Vampire Academy 1 - Vampire Academy by Mead Richelle

Author:Mead, Richelle
Language: eng
Format: epub

Vampire Academy 1 - Vampire Academy

THIRTEEN

THE AF­TER­MATH OF JESSE AND Ralf's lies was about as hor­ri­ble as I'd ex­pect­ed. The on­ly way I sur­vived was by putting blin­ders on, by ig­nor­ing ev­ery­one and ev­ery­thing. It kept me saneÑbare­lyÑbut I hat­ed it. I felt like cry­ing all the time. I lost my ap­petite and didn't sleep well.

Yet, no mat­ter how bad it got for me, I didn't wor­ry about my­self as much as I did Lis­sa. She stood by her promise to change things. It was slow at first, but grad­ual­ly, I would see a roy­al or two come up to her at lunch or in class and say hel­lo. She'd turn on a bril­liant smile, laugh­ing and talk­ing to them like they were all best friends.

At first, I didn't un­der­stand how she was pulling it off. She'd told me she would use com­pul­sion to win the oth­er roy­als over and turn them against Mia. But I didn't see it hap­pen­ing. It was pos­si­ble, of course, that she was win­ning peo­ple over with­out com­pul­sion. Af­ter all, she was fun­ny, smart, and nice. Any­one would like her. Some­thing told me she wasn't win­ning friends the old-​fash­ioned way, and I fi­nal­ly fig­ured it out.

She was us­ing com­pul­sion when I wasn't around. I on­ly saw her for a small part of the day, and since she knew I didn't ap­prove, she on­ly worked her pow­er when I was away.

Af­ter a few days of this se­cret com­pul­sion, I knew what I need­ed to do: I had to get back in her head again. By choice. I'd done it be­fore; I could do it again.

At least, that's what I told my­self, sit­ting and spac­ing out in Stan's class one day. But it wasn't as easy as I'd thought it would be, part­ly be­cause I felt too keyed up to re­lax and open my­self to her thoughts. I al­so had trou­ble be­cause I picked a time when she felt rel­ative­ly calm. She came through the “loud­est” when her emo­tions were run­ning strong.

Still, I tried to do what I'd done be­fore, back when I'd spied on her and Chris­tian. The med­ita­tion thing. Slow breath­ing. Eyes closed. Men­tal fo­cus like that still wasn't easy for me, but at long last I man­aged the tran­si­tion, slip­ping in­to her head and ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the world as hers. She stood in her Amer­ican lit class, dur­ing project-​work time, but, like most of the stu­dents, she wasn't work­ing. She and Camille Con­ta leaned against a wall on the far side of the room, talk­ing in hushed voic­es.

“It's gross,” said Camille firm­ly, a frown cross­ing her pret­ty face. She had on a blue skirt made of vel­vet-​like fab­ric, short enough to show off her long legs and pos­si­bly raise eyes about the dress code. "If you guys were do­ing it, I'm not sur­prised she got ad­dict­ed and did it with Jesse.

“She didn't do it with Jesse,” in­sist­ed Lis­sa. “And it's not like we had sex. We just didn't have any feed­ers, that's all.” Lis­sa fo­cused her full at­ten­tion on Camille and smiled.

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