The Keep

“Is that your assignment?” she asked.

Brilliant. Thank you, Frosty. “Yep. That’s my project.” We had to do an unusual translation of our choosing. Most girls probably weren’t even thinking about runes yet, so ironically, this might even get me some much-needed brownie points with Master Dagursson. “I’m just finishing it up now.”

Finally, she turned to face me, presenting me with the snottiest expression. “Well, I’m glad to hear you’re still working on it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means, I should hope you’re not done yet.” She was speaking slowly, like I was hard of hearing or something. “Because you’ve gotten it all wrong.”

“Wrong?” My jaw clenched as I snatched the paper to study it. How had I gotten the runes wrong when I hadn’t even been the one to write them in the first place?

“Yes, wrong. Those runes you wrote…they’re ridiculous.”

“What do you mean ridiculous?” I’d copied them from a fricking cliffside, for chrissake. Not that I could tell her that.

“Well, I’ve done several of these translations now.”

“How awesome for you.”

“Thanks,” she said with a prim smile. She hadn’t caught my sarcasm. Apparently, irony wasn’t in Frost’s little toolbox. “I hate to tell you, but what you’ve written there is gibberish.”

“Gibberish?” I’d just translated it before the gym. Vampíru drottinn Sonja. Seemed simple enough.

“Yes. You know, gibberish. Nonsense.” Her eyes lit, like she was about to win some game I hadn’t realized we were playing. She adjusted herself in her chair, looking eager to rub my face in something. “What do you think you wrote?”

Screw roommate bonding. This girl was a freak, and I didn’t like her messing in my private business. All I wanted was to blow her off and get back into my own head. I turned, pretending to busy myself with some papers. “It says ‘Sonja, ruled by vampires.’”

“Just like I thought.” She scooted from her desk and headed over to mine. “Don’t worry. It’s to be expected you’d make some mistakes if you’re using this thing.” She ran a finger down the spine of the special book/hiding place Carden had given me. “This edition has been out of print since the forties. Where’d you even get it?”

“It was a gift.” I stared at her stubby fingers with their chewed-off nails. “Don’t touch it.”

She recoiled like I’d accused her of intellectual slumming. “As if.”

I sensed her about to return to her desk, but I was too curious now. Tamping down my frustration, I turned my attention back to the runes. Was I going crazy? I translated them again in my head. Doodling a wavy line under them, I muttered, “‘Vampíru drottinn…Sonja, ruled by vampires.’ I don’t see the problem.”

“The problem is, your runes suck. Maybe you’d have seen that if it weren’t for the fact that your translation sucks even more.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. I knew the runes weren’t messed up, because Sonja, whoever she was, had written them, not me. And if Sonja was expressing herself runically, then it was a safe freaking assumption she knew what she was doing. “Let’s start with my translation,” I said, my voice flat. “You’re saying it’s wrong?”

She shrugged, acting coy. A snitty little look like triumph pursed her lips.

“What?” I demanded.

Frost made a giggly sound, and not being a giggly girl, it sounded really messed up. Like, menacing almost.

I stared at them, growing angrier by the second, until the treelike shapes started to blur in my vision.

I sounded out, “Vampíru…drottinn…Sonja. Sonja,” I emphasized firmly, “ruled by vampires.” I shifted in my seat to glare up at her. “Right?”

“Well, what you have there doesn’t say that.” With a smug look, she leaned over me, resting her hand on my desk, and I fantasized about elbowing her in the gut.

She shifted closer and I got a whiff. Ick. The girl smelled dry and papery, just like Dagursson. I cringed away, ever so subtly. “A little space, please?”

Frost ignored me, getting off on full lecture mode. “If ‘Sonja, ruled by vampires’ is what you want to write, you need to start again from the beginning and rewrite the runes.”

“Let’s just translate what I have here, shall we?”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. We can address this gibberish. This doesn’t say ‘ruled by vampires.’ You’ve confused the verb ‘drottnun’ with the noun ‘drottning.’ Drottnun means ‘overlording.’ Here, the usage is feminine.”

I scooted away, peering up at her. “No, it’s masculine. In Old Norse society, kings were ‘Drottinn.’”

“Just because the noun is masculine, doesn’t mean it can’t refer to a female.” She sneered at me like I was the most moronic person on earth. “Duh.”

