Vampire Academy: The Complete Collection (Vampire Academy, #1-6)

by Richelle Mead

“We don’t know that!” The desperation in my own voice startled me.

“Lissa’s no warrior. No spirit user we know is, so unless we find one, I’d rather . . . ” I winced. “I’d rather Dimitri died.”

“I can teach you how to stake a Strigoi.”

I should have felt flattered that sneaking around me was bringing them together, but I wasn’t. I was pissed off.

“Because it gives him an excuse to be around her—without making it look like he gave in first. That way, he can still seem manly.”

There was something cute about her rambling, and it reminded me charmingly of Jill.

He had a point. In my mind, punishment involved easy things like lashings and starvation. Not filing.

No matter what happened, I would lose one of them tonight. If we rescued Lissa, Dimitri would die. If he survived, she would die. There was no happy ending for this story, nothing that could save my heart from being crushed into pieces.

One of them dies tonight. Lissa or Dimitri.

All of this, everything happening, had led to this moment: the final showdown between Dimitri and me.

“All this death is because of you, you know,” he said. “If you’d let me awaken you . . . let us be together . . . well, none of this would have happened. We’d still be in Russia, in each other’s arms, and all of your friends here would be safe. None of them would have died. It’s your fault.”

I’ll never be able to say for sure just how long the next series of events took. In some ways, it felt like only one heartbeat passed. At the same moment, it was as though we were frozen in time. Like the entire world had stopped.

She had managed to charm the stake with spirit.

The command hit me hard, an invisible wall that made me come to a halt. I stood there dazed, both from the compulsion itself and the realization that she’d used it on me. It only took a moment for me to shake it off. She was too distracted to put her full power into the order, and I was pretty compulsion-resistant anyway.

pierced his heart. And as it did, I felt magic flood our bond, the familiar magic I’d felt so many times when she performed a healing.

For a moment, it was as if there was no bond anymore. I felt nothing from Lissa—no pain, no magic. The bond was as colorless and empty as the white light filling the room. The power she’d used had over-flooded and overwhelmed our bond, numbing it.

Not just a miracle. A fairy tale.

She was stroking Dimitri’s hair. While she sat in some semblance of an upright position, he was in an ungainly sprawl. His head rested in her lap, and she was running her fingers through his hair in a gentle, repetitive motion—like one does to comfort a child or even an animal.

Dimitri . . . was not a Strigoi. And he was weeping.

When the bond had first come about years ago, it had been so strange . . . surreal. Now I’d accepted it as part of my life. Its absence today had felt unnatural.

“Rose, you can’t go.” This time the sadness in Lissa’s voice was mirrored through the bond, flooding into me. “It’s not just that Dimitri didn’t ask to see you. He asked specifically not to see you.”

Dimitri sat on the narrow bed, his legs drawn up to him as he leaned into a corner of the wall and kept his back to the cell’s entrance. It wasn’t what I had expected. Why wasn’t he beating at the bars? Why wasn’t he demanding to be released and telling them he wasn’t a Strigoi? Why was he taking this so quietly?

“It’s . . . it’s hard to describe. It’s like I’ve woken up from a dream. A nightmare. Like I’ve been watching someone else act through my body—like I was at a movie or a play. But it wasn’t someone else. It was me. All of it was me, and now here I am, and the whole world has shifted. I feel like I’m relearning everything.”

“Anyone but her,” he repeated. “Not after what I did to her. I did a lot of things . . . horrible things.” He turned his hands palm-up and stared at them for a moment, like he could see blood. “What I did to her was worst of all—especially because it was her. She came to save me from that state, and I . . .” He shook his head. “I did terrible things to her. Terrible things to others. I can’t face her after that. What I did was unforgivable.”

He’d always been so invincible in my eyes, and this sign of vulnerability didn’t make him seem weaker to me. It simply made him more complex. It made me love him more—and want to help him.

How dare he? How dare he act like Lissa was the greatest thing in the world? She’d done a lot to save him, true, but I was the one who’d traveled around the globe for him. I was the one who had continually risked my life for him. Most importantly, I was the one who loved him. How could he turn his back on that?

“Of course it’s jealousy,” said Adrian nonchalantly. “What do you expect? The former love of your life comes back—from the dead, no less. That’s not something I’m really excited about. But I don’t blame you for feeling confused.” “I told you before—” “I know, I know.” Adrian didn’t sound particularly upset. In fact, there was a surprisingly patient tone in his voice. “I know you said him coming back wouldn’t affect things between us. But saying one thing before it happens and then actually having that thing happen are two different things.”

Mikhail took a deep breath and exhaled. “I think I can sneak you in to see him.”

“Why are you doing this for me? The Moroi Council might not think Dimitri’s a big deal, but the guardians do. You could get in big trouble.”

