She had tried contacting me. I had maybe a full dozen petitions to send her a message as soon as I could, all of which I had averted. And it wasn't like I wasn't busy. I was.

And I was still avoiding Timothy's sister. Busy or not, there was one person I wouldn't lie about it. That person was Valentina Farías.

Blizzard lifted me off my feet, turned me around and slammed me hard against the mattress.

I found myself on the ground with no air in my lungs. And I didn't seem to find it anywhere around me either.

The white painted ceiling swam in my view.

The huge vampire sat on the edge of the mattress to wait me out.

Eventually I found air. I gulped it in huge lungfulls. It felt raw, my head hurt and I felt slightly nauseated.

"Why?" I asked, once I could talk.

We were in a hall that had once been the gymnastics room for a school. Now it hosted a few other pairs practicing, some vampires, some human links. Two people were standing at a side talking and laughing. It was a lively summer night here in the Castle.

"Where is your mind, Valentina?" Blizzard asked me instead of answering. He turned his wine red gaze to me as I hauled myself to sit.

He offered me a water bottle.

Lovely gesture after I had almost fainted.

I took the bottle.

"It was elsewhere. Why did you do that? I get sweeping. I get throwing. But you had force behind that move and it could have broken me. What if I had hit my head?"

Well, I had hit it. Just not badly.

"You would have passed out. Then, probably, you would have had some sore bruises and a good headache tomorrow."

I folded my arms. I would most certainly have a headache tomorrow.

"No. Don't you dare. Ever since I came here into the Castle to practice, it has been different. And I don't mean I don't welcome some extra sparring and even teaching the humans. I mean with you. You are sparring differently. There are more broken things. You aim everything you can at the head. I haven't gotten a single fist in my stomach in the whole month. Or a leg for that matter. What's going on?"

"Can you stand?"

"Yes. Sir."

I stood. Very slowly, Blizzard took my arm. I let him twist my arm and force me on my back, back on the mattress, where Blizzard pressed his knee gently against my breastbone. It was a standard technique. Not overly complicated.

"Now tell me why you are on the floor," He asked. "And why won't you struggle?"

"Because you twisted my arm? And if I move, you push that knee and it is going to hurt like hell."

"Good."

He lifted the knee and rose up in an effortless, almost playful twist. Then he offered me a hand down.

"Now, try the same."

He placed his big, lukewarm hand on my wrist to give me an opening. Suspiciously I took the arm, almost sure he would resist me when I tried to remove the hand and bring it to the same twist he had just used for me. But he let me take it. His hand in my grip was slack.

But the first twist I tried with it yielded me no results.

I changed the grip, bringin the hand against my breastbone as I sometimes did when a pair was clearly bigger than I was. I felt his joints and muscles twist under my fingers. But he himself didn't even blink.

I tried at least a dozen different poses, locks and twists.

He even let me throw himself onto the mattress, and continue on the ground where I got all my bodily force twisting his one arm in an arc that would have broken the elbow of any human being.

Then, in a fury, I tried strangling him. But Blizzard only stared at me as I pressed his neck gripping the thick collar of the white suit he was wearing.

I let go of the collar and looked down in the red, glimmering inhuman eyes of the undead.

"You don't really feel pain, do you? And you don't breathe."

Blizzard drew in a very clear lungful of air.

"Air is needed for speaking. And I do feel pain. But."

He grabbed me suddenly with inhuman strength and while I knew exactly what he was about to do, I was still unable to stop him from changing our position so it was suddenly my arm that was painfully stretched over the joint of my elbow.

I tapped at his side furiously to let him know he needed not add pressure.

"But it isn't really pain that makes you pat me there. You have gotten worse bruises than this one."

He arched his body slightly more. And in doing so, my right arm stretched yet a millimeter over the elbow.

"Stop! You'll break my arm!" I screamed.

He slacked the pressure.

There were tears at the corners of my eyes. My ears were humming. And I couldn't have cared less about the fact that the whole room around us had suddenly fallen to absolute silence while everyone in it, human and vampire, were staring at us. What I cared about was my elbow that hadn't popped out of its socket.

"Exactly," Blizzard said softly on the floor, still holding me. "Your arm breaks. The joint can be pressured out of its place. And you know this. You know that pain. It is a warning of a serious injury that might soon follow."

He let me go and we faced each other again. Still sitting on the floor. My hair was plastered against my skull. The braid had come undone a long time ago. Blizzard on the other hand sat immobile, there was no shine of sweat on his forehead, no signs of a tired body, no beating heart.

"I don't breathe. And my joints can't be dislodged. And I know that no amount of pain will ever break my arm, or even a finger. While I feel the pressure, it has no consequences. You can't pop my eyes with a sharp object. Have you ever thought, in all this time we had known each other, what you would do, if ever you really needed to fend off a vampire?"

I gulped. I had dreamed of it, many times. But in all those dreams the fights had been short and brutal. And I had not come out the winner.

"No," I said.

"Well. I ask you to think about it now. Because now you have the time and space to practice, to think. What do you have that I do not?"

"A beating heart and many easily breakable joints?"

Blizzard smiled ruefully.

We had collected a semicircle of audience. Blizzard didn't seem to mind.

"She has nothing." The speaker was one of the two vampires. "Why are you teasing her, Blizzard? And what is this nonsense of fending off a vampire? She cannot fend off a vampire. She is a human."

Blizzard lifted his gaze to the tall blond woman.

