Vampire Academy 5 – Spirit Bound

One

"Rose?" Lissa was looking at me. I could sense that she was getting worried. "So will you tell me what this is about?"

I kept on staring at the note, then shook my head to wake up.

I showed Lissa the letter, and while reading it, she gasped.

"This means…" she started. I felt the terror inside her. Yes, this meant that Dimitri was still alive, and I didn't know whether to be happy because I hadn't killed the man I loved, or to be sad because I couldn't free his soul from evil?

I nodded.

"You will go and kill him again?"

"No." I said. I had promised my mother that I wouldn't leave campus for two and a half months. I never turned from my promises. "He will come to me."

Lissa looked kind of puzzled, and then she understood.

"But won't that be too dangerous for the moroi and dhampirs on the campus?" she asked.

Dimitri was a single strigoi, but then I remembered how we killed Galina that night, and that now he was the leader. Would he attack with a whole army?

Lissa had a point, and even though I didn't like this, I had to find a way to kill Dimitri without getting him anywhere near the campus.

But I would do no good if I attacked a whole army of strigoi myself.

I had to find Robert.

And for that… well, I had to get Victor Dashkov out of prison.

Thinking twice, would Dimitri want us to sacrifice so many things for him? But again, Dimitri wasn't here anymore, a strigoi was, which meant that it was my turn to take over the control. I had to warn the others.

But they would kill the strigoi the moment they knew about this attack. They wouldn't give us an opportunity to save Dimitri…

I was lost.

I knew I couldn't get to action at that moment. I had to come up with a plan, and Lissa and the others were the only ones who could help me.

"Liss," I said. "We need to get the others."

Lissa nodded, and then headed for her phone.

"I'll get Adrian." She said. Oh great, I was the one to get Christian. I knew this was hard for her, but she had promised that she would be there for me on my next crazy quest.

I went out of her room, and everyone was still looking at me. When I came downstairs, Jesse stopped me.

"Oh, look who's here." He said with a wry smile. "Little miss dropout."

I laughed, even though there was no humor in my laughter.

"I can see that your little mana didn't last so long. What was your pretext? 'No Alberta, we weren't torturing those people, we were smoothing things over, that's all'. I'm sure she believed you." My imitation wasn't that strong, but that was enough to piss both Jesse and Ralf off.

Jesse's face went white with the memories of that night.

"Well, I have a class now. I guess I'll see you around." His voice broke a little, but he was out of there before I could say anything.

Jesse thought he could easily mess with me, and we had some bad experiences in the past, but now he was well aware of what could happen when my fist connected with his nose. He had personally experienced it last semester, right before the strigoi attack, when he tortured Lissa, and many other moroi who could use compulsion, to create a group and compel people to achieve his selfish goals. His trials also caused the wards around the school to weaken, which was the main reason the strigoi broke into campus. And if strigoi didn't brake knot campus, no one would be captured. If no one would be captured, we wouldn't need to go on a rescue mission. And if we didn't have to go on a rescue mission…

…Dimitri would still be alive.

No.

I shouldn't blame other people for things that happened in the passed. There was no way of changing the past anyway. What I had to do was… what did I have to do, anyway? What if we would get Victor out of prison for nothing? What if all this was a fairytale, like Mark had said?

But I had no other choice but trust them.

Or we could do this the easy way, and kill Dimitri. But I wasn't sure how much of that my heart could take anymore. No, I had to do this the hard way. Who said that you shouldn't do some sacrifices for love?

I was walking on the hallway, when I realized I was in front of the room where Christian was practicing with his students. They didn't usually practice today, but maybe Christian had changed the schedules… Well, I saw Jill go in the room earlier today, which meant he was practicing.

The door was closed, but it wasn't sealed. There was a little gap left, which made me wonder why it was so. Maybe he wasn't in the room because I was sure that Christian wouldn't risk his little sessions being discovered by some instructor…

But when I got in the room, I saw that it was a totally different issue going on in here.

Yes, Christian was in here. Jill was here too, but the thing was, they weren't practicing.

They were kissing.