"Rose, you've got to stop saying things like that."
"I'm just saying what you won't."
"She's only a year younger," said Lissa. She laughed. "I can't believe you think I'm the one who's going to get us in trouble."
Smiling as we strolled toward class, I gave her a sidelong glance. "Aaron does look pretty good though, huh?"
She smiled back and avoided my eyes. "Yeah. Pretty good."
"Ooh. You see? You should go after him."
"Whatever. I'm fine being friends now."
"Friends who used to stick their tongues down each other's throats."
She rolled her eyes.
"Fine." I let my teasing go. "Let Aaron stay in the nursery school. Just so long as you stay away from Christian. He's dangerous."
"You're overreacting. He's not going Strigoi."
"He's a bad influence."
She laughed. "You think I'm in danger of going Strigoi?"
She didn't wait for my answer, instead pushing ahead to open the door to our science class. Standing there, I uneasily replayed her words and then followed a moment later. When I did, I got to see royal power in action. A few guys - with giggling, watching girls - were messing with a gangly-looking Moroi. I didn't know him very well, but I knew he was poor and certainly not royal. A couple of his tormentors were air-magic users, and they'd blown the papers off his desk and were pushing them around the room on currents of air while the guy tried to catch them.
My instincts urged me to do something, maybe go smack one of the air users. But I couldn't pick a fight with everyone who annoyed me, and certainly not a group of royals - especially when Lissa needed to stay off their radar. So I could only give them a look of disgust as I walked to my desk. As I did, a hand caught my arm. Jesse.
"Hey," I said jokingly. Fortunately, he didn't appear to be participating in the torture session. "Hands off the merchandise."
He flashed me a smile but kept his hand on me. "Rose, tell Paul about the time you started the fight in Ms. Karp's class."
I cocked my head toward him, giving him a playful smile. "I started a lot of fights in her class."
"The one with the hermit crab. And the gerbil."
I laughed, recalling it. "Oh yeah. It was a hamster, I think. I just dropped it into the crab's tank, and they were both worked up from being so close to me, so they went at it."
Paul, a guy sitting nearby whom I didn't really know, chuckled too. He'd transferred last year, apparently, and hadn't heard of this. "Who won?"
I looked at Jesse quizzically. "I don't remember. Do you?"
"No. I just remember Karp freaking out." He turned toward Paul. "Man, you should have seen this messed-up teacher we used to have. Used to think people were after her and would go off on stuff that didn't make any sense. She was nuts. Used to wander campus while everyone was asleep."
I smiled tightly, like I thought it was funny. Instead, I thought back to Ms. Karp again, surprised to be thinking about her for the second time in two days. Jesse was right - she had wandered campus a lot when she still worked here. It was pretty creepy. I'd run into her once - unexpectedly.
I'd been climbing out of my dorm window to go hang out with some people. It was after hours, and we were all supposed to be in our rooms, fast asleep. Such escape tactics were a regular practice for me. I was good at them.
But I fell that time. I had a second-floor room, and I lost my grip about halfway down. Sensing the ground rush up toward me, I tried desperately to grab hold of something and slow my fall. The building's rough stone tore into my skin, causing cuts I was too preoccupied to feel. I slammed into the grassy earth, back first, getting the wind knocked out of me.
"Bad form, Rosemarie. You should be more careful. Your instructors would be disappointed."
Peering through the tangle of my hair, I saw Ms. Karp looking down at me, a bemused look on her face. Pain, in the meantime, shot through every part of my body.
Ignoring it as best I could, I clambered to my feet. Being in class with Crazy Karp while surrounded by other students was one thing. Standing outside alone with her was an entirely different matter. She always had an eerie, distracted gleam in her eye that made my skin break out in goose bumps.
There was also now a high likelihood she'd drag me off to Kirova for a detention. Scarier still.
Instead, she just smiled and reached for my hands. I flinched but let her take them. She tsked when she saw the scrapes. Tightening her grip on them, she frowned slightly. A tingle burned my skin, laced with a sort of pleasant buzz, and then the wounds closed up. I had a brief sense of dizziness. My temperature spiked. The blood disappeared, as did the pain in my hip and leg.
Gasping, I jerked my hands away. I'd seen a lot of Moroi magic, but never anything like that.
"What...what did you do?"
She gave me that weird smile again. "Go back to your dorm, Rose. There are bad things out here. You never know what's following you."
I was still staring at my hands. "But..."
I looked back up at her and for the first time noticed scars on the sides of her forehead. Like nails had dug into them. She winked. "I won't tell on you if you don't tell on me."
I jumped back to the present, unsettled by the memory of that bizarre night. Jesse, in the meantime, was telling me about a party.
"You've got to slip your leash tonight. We're going up to that spot in the woods around eight thirty. Mark got some weed."