“But there are no female vampires,” I snapped. “DUH.”

She stood—finally, a little space!—and put her hands on her hips. “No need to be rude. You wanted to know what this nonsense is that you’ve written, and I’m just telling you. If you wanted to write ‘Vampires ruled Sonja’ then it would be ‘Vampírur drottnuðu yfir Sonja.’ You see,” she said with exaggerated patience, “it’s easy to play with the similarity of the word ‘drottnun,’ which means ‘to rule over.’ And although this passage is confusing, contextually speaking—”

“Jesus.” I grabbed my hair, ready to pull it out strand by strand. “In English, Frost, please, just tell me whatthehellthissays.”

She gave me a blank look.

I sucked in a breath. “Please, Frost,” I said more evenly. “Would you please tell me what you think I wrote. These runes.” I stabbed a finger at the page. “What do they say?”

“This gibberish?” Looking like she had a bad taste in her mouth, she gave a funny little perplexed shrug. “It says, ‘Sonja, ruler of vampires.’”

And, like that, my world imploded.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGod.

Frost had been right about one thing—I had made a mistake. But not like she thought. My error hadn’t been in writing the runes; it’d been transposing active for passive verbs: Sonja ruled by versus Sonja ruler of.

Sonja. Ruler of vampires.

As in:

A woman.

In charge.

Because there was no other way to read that. Sonja. That was a woman’s name. It wasn’t the sort of name that could go either way—not Pat, or Taylor, or Carter. It was so surreal, I’d repeated it in my head over and over, considering it from all angles and all nationalities, until it seemed like an unreal mashup of vowels and consonants. But it was real. Sonja was a name, and it was undeniably feminine.

Did that mean there’d been a ruler of vampires who was a woman?

I blew off Frost as best I could after that, head reeling and hands trembling from the revelation. And, by the way, thank God she didn’t see the original rubbing. As it was, she just thought I was crappy at Old Norse, and that was fine by me. Those original runes were burning a hole in my bookshelf, but I dared not take them back out now. Who could I even show them to?

Carden. I could show them to Carden. I wanted to share them with him.

Yeah, right.

Screw him. He’d apparently ridden off into the sunset, leaving me to deal with this by myself.

All right. Not screw him. Not really. I was hurt, not angry. Heartbroken. Aching to see him. Missing him physically. Longing for his touch. For the feel of our bond igniting whenever I fed from him.

How had I ever let myself get so vulnerable? I replayed our last night. As you grow stronger, as our bond grows deeper, you will be able to part from me.…Like he was setting it up so he could leave me. And though he’d said we could part for longer periods, I was beginning to feel that familiar unpleasant ache in my belly—the ache of the blood fever.

Why would he put me through this? What had I done wrong? Should I have gone further with him? Was that what he’d wanted?

And then there was all that stuff he’d said. Had it meant anything to him? Or had he just been trying to get in my pants? You are an innocent. You help me to remember. Blah blah blah…Helped him to remember what? That I was an inexperienced virgin who wasn’t ready for more, while he was?

Of course, his disappearance had another explanation, one that I dared not consider. He might’ve disappeared because he’d…disappeared. Something bad might’ve happened to him.

But wouldn’t I have felt it? I was certain I’d know if Carden were ripped from this earth. The thought was too painful—I couldn’t even touch it. Much easier to think I’d been blown off. And how pathetic was that?

Which put me back at squares one and two: hurt and pissed. If and when I saw Carden again, I’d be too angry to tell him anything but off.

There was Ronan—I could’ve confided the whole Sonja thing to him. Yeah, except for the fact that I couldn’t even think about that interlude in the gym without feeling heat creep into my cheeks.

Besides, getting Ronan involved in something this big could only put him in danger. First off, Carden might not want me, but he surely wouldn’t want any other guy to have me either. Confiding too much in Ronan would only set him up for some major conflict. Ronan might’ve been a Tracer with some crazy powers, but he’d never survive a fight with a vampire. Secondly, even if Carden weren’t an issue, asking Ronan to help investigate the monsters that employed him? Talk about putting the guy in harm’s way.

No, I was on my own with this.

Sonja, ruler of vampires. I might’ve been curious about the keep before, but now I was on fire with it. I needed to act, once and for all.