School starts in two weeks! It's crunch time.

I'm going to try to get as much out to you guys as possible, but between the crunch for more hours at work, preparing for school coming back, and the crunch in my personal life, I would warn you to prepare for the worst. I'm going to do my best though!

I hope you like this chapter. I didn't really have a direction for it, so I don't think it's one of my best. I'm sorry.

Please review!

CHAPTER 5

So I slowly shut my eyes, blocking out all thoughts of craziness versus sanity and the power the darkness had in it, and instead focused on the part of the dream that had made me happiest. Dimitri.

I couldn't call him, despite it being perfectly within his time zone, because of my shared room with Lissa. So instead I settled for visualizing, and my imagination somehow managed to coax me into a deep sleep for the rest of the night.

Or maybe just a deep sleep for the next hour. Because after that, I was wide awake, and my mind couldn't get off that nightmare.

I started over-thinking its meaning and everything about it. Was I unhappy? I hadn't thought about Dimitri and our secret cabin since Russia. Was I subconsciously worried about Lissa? Without the bond, I had definitely been more paranoid about her health and safety. Was that dream, God forbid, some kind of premonition? Was I going to fail Lissa when she needed me most?

I was awake when Lissa stirred, but I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep so she wouldn't worry. I didn't know whether she was angry or scared about last night, but either way I didn't want to make it a big deal.

I let her adjust for a minute, and then sat up and yawned myself. "Morning," I greeted.

Lissa's face was painted with worry. "How did you sleep last night?"

"I'm fine," I insisted, trying to dodge her question and avoid any more from coming. "It was a bad dream and some pent-up paranoia gone awry."

Lissa didn't look convinced, but I didn't give her any time to argue. "Come on, let's shower and get to class."

I had to check the schedule that I had created to keep track of what guardians would be in what class with Lissa at all times, as well as where they would be when not with the Queen. According to it, I was not in Lissa's first class, which opened up my morning.

I found Pike in the hall and asked if she wanted to train with me this morning. Her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree, and for the first time, I realized just how homesick she may have been. I would have extended the offer to the other guardians on campus that weren't currently with Lissa, but I still wasn't held in the highest regard…

Instead, Pike and I trekked down the campus without talking to each other, taking stock of our surroundings. We had to know every nook and cranny of this place to ensure Lissa's safety, so our little detour was helpful.

When we reached the track, we simply started running. We didn't do a count-off, or set a certain number of laps to run. We didn't even keep pace with each other. Halfway through, it turned into an unspoken competition, and the race was intense. Pike was older than me and had had more years of training, but I had lived life in my eighteen years far more than she had in her twenty. My legs carried me farther and faster, despite her history and height, and I managed to get almost a full lap ahead of her.

According to the clock, we ran for an hour. In my mind, it was timeless. Running brought back memories of Dimitri—everything from training with him at St. Vladimir's to trying to escape his Strigoi counterpart in Russia—and at the moment, that was what I needed. I was still shaken by that nightmare, and I was hoping that these memories, the familiarity of training, the memory of that rocky success, would ground me again.

"Hathaway!"

Pike had yelled at me, but I hadn't needed her warning. My phone had beeped with the same emergency alert hers had, and I was only mere steps behind her as we took off back towards campus.

My heartbeat echoed in my ears as the memory of my nightmare pressed at the back of my eyes. Lissa, her eyes wide, all that blood—

My legs were shorter than Pike's, but my determination was stronger. I pushed through the building's doors and she was on my heels.

I reached for the bond, wishing it could somehow reestablish itself, just for the moment, so I could find Lissa. I hated this not knowing.

Pike and I ran into Mernowsky in the hallway, with two other male guardians flanking her.

"What happened?" I demanded immediately. We may all be equals in protecting Lissa, but I was still her best friend. I had to know now.

Mernowsky's face was taut. "There was another Moroi attack."

"Right now? On the Queen?" Pike asked, incredulously.

Mernowsky nodded tersely. "It was a fire user. He tried to light the Queen on fire, but thankfully missed and set her neighbor's backpack ablaze instead."

"Lissa's okay?" I pressed anxiously. "Where is she?"

"She was removed from the premises immediately and put under heavy guard in your dormitory room. Guardians Royce, Simms, and myself stayed to debrief you and also…" She trailed off, and I frowned. It seemed to strike me in her silence.

"Where is this Moroi?"

Mernowsky wet her lips uncomfortably. "Dead. The Queen…retaliated before we could."

Nerves lit up in my body. "Lissa killed them with spirit?"

Mernowsky simply nodded. I didn't take the minute that I needed to process this development, instead taking off in the direction of my dorm.

On some level, I was glad that Lissa had been able to handle protecting herself. She was getting stronger and learning to harness spirit more and more everyday. That was an accomplishment worth noting.

