Disclaimer: I do not own Vampire Academy (unfortunately) and have used its characters and general plot in order to create this story. I have also kept the same sort of structure as the original story and include some of the original lines, and I AM NOT taking credit for Richelle Mead's work. This is my take on how the story could have gone with hopefully a few more things expanded on and explained. I also wanted more involvement of spirit and a more badass Rose, so...here it is.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed/favourited/followed!

Chapter Five

Or rather, they had been Strigoi. A bunch of guardians had hunted them down and killed them shortly after their transformation. If rumours were true, Christian had witnessed it all when he was still a very young boy. And, although he wasn't Strigoi himself, some people thought he wasn't far off. It didn't help that he always wore black and kept to himself.

However, strigoi or not, I didn't trust him. He was a still brooding jerk, and I silently screamed at Lissa to get out of there—not that my screaming did much good. Stupid one-way bond. Once she gets away from the creep we're going to work more on correcting that.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, surprised.

"Taking in the sights, of course. That chair with the tarp on it is particularly lovely during this time of year. Over there, we have an old box full of the writings of the blessed (and highly crazy) St. Vladimir himself. And let's not forget that beautiful table with no legs in the corner."

"Whatever." She rolled her eyes and moved toward the door, wanting to leave, but he blocked her way. Asshat.

"Well? What about you?" he taunted. "Why are you up here? Don't you have parties to go to or innocent lives to destroy?"

Some of Lissa's old spark returned as the darkness riled up and I wasn't quick enough to grab it. "Wow, that's hilarious. Am I like a rite of passage now? Go and see if you can piss off Lissa to prove how cool you are? Some girl I don't even know screamed at me today, and now I've got to deal with you? What do I have to do to be left alone?"

"Oh. So that's why you're up here. For a pity party. How cute."

"This isn't a joke. I'm serious." I could tell Lissa was getting very angry. It was trumping her earlier distress. I guess Christian just had that effect on people.

He shrugged and leaned casually against the sloping wall. "So am I. I love pity parties. I wish I'd brought the hats. What do you want to mope about first? How it's going to take you a whole day to be popular and loved again? How you'll have to wait a couple weeks before you can get the new Prada shoes?"

"Let me leave," she demanded, this time forcefully pushing him aside.

"Wait," he said, as she reached the door. The sarcasm disappeared from his voice. "What…um, what was it like?"

"What was what like?" she snapped.

"Being out there. Away from the Academy."

She hesitated for a moment before answering, caught off guard by what seemed like a genuine attempt at conversation. "It was great. No one knew who I was. I was just another face. Not Moroi. Not royal. Not anything." She looked down at the floor. "Everyone here thinks they know who I am."

Oh, Lissa. Why must you be so truthful all the time?

"Yeah. It's kind of hard to outlive your past," he said bitterly.

It occurred to Lissa at that moment—and me to by default—just how hard it might be to be Christian.

Most of the time, people treated him like he didn't exist. They didn't talk to, or about, him. They just didn't notice him. The stigma of his parents' crime was too strong, casting its shadow onto the entire Ozera family tree, despite its large numbers, and Christian had got the brunt of most of it.

Still, he'd pissed her off, and she wasn't about to feel sorry for him. Good girl.

"Wait—is this your pity party now?"

He laughed, almost approvingly. "This room has been my pity party for over a year now."

"Sorry," said Lissa sarcastically. "I was coming here before I left. I've got a longer claim."

"Squatters' rights. Besides, I have to make sure I stay near the chapel as much as possible so people know I haven't gone Strigoi…yet." Again, the bitter tone rang out.

"I used to always see you at Mass. Is that the only reason you go?" Strigoi couldn't enter holy ground. More of the 'us verse them' thing.

"Sure," he said. "Why else go? For the goodness of your soul?"

"Whatever," said Lissa, who clearly had a different opinion. "I'll leave you alone to sulk then."

"Wait," he said again. He didn't seem to want her to go. "I'll make you a deal. You can hang out here too if you tell me one thing."

"What?" She glanced back at him.

