Silver Shadows (3 page)

And I’d blown it off.

Bits of conversation came back to me now, her telling me the day and time, and me promising I’d come and support her. She’d even made a point to remind me the last time I’d seen her this week. I’d noted what she said and then went out to celebrate Tequila Tuesday at a bar near my apartment. Saying her show had slipped my mind was an understatement.

“Crap, I’m sorry, Jailbait. I tried texting. …” I lifted up my phone to show them, except it was the vodka flask I picked up instead. I hastily shoved it back in the bag.

“We had to turn our phones off during the show,” explained Neil. He was the third dhampir in the group, a recent addition to Palm Springs. He’d grown on me over time, maybe because he was suffering from his own heartache. He was head over heels for a dhampir girl who’d dropped off the face of the earth, though unlike Sydney, Olive Sinclair’s silence was most likely from personal baggage and not Alchemist abduction.

“Well … how it’d go then?” I attempted. “I bet your stuff was awesome, right?”

I felt so incredibly stupid, I could hardly stand it. Maybe I couldn’t fight against what the Alchemists had done to Sydney. Maybe I couldn’t prepare for an exam. But for God’s sake, I should’ve at least been able to make it to one girl’s fashion show! All I had to do was show up, sit there, and applaud. I’d failed at even that, and the weight of it was suddenly crushing. A black haze filled my mind, weighing me down, making me hate everything and everyone—myself most of all. It was no wonder I couldn’t save Sydney. I couldn’t even take care of myself.

You don’t need to
, Aunt Tatiana whispered in my mind.
I’ll take care of you.

A spark of compassion showed in Jill’s eyes as she sensed the dark mood coming on. “It was great. Don’t worry—we’ll show you pictures. They had a professional photographer doing everything, and it’ll go online.”

I tried to swallow back that darkness and managed a tense smile. “Glad to hear it. Well, how about we all go out and celebrate then? Dinner’s on me.”

Jill’s face fell. “Angeline and I are eating with a study group. I mean, maybe I could cancel. Exams are still a month away, so I could always—”

“Forget it,” I said, getting to my feet. “Someone in this bond needs to be ready for exams. Go have fun. I’ll catch you later.”

No one tried to stop me, but Trey Juarez soon fell in step with me. He was perhaps the oddest member of our circle: a human who’d once been part of a group of vampire hunters. He’d broken ties with them, both because they were psycho and because he’d fallen—against all reason—for Angeline. Those two were the only ones in our little group with any semblance
of a happy love life, and I knew they tried to downplay it for the rest of us miserable souls.

“And how exactly are you going to get home?” asked Trey.

“Who says I’m going home?” I retorted.

“Me. You have no business going out and partying. You look like crap.”

“You’re the second person to tell me that today.”

“Well, then, maybe you’ll start listening,” he said, steering me toward the student parking lot. “Come on, I’ll drive.”

It was an easy offer for him to make because he was my roommate.

Things hadn’t started out that way. He’d been a boarder at Amberwood, living at school with the others. His former group, the Warriors of Light, had the same hang-ups the Alchemists had about humans and vampires interacting. Whereas the Alchemists dealt with this by covering up the existence of vampires from ordinary humans, the Warriors took a much more savage approach and hunted vampires. They claimed they only went after Strigoi, but they were no friends to Moroi or dhampirs either.

When Trey’s father had found out about Angeline, he’d taken a different approach than Sydney’s father. Rather than kidnapping his son and making him disappear without a trace, Mr. Juarez had simply disowned Trey and cut off all his funding. Lucky for Trey, tuition had already been paid for through the end of the school year. Room and board had not, and so the Amberwood dorm had turned Trey out a few months ago. He’d shown up on my doorstep, offering to pay me rent with his meager coffee shop earnings so that he could finish high school at Amberwood. I’d welcomed him in and refused the
money, knowing it was what Sydney would’ve wanted. My only condition had been that I had better never, ever come home and find him making out with Angeline on my couch.

“I suck,” I said, after several minutes of uncomfortable silence into our drive.

“Is that some kind of vampire joke?” Trey asked.

