by Eva Chase
And he’d been gone an awfully long time. I wouldn’t wish an extended nighttime wandering around this place on my worst enemy, especially in its current state.
“Before we do anything else, I think we should make sure Jenson is okay and see if he’s found out anything useful,” I said. “It doesn’t seem right for any of us to be off on our own right now.”
Elias looked as if he might have argued, but whatever he’d been going to say, he bit it back. Trix’s brow knit. “It has been a while. I kept an eye out for him when I was coming back from checking on Cade, and I didn’t see him.”
And Cade hadn’t shown up to join us either. I couldn’t say I was disappointed about that, especially after he’d outright attacked Trix, but the uncertainty of his fate would be weighing on her.
“All right,” Elias said. “We go out together, search the campus, and see if we can find him.” He shook the few remaining brambles out of his suit jacket and pulled it on, then stuffed a handful from the floor into one of the pockets. “We should bring some of the rosebush pieces in case we run into another of our ghost friends out there at a time when we’d rather not get distracted.”
Good point. I didn’t regret having faced the vision of my family, as hard as it’d been to finally walk away from them with Trix’s words of devotion buoying me along, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be bad moments when I’d rather delay encountering whatever and whoever Roseborne threw at me next.
Trix and I bent to gather up the rest of the pieces. I shoved some into the pockets of my cargo pants, and she set hers on the teacher’s desk. “Just a second,” she said, and hustled out of the room. We followed, stopping just long enough for me to scoop up the bits she’d left, but by the time we made it into the hallway and wove through the crowd still braced there, Trix had already darted up to the dorms and come back down, yanking on her leather jacket.
She accepted the brambles from me and divided them between the two pockets. Then she raised her chin toward the staircase. “Let’s go.”
We skirted the banister and jogged down the steps. My feet stumbled as we reached the first floor. A girl I recognized from some of my classes, though her name didn’t immediately come to me, was slumped limp on the floor off to the side of the foyer. No ghostly form hunched over her. She lay as still as death.
My heart lurched. I hustled over to her. Her body showed no obvious injuries, but when I tentatively swiped the hair from her face, her eyes were open, staring lifelessly at the wall.
Trix came up beside me. Her mouth pressed tight. “There’s nothing we can do for her. Roseborne took her just like it did Delta.”
And all the other students who’d succumbed to the staff’s horrifying powers over the decades. But that answer didn’t satisfy me. I’d spent too long being helpless, not even trying to get out of this hellhole. I didn’t want to walk away doing nothing all over again.
Especially not when the awkward angles of the girl’s limbs reminded me too much of a body sprawled broken against asphalt.
I closed my eyes and opened them again, struggling to get a grip on myself. Trix was right. As much as I might long to help, I couldn’t here. None of us could bring someone back from the dead. We had to get going to make sure Jenson didn’t end up like this girl.
Part of actually contributing was recognizing when you could and when you had to move on. Choosing your battles wisely, my mother would have called it.
The front door’s hinges squeaked as we pushed it open. Cold night air flooded over us. I immediately wished I was wearing something thicker than a sweatshirt over my tee.
In the light that spilled from the building behind us, I made out too many figures sprawled here and there across the lawn. At least most of them were in the grips of faintly glowing ghosts and not completely gone from this world like the girl inside.
We’d only taken a couple of steps away from the building when an undulating howl split the air. Trix’s posture stiffened, her head jerking toward the woods.
Cade must be on the prowl. The howl had sounded closer than I usually heard it, as if he were right at the edge of the forest.
I stepped closer to Trix. “At least you know if he’s able to do that, he’s alive and conscious. The school hasn’t really gotten to him yet.”
“That’s true,” she said, but the worry didn’t leave her face. After all this time, after everything he’d done to her and the ways she’d realized it’d hurt her, she still felt responsible for saving him.
I loved her for that dedication and at the same time I wished she didn’t have it.
We set off in the opposite direction somewhat at random—or maybe Elias led us that way on purpose to avoid any immediate confrontation with Trix’s foster brother. Halfway across the lawn to the sparser forest at the north end of campus, a familiar voice careened through the air from behind us.
“Do you think I’m not ready? Give it your best shot, fuckers.”
It was Jenson. He sounded pissed off and defiant and… a little crazy, really. If I hadn’t known Roseborne wouldn’t have offered the means, I’d have thought he was tipsy or high.
We spun around and took off toward the direction his voice had come from, around the back of the school building. Within moments, the streaks of light I now recognized as the staff’s supernatural forms came into view just beyond the school. They blazed back and forth in front of Jenson’s silhouetted figure, tall and thin as ever, rigid with resolve.
“Jenson!” Trix called out.
He glanced over his shoulder at us and then quickly turned back to the spirits that had confronted him—or that he’d confronted; it was hard to tell. He wasn’t holding anything, just standing there empty-handed, daring them to take him on.
Right then, I did like him, at least a little.
As we reached him, the faces of the spirits became clearer—the faces I’d seen in the portraits hanging inside the school every day for the last three years, that I’d tried to replicate during the yearly art contest. Our jailers. Murderers multiple times over.
