THE VAMPIRE I WAS NEVER MEANT TO LOVE

Chapter Three : The Founder's Table

Headmistress Crane did not say another word about the Vespers.

Liora tried twice. The first time, the Headmistress just poured her a cup of tea she didn't want. The second time, she said, "Not tonight, Miss Hale," in a voice that closed the subject like a lid on a pot.

So Liora drank the tea, and listened to the rules instead.

There were three. Lights out at ten. No one left their dorm after midnight, for any reason, because the doors locked themselves and nobody would come to open them. And dinner tonight was at seven, in the Great Hall, at the Founders' Table.

"I'm sorry, the what?"

"Every Founders' Scholar sits there on their first night. It's a tradition." The Headmistress slid a brass key across the desk. "It is not optional."

"What happens if I don't go?"

"Then you will have started badly," said Crane, "and that is a hard thing to fix here."

Liora took the key. It was heavier than it looked.

~

Her room was on the third floor of Ashe House, up a staircase so narrow she had to turn her suitcase sideways. The door was already open. A girl sat cross-legged on the left-hand bed, eating a chocolate bar out of the wrapper and reading a paperback with a cracked spine.

She looked up. She grinned. She had a round face, a lot of freckles, and dark curly hair she'd shoved into a bun with a pencil.

"Oh, thank God," she said. "You're real. I've been alone in here since August, and I was starting to talk to the radiator." She hopped off the bed and stuck out a hand. It had chocolate on it. She looked at it, wiped it on her jeans, and stuck it out again. "Wren Alder. Please don't tell me you're one of those people who gets up at six."

"Liora." She shook the hand. "I don't think so. Not on purpose."

"Good. We'll get along fine." Wren flopped back down. "So. Did you meet the Headmistress? Did she do the voice?"

"The voice?"

"The one where she says something that sounds like a warning and then doesn't explain it."

Liora laughed. It was the first time in days, and it surprised her. "Yes. She did the voice."

"She does it to everybody." Wren broke off a square of chocolate and held it out. "Okay, quick tour, because nobody tells you anything here. The showers on this floor are good if you go before seven and terrible after. The library closes at nine, but Mr. Pell will let you stay if you don't talk. Don't go past the lake. Don't ask why."

"Why?"

"I said don't ask." Wren grinned again, but her eyes slid away for half a second. "And don't be late for the Founders' Table. Seriously. Not even by a minute."

"Everyone keeps saying that."

"Because everyone knows what it's like when somebody is."

Liora wanted to ask what that meant. But Wren had already moved on to which teachers gave too much homework, and Liora decided she liked her too much to push on the first day.

She unpacked. It didn't take long. Four shirts, two pairs of jeans, her mother's gray coat. When she hung the coat in the wardrobe, her hand stayed on the sleeve a little too long.

~

The Great Hall looked like something from a movie, and she hated that she was impressed.

It was huge, with a ceiling lost in shadow and long wooden tables running the whole length of the room. Hundreds of candles burned along the walls. The windows were covered with thick dark cloth, even though it was barely evening. Every seat was taken. The noise of a hundred conversations dropped to nothing the moment she walked in.

She wasn't imagining it. Heads turned. Forks stopped. She felt it on her skin, like walking into a room where everyone had just been talking about you.

Wren squeezed her arm. "You're on your own from here. I sit down there." She pointed at the far end, then whispered, "You'll be fine," in the voice of a person who very much did not know that.

At the front of the hall, up three stone steps, was a single long table with high-backed chairs. There were maybe fifteen people sitting there. They all looked like they had been born in good clothes. Liora's mouth went dry.

At the middle sat Cassian Vesper.

He didn't look up. He was cutting something on his plate, very carefully, as if it had personally wronged him. The sleeves of his dark jacket were buttoned to the wrist, again. On his right, a boy with messy golden hair and a loose, easy smile watched her come with open interest. On his left sat a girl with black hair and a mouth painted dark red. She looked at Liora's secondhand sweater and her face did a tiny thing, a flicker, like someone smelling milk that had gone off.

There was one empty chair. It was at the end, far from Cassian. Liora started toward it.