“When I lost Sonya . . .” Mikhail closed his eyes for a heartbeat, and when he opened them, they seemed to be staring off into the past. “When I lost her, I didn’t want to go on living. She was a good person—really. She turned Strigoi out of desperation. She saw no other way to save herself from spirit. I would give anything—anything—for a chance to help her, to fix things between us. I don’t know if that’ll ever be possible for us, but it is possible for you right now. I can’t let you lose this.”

“No, as in I don’t want to see you.” His voice was thick with emotion. “They weren’t supposed to let you in.” “Yeah. Well, I kind of found a work-around.” “Of course you did.”

“How do you think she got to that point?” I demanded. “How do you think she learned how to save you? Do you have any idea what we—what I—had to go through to get that information? You think me going to Siberia was crazy? Believe me, you haven’t even come close to seeing crazy. You know me. You know what I’m capable of. And I broke my own records this time. You. Owe. Me.”

It was like one of those moments when people talked about their lives flashing before their eyes. Because as we stared at one another, every part of our relationship replayed in my mind’s eye. I remembered how strong and invincible he’d been when we first met, when he’d come to bring Lissa and me back to the folds of Moroi society. I remembered the gentleness of his touch when he’d bandaged my bloodied and battered hands. I remembered him carrying me in his arms after Victor’s daughter Natalie had attacked me. Most of all, I remembered the night we’d been together in the cabin, just before the Strigoi had taken him. A year. We’d known each other only a year, but we’d lived a lifetime in it.

“It matters to me!”

“It matters to me. That’s what you don’t get. You can’t understand. You can’t understand what it’s like knowing what I did. That whole time being Strigoi . . . it’s like a dream now, but it’s one I remember clearly. There can be no forgiveness for me. And what happened with you? I remember that most of all. Everything I did. Everything I wanted to do.”

“You don’t understand what it’s like coming through what I did—coming back from being a Strigoi. It’s changed everything. It’s not just that what I did to you is unforgiveable. All my feelings . . . my emotions for you . . . they changed. I don’t feel the way I used to. I might be a dhampir again, but after what I went through . . . well, it’s scarred me. It altered my soul. I can’t love anyone now. I can’t—I don’t—love you. There’s nothing more between you and me.”

“The Council just passed a decree lowering the guardian age to sixteen. Dhampirs’ll graduate when they’re sophomores and then go out for assignments.”

I’d run off with Lissa, watched friends die, traveled around the world, fallen in love. . . . “You can live a lifetime in two years. And if you want us to keep being on the front lines—which most of us willingly do when we graduate—then you owe us those two years.”

“Well, then, perhaps we need more excellent training. Perhaps we should send you to St. Vladimir’s or some other academy so that you can improve your young colleagues’ education. My understanding is that your upcoming assignment will be a permanent administrative one here at Court. If you wanted to help make this new decree successful, we could change that assignment and make you an instructor instead. It might speed up your return to a bodyguard assignment.”

“Do not,” I warned, “try to threaten, bribe, or blackmail me. Ever. You won’t like the consequences.”

“It wasn’t a fair vote,” I declared. “It wasn’t legal.”

“Vasilisa Dragomir is eighteen now and can fill her family’s spot.” In all of this chaos, her birthday had been overlooked, even by me.

“Isn’t eighteen the legal voting age?” Checkmate, bitch. “Yes,” she said cheerfully. “If the Dragomirs had a quorum.” I wouldn’t say my stunning victory exactly shattered at that point, but it certainly lost a little of its luster. “A what?”

Tatiana grimaced. “Not now, of course. Someday, I’m sure. For a family to have a vote, they must have at least two members, one of whom must be over eighteen. It’s Moroi law—again, a law that’s been in the books for centuries.”

With no more ammunition, I resorted to old standbys. “That,” I told Tatiana, “is the most fucked-up law I have ever heard.”

“You could change the quorum law if you wanted, you sanctimonious bitch!” I yelled back. “You’re twisting the law because you’re selfish and afraid! You’re making the worst mistake of your life. You’ll regret it! Wait and see—you’ll wish you’d never done it!”

I knew the more power a spirit user wielded, the quicker they’d travel down the road to insanity.

Now I wondered if “undead” meant the Strigoi part of Dimitri. Even if I hadn’t driven the stake, I’d certainly played a major role.

“The cards don’t make the future,” she said gently. “If something’s meant to be, it’ll be, regardless of whether you see it here. And even then . . . well, the future is always changing. If we had no choices, there’d be no point in living.”

“Cups are tied to emotions,” Rhonda explained. “The Two of Cups shows a union, a perfect love and blossoming of joyous emotions. But since it’s inverted—”