If they got their way and we all died here even after Trix had destroyed the source of their power, what would they do next? Could they summon up another rosebush in the depths of the basement? Or would they fade away alongside our roses?
From the sharp glints in their eyes and the fierce thrum of their energy cutting through the air, I was going to guess their own fate didn’t matter that much to them as long as they took us down with them.
Trix caught Jenson’s arm. “What are you doing? You can’t fight them.”
“Who says I can’t?” he said, and pitched his voice toward the spirits. “Do you really think I’m going to just wait for you to throw more crap at me on your own schedule? Come at me and we’ll find out who’s got more fight.”
Whatever had happened to him out here, it’d obviously cracked something open inside him, but I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing. Maybe he had a point. The powers that be might still be tormenting, but they’d lost a lot—because of us. Was it really so impossible that we could weaken them at least a little more by taking them on directly?
What was the worst that could happen if we didn’t try?
I stepped up by Jenson’s other side and elbowed him gently. “Sounds reasonable to me. Even if you’ve been kind of a prick to me, I’ll stand with you.”
Jenson blinked at me, looking as if he wasn’t sure whether to be gratified or insulted.
Elias joined us with a tight smile. “Sometimes being a prick is useful.”
Trix laughed. Jenson rolled his eyes, but I thought his face turned a little brighter at the show of support. I dug a handful of the brambles from my pocket and offered it to him.
“Here, take these. They repel the ghosts a little bit, at least. Not sure about those psychos.” I tipped my head toward the spirits.
Jenson let out an amused huff of breath and accepted the crumpled twigs. Then he turned his gaze on the spirits he’d challenged, shifting i
t into a glare.
“What do you think? Can you take on all four of us? Too bad you didn’t take your chance when it was just me, huh?”
For a few seconds, the blazes of energy simply kept thrumming through the air in front of us. A glimmer of hope that they might back away completely started to form in my chest.
An instant later, they whipped around each other and flung themselves straight at us.
Chapter Thirteen
Trix
As the barrage of light raced into us, I couldn’t stop a yelp from breaking from my lips. The energy of the staff-turned-spirits crackled over my skin with a wavering heat and enough force to rock me backward. I barely managed to keep my balance.
The spirits of the seven former students raced around us and careened through our group again, this time with a smack like an electric current across my face. It stung, but not enough to shift me.
I’d seen them chasing students before—they hadn’t actually hurt anyone directly, had they? I wasn’t sure they could still inflict the incapacitating headaches and stomach cramps they’d used to punish us during classes. The dispersing of the school’s power had changed some things for the worse, but possibly others for the better.
I swiveled on my feet, studying the figures encased by their bolts of light. Something Ryo had said came back to me—that if I’d been able to influence Winston’s thinking in our shared vision, I might be able to sway the other spirits too.
If I could get through to any of them, I knew who it was most likely to be. The girl—woman—whatever—who already had the biggest stake in me and my heritage. My gaze locked on Mildred’s streaming dark hair.
I’d grabbed onto the school’s newer ghosts. What would happen if I latched onto one of Roseborne College’s founders?
No time like the present to find out.
The spirits came at us again, ignoring Jenson’s rough chuckle at their attempts to intimidate us, and I sprang at Mildred’s wavering form. My hands sank into her light partway into her shoulders. Panic flashed across her face, and suddenly I was tumbling through another stretch of darkness.
The images I fell out into on the other end had a more dream-like quality than the visions the ghosts had provoked. I wasn’t in Mildred’s head or anyone else’s, as far as I could tell. I seemed to be floating by the ceiling of Roseborne’s cafeteria, which looked pretty much the same as it did now other than the uniforms the students were wearing.
There was Mildred making her way to the table beneath me, a tray in her hands. One of the other girls from the group of eight walked next to her. They set down their trays with their meals on the table, and a guy in a nearby chair tossed an apple at Mildred’s back.
Both girls whipped around, Mildred glowering but silent. With their backs turned, another girl leaned over from the neighboring table, her mouth twisted into a smirk. She dropped something from her palm into both of the girls’ mugs, the milky tea absorbing whatever it’d been in an instant.
My stomach knotted. I’d seen where Archery class had originated. Now I was abruptly, sickeningly certain I was about to discover the origins of Tolerance class.
It didn’t take long to have my suspicions confirmed. Mildred sat down without saying anything to the guy who’d tossed the apple at her, her shoulders hunched. She took a bite of toast and a gulp of her tea. Less than a minute later, her mouth tightened. A queasy color came across her face. She pressed her hand to her gut like I’d seen students do in Tolerance class after downing the potions we were forced to mix up, but it didn’t hold back the effects any more than it would have for us.
She leapt to her feet, wobbled, and vomited all over her breakfast tray and much of the table. A chorus of snickers and snarky comments carried around the room, but before I could focus on them, I jerked away. Some force yanked me from that scene into—
The library. Five heads bowed in a quiet corner between two of the shelves. Mildred was there, and Oscar with his messy black hair. He jabbed his finger toward the other end of the aisle. “We’ve put up with years of this shit. Are we going to let our whole lives happen like this? People like them are always going to be on top unless we take them down.”
