The Unfairfolk (Valenbound Book 1)

by Sara Wolf

  Bedside table in the same place.

  He kneels, rustling through her hairbrush, her hair ties, her bottle of lotion, her horde of tampons. It’s not here. Where else would she -

  He can hear the cleaning lady coming back.

  Ciel whips his head around. Somewhere close, somewhere only she’d think to look.

  He plunges his hand into the smallest drawer - underwear, laughably drab and threadbare - and his fingers catch on cool metal. Footsteps near. He pulls the lipbalm case out and dives for the closet and waits until the roar of the vacuum dies down, until the cleaning lady has to leave to empty it, and darts out of the door.

  They see him, the cameras and the security sees him, but he doesn’t care; a bright blonde streak striding down the hall, placid from the back and vibrating with a triumphant smile in the front.

  He cares little for anything, anymore, save for the thing now clutched in his palm.

  The thing that should’ve been his, all along.

  33

  The Dream (Or, How ‘probably’ has never been good enough for you)

  I breathe, over and over, until the nights flip into days and I can navigate Silvere by the marble statues alone - there’s the Hall of Half-Naked Lady, and the Hall of Man With Olive Leaf Ding Dong, and the Hall of Just Big-Ass Paintings. Some things never stop itching - like the prime minister’s son who arrives via helicopter once every week because he has to go to some ‘PR event’. Like the way people talk about ‘family homes on the Med’(iterranean Ocean, I figured that out later) like it means nothing to them, like it’s a nuisance. Like the gold-foil everywhere; in the ceilings, on the books, on the fuckin’ curtains and blankets and vases and fancy ice creams. But mostly, mostly, I learn to be okay at Silvere. Physically, at least. The same way you learn to be okay anywhere, with enough food and enough time. And there’s nothing like a little restrictive, precisely-scheduled day to keep your mind off impossible things like white dream deer and gold-masked cultists and red-eyed men.

  And then it happens.

  Red, coming to ruin my life again.

  I start seeing it in the bathroom next to Economics - a wad of crimson-splotched toilet paper in the trash can. At first I think it’s a nosebleed, or period blood, but no - the red is always in perfect, thin, uniform little lines. Not splotched. Which means a cut. Maybe someone’s hurt. But methodically hurt, day after day? It nibbles at the back of my brain, but I’ve got so much else going on I just write it off. Like an idiot. If I just cared a little more, I could’ve seen it coming. If I just paid more attention to anyone else, instead of worrying only about myself.

  Ana’s with me when we stumble into that bathroom at lunch on Wednesday.

  “Why’d you send a picture of you with a banana on your head that says ‘Happy Friday’ to the sixth-year snapchat?” She asks, flashing the snap in question at me.

  “To let ‘em know what’s up,” I chime.

  “What is up?”

  “My totally sick-nasty personality.”

  We stare at each other for a second, and then burst into laughter. Bianca comes out of the stall almost instantly, adjusting her skirt and throwing us a look.

  “Oh. It’s just you two,” She mutters.

  “Just us?” I act offended. “You wound me, madame.”

  “It’s mademoiselle, technically,” Ana offers around a giggle. Bianca says nothing, walking up to the counter and washing her hands quietly. She’s usually quiet, so it’s not weird. I go in to pee, and I’m halfway through when I hear Ana gasp mid-conversation.

  “Oh my god! Bianca! You’re hurt!”

  My head snaps up, and I hurriedly wipe. Bianca’s stuttering (stuttering? From her of all people?) echoes.

  “I-It’s just my period -”

  “Deus!” Ana gasps again. “Did you do this to yourself?”

  Fuck.

  I slam out of the stall to see Ana holding the hem of Bianca’s skirt up just enough to see a bright red line there. Fuck fuck fuck fuck -

  “Ana,” I lunge for her hand, pulling it away. “Calm down -”

  “Calm? How can I -” Her eyes flash up to Bianca. “Did you do this? On purpose?”

  I expect Bianca to freak. I would if I was her. I’d run, or hide. I’d stammer and make excuses, anything to get the attention off me, anything to explain it away like something normal. The secondhand shame burns me alive. But I’m a coward. And Bianca’s braver than me.

  “It’s none of your concern,” She says, raising her pointed chin.

  “None of our concern?” Ana presses. “You’re hurting yourself!”

  Ana doesn’t get it. I mean, neither do I, but I at least know these things aren’t so straightforward. Pain is pain. People cut for a lot of different reasons. It’s not great, or ideal, but sometimes it’s all people have. You want them to stop, especially if it’s someone you care about. But sometimes the only way to make something hurt less is to make it hurt more elsewhere. The only people who can really help Bianca are shrinks. Trained professionals. All we can do is be supportive, non-judgmental. And something tells me Ana’s skipped over that last one.

  “Hey,” I move between them and look at Ana. “No judgement, okay? This shit is…it’s delicate.”

  “I don’t understand -”

  “I don’t expect you to,” Bianca cuts Ana off coldly. Ana shrinks back like she’s been slapped.

  “I thought - I thought you, the three of us…why wouldn’t you tell us about something like this?”

