"Don't send me any more gifts."

"It isn't a gift. It's a public service. What woman doesn't own perfume?"

"Don't do it again," I said firmly.

Suddenly, a voice behind him asked, "Rose? Is that you?"

I peered beyond him. Lissa.

"What are you doing here?"

Between my headache and what I had assumed was some interlude with Christian, I'd blocked her out as best I could this morning. Normally I would have known the instant I approached that she was inside the room. I opened myself up again, letting her shock run into me. She hadn't expected me to show up here.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"Ladies, ladies," he said teasingly. "No need to fight over me."

I glared. "We're not. I just want to know what's going on here."

A breath of aftershave hit me, and then I heard a voice behind me: "Me too."

I jumped. Spinning around, I saw Dimitri standing in the hallway. I had no clue what he was doing in the Ivashkov wing.

On his way to Tasha's room, a voice inside me suggested.

Dimitri no doubt always expected me to get into all sorts of trouble, but I think seeing Lissa there caught him off guard. He stepped past me and came into the room, looking between the three of us.

"Male and female students aren't supposed to be in each other's rooms."

I knew pointing out that Adrian wasn't technically a student wasn't going to get us out of trouble here. We weren't supposed to be in any guy's room.

"How do you keep doing this?" I asked Adrian, frustrated.

"Do what?"

"Keep making us look bad!"

He chuckled. "You guys are the ones who came here."

"You shouldn't have let them in," scolded Dimitri. "I'm sure you know the rules at St. Vladimir's."

Adrian shrugged. "Yeah, but I don't have to follow any school's stupid rules."

"Perhaps not," said Dimitri coldly. "But I would have thought you'd still respect those rules."

Adrian rolled his eyes. "I'm kind of surprised to find you lecturing about underage girls."

I saw the anger kindle in Dimitri's eyes, and for a moment, I thought I might have seen the loss of control I'd teased him about. But he stayed composed, and only his clenched fists showed how angry he was.

"Besides," continued Adrian, "nothing sordid was going on. We were just hanging out."

"If you want to 'hang out' with young girls, do it at one of the public areas."

I didn't really like Dimitri calling us 'young girls, and I kind of felt like he was overreacting here. I also suspected part of his reaction had to do with the fact that I was here.

Adrian laughed just then, a weird kind of laugh that made my skin crawl. "Young girls? Young girls? Sure. Young and old at the same time. They've barely seen anything in life, yet they've already seen too much. One's marked with life, and one's marked with death…but they're the ones you're worried about? Worry about yourself, dhampir. Worry about you, and worry about me. We're the ones who are young."

The rest of us just sort of stared. I don't think anyone had expected Adrian to suddenly take an abrupt trip to Crazyville.

Adrian was calm and looked perfectly normal again. He turned away and strolled toward the window, glancing casually back at the rest of us as he pulled out his cigarettes.

"You ladies should probably go. He's right. I am a bad influence."

I exchanged looks with Lissa. Hurriedly, we both left and followed Dimitri down the hall toward the lobby.

"That was…strange," I said a couple of minutes later. It was stating the obvious, but, well, someone had to.

"Very," said Dimitri. He didn't sound angry so much as puzzled.

When we reached the lobby, I started to follow Lissa back toward our room, but Dimitri called to me.

"Rose," he said. "Can I talk to you?"

I felt a sympathetic rush of feeling from Lissa. I turned toward Dimitri and stepped off to the side of the room, out of the way of those passing through. A party of Moroi in diamonds and fur swept past us, anxious looks on their faces. Bellhops followed with luggage. People were still leaving in search of safer places. The Strigoi paranoia was far from over.

Dimitri's voice snapped my attention back to him. "That's Adrian Ivashkov." He said the name the same way everyone else did.

"Yeah, I know."

"This is the second time I've seen you with him."

"Yeah," I replied glibly. "We hang out sometimes."

Dimitri arched an eyebrow, then jerked his head back toward where we'd come from. "You hang out in his room a lot?"

Several retorts popped into my head, and then a golden one took precedence. "What happens between him and me is none of your business." I managed a tone very similar to the one he'd used on me when making a similar comment about him and Tasha.

"Actually, as long as you're at the Academy, what you do is my business."

"Not my personal life. You don't have any say in that."

"You're not an adult yet."

"I'm close enough. Besides, it's not like I'll magically become an adult on my eighteenth birthday."

"Clearly," he said.

I blushed. "That's not what I meant. I meant-"

"I know what you meant. And the technicalities don't matter right now. You're an Academy student. I'm your instructor. It's my job to help you and to keep you safe. Being in the bedroom of someone like him … well, that's not safe."

"I can handle Adrian Ivashkov," I muttered. "He's weird- really weird, apparently-but harmless."

I secretly wondered if Dimitri's problem might be that he was jealous. He hadn't pulled Lissa aside to yell at her. The thought made me slightly happy, but then I remembered my earlier curiosity about why Dimitri had even wandered by.

"Speaking of personal lives … I suppose you were off visiting Tasha, huh?"

I knew it was petty, and I expected a "none of your business" response. Instead he replied, "Actually, I was visiting your mother."

"You going to hook up with her too?" I knew of course that he wasn't, but the quip seemed too good to pass up.

He seemed to know that too and merely gave me a weary glance. "No, we were looking over some new data about the Strigoi in the Drozdov attack."

My anger and snarkiness dried up. The Drozdovs. The Badicas. Suddenly, everything that had happened this morning seemed incredibly trivial. How could I have stood there arguing with Dimitri about romances that might or might not be happening when he and the other guardians were trying to protect us?

"What'd you find out?" I asked quietly.

"We've managed to track some of the Strigoi," he said. "Or at least the humans with them. There were witnesses who lived nearby who spotted a few of the cars the group used. The plates were all from different states-the group appears to have split up, probably to make it harder for us. But one of the witnesses did catch one plate number. It's registered to an address in Spokane."

"Spokane?" I asked incredulously. "Spokane, Washington? Who makes Spokane their hideout?" I'd been there once. It was about as boring as every other backwoods northwest city.

"Strigoi, apparently," he said, deadpan. "The address was fake, but other evidence shows they really are there. There's a kind of shopping plaza that has some underground tunnels. There've been Strigoi sightings around that area."

"Then …" I frowned. "Are you going to go after them? Is somebody going to? I mean, this is what Tasha's been saying all along…. If we know where they are …"

He shook his head. "The guardians can't do anything without permission from higher up. That's not going to happen anytime soon."

I sighed. "Because the Moroi talk too much."

"They're being cautious," he said.

I felt myself getting worked up again. "Come on. Even you can't want to be careful on this one. You actually know where Strigoi are hiding out. Strigoi who massacred children. Don't you want to go after them when they don't expect it?" I sounded like Mason now.