He leaned forward. "Of all the rumours I heard about you guys today—and believe me, I heard plenty, even if no one actually told them to me—there was one that didn't come up very much. They dissected everything else: why you left, what you did out there, why you came back, blah, blah, blah. And in all of that no one, no one, ever questioned that stupid story that Rose told about there being all sorts of humans who let you take their blood. It's bullshit."

She looked away, and I could feel her cheeks starting to burn. "It's not stupid. Or a story." She was hesitant to swear.

He laughed softly. "I've lived with humans. My aunt and I stayed away after my parents…died. It's not that easy to find blood." When she didn't answer, he laughed again. "It was Rose, wasn't it? She fed you."

A renewed fear shot through both her and me. No one at school could know about that. I know Dimitri knew and I'm sure the guardians on the scene knew, but they'd kept that knowledge to themselves. Well, they might have told Kirova, but that's it.

"Well. If that's not friendship, I don't know what it is," he said.

"You can't tell anyone," she blurted out.

Oh, come on! This was all we needed. As I'd just been reminded, feeders were vampire-bite addicts. We accepted that as part of life but still looked down on them for it. For anyone else— especially a dhampir—letting a Moroi take blood from you was almost, well...dirty. In fact, one of the kinkiest, practically pornographic things a dhampir could do was let a Moroi drink blood during sex. Lissa and I hadn't had sex, of course, but we'd both known what others would think of me feeding her. But I still didn't want the school creep, or anyone else for that matter, to know about it.

"Don't tell anyone," Lissa repeated.

He stuffed his hands in his coat pockets and sat down on one of the crates. "Who am I going to tell? Look, go grab the window seat. You can have it today and hang out for a while. If you're not still afraid of me."

She hesitated, studying him. He looked dark and surly, lips curled in a sort of I'm-such-a-rebel smirk. But he didn't look too dangerous (to her). He didn't look Strigoi. So, gingerly, she sat back down in the window seat, unconsciously rubbing her arms against the cold.

Christian watched her, and a moment later, the air warmed up considerably.

Lissa met Christian's eyes and smiled, surprised she'd never noticed how icy blue they were before.

"You specialized in fire?"

Who could have seen that coming?

He nodded and pulled up a broken chair. "Now we have luxury accommodations."

I snapped out of the vision.

"Rose? Rose?"

Blinking, I focused on Dimitri's face. He was leaning toward me, his hands gripping my shoulders firmly. I had stopped walking and we now stood in the middle of the quad separating the upper school buildings.

"Are you all right?"

"I…yeah. I was…I was with Lissa…" I put a hand to my forehead. "I was in her head."

"Her…head?"

"Yeah. It's part of the bond." I didn't really feel like elaborating and I only told him in case I blanked out during practice. I hated the infirmary and didn't want him to think I was constantly going into shock or having a seizure or something.

"Is she all right?"

"Yeah, she's…" I hesitated. Was she all right? Christian Ozera had just invited her to hang out with him. Not good. There was 'coasting through the middle,' and then there was 'turning to the dark side.' But the feelings humming through our bond were no longer scared or upset. She was almost content, though still a little nervous. "She's not in danger," I finally said. At least not at the moment.

"Can you keep going?"

The hard, stoic warrior I'd met earlier was gone—just for a moment—and he actually looked concerned. Truly concerned. Feeling his eyes on me like that made something flutter inside of me—which was stupid, of course. He was a teacher. An older teacher. I had no reason to get all giddy just because the man was too good-looking for his own good. After all, he was an antisocial god, according to Mason. One who was supposedly going to leave me in all sorts of pain.

Ha, bring it.

"Yeah. I'm fine."

I went into the gym's dressing room and changed into the workout clothes from my suitcase that someone had finally thought to give me after a day of sweating in my too small clothes. Gross.

I was about to suggest to Dimitri that maybe he should let me off this time as it was getting late and I had been on human schedule for two years but decided against it. I had to prove to him that even though I had run away it didn't mean I didn't take this seriously.

"How do you feel right now?" He asks, looking over me for any sense of fatigue or weakness, "After the training you've done so far?"

"I feel fine." And I did, aside from being a little sleepy.

He didn't seem to believe me (again) and led me into the weight room. He showed me the weights and reps he wanted me to do (please), and then sprawled in a corner with a battered Western novel. Some god.