  “Because I couldn’t.” Bianca says, her lip trembling. This is the first time I’ve ever seen her anything less than completely, utterly cool and composed. Her ballerina poise is gone, her whole body shaking and vibrating like a leaf caught in a spiderweb. What do I do? I want to comfort her, reach out and touch her shoulder or something, but the red is right there. I can still see it and it makes all the flesh on my arms curdle.

  Weak. Coward.

  How long has Bianca been carrying around this struggle, alone? Does anyone other than us know? Or are we the first?

  “Ana,” I say. “It’s not that simple. Please. C’mon. Just leave it.”

  “Leave it?” Ana twists away. “She’s hurting herself, and we’re her friends -” Tears start to well up in her black eyes as she bolts around me and grabs Bianca’s hands. “Please, Bianca. I don’t understand, and that’s…that’s fine. But please. Don’t keep doing this.”

  Bianca’s indigo eyes blur too. She looks up at the ceiling, as if begging her tear ducts to stop. She doesn’t pull her hands away from Ana’s for a long time, and I stare at them half-awkwardly, wanting to help but not knowing how. I watch their clasped hands and jealousy clings to every inch of me like water. Jealous they can touch people that easily. So easily. So trusting. Just like that.

  “You…people care about you,” Ana finally sobs. It hurts real bad to watch her cry. “I care. Please, promise me. Promise me you won’t do it anymore.”

  “Ana, it doesn’t - ” I step up, but freeze at the look on Bianca’s face. The flawless, matte-perfect, matte-neutral Bianca is gone. I’ve never seen her smile - not once. But now she does. It’s not big - big, goofy smiling wouldn’t suit her. It’s a very ‘her’ smile; small, refined, in the corners of her lips. A single tear rolls down her high cheekbones, and she nods.

  “I promise.”

  The words ring against the tile, and Ana squeezes Bianca’s hands before letting go.

  After the storm comes a calm.

  The bathroom was the eye of the tornado, and we walk out of it together in silence, down the hall in silence. It’s too dramatic to say we’re new people, but I can’t help but notice something’s changed. The air’s different. It’s a nice silence, but it feels too heavy to bear for long. My turn. Ana helped her, and now it’s my turn.

  “So, I was looking koalas up on Wikipedia the other day, and get this - rampant chlamydia.”

  “Ew!” Ana wrinkles her nose. “What?”

  Out of the
corner of my eye, I see Bianca smile again, small.

  Maybe things will change, maybe they won’t. Maybe promises will be kept. Maybe this is friendship. Maybe it isn’t. But maybe none of that matters.

  Maybe all that matters is that smile, right now.

  We don’t talk about the bathroom incident, after that.

  Because what would we even say? What would we even talk about? Blood? Pain? Things nobody wants to touch with a twenty-foot gilded pole, especially not in the sober light of day. It doesn’t need to be talked about, maybe. Not immediately, anyway. I explained to Ana the next morning that, honestly, the only one who can bring it up is Bianca, and that’s only if she wants to. We can’t force anything. Ana agrees, but I catch her at breakfast reading through her phone - an article on how to support someone going through self-harm. She closes it quickly when Bianca arrives, though, covering it with the cheery chirp of ‘I had the craziest dream about elephants last night!’.

  We eat, we talk.

  Life keeps going on, no matter how much red there was.

  I, Lilith Pierce, happen to hate rating people. But I happen to hate free cucumber-and-mayo tea sandwiches way less.

  Not mayo, Chunhua corrects me. Clotted~ cream~.

  “Whab does thab eveb meab?” I mutter through a cheekful of bread and a lip-smear of cream. “Did it get clotted up in the cow’s titty, or something?” I swallow and look at her with utter horror. “Am I eating tit clots right now?”

  “No, no,” Chunhua waves her hand. “It’s like, milk that’s been baked in the oven. Or something.”

  “Oh. Phew. Dodged a bullet then.” I pick up a fresh sandwich in each fist. “But like hell I’m gonna dodge these next two.”

  I smash them elegantly into my mouth and look around Room 239. Instead of old paintings on the walls, this room’s decided to decorate with mounted animal horns. Moose, goat, ram, and lots of deer, all nailed to velvet-backed boards and hung on the wall like grisly warnings. I try and fail not to think about the white deer. All its ancestors are here for sure.

  Chunhua and Sadeen, her friend, have pushed back all the massive claw-foot chairs to form a circle in the middle of the room. They’ve set up a fold-out table that’s so fancy it doesn’t even look like a fold-out table, and one of the sous chefs came in shortly after with a cart of sandwiches and cookies and pots of fragrant tea. The cookie spread includes not only my personal lord and savior the choco chip, but also the flowery bougie shit - literally. Cookies with real candied flowers pressed on them, the petals frozen in clear sugar, cookies with glittering leaf patterns sprayed in gold, cookies piled delicately with sunset-colored frosting peaked so precise it looks just like the autumn tree line outside.

  “These aren’t cookies,” I say around a fourth sandwich. “These are art.”

  “Super pretty, aren’t they?” Chunhua takes snaps of her plate piled high with them. “Jia’s gonna be so jealous. She’s, like, cramming exams