“What are you thinking?” one of the other guys asked, his hands clasped in front of him with whitening knuckles. The bruise on his cheekbone suggested he’d suffered at the hands of his classmates pretty recently.
“I say we slaughter them like the pigs they are. I say we’ve earned that right. I want to see how terrified they look before they get their payback.”
Mildred’s eyes grew round, but she nodded, a fierce light crossing her face.
The force wrenched me away again, through a blur of darkness and over the grand staircase in the middle of the mansion. Mildred dashed around the second-floor banister to catch up with Winston as he started down the steps. “Hey,” she said breathlessly as she joined him, a blush coloring her cheeks. “Are you doing anything after class? I was thinking—”
A guy striding up the stairs shoved purposefully between them at just that moment. He heaved Winston into the banister and kicked the back of Mildred’s ankle. With a cry, she tripped and fell, landing on the lower steps and skidding farther down with little gasps of pain.
Her arms had shot up to protect her head. Her elbow jarred and jutted at an unnatural angle as she hit the floor at the base of the staircase. Tears trickled from her eyes.
No one stopped to help her except Winston dashing after her, holding his ribs where the asshole had assaulted him.
Okay, I might not have agreed with mass murder by bow and arrow, but I was starting to see how these kids could have gotten angry enough to resort to those measures. My teeth had gritted on their behalf.
Mildred rolled over on the floor, clutching her probably broken arm, and I hurtled off again, away and down into the dark depths of the school basement.
An undulating, wordless chant echoed off the cement walls. Eight figures stood in a circle in the middle of the room, their faces lit by a little fire they’d kindled in the spot where at some point later Oscar would shove the bloody knife of their sacrifice into the floor and a twisted rosebush would grow. Shadows shifted and twined around them—and a thicker darkness seeped through their clothes, like the wisps I’d seen inside their glow when I’d confronted them earlier.
They didn’t seem to notice. Didn’t seem to realize they were absorbing something beyond themselves, something toxic. Or maybe that was the whole purpose of this little ritual, whether they’d fully understood the consequences or not.
A pressure gripped me by the shoulders. I had the impression of someone shaking me as if trying to snap me back to reality. And then I did snap out of the basement scene, but not back to the lawn in the night with the spirits blazing around us. No, I was in a hazy, dark gray vagueness with Mildred’s face looming just inches from mine. A smell like mildew filled my nose, cool and clammy.
“Winston?” Mildred said, peering at me so intently she might have been looking straight through my skull. Her own head was clearly defined but translucent enough that I could make out the scudding currents of fog behind her. “You came back with her, didn’t you? You finally came back.”
“He doesn’t want to be here,” I said. My voice came out hoarse. I cleared my throat and barreled onward. “He left because he didn’t believe in what you were doing anymore—in what you’d done before. If anything, he’s been helping me try to stop you.”
“No.” She shook her head, the locks of her hair flying around her face wildly. “He wouldn’t—there must have been something— The people out there forced him to stay.”
A laugh sputtered out of me. “With the power you all have, do you really think anyone could have done that? He stayed because he wanted to. As far as I can tell, he stayed and fell in love and raised a family. He’s my family. That’s why he’s with me now.”
I was sure of it then, feeling an energy inside me resonate with the words. Winston couldn’t speak, but h
e made his presence known all the same. And part of him recoiled at the desperation on Mildred’s face.
“You don’t know anything,” she snapped at me. “You’re just like them.”
I grasped her hand where it clutched my shoulder and held her gaze. “No, I’m not. I think you know that. I’ve been through all kinds of crap. But I still know that what you’re doing here is sick, no matter what anyone you drag into Roseborne has done before. You’ve made yourselves just as bad as the people you hated. Is that what you really want?”
That distant glaze came over her eyes again, her attention slipping away from me and seeming to focus on some point behind me eyes. “Winston, you can’t let her talk for you. I need to see you. It’s been such a long time. Can’t you say something for yourself, show me something…?”
“Hey.” I squeezed her hand. “Maybe his essence came along with me, but I’m still me. And I know him better than you ever did. I’ve been inside his head, seen his memories—I’ve felt what he felt during your little meetings. What he went through in the moment when the bunch of you murdered all those kids.”
“Kids,” she scoffed. “They knew what they were doing, and they got what they deserved. If anything, we let them off easy.”
“Winston didn’t feel that way. Shooting those arrows made him queasy even while he was doing it. He was angry too, sure—he let that emotion override the rest—but he didn’t enjoy it. And if you did, I don’t think he’d have any interest in talking to you now.”
An angry flush darkened Mildred’s face. “He was mine first. He was one of us. You have no idea about any of it.”
I fixed her with my firmest stare. The sense of power I’d found inside me before surged through me again. She needed to hear me—she needed to listen.
“He was never yours,” I said. “Any of yours. You don’t get to claim someone. You did know him, at least partly; you saw how he acted, you talked with him, and you watched him leave. Do you really think whatever’s left of him is happy seeing you acting like this—talking to his great-granddaughter like this? Maybe… maybe if you could let go of the rage and the need to hurt people and focus on how much you cared about him instead, there is some way you could reconnect with him.”
