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yet he was harmless. I liked the combination.
    He started to walk backward toward his dorm. He admired me with a look of relaxed contentment and said, “See you at assembly.”
    I picked up my bag of books and headed toward the path to Seeker. Once on the pathway, I looked back at his dorm. He was in the archway of the building, leaning his shoulder against the stone, and had one ankle crossed over the other. The rain was still falling and when our eyes met through the drops, he cracked a smile and turned into the darkness of the building alleyway.

Chapter Five
    Bleeeeeep. Bleeeep. I smacked the alarm clock with the palm of my hand. Saturday morning, placement test morning. As I hadn’t been, well… above ground, I was required to take the tests when I arrived on campus. The night before, I read directions for various electronics and fumbled with timers and dials. It all worked and I was awake at 7 a.m. in time to get ready and walk to Hopper. Turns out Tony was right. According to my itinerary for the first few days before school started, anything and everything I needed to do was in that building.
    With a backpack slung over my shoulder, I walked into Hopper building and down the first-floor hallway toward the administrative offices. As I walked, I noticed school advertisements and posters. A notable one said, biology club. we love blood! I smiled but I wanted to tell Rhode. I wondered if he had seen what I was seeing.
    I approached the headmistress’s door at the end of the hallway. MS. WILLIAMS was embossed in gold lettering on the glass. I opened the door, and Ms. Williams stood beside her desk.
    “Come with me, Ms. Beaudonte,” Ms. Williams said, and gestured to the open doorway. I followed after.

    They made me take five tests. Yes, five. The headmistress herself stood over my right shoulder and watched me take the Japanese test. She didn’t believe I could speak and write in every language that Wickham offered. In this world, the human, contemporary world, clocks are everywhere. Mortals live their lives by a ticking clock. Vampires spend days, even weeks, awake. We’re not truly alive. We look alive, though there is no circulation, there is no pumping heart, no reproductive organs that thrive. Our chests do not rise and fall because there is no oxygen in the blood to flow through our veins. In moments when I wanted to escape the pain and terror, I longed to inhale. If I felt the air hit the back of my throat, I could pretend I was alive. I never did feel it, though. There was just an eternal aching—a constant reminder that I was numb, turned off, no longer part of the living world. Being a vampire is an ancient magic. Nothing exists…nothing but our minds.
    I have traveled the entire earth more than once, learned many languages, some that don’t exist anymore. Heath, one in my coven, taught himself Latin in three months and when he did, it was all he would speak. He was tall, blond, and strong boned, like a swimmer. He was so beautiful that no woman ever saw it coming when he whispered Latin into her ear and then ripped out her throat.
    The smell of overly sweet perfume brought me back to the moment. Ms. Williams returned to her office. I sat in a brown leather lounger facing the secretary’s desk.
    “What should we do?” I heard Headmistress Williams ask one of her colleagues, a stuffy, older woman holding a clipboard. “She’s placed out of all the AP classes,” Ms. Williams whispered.
    “I need a job?” I offered. Might as well throw in my two cents. Also, I had a promise to keep to Rhode.
    “What are your strengths, besides speaking languages?” Headmistress Williams asked.
    “How about the library?” the stuffy colleague suggested.
    They were speaking about me as though I wasn’t there. Anger shot through me, which surprised me at first. I wanted to kill them both, though something within me told me it wasn’t a good idea. In my vampire life, I would have drained their blood and murdered