“Criminy has to find us before he can kill us, and he’s not going to find us.” I smiled and patted her shoulder. “At least, not until we’re the most celebrated act in the cabarets of Mortmartre.”
“No. No no no no no. I’m going to Ruin. I’m going to university. I am not, under any circumstances, going to Paris. And I’m definitely not going to the cabarets. Did you even listen to Caprice yesterday? It’s dangerous. Even for us.”
“And it’s the only way to be a star.”
“I. Don’t. Want. To. Be. A. Star.” She punctuated each word with a little slap on top of my head.
“I don’t want anything else but to be a star. Besides, you’re going to live to be three hundred. You’ve got plenty of time to make youthful errors. You can always use your mad cash from the cabaret to go to university later, after you sow your wild oats.”
Cherie sat down and put her head in her hands.
“What are oats, and why should I sew them? I hate sewing. Honestly, Demi, I feel like a mother with an out-of-control child. You won’t listen to anyone. Not me, not Mademoiselle Caprice, not even Criminy and Letitia. Why can’t you just be happy with what you have?”
I stared into her cloudy gray eyes, begging her to understand, as pink-tinged tears spilled down my cheeks unbidden and unwanted. “Because I’m not happy, Cherie. I’m hungry. Why are you so ready to be complacent? Why don’t you want more?”
She scooted over to me, folded our black-scaled fingers together. “I don’t know how to get through to you. You’re my best friend, and you’ll never be happy until you’ve destroyed us both.”
I shook my head. “It’s not destruction. It’s reinvention. Trust me. It’s going to be the biggest adventure of our lives. We just have to reach out and take it.”
She sighed deeply and reached to pull the coverlet over Mademoiselle Caprice’s shoulder. “You’ll never give up, will you?” she asked quietly. “No matter what?”
“Not until I get what I want.”
“So my only choices are to join you on this mad caper to Paris or stay here alone and explain to Mademoiselle Caprice why I let you go?”
“Pretty much.”
She took two more vials from the train case and twined her arm around mine. We uncorked the vials and sipped them at the same time, a Bludman’s pinkie promise. Her eyes were sad and rueful, maybe the tiniest bit amused.
“Then I guess, yet again, I’ll give in to you.”
“It’s going to be amazing, Cherie. I promise.”
She tossed her empty vial at my chest. “If you’re wrong, I’m going to kill you myself.”
“Fair enough. But I’m going to be right.”
We slipped out the door with nothing but the train case of blood vials, our papers, and a pocket full of dreams.
And by dreams, I mean money I nicked off our sleeping chaperone.
Little did I know how quickly we would lose them all.
4
I was giddy as I watched the muffin-shaped haystacks roll past like a live Monet painting, the sky shimmering pink behind them. Beside me, Cherie vibrated like a frightened chihuahua.
“Criminy’s going to kill us.”
“You’ve already said that a thousand times. It’s too late to worry about it.”
“It’s never too late to worry.”
I rolled my eyes at her and leaned my head against the worn cushion of the jouncing carriage, which was moving across the fields of Franchia at a fast clip, spiriting us from Callais to Paris. My best friend was starting to sound way too much like my conscience. I was fairly certain she would nag me to death before we even reached our destination, much less before Criminy found out.
“He’s got to find us before he can kill us. And Paris is a big city, mon petit chouchou.” I elbowed her in the ribs.
“And what is that supposed to mean, Demi?” She elbowed me right back.
“It means I called you a cabbage. It’s a French—I mean, Franchian—term of endearment. And did you know you have seriously pointy elbows?”
Her voice went so quiet that surely the Pinkies in the carriage wouldn’t hear. “I just don’t think it’s right, running out on Mademoiselle Caprice and taking all her francs. Criminy’s going to kill her, too, for being a bad chaperone. What was so horrible about going to the University of Ruin, anyway?”
We hit a pothole, and my head knocked against the wood, loosening a dark brown curl to dangle in my eyes. I sat up straighter and shrugged. “I left her enough money to get back to the caravan. And Ruin wasn’t horrible; I just wanted an adventure. I don’t want to be a boring contortionist in the boring caravan anymore, and I don’t want to go back to college, either.”
“Back to college?”
I wedged my head onto her shoulder, my mouth to her ear behind a curled glove. The other passengers didn’t know we were Bludmen or that I was a Stranger from Earth. We would be in serious trouble if they found out we were bloodsuckers—not the nice, normal, Pinky girls we appeared to be. “I guess I never told you. I was at university when I . . . when I ended up in Sangland. When Criminy found me and saved me. I was a student, in my world. I hated it.”
“Why did you never say? And why did you hate it so?”
I scowled behind my hand, but her confusion was genuine.
It was easy to forget that Cherie had grown up poor and freezing in the forests of Freesia after her family fell out of favor with the Tsarina. To her, the caravan was a life of warmth and security. And I had taken that from her when I decided to leave. Breathing in the scent of her hair, I felt a rush of love for the first person who’d reached out to me when I arrived in Criminy’s caravan, naked and confused and newly blood-hungry. She’d hugged me and taken me in like a lost kitten, teaching me how to drink blood from vials without staining my clothes and showing me how to line my eyes with kohl like the other girls. When I looked at her, I saw only my dear friend, the closest thing I’d ever had to a sister. Golden curls, eyes too innocent for a Bludwoman, pink cheeks, and an upturned nose. She looked like an American Girl doll, not a well-disguised wolf.
But to her, the University of Ruin represented untold wealth and opportunity. Most likely, no one in her entire family had ever been to university, much less a woman. I would have to keep reminding myself, before we landed in Paris, that women in Sang didn’t have the sort of freedom I had known back home in Greenville, South Carolina. I hadn’t spoken much of my life before Sang, it was true. But I owed her a better explanation for why I’d forced her to join me on a risky adventure.
“I never told you because I wanted a clean start, wanted to forget how I ended up here. Earth is different. Safer. I guess I thought that once I left home and got to a new city for college, everything would be different. That I would make friends and get a boyfriend and do well in my classes without really trying and that a degree in art history would actually get me a job. I thought life would be as pretty as it looked in the brochures, in the advertisements. I thought that just getting away from my parents would suddenly make everything better.”
“It didn’t?”
“Nope. Kind of the opposite. It just made me more depressed and alone.”
The Pinky gentleman across the carriage watched our whispered closeness with an unhealthy fascination, a creepy gleam growing behind his spectacles. My instinct was to flash my fangs at him and hiss, but that would get us thrown off the carriage, if not killed. Instead, I pulled my head away from Cherie and locked eyes with the older man. After a few moments of my intense glaring, he cleared his throat juicily and looked away. The prim nursemaid beside him sniffed in disdain and sidled closer to her charge, a girl of about seventeen. The girl gave us an innocent, hopeful smile, which I was sure Cherie would return behind closed lips. We might have looked her age, but we were probably ten years older. There were benefits to being bludded, after all.