"Poppy. I hope you know that is not true. Because there is one thing that will always support her: gravity. She has real weight. While you and me," he rose to his feet and looked down at the woman, "You and me, we can easily be lifted off our two feet. If she is quick, Valentina can sweep us off our feet without even swaying herself. She can aim a kick at our heads, knocking us unconscious. And unlike she, a human, we won't become conscious for some time after that."

The female vampire looked coldly, disdainfully, up at the boulder-sized Blizzard looming over her. Then she looked down at me, with an arched eyebrow.

She didn't need to say it. Her face made her thoughts abundantly clear.

She didn't think I was quick. And we weren't talking of quick enough. She meant not quick at all.

I returned her gaze.

Sure, I knew by now that vampires were quick. I had seen her sparring just moments before. And I had no supernatural strength either. But up until this very moment I had thought I was up against gods.

I smiled.

And I knew she knew my mirth wasn't faked. Vampire that she was, she undoubtedly could sense my emotions, my aura. And this knowledge added to my amusement.

It was possible to fight against a vampire. It was possible.

I let that knowledge sink in and become a conviction.

I could stand up against them.

She snorted. And turned away.

She opened the door to go out, but in came a man who was slightly shorter than she was, despite his high heels. He almost collided with the blond vampire when she exited the gym.

Plume came to us, wooden high heels clanging against the hard laminate floor. He was the only person in the room not dressed in white pajamas.

"I missed something, didn't I?" He yawned. "I'll drop off my feet soon. But I just..."

Another yawn.

"So sorry. Just wanted to tell you that Timothy sends his greetings. Mo said you would be here."

My mood soured immediately.

Plume cast a dark, lens-covered eye at me.

"It's not the Queen. And not Timothy either," I explained. "It's his sister. She has been pestering me. She wants to meet. I think some part of her misses him. I saw her at the beginning of summer. She knows I know something she doesn't."

Plume massages his eyes. Then yawned again.

"Well. Whatever the case, Timothy is well."

"As you just told the Queen," Blizzard's low voice interrupted.

Plume looked at the taller vampire.

"Yes...?"

"You are reporting on Timothy to the Queen?"

"Well..." Plume looked aside to me, "I wouldn't call it reporting. I don't think anyone reports anything to her. Mo asked how he was doing. What was I to say? That I haven't seen her little boy?"

"Mo? Since when do you call the Queen by her name?"

Plume gave Blizzard an annoyed stare.

"Why don't you go deep into yourself to find the answer to that question? It's a catchy name. Timothy uses it."

He swayed where he stood.

Then, without warning, Plume simply collapsed.

Blizzard caught him while he was still falling and then held him. Plume looked like a child in his arms.

Blizzard sighed.

"You should have come tomorrow," he said to the man in his arms.

"What happened?" I asked.

Blizzard hoisted the smaller man up to carry him. Then he looked at me. And before I could really prepare myself for anything, he dumped the other vampire into my arms.

I expected him to weigh more. But the weight I caught was nothing. Like Plume had really been a bird with hollowed out bones. He weighed less than a seven years old child.

Yes indeed. Vampires weighed nothing.

Blizzard crouched down to pick up one of Plume's shoes that had slipped off his foot that now dangled shoeless over my arm.

"He uses a drug," Blizzard explains. "And thinks he is stronger than it is because he uses another drug to counter some of the side effects."

"Why? What does it do to him?"

Blizzard had started walking to the door. I followed him out into the summer night.

"It breaks his ties with the night. Reverses the rhythm. Plume cannot fly under the stars. Not for very late at least. He falls asleep. Like a vampire falls asleep when morning breaks. I suspect he has been doubling his dose because it's summer and the daylight hours are long. Even I take a small amount of the same stuff now when it's near midsummer. Otherwise I could be awake maybe for six hours or so."

He sounded angry as he explained this and we walked from the school building towards a neat neighborhood across the street.

For a moment it seemed Blizzard was aiming for a dark, red tiled building, but he turned at the last minute to a white tiled house just beside it. He tried the door, finding it locked.

I could hear him taking in a calming breath and then releasing it slowly.

I heard a click as the door's mechanism turned.

Blizzard breezed past a living room to the stairs. We took Plume upstairs where there was a door with his name on it.

It wasn't locked and Blizzard indicated I should take Plume in.

Gratefully, I set my burden on a couch inside. Light or not, he wasn't weightless.

I stretched my arms.

Plume's room was a mess from a different era. There were CDs in racks and a portable radio on a table. More books than any of my friends owned. A guitar rested against a wooden work table that was surprisingly simple in its appearance. He had laid clothes here and there, same as paper sheets full of neat slanting handwriting. They littered the table, the couch and the floor. I must have stepped on various pieces of paper on my way in.

Blizzard set the high heel on top of the table.

I turned to him, away from the dead youngster on the sofa. I was just about to ask again why Plume did this to himself, when my eyes hit a small fridge by the table. The door was covered in pictures, adding to the overall clutter of the room. Some were clippings from newspapers.

One of the clippings featured a familiar face.

I crouched down by the fridge to read the article.

"Professor Scale Tongue, head of French Philology at the University of Breasinghae, launches a new approach to language learning..."

My eyes skipped to the next clipping. It too was of Rosemary Scale Tongue, arguing for better mental health support for students. Both articles had yellowed over time, but this second clipping seemed to be already decades old. Plume had laminated it in plastic. The woman in the picture was young, maybe close to my current age.

I glanced back behind my back to the sleeping vampire. I had left him in an uncomfortable looking angle, one arm dangling outside the couch.

"He is obsessed," Blizzard offered. "I have taken it up with the Queen a few times, but she seems willing to wait. Eventually the problem will solve itself."

We left the room.

Once I came away from the showers, I finally texted Mimosa back.