However, if she was able to use that power to kill someone? And if she was actually exercising it? The darkness had to be worse than she let on.

Lissa definitely was under heavy guard. I passed guardians on every floor, and when I reached ours, the watch doubled. There were three alone standing by the door, not counting the rest that were spread out through the hallway.

I was let through without a fuss since my face was so recognizable, but they wouldn't let me in the room without Lissa's permission.

I gawked. "This is my room, too!" I pushed through the guardians adamantly, and they didn't fight me (because Lissa gave them permission to let me in, I later learned).

Once she and I were alone behind closed doors (Kruz and Calleigh had evacuated the room once they saw I was with Lissa), I spun on her.

I managed to stay calm while I asked her what happened. I figured I needed to be her rock, to let her be hysterical and frantic and devastated over the last half hour while lending a supportive shoulder to cry on. It was her calm response that threw me into hysterics.

"There was another attempt on my life," she said with a straight face. She was sitting on her bed, legs crossed, plucking at a fuzzy pillow in front of her. "This Moroi used fire and tried to char me." Her gaze never wavered or changed emotion as she said, "I killed him."

I couldn't stop my jaw from dropping. "What?"

Lissa's expression finally changed to one of puzzlement. "Didn't they tell you? I thought you knew all the details."

"I do," I hissed, trying to rapidly sort through my frazzled, bipolar emotions. "I just—how come—why aren't you beside yourself?"

Lissa frowned. "What do you mean? I'm fine. He didn't hurt me at all."

"Yes, I know, but you killed him. Using spirit. Last time you channeled enough spirit to kill someone, I took it all and almost did the deed for you. And it was unpleasant and scary and I was sure as hell left shaken up. So why are you looking all happy-go-lucky, all-is-fine-and-dandy-in-the-world, I-just-killed-a-guy-no-big-deal?"

Lissa was silent. She kept her face carefully blank—her own guardian mask—and this was another one of those times that I started silently screaming for the bond to come back.

When I had taken the darkness from Lissa when she was trying to hurt Jesse, I had been on a rampage. I would have killed him if there hadn't been trained guardians there to stop me. And if it weren't for Dimitri, I don't know if I would have been able to snap out of it. Then there was Victor Dashkov, when there was no one there to stop me and the same urge came along. He didn't wind up as lucky as Jesse.

And even though Victor was a monster and the world was a better place without him, I still felt sick whenever I thought about what I did to him. The darkness made me lose control of myself and I turned into an uncontrollable monster.

So why wasn't Lissa at all disturbed by what she had just done? I mean, we're talking about the girl who discovered her powers trying to heal a freaking bird.

"I did what I had to do. I protected myself."

I collapsed onto the bed, still in shock. I didn't even know how to respond to that. Was I going crazy? All I could think about was that damned nightmare again, and Lissa on the floor with all that blood, saying, "It was the darkness. Always there. Always hurting."

"Maybe you're right," she finally said. "I killed someone. That's…hard."

I studied her. There was a strange timbre to her voice—not necessarily fakeness, but definitely not what I would call sincerity. When she met my eyes, she seemed to notice my scrutinizing gaze and her eyes widened.

"You don't believe me?" she asked incredulously.

And then I realized it was Lissa, and she simply had a different way of coping with things, and maybe detachment was how she was handling this now.

"No, I do," I quickly backtracked. "I just…how did it get to that point, Lissa?"

She flushed. "I just got so angry. It's not fair. I'm a good queen. Why is there a Moroi uprising against me? Everyone loved Tatiana and she was a royal bitch."

I flinched. That sounded like something I would have said, not Lissa.

"I just…it happened. I don't know how, but it did. And then chaos erupted around me and they had to tell me that I was the one who had killed him."

I handed her an extra pillow from my bed. "Here. Take a nap and…recover from this morning. I'll talk to Guardian Locke and figure out what to do."

Kruz went back into Lissa's room to sit with her once I left, and I noticed as I walked into the hallway that the obvious group of guardians had dispersed and were blending in better throughout the building. Lissa's guard was still high right now, but we weren't on lockdown anymore.

On my way to Locke's office, I called Dimitri. It was late for him, almost midnight vampire-time. I half-expected to miss him, but my heart leapt with relief when he answered on the fourth ring.

"Belikov," he said. He must not have glanced at the caller ID.

"Hathaway," I barked back.

There was only a second-long pause before he breathed, "Roza."

I don't think I would ever get tired of hearing him say my name. A part of me wondered if he felt the same way about his own nickname. "Hey, Comrade."

"How are things over there? Are you enjoying college life?"

"Oh yeah, the campus is gorgeous, the classes are fun, and you should see the hot frat guys that roam the campus."

Dimitri's silence on the other end of the line would have worried me if I hadn't heard Christian in the background, frantically demanding, "Hot frat guys?!" But then Christian's voice faded and Dimitri's voice strengthened and I realized he had walked into a different room.

