o_18vdqvms01tdp1ck54q91frg17mg2d.pdf

"So, Guardian Hathaway," I began. "Why didn't you guys just secure the place?"
She frowned. I think she'd gone on her guard the moment she called on me. "What do you
mean?"
I shrugged and slouched back in my desk, attempting a casual and conversational air. "I don't
know. It seems to me like you guys messed up. Why didn't you scope out the place and make
sure it was clear of Strigoi in the first place? Seems like you could have saved yourself a lot of
trouble."
All eyes in the room turned toward me. My mother was momentarily at a loss for words. "If we
hadn't gone through all that 'trouble,' there'd be seven more Strigoi walking the world, and those
other captured Moroi would be dead or turned by now."
"Yeah, yeah, I get how you guys saved the day and all that, but I'm going back to the principles
here. I mean, this is a theory class, right?" I glanced over at Stan who was regarding me with a
very stormy look. He and I had a long and unpleasant history of classroom conflicts, and I
suspected we were on the verge of another. "So I just want to figure out what went wrong in the
beginning."
I'll say this for her—my mother had a hell of a lot more self-control than I did. Had our roles
been reversed, I would have walked over and smacked me by now. Her face stayed perfectly
calm, however, and a small tightness in the set of her lips was the only sign that I was pissing
her off.
"It's not that simple," she replied. "The venue had an extremely complex layout. We went
through it initially and found nothing. It's believed the Strigoi came in after the festivities had
started—or that there might have been passages and hidden rooms we hadn't been aware of."
The class ooh'ed and ahh'ed over the idea of hidden passages, but I wasn't impressed.
"So what you're saying is that you guys either failed to detect them during your first sweep, or
they broke through the 'security' you set up during the party. Seems like someone messed up
either way."