Hourglass by Claudia Gray

despite not having seen another vampire the whole time. But as soon as we walked in, we learned that the Black Cross cell was on alert.
    “That’s not lockdown, is it?” I asked Lucas.
    “No, but they’ll be watching us.” He clasped my hand as we walked deeper into the tunnel. Everyone seemed to be awake, and the lights remained on. The lieutenants on watch that night were talking animatedly to Eliza, who didn’t look thrilled.
    “What is it?” Raquel asked, nervously fiddling with the tawny leather bracelet she always wore. “Did something go wrong with our hunt?”
    “Five boring hours in the park? That’s not the crisis.” Dana’s eyes were narrow as she studied the uneasy crowd. She had a crossbow slung over one shoulder, and she rubbed Raquel’s back absently, trying to settle her down. “Sure would like to know what it is.”
    Eliza overheard our whispers and turned toward us. Traffic overhead made the ceiling shiver a bit, and the strings of lights swayed back and forth, casting her lined face in shadow, then in light. “We might have vampires staking this place out.”
    Raquel brightened—like that was good news, not reason to freak. “You think they’re going to try to come down here and take us on?”
    “They wouldn’t dare,” Eliza replied, with a proud toss of her braid. “But somebody might be watching.”
    Mrs. Bethany , I thought with a shiver. She would get revenge for the damage to Evernight Academy if there were any way possible. “Why do you think that?”
    “We keep finding dead birds near the building. Like something’s killing them. At first we were making jokes about bird flu, but today Milos checked out the corpses, and sure enough, they’d been drained of blood. We’ve got a vamp around here, and we’ll all be watching the roof and the nearby area to get a glimpse of our visitor. Then we’ll ask a few questions of our own.”
    Lucas and I shared a glance. No vampires were watching the HQ; I had left the birds. Why hadn’t I thrown them away more carefully? I had tried, but there hadn’t been many options.
    From this moment on, my blood supply was cut off—and that meant our time to plan our escape was running out.

Chapter Five
    THAT NIGHT, AS I TRIED TO GO TO SLEEP, I KEPT telling myself, You have five days. You were able to last that long without blood when you first left Evernight Academy. That means you can last that long again.
    Besides, Black Cross has put me on patrols. I’ll be able to get out, nearly every day, and surely I’ll have chances to eat then. Everything will be okay.
    I couldn’t have been more wrong.
    First of all, my hunger for blood had grown. I’d spent only a month in Black Cross, but my body was continuing to change. The vampire inside me was growing stronger as the human grew weaker.
    After I had drunk Lucas’s blood for the first time, my mother had warned me: You’ve turned over the hourglass. What she meant was that my vampire nature had been awakened by the taste of living human blood. Where, before, I’d been a mostly normal teenage girl—albeit one who drank a glass of Opositive with her dinner—I wasn’t so normal anymore.
    My hearing had become so acute that I could hear people whispering several car cabins down from mine and Raquel’s. My skin had become so pale that a couple of people had remarked on it, though mostly jokingly, like Dana saying that this was what happened when white people tried to live underground. Occasionally the Black Cross patrols crossed the East River bridges to guard areas in Brooklyn or Queens; the mere thought of crossing running water made me nauseated. I felt grateful that the makeshift bathroom in Black Cross headquarters had no mirror, because I suspected my reflection was beginning to fade.
    My parents had warned me what happened to vampires who didn’t drink blood. Their appearances continued to change, warping until they looked like the monsters of legend: white, bony creatures whose