"How are things at Court?" I asked before he could ask me another question about school.

"They're going. I've been staying with Christian more than usual lately, because there were a few threats that managed to reach him."

That was happening at Court, too? What the hell was going on with the Moroi community? There hadn't been an uprising this intense in…well, I don't know if there had ever been one!

"A Moroi tried to attack Christian?"

"Not physically. Christian's been getting letters detailing how this certain Moroi would like to attack him."

I groaned. "Jesus, this is worse than I thought."

"What?"

Oops, I hadn't meant to let that last part slip. Now I had no choice but to tell him. And since I was unloading all of my problems onto his shoulders, I might as well include my insecurities about the nightmare, too.

"All right," I sighed. "Let me start at the beginning."

DPOV

Needless to say, I was worried sick. Not only did Rose's dream have me completely discomforted, but the way she described Lissa's reaction had me greatly upset.

"What do you think that dream meant?" I asked, hating how I sounded like a shrink. I didn't want to sound generic and unhelpful. I wanted to have all of the answers for her.

"I don't know," she groaned. "Maybe I'm more worried about Lissa than I realized? This whole not-having-the-bond is throwing me for a loop, too, you know."

"I know," I said in my most soothing voice. I wanted nothing more than to gather her in my arms right then, and I ached with the fact that I couldn't. "Have you talked to her about it?"

Rose hesitated. I braced myself for the worst, wondering what new curveball she could throw my way. Did Lissa come clean about her cutting relapse?

"I kind of…attacked her after the nightmare."

My eyebrows shot up even though she couldn't see me. "Attacked her?"

She sounded sheepish on the other end. "Well, I went a little crazy and demanded to see her wrists. When she resisted, I may have been a little rough."

My breath caught in my throat. Had she seen the scars? "And?" I prompted.

"They were clean. Nothing, except the faint outline of the old, healed scars."

I scowled in confusion. What had Lissa done? How far had she gone to hide her weakness from Rose? And why the hell was she so against telling Rose, anyway?

Rose sighed on the other end, no clue what was raging through my own mind at the moment. "It was good news, though, so I can't complain. I think I worried her, though, which might have given the darkness a chance to move in—"

"Don't," I interjected quickly. "Don't blame yourself, Roza."

She sighed again. "It's hard not to. I was so used to taking it from her and being able to…somehow control it…now that I can't do anything to help her, it's frustrating."

"I know," I said quietly. I couldn't say anything else. I couldn't warn her like I wanted to, because it wasn't my place. I couldn't tell her that her instincts were right and that Lissa was on a horribly destructive path and that Rose needed to be aware and help her friend through it again as best she could without the bond.

When Rose spoke again, I thought I detected a smile in her voice. "There was one good part about that dream, though,"

"And what part was that?" I asked.

"The beginning," she said warmly. "It was you and me, and we were living together on our own in this amazing cabin."

She had left that part out in her first description.

I smiled. "I wish I could share that part of the dream with you. I don't like sleeping alone."

"Soon, Comrade," she said. "I'll be with you again soon."

After that we had to hang up, because she had reached the head guardian's office.

With an exasperated groan, I returned to where Christian was thoroughly enjoying his Wii.

He had gotten one shipped into Court after Lissa had left and he started complaining about how boring life had become without her. After the threats started rolling in, I advocated his new gaming system and even went as far as to make sure he got as many games as he wanted.

He was flicking the remote back and forth, and the motion translated into a swinging tennis racket on the television screen. When I walked in, he never took his eyes off the simulated game.

"So how many frat guys do I have to fight?" he asked as he swung forward, lobbing the ball into the row of oddly shaped characters.

I almost laughed. "Don't worry about frat boys," I told him. "Although I think it might be time to schedule a visit to Lehigh."

Christian paused the game, finally turning to face me. His face was alight with excitement. It was then that I saw how dearly he missed Lissa. His face creased as he asked, "Is something wrong?"

I should have told him the truth. It was only a matter of time before he found out anyway. But instead I shook my head and replied, "No. I just think it would do everyone good to have a little time with their significant other."

Christian moaned. "Oh, God, there is a frat boy, isn't there?"

This time I did laugh. "No," I insisted. "No frat boys."

"Just lonely girlfriends?" He perked up.

"Yes."

He powered down the system without finishing his game. "I'll go pack now."

"Slow down," I said. "I still have to talk to Guardian Croft about security measures and transportation." Not to mention concoct my own plan of attack…

Christian turned his game back on dejectedly. He grumbled under his breath. What I could finally make out sounded like this: "Way to be a fun-sucker."

I excused myself to go speak with Hans. I had a feeling Rose needed me now, and I wasn't going to repeat past mistakes. I wasn't going to ignore her and push her away.

I loved her too much.