When I finished, he stood beside me and demonstrated a few cool-down stretches (yawn).

"How'd you end up as Lissa's guardian?" I asked. "You weren't here a few years ago. Were you even trained at this school?"

He didn't answer right away. I got the feeling he didn't talk about himself very often. "No. I attended the one in Siberia."

"Whoa. That's got to be the only place worse than our backwoods Montana."

A glint of something, maybe mild amusement, sparked in his eyes, but he didn't acknowledge the joke.

"After I graduated, I was a guardian for a Zeklos lord. He was killed recently." His smile dropped, his face grew dark. "They sent me here because they needed extra guardians. When the princess turned up, they assigned me to her, since I'd already be around. Not that it matters unless she leaves the campus."

I thought about what he'd said before. Did the Strigoi kill the guy he was supposed to have been guarding? "Did this lord die on your watch?"

"No. He was with his other guardian at the time. I was away."

He fell silent, his mind obviously somewhere else. The Moroi expected a lot from us, but they did recognize that the guardians were—more or less anyway—only human. So, guardians got reasonable pay and time off like you'd get in any other job. Some hard-core guardians (like my mother) refused vacations, vowing never to leave their Moroi's sides even if it meant abandoning their own kid. Looking at Dimitri now, I had a feeling he might very well turn into one of those. If he'd been away on legitimate leave, he could hardly blame himself for what happened to that guy. Still, he probably did anyway. I'd blame myself too if something happened to Lissa and I wasn't there for her.

"Hey," I said, suddenly wanting to cheer him up, "did you help come up with the plan to get us back? Because it was pretty good. Brute force and all that." And dumb luck that Lissa had just fed.

He arched an eyebrow curiously. I'd always wished I could do that. "You're actually complimenting me on that?"

"Yeah?" I frowned as something occurred to me. "Oh, by the way, how did you find us?"

"Pure coincidence, really."

I waited. "And..."

"We had been tracking Lissa's credit cards but we soon realised they only popped up just before you left an area and we could never figure out where you were heading." That was the intention. Sometimes we didn't find as much as we needed on the strigoi bodies and had to pull some cash from her family inheritance before we left an area just in case pickings were just as slim in the new area. "So we handed in your pictures to the human police – "

"Isn't that cheating?"

He ignored me.

" – and one of them saw you buying donuts at a coffee house in Portand. He then reported it back to us."

Seriously? That was how we had been caught? Lissa had always said that my love for donuts would be my downfall. Though I'm sure she meant that I'd one day die of heart failure from all the sugar.

She could never know about this, she'd never let me forget it.

"Well, it was a hell of a lot better than the last one they tried." I could admit that, though the other one was a lot scarier.

"Last one?"

"Yeah. In Chicago .With the pack of psi-hounds."

"This was the first time we found you. In Portland ."

I sat up from my stretches and crossed my legs. "Um, no. I don't think I imagined psi-hounds. Who else could have sent them? They only answer to the Moroi. Maybe no one told you about it."

"Maybe," he said dismissively. I could tell by his face he didn't believe that either.

I returned to the novices' dorm after that, running there, as I still felt energised. We had barely done anything at all in training.

The Moroi students lived on the other side of the quad, closer to the commons. The living arrangements were partly based on convenience. Being here kept us novices closer to the gym and training grounds. But we also lived separately to accommodate the differences in Moroi and Dhampir lifestyles. Their dorm had almost no windows and what windows they did have were tinted ones that dimmed sunlight. They also had a special section where feeders always stayed on hand at all hours. The novices' dorm was built in a more open way, allowing for more light.

I had my own room because there were so few novices, let alone girls. The room they'd given me was small and plain, with a twin bed and a rectangular desk with an old computer resting on top. My suitcase and my few belongings from Portland now sat in the corner of the room. I rummaged through them, checking for my silver stakes and then the diary where I kept a list of all my kills, before pulling out a T-shirt to sleep in. I also pulled out a few pictures that I had of me and Lissa and one special one I kept that was taken just before the accident of me and Lissa's whole family. I only kept the happy ones. The photos I took of the dead strigoi I had hunted were handed into Sydney so she could identify them and then they were deleted of my camera, any spare copies were also burned – I wanted nothing to do with those memories.

