All Chapters of The Vampire King's Mate: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

IVORY POVThe Royal Academy smelled like old stone and floor polish and nervous teenagers.The iron gates swung open at eight sharp. Hundreds of cadets poured through in grey-blue uniforms, wolves with swagger in their shoulders and packs of friends already fixed in place. I walked in alone, in a blazer that was one size too big, with my braid still damp from the morning training and my whole body aching in places I hadn't known I owned.They looked at me. All of them.I had been looked at before. In school hallways, after Stella and her friends had spread photos of me around the campus. But this was different. These looks weren't curious or cruel. They were sniffing. I heard a boy to my left inhale sharply, then whisper to his friend, "She smells like rain on concrete.""That's what a human smells like.""She is not a human. She's Rose's.""She is a human with Rose's chin."I walked faster.My locker was number 117, on the second floor, between a boy who was already eating a sandwich

IVORY POVCombat class was held in a long stone hall with sand on the floor and a wooden gallery running around the walls. It smelled like sweat and old blood. I knew that last part wasn't my imagination, because the first time I walked in, my stomach turned over, and a boy next to me whispered, "Yeah. You get used to it."I did not get used to it.Thirty cadets stood in two rows along the wall, stretching, joking, cracking their knuckles. Instructor Brandt, a squat, scarred woman with a voice like gravel in a bucket, paced in front of us with her hands behind her back."Today we spar," she barked. "Pairs. Light contact. No claws. No fangs. If I see blood, you scrub this floor on your knees."Groans. Somebody laughed. I tried to shrink behind a tall boy with a shaved head."Excuse me, Instructor."I knew the voice before I turned. Evelyn had stepped out of the line, lovely and calm in her training clothes, her black hair in a high ponytail. Her two friends flanked her like bookends."

IVORY POVThe infirmary nurse wrapped my ribs and told me I had a hairline fracture and that it would heal in a day or two."A day or two?" I said. "That's... not how bones work."She smiled like I'd said something sweet. "Not for humans."I didn't know what to do with that. So I walked out of the infirmary and kept walking, past the gates, past the training field, all the way down the hill to the lake. It was getting dark. The water was a sheet of dark glass, with a few silver ribbons of moonlight floating on top.I sat down on a flat rock at the edge, tucked my knees under my chin, and, finally, cried.It wasn't a pretty cry. It was the loud, ugly kind that took my whole body and shook it. I cried because my ribs hurt. I cried because Evelyn's friends had laughed. I cried because the pack looked at me like I was a coin they hadn't decided whether to spend. And I cried because nobody on this entire hill knew that on the night of my prom, a boy with dark blue eyes had held my face in

DANIEL POVI waited until sundown.My father never came out of his study before dark. I had learned that without anybody teaching me, the way you learn which stairs creak. During the day, the heavy curtains stayed drawn and the door stayed locked. At night, the whole house woke up around him.I had slept eleven hours. I had showered, shaved, eaten two sandwiches and a banana, and thrown every cigarette from my pocket into the kitchen trash. My hands had stopped shaking. I stood outside the study with my knuckles still scabbed from the ring and I thought, If I don't do it now, I never will.The last time I had stood at this door, I was nine years old.I remembered it with a clarity that made my stomach hurt. I had come home from school with a gold star on my math test, the very first one I had ever earned, and a drawing of a wolf that my teacher had pinned to the board. The housekeeper had said, "Your father's in his study, Mr. Daniel," in a voice that sounded like a warning. I had wal

DANIEL POVThe stranger took the leather armchair by the window without being asked. He moved like water, no wasted motion, no sound. His grey coat didn't wrinkle when he sat down.My father had not stood. He had not even looked surprised. And that was how I knew that whatever was about to happen in this room had been decided long before I knocked on the door."Sit down, Daniel," he said."I'd rather stand.""Then stand. But breathe. You are very pale."I pulled out the chair and sat.The man in the grey coat tilted his head. His eyes were a washed-out color somewhere between grey and green, and they were very patient. "You want to find a girl," he said, in that dry-leaf voice. "A girl whose mother took her somewhere and cut every thread behind them.""Yes.""Do you know how hard it is to hide a person in a world this size?""No.""Nearly impossible. Phones. Cameras. Cars. Credit cards." He smiled slightly. "Unless someone very careful, who has done it before, decides to do it properl