Page 35 of Strength of Desire

“About the same. Peachy keen, really.”

In a quiet voice, only audible to me, Erika said, “I keep having these nightmares. Reliving the attack. And afterwards. I see myself turn into one of them. The whole student body staring at me, trying to kill me. Pretty melodramatic, you know?” She tried to smile again, but it wasn’t a very good one.

“If anyone has an excuse for nightmares, I think it’s you.”

“Doyouhave them?”

I nodded grimly. Sure, my nightmares weren’t exactly the same. But I did keep flashing back to that day. The moragh standing over me, slavering, seconds away from killing me. Try as I might, I still couldn’t remember stabbing the thing in the eye, the way Ash said I had. All I saw was myself standing there, frozen, just waiting for it to kill me. Letting it happen.

“Yeah,” I said simply. “Yeah, I do.”

“Fun times, huh?”

I snorted. “You could say that.”

I tried to go back to looking at books, but my brain refused to cooperate. Now that we were talking about it, I was stuck on the day of the attack, unable to get visions of it out of my mind. Why had I thought bringing it up was a good idea, again?

“Ash says that if you get infected, it’ll show up in twenty-four hours,” I said after a moment. “So you’re safe. We both are. We have to be.”

Erika shrugged helplessly. “That’s what I keep telling myself. Maybe one of these days I’ll even believe it.”

The loud boom of a bell filled the air as Vesperwood’s great clock began pealing the eleven strikes that ended Third Hour. After a moment’s pause, the sounds of students jostling, talking, and stacking books filled the library. Those who were checking books out made their way to the front, shuffling along in a slow line towards the massive ledger that kept track of who had borrowed what.

I bent to grab my backpack and when I straightened, Ash and Felix had joined me. Felix had an even bigger stack of books in his arms than Erika. Ash, predictably, had none.

Min looked at Felix, disgusted. “Are you serious? How can you even find anything in here?”

“You use the catalog,” he said, as if he didn’t understand the question.

I was on Min’s side. The catalog was an even larger, vellum-bound tome that sat on a desk by the door, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of the organization system. Felix, evidently, had no such problem.

“I’ll grant you that most of the texts here are elementary,” he said. “But I asked Professor Romero and he says he doesn’t expect us to need anything out of the second library or the third, so I think he’s alright with papers that concentrate on a beginner’s level understanding of the subject matter.”

“Well, here’s hoping you find this beginner’s level too,” I said, handing him the book Erika had given me. “Because it’s all gibberish to me.”

Keelan hoisted his bag onto his shoulder and looked at Felix. “You going back to your room before Combat, or are you going to carry those books around for the rest of the day?”

“It’s only one more class,” Felix said. “Why?”

“I was going to offer to take them, if you wanted. I have a pass out of Combat today, to meet up with Annaliese and Professor Rosato in Room 318. It’ll take me right by your room.

“Oh,” Felix said. “Yeah, thanks. That’d be great.”

“What are you meeting with them for?” Ash asked.

“Imbolc preparations,” Keelan said. “Things are different this year, since we have to hold celebrations in the ballroom instead of outside. They’re trying to figure out if we can still have a bonfire. I told them I’d keep water at the ready as they test out a new fire spell.”

“Suck-up,” Ash said. “You realize you’ve already made it to college. You don’t need to keep padding your file with extracurriculars.”

“He’s not sucking up,” Min said with a grin. “He’s pining.”

Keelan’s cheeks went scarlet, and Ash’s eyes widened. He twitched his nose, like a squirrel who’d just caught the scent of the perfect acorn.

“Do tell,” he said.

“Annaliese,” Min said. “Keelan wants to bang her.”

“I do not,” Keelan said heatedly, which only made it sound like he really did. His cheeks got even redder, if that was possible.

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