with the other and screamed bloody murder. I forgot myself and turned to hiss at her, which only made her more annoyingly hysterical.
A loud screech in the road caught my attention. It was a metal conveyance, shaking and belching smoke as it skidded to a halt. Masked figures with bird beaks and round goggles appeared in the haze, and I started to run in the opposite direction. Cherie was motionless beside me, stiff with fear.
“Run, you idiot!” I hissed.
“I—I can’t.”
The figures hovered closer, dark arms up as if to calm us, as if creepy, masked monsters could ever calm anyone. I grabbed her hand and pulled, but she was rooted to the ground and stronger than she looked. Gritting my teeth, I slapped Cherie’s white face. “You’re a goddamn predator, Cherie. Act like it. Run.”
“I can’t. I’m . . . I’m scared of fire, Demi. You don’t understand. I never told you—”
With a growl, I scooped her up over my shoulder and dodged around the thrashing, burning, screaming bodies of the once-white bludmares to charge into the waist-high grass of the moors. Crossbow arrows thwacked over my head, carrying nets instead of killing points. I tripped and fell face-first into the grass. Cherie slipped out of my grasp and landed with a groan just ahead of me. I couldn’t see her, but the plants up ahead swayed with her passing, her frantic breathing and grunts as clear as the sounds of prey being hunted.