I shot him a look. “You know what I mean. I screwed up. No one asks that much of me. Not anymore. All I had to do was remember to go to her fashion show, and I blew it.”

“You’ve had a lot of crap going on,” he said diplomatically.

“So has everyone else. Hell, look at you. Your whole family denies your existence and did their best to get you kicked out of school. You found a workaround, kept up your grades and sports, and managed to nab some scholarships in the process,” I sighed. “Meanwhile, I may have failed an introductory art class. A few of them, actually, if I’ve got more exams coming this week—which seems likely. I don’t even know.”

“Yeah, but I’ve still got Angeline. And that makes it worth putting up with all the other crap. Whereas you …” Trey couldn’t finish, and I saw pain flash over his tanned features.

My friends here in Palm Springs knew about Sydney and me. They were the only ones in the Moroi world (or the human world that shadowed the Moroi) who knew about our relationship. They felt bad for what had happened for my sake and also for hers. They’d loved Sydney too. Not like I did, of course, but she was the kind of person who was fiercely loyal and inspired deep bonds in her friends.

“I miss her too,” Trey said softly.

“I should’ve done more,” I said, slouching into my seat.

“You did plenty. More than I would’ve thought to do. And
not just the dream walking. I mean, you harassed her dad, pressured the Moroi, made life a living hell for that Maura girl … you exhausted everything.”

“I
am
good at being annoying,” I admitted.

“You’ve just run into a wall, that’s all. They’re just too good at keeping her prison a secret. But they’ll crack, and you’ll be there to find that crack. And I’ll be right by your side. So will the rest of us.”

The pep talk was unusual for him but didn’t cheer me up any. “I don’t know how I’m going to find that crack.”

Trey’s eyes went wide. “Marcus.”

I shook my head. “He’s exhausted his leads too. Haven’t seen him in a month.”

“No.” Trey pointed as he pulled the car up to my apartment building. “There. Marcus.”

Sure enough. There, sitting on the building’s front step, was Marcus Finch, the rebel ex-Alchemist who’d encouraged Sydney to think for herself and who had been trying—futilely—to locate her for me. I had the door open before Trey even brought the car to a stop.

“He wouldn’t be here in person if he didn’t have news,” I said excitedly. I jumped out of the car and sprinted across the grass, my earlier lethargy replaced with a new sense of purpose. This was it. Marcus had come through. Marcus had found answers.

“What is it?” I demanded. “Have you found her?”

“Not exactly.” Marcus got to his feet and smoothed back his blond hair. “Let’s go in and talk.”

Trey was nearly as eager as me when we ushered Marcus inside to the living room. We faced him down with mirrored stances, arms crossed over our chests. “Well?” I asked.

“I got a list of locations that may have possibly been used as Alchemist re-education holding facilities,” Marcus began, not looking nearly as enthusiastic as he should have for news like that. I clutched his arm.

“That’s incredible! We’ll start checking them out and—”

“There are thirty of them,” he interrupted bluntly.

I dropped my hand. “Thirty?”

“Thirty,” he repeated. “And we don’t exactly know where they are.”

“But you just said—”

Marcus held up a hand. “Let me explain it all first. Then you can talk. This list my sources got is from cities in the United States that the Alchemists were scouting for re-education and a few other operations centers. It’s several years old, and while my sources confirm that they did build their current re-education facility in a city on the list, we don’t know for sure which one they ended up picking—or even where in that location they chose. Are there ways of finding out? Sure, and I know people who can start digging around. But we’ll have to do it on a city-by-city basis, and each one is going to take a while.”

All the hope and enthusiasm I’d felt upon seeing Marcus shattered and blew away. “And let me guess: ‘A while’ is a few days?”

He grimaced. “It’ll be a case-by-case basis, depending on the difficulties of researching each city. Might take a couple days to knock one off the list. Might take a few weeks.”

I hadn’t thought I could feel worse than I had over the exam and Jill, but apparently I was wrong. I threw myself down on the couch, defeated. “A few weeks times thirty. That could be over a year.”

