Demonglass by Rachel Hawkins Page A

gently pulled his face to hers. He kissed her with surprising tenderness, and I felt my face grow hot. I hadn’t realized they were together, at least not like that.
    Daisy and Nick finally pulled apart. “Okay.” Nick slouched against the wall, his fingers flirting with the hem of Daisy’s skirt. “If we’re not going to talk about demon stuff, what are we going to talk about?” Even though his tone was friendly, his eyes were hard when he said, “After all, isn’t that why you’re here, Sophie? To get a crash course in all things demon?”
    Suddenly I wished I did drink. Why was it that everyone here wanted to get all intense with me right away? “I guess.”
    Linda reappeared, setting down Jenna’s glass of blood with a thunk that sent some of its contents slopping over the sides. I think she would have slammed down Nick’s and Daisy’s drinks just as hard, but Nick took them from her before she could. A look of disgust flickered over her face when their hands touched. I guess I should have been offended at that, what with her slighting my demon brethren and all, but I couldn’t really blame her. There was something about Nick and Daisy that made my skin crawl. I could only imagine how creepy they seemed to regular Prodigium.
    Especially when I noticed that the liquid in Nick’s and Daisy’s glasses was pitch black and oily looking.
    “Um, what is that?” I asked after Linda tossed me a room-temperature bottle of water and huffed away.
    Nick quirked his eyebrows at me and raised the glass in a kind of toast. “And so the education begins! This, Sophia, is Cassandra’s Elixir. It’s a potion they brew here at Shelley’s.”
    I twisted the cap off my water bottle. “A potion? Like with eye of newt and all that?”
    Laughing, Nick dipped a finger in his drink and licked it. Ew. “No, no eye of newt. Just water from the Aegean Sea, a couple of shots of hundred-year-old brandy, and a whole lot of magic. Oh, and a dash of faeries’ blood.”
    I took a sip of water to keep my mouth from puckering in disgust.
    “What does it do?” Jenna asked, turning her glass of blood around in her hands.
    “They say it puts you in the right frame of mind to receive visions of the future,” Daisy said. Then she took her drink from Nick and threw it back like it was water. My esophagus burned in sympathy as Nick did the same thing.
    Daisy put down her empty glass, her eyes brighter and cheeks flushed. “But really it just makes everything in here”—she pointed to her temple—“go all…hazy. It’s nice. You should order one.”
    “Yeah, I think I’ll pass on hazy for tonight.”
    Nick shrugged. “Your loss.” He leaned back in the booth, wrapping his arm tighter around Daisy. She snuggled against him as he said, “So should we get to the bonding part now?” He nudged Jenna’s foot with his own. “Why don’t you tell us how you got vamped? That’s probably an interesting story.”
    It wasn’t. It was a sad story, and one that Jenna hadn’t told me until we’d been rooming together for months. I waited for Jenna to tell them that she didn’t want to talk about it.
    Instead, she took a deep breath and said, “I fell in love with a vampire. I let her turn me because I bought into that whole eternal love spiel. Then The Eye staked her, and I…I killed someone because I was starving. Eventually the Council took me in and sent me to Hecate.”
    Her voice was flat and emotionless, but I could see how much it cost her to tell that story, even such a condensed version of it.
    “Oh, wow,” Daisy breathed. “I’m so sorry.” For a second, I thought she was making fun of Jenna, and my hands tightened into fists in my lap. But then I really looked at her, and saw that her sympathy was totally genuine. There might have even been tears in her eyes.
    “Yeah,” Nick said, sounding completely sincere. “That’s rough.”
    No one at Hex Hall had known about Jenna’s past except me and, I guessed, Mrs.