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is the girl he was flirting with.”
    Lucy pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket. “I’ll call it in to Hunter.” She
     touched Nicholas’s cheek when he wove slightly on his feet. “Go to bed,” she murmured.
     “I’ve got this.”
    “Be . . . careful,” he slurred.
    “I’m always careful.”
    Even on the brink of being catatonic he could snort disbelievingly. He shuffled toward
     the tiny room beside Lucy’s bedroom, where he slept. There were locks on the inside
     of the door, barred and shuttered windows, and a bar fridge filled with blood like
     all the vampire’s rooms. Paige and Fletcher helped drag Cal, Noah, and Kali to their
     respective beds.
    Aggie didn’t know what to feel. This should have been simple. She was the good guy
     saving the idiots from monsters.
    “Aggie, come with me,” Lucy said, after hanging up with Hunter. She went straight
     to the stove to boil water for hot chocolate.
    Aggie sat down. She’d be expelled from the academy. She had nowhere to go. She’d have
     to steal money for bus fare back to New York. And then what? Dumpster diving and vampire
     staking while dodging the cops and the teen shelters. “Are you kicking me out?”
    “I guess that’s up to you, isn’t it?” She leaned against the counter as the water
     boiled. “Whitethorn posted that photo, didn’t they?”
    Aggie blinked. “Um.”
    “Any idea who they are?”
    “No.”
    “Not that you’d tell me even if you did,” Lucy said wryly. “Just be careful with them.
     Being anti-vampire isn’t the same as being pro-human.”
    “Cal was with that girl at the coffeehouse,” Aggie felt compelled to point out. She
     didn’t mention that Whitethorn had sent her an e-mail to recruit her. If she passed
     their test. They hadn’t mentioned what that was yet. “It was a reasonable assumption
     on my part.”
    “Your assumptions stop being reasonable when they come from fear instead of facts,”
     Lucy pointed out, joining her at the table with the mugs of hot chocolate. “You attacked
     before asking any questions. Just because it was Cal. And that much holy water would
     have killed him anywhere else. He was lucky the house magic gave him those extra seconds
     to react.”
    “I didn’t dose him!” Mostly because she’d never thought of it. “My heart speeds up
     whenever he’s around,” Aggie grumbled. “My body knows he’s a monster, even if you
     choose not to see it.”
    “Are you sure that’s what your body is telling you?”
    “What else could it be? How was I supposed to know someone jumped him? This is Violet
     Hill.”
    “True. But the thing about Violet Hill is that nothing is ever exactly as it seems.
     There are hundreds of ways we all misunderstand one another.”
    “I can’t just forget.” She didn’t mention the stake she’d found. What was the point?
    “I’m not asking you to. Cal has suffered as much as you have. You have no idea what
     he’s been through. His file is thicker than the last Harry Potter book. So I’m asking
     you to act in the present instead of reacting to the past.” Lucy rubbed her face with
     both hands. “Because, dude, I
really
can’t stand giving these old-lady psych lectures anymore. It’s totally lame. But
     since the garden hose won’t reach this far it’s all I’ve got.”
    * * *
    “What are you doing
now
?” Paige mumbled, sitting up in her bed. She squinted at Aggie, who’d frozen while
     reaching for the doorknob.
    “I’m going to pee, what do you think?”
    “In your parka?”
    “It’s cold.”
    “You are such a bad liar.” Paige pushed aside her blankets and scrambled out of bed.
     “What are you really doing?”
    “Go back to sleep.”
    “Yeah, like that’s going to happen.”
    Aggie sighed and counted to ten. The counselor at the academy had been trying to get
     her to count to ten when she was annoyed, to help her keep her temper in check. So
     far, it wasn’t entirely successful. Paige just crossed her