“Unless we get lucky and she’s in one of the first cities we search.” I could tell even he didn’t think that was likely, though.

“Yeah, well, ‘lucky’ hasn’t really been the way I’d describe how things have been going for us,” I remarked. “Don’t see why that should change now.”

“It’s better than nothing,” said Trey. “It’s the first real lead we’ve got.”

“I need to find her dad,” I muttered. “I need to find him and compel the hell out of him so that he tells me where she’s at.” All attempts at locating Jared Sage had proven unsuccessful. I
had
managed a phone call and been promptly hung up on. Compulsion didn’t work so well over the phone.

“Even if you did, he probably wouldn’t know,” said Marcus. “They keep secrets from each other, for the very purpose of protecting against forced confessions.”

“And so there we are.” I stood up and headed for the kitchen, off to make a drink. “Stuck just like we were before. Come get me in a year when you’re able to verify your list was a dead end.”

“Adrian—” began Marcus, looking more at a loss than I’d ever seen him. He was usually the poster boy for cocky confidence.

Trey’s response was more pragmatic. “No more drinks. You’ve had too much today, man.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” I snapped. Rather than actually making a drink, I ended up just grabbing two liquor bottles at random. No one tried to stop me as I went to my room and slammed the door.

Before I began my one-man party, I made another attempt to reach out to Sydney. It wasn’t easy since some of this afternoon’s vodka was still hanging around, but I managed a tentative grasp
of spirit. As usual, there was nothing, but Marcus’s certainty that she was in the United States had made me want to try. It was early evening on the East Coast, and I’d had to check, just in case she was calling it an early night. Apparently not.

I soon lost myself in the bottles, desperately needing to wipe away everything. School. Jill. Sydney. I hadn’t thought it was possible to feel this low, to have my emotions so black and so deep that there was no way to raise them into any sort of constructive feeling. When things had ended with Rose, I thought no loss could be more terrible. I’d been wrong. She and I had never really had anything substantial. What I’d lost with her was
possibility
.

But with Sydney … with Sydney, I’d had it all—and lost it all. Love, understanding, respect. The sense that we’d both become better people because of each other and could take on anything so long as we were together. Only we weren’t together anymore. They’d ripped us apart, and I didn’t know what was going to happen now.

The center will hold.
That was the line Sydney had coined from “The Second Coming,” a poem by William Butler Yeats, for us. Sometimes, in my darkest moments, I worried the poem’s original wording was more fitting:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
.

I drank myself into oblivion, only to wake up in the middle of the night with a raging headache. I felt nauseous too, but when I staggered to the bathroom, nothing came up. I just felt miserable. Maybe that was because Sydney’s hairbrush was still in there, reminding me of her. Or maybe it was because I’d skipped dinner and couldn’t remember the last time I’d had blood either. No wonder I was in such bad shape. My alcohol
tolerance had built up so much over the years that I rarely felt ill from it, so I must’ve really screwed myself up this time. The smart thing would’ve been to start hydrating and drinking gallons of water, but instead, I welcomed the self-destructive behavior. I returned to my room for another drink and succeeded only in making myself feel worse.

My head and stomach calmed around dawn, and I managed some kind of fitful sleep back in my own bed. That was interrupted a few hours later by a knock at the door. I think it was actually pretty soft, but with the lingering remnants of my headache, it sounded like a sledgehammer.

“Go away,” I said, peering bleary-eyed at the door.

Trey stuck his head in. “Adrian, there’s someone here you need to talk to.”

“I’ve already heard what Merry Marcus has to say,” I shot back. “I’m done with him.”

The door opened farther, and someone stepped past Trey. Even though the motion made my world spin, I was able to sit up and get a better look. I felt my jaw drop and wondered if I was hallucinating. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Usually, I only imagined Aunt Tatiana, but this person was very much alive, beautiful as the morning sunlight illuminated her chiseled cheekbones and blond hair. But there was no way she could be here.

“Mom?” I croaked out.

“Adrian.” She glided in and sat down beside me on the bed, gently touching my face. Her hand felt cool against my fevered skin. “Adrian, it’s time to go home.”