Vampire Academy: The Ultimate Guide Read Free Page B

leave, Rose notices Christian making a beeline for her distraught friend, but she stops him before Lissa sees him. Rose thinks Christian’s a bad influence and decides to lie to him, to tell him Lissa doesn’t like him and thinks he’s a freak. The lie works perfectly, and a hurt Christian steers clear of Lissa that night.
    Later, Rose is awakened by Lissa’s emotions flowing through their bond—she’s incredibly upset. When Rose makes it to her friend’s dorm room, she sees that someone has left another horrific gift for Lissa—a dead rabbit. This time there’s a note attached warning Lissa that the sender knows what she is and that she won’t survive if she stays at the Academy. The grave message is enough to put her over the edge, and she resorts to her old method of dealing with stress. Cutting herself helps refocus her pain. This is a very bad sign for Rose, since this isn’t the first time Lissa’s done this. It happened before they ran away from the school, and it means Lissa’s becoming more mentally fragile by the day. Rose is very worried about her friend.
    As desperate as Rose is to help Lissa, the next day she has other major problems she can’t ignore. There’s now a devastating rumor going around that Rose had sex with both Jesse and his friend Ralf... and she let them drink her blood. Everyone’s saying that Rose Hathaway is a blood whore. Rose is willing to bet the mastermind behind this little catastrophe is Mia—Jesse and Ralf are just her meathead tools.
    But this realization doesn’t help matters. The damage is done.
    A sickening feeling settled in my stomach. I thought about the friends and respect I’d managed to eke out, despite our low profile. That would be gone. You couldn’t come back from something like this. Not among the Moroi. Once a blood whore, always a blood whore. What made it worse was that some dark, secret part of me did like being bitten.
    —page 173
     
     
    Sickened by the rumors, Lissa resolves to protect Rose from now on, just as Rose has always protected her. She begins to use her compulsion to get everyone to shun Mia and accept Rose again.
    And it actually starts to work. Before long, the rumors about Rose begin to fade—and not only that, Lissa’s accepted back into the popular crowd and has successfully stolen Aaron away from the vengeful Mia. While she’s not in love with her ex, it’s a way to snub Mia and hang out with the royal students again now that she isn’t trying to keep a low profile around school anymore—which hasn’t really gained them anything. Besides, dating-wise, it’s not like Christian is even acknowledging her existence anymore, so what difference does it make if she dates Aaron? Lissa, of course, doesn’t realize that Christian is only distancing himself from Lissa because of what Rose told him.
    But the more Lissa uses compulsion to fix things, the darker her moods become. Rose finds herself worrying more and more about Lissa’s ever-diminishing emotional stability, and this sends her straight back to researching the story of St. Vladimir. The similarities to Lissa and Ms. Karp are striking—like them, he was able to heal. But his talents didn’t end there. He could also bring people back from the dead. Rose needs to know more, but information on the saint is extremely hard to find.
    Fortunately, there’s a box of St. Vlad’s writings in the chapel’s attic—Rose remembers Christian pointing out a box to Lissa that he said was “full of the writings of the blessed and crazy St. Vladimir.” Rose sends Mason, who’s been helping her research St. Vlad at the library, with a message to Christian to bring them to her. He does, which is a bit of a surprise given their unfriendly relationship, especially in regard to Lissa.
    Rose reads St. Vlad’s diary and is intrigued when he mentions his gratitude toward his “shadow-kissed” guardian, Anna, and his ability to heal. It scares Rose to read that the more he used his