"That seat is taken," said Cassian.

He still hadn't looked up. He said it quietly, the way you'd mention the weather. But the whole hall heard him. She knew because it got so quiet she could hear the candles.

Liora stopped. "The Headmistress told me to sit at this table."

"Did she?" He set down his knife. Finally he lifted his eyes, and they were so cold she almost took a step back. "Then you should know what this table is for. It's for people who've earned their place. The Founders' Scholarship goes to someone brilliant. Someone with a name." He looked at her sweater. Her shoes. "Which one are you?"

Somewhere behind her a girl let out a short, shocked laugh and then covered it with a cough.

Liora's face went hot. She could feel it climbing up her neck. For a second she was twelve years old again, standing in the doorway of a new school with a bag that didn't match anyone else's, while some kid asked if she'd gotten her clothes out of the lost-and-found.

She had promised herself she would never stand in that doorway again.

"I don't know," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. "I never applied. Ask whoever picked me."

A pause. The golden-haired boy made a small noise that might have been a laugh.

Cassian's jaw moved. "Sit down, then," he said. "Over there. Where nobody has to look at you."

"Cass," said the golden boy, quietly. It sounded like a warning.

Cassian ignored him. He picked up his knife and went back to his plate as if she had stopped existing.

Liora walked to the empty chair. It was the longest walk of her life. She pulled it out. It scraped. She sat. Her hands were shaking so badly she hid them in her lap.

The conversation did not come back. It did not even try. For the whole meal, fifteen people ate in silence around her, and she realized after a while that most of them weren't eating at all. They pushed food around. They cut it into smaller pieces. Nobody lifted a fork to their mouth.

Only Cassian ate, in slow, careful bites, and never once looked her way.

She ate every bite on her plate. She chewed each one slowly, and she did not cry, and she did not look away from anyone who stared at her. It was the most stubborn thing she had ever done.

When the Headmistress finally stood and the meal ended, Liora walked out with her head up. She made it all the way into the corridor before her knees started to go.

"Hey. Hey, wait up."

It was the golden-haired boy. He jogged over, hands in his pockets, still smiling, though it looked a little tired. Up close he had green eyes and a scar through one eyebrow.

"Julian Thorne," he said. "I'd shake your hand, but I think you'd bite it."

"I might."

"Fair." He glanced back at the hall, then lowered his voice. "He doesn't hate you. I mean, he does. But it isn't what you think. It's not about your sweater, and it's not even about you." He rubbed the back of his neck. "That came out wrong."

"It came out very confusing."

"Yeah." Julian sighed. "Just don't take it personally. He's like that with everyone."

"He wasn't like that with anyone else."

Julian opened his mouth. Then he closed it again, and for a second he looked like he really wanted to say something true.

"Good night, Liora," he said instead.

She had never told him her name.

~

The lock clicked at midnight.

Liora heard it from her bed, a heavy, final sound, like the gates earlier that afternoon. Wren was already asleep, one arm hanging off the mattress. The room was dark, except for a long thin line of moonlight cutting across the floor.

She couldn't sleep. Her eyes were hot and her thoughts wouldn't stop. Cassian Vesper's cold voice. The empty chair. Julian knowing her name. Don't trust the Vespers, she thought for the hundredth time, and turned over, and turned back.

At last she got up and tiptoed to the window. She pushed back the edge of the curtain.

Three floors below, the courtyard was silver with moonlight. It was empty, except for one figure standing in the middle of the grass.

Cassian.

He wasn't doing anything. He was just standing there, with his hands at his sides, very still. It was well past midnight, and the doors were locked, and he was out in the open as if the rule had never been meant for him.

Liora's breath fogged the glass.

Her room was dark. She hadn't turned on a lamp. She was standing behind the curtain, with only a sliver of face showing, three floors up. He could not possibly see her.

Slowly, Cassian lifted his head.

He looked straight up at her window. Not near it. At it.

And he spoke. He said it softly, hardly louder than a breath. A person standing that far away, down in the cold air, should not have been heard at all.

But Liora heard every word.

"Go to bed, Hale."

She let go of the curtain like it had burned her.