I set them on my desk and booted up the computer. Someone from tech support had helpfully given me a sheet with instructions for renewing my e-mail account and setting up a password. I did both, happy to discover no one had realized that this would serve as an easy way for me to communicate with Lissa. I might be able to hear her from any distance but, as discussed before, it was a little harder to do the other way around. Too tired to write to her now, I was about to turn everything off when I noticed I already had two messages. The first from Janine Hathaway. It was short (much like her stature): I'm glad you're back. What you did was inexcusable.

"Love you too, Mom," I muttered. Bitch. Surprised she even bothered or even remembered I was gone.

The next was from Sydney, though she always used the name 'Iolanthe' when dealing with me across the internet or in letters in order to remain anonymous from the other alchemists. I wasn't sure why and she never told me. It read: Found two more identities for #48 and #93. I'll let the families know. PS; I heard about your capture. Best of luck with whatever you choose to do. You know how to contact me if you want any assistance. PPS; A says hi.

I responded quickly, typing out my thanks and my gratitude that at least two more families could rest in peace now, knowing their loved one was no longer a monster. I also sent my regards back to Adrian ('Tell the Dream Stalker I say hi back') before shutting down and heading to bed.

I passed out before even hitting the pillow, and woke up the next morning with very little recognition of actually having any sleep at all. Lying there in bed, I reconsidered the perks of running away. Then I remembered my promise to make myself better for Lissa and forced myself to leave the warmth of my bed and get my ass to training.

My before-school practice with Dimitri was pretty much the same as last nights and I managed to get to all my subsequent classes on time. And, at lunch, I dragged Lissa away from Natalie's table early and gave her a Kirova-worthy lecture about Christian—particularly chastising her for letting him know about our blood arrangement. If that got out, it'd kill both of us socially and I didn't trust him not to tell.

"Why didn't you just compel him?"

Lissa had other concerns.

"You were in my head again?" she exclaimed."For that long?"

"I didn't do it on purpose," I argued. "It just happened. And that's not the point. How long did you hang out with him afterward?"

"Not that long. It was kind of…fun."

"Well, you can't do it again. If people find out you're hanging out with him, they'll crucify you." I eyed her warily. "You aren't, like, into him, are you?"

She scoffed. "No. Of course not.

"Good. Because if you're going to go after a guy, steal Aaron back." He was boring, yes, but safe. Just like Natalie. How come all the harmless people were so lame? Maybe that was the general definition of 'safe.'

She laughed. "Mia would claw my eyes out."

"We can take her. Besides, he deserves someone who doesn't shop at Gap Kids."

"Rose, you've got to stop saying things like that."

"I'm just saying what you're too nice to say."

"She's only a year younger," argued Lissa. Bu she then laughed. "I can't believe you think I'm the one who's going to get us in trouble."

Smiling as we strolled toward class, I gave her a sidelong glance. "Aaron does look pretty good though, huh?"

She smiled back and avoided my eyes."Yeah. Pretty good."

"Ooh. You see? You should go after him."

"Whatever. I'm fine being friends now."

"Friends who used to stick their tongues down each other's throats to play tonsil hockey."

She rolled her eyes.

"Fine." I let my teasing go. "Let Aaron stay in the nursery school. Just so long as you stay away from Christian. He's dangerous."

"You're overreacting. He's not going Strigoi."

"He's a bad influence."

She laughed. "You think I'm in danger of going Strigoi?"

She didn't wait for my answer, instead pushing ahead to open the door to our science class. Standing there, I uneasily replayed her words and then followed a moment later. When I did, I got to see royal power in action. A few guys—with giggling, watching girls—were messing with a gangly-looking Moroi. I didn't know him very well, but I knew he was poor and certainly not royal. A couple of his tormentors were air-magic users, and they'd blown the papers off his desk and were pushing them around the room on currents of air while the guy tried helplessly to catch them as they danced across the floor.

My instincts urged me to do something, maybe go smack one of the air users on the back of the head. But I couldn't pick a fight with everyone who annoyed me, and certainly not a group of royals—especially when Lissa needed to stay off their radar. So I could only give them a look of pure disgust as I walked to my desk. As I did, a hand caught my arm. Jesse.

"Hey," I said jokingly. Fortunately, he didn't appear to be participating in the torture session. Good. That would have decreased his attractiveness quite a bit. "Hands off the merchandise buddy."

He flashed me a smile but kept his hand on me. "Rose, tell Paul about the time you started the fight in Ms. Karp's class."

I cocked my head toward him, giving him a playful smile. "I started a lot of fights in her class."

"The one with the hermit crab .And the gerbil."

I laughed, recalling it."Oh yeah. It was a hamster though, I think. I just dropped it into the crab's tank, and they were both worked up from being so close to me, that they went at it."

Paul, a guy sitting nearby whom I didn't really know, chuckled too. He'd transferred last year, apparently, and hadn't heard of this. "Who won?"

I looked at Jesse quizzically. "I don't really remember. Do you?"

"No. I just remember Karp freaking out." He turned toward Paul. "Man, you should have seen this wack teacher we used to have. Used to think people were after her and would go off on stuff that didn't make any sense. She was nuts. Used to wander the campus while everyone slept."

I smiled tightly, like I thought it was funny. Instead, I thought back to Ms. Karp again. Jesse was right—she had wandered campus alone a lot when she still worked here. It was pretty creepy. I'd unexpectedly run into her once.

I'd been climbing out of my dorm window to go hang out with some people. It was after hours, and we were all supposed to be in our rooms, fast asleep. Such escape tactics were a regular practice for me. I was good at them. But I fell that time. I had a second-floor room, and I lost my grip about halfway down. Sensing the ground rush up toward me, I tried desperately to grab hold of something and slow my fall and the building's rough stone tore into my skin, causing cuts I was too preoccupied at the time to feel. I slammed into the grassy earth, back first, getting the wind knocked out of me.

"Bad form, Rosemarie. You should be more careful. Your instructors would be very disappointed."

Peering through the tangle of my hair, I saw Ms. Karp looking down at me, a bemused look on her face.

Pain, in the meantime, shot through every part of my body. It was humiliating.

Ignoring it as best I could, I clambered to my feet. Being in class with Crazy Karp while surrounded by other students was one thing. Standing outside alone with her was an entirely different matter. She always had an eerie, distracted gleam in her eye that made my skin break out in goose bumps.

There was also a high likelihood she'd drag me off to Kirova for a detention. Scarier still.

Instead, she just smiled and reached for my hands. I flinched but let her take them. She tsk'ed when she saw the scrapes. Tightening her grip on them, she frowned slightly. A tingle burned my skin, laced with a sort of pleasant buzz, and then the wounds closed up. I had a brief sense of dizziness and my temperature spiked. The blood then disappeared, as did the pain in the rest of my body.

Gasping, I jerked my hands away. I'd seen a lot of Moroi magic, but never anything like that. At least, not that I realised at the time.

"What…what did you do?"

She gave me that weird smile again. "Go back to your dorm, Rose. There are bad things out here. You never know what's following you."

I was still staring at my hands. "But…I...You..."

I looked back up at her and for the first time noticed scars on the sides of her forehead. Like nails had dug into the flesh there. She winked. "I won't tell on you if you don't tell on me."

I jumped back to the present, unsettled by the memory of that bizarre night. Jesse, in the meantime, was telling me about a party.

"You've got to slip your leash tonight. We're going up to that spot in the woods around eight thirty. Mark got some weed."

I sighed wistfully, regret replacing the chill I'd felt over the memory of Ms. Karp."Can't slip that leash. I'm with my Russian jailer." Plus, I really didn't need the extra worry. I already have Lissa's sanitary to worry about it; I didn't need any more brain cells disappearing from my cranium.

He let go of my arm, looking disappointed, and ran a hand through his bronze-coloured hair. Yeah. Not being able to hang out with him was a damned shame. I really would have to fix that someday. "Can't you ever get off for good behaviour?" he joked.

I gave him what I knew was a seductive smile as I found my seat.

"Sure," I called over my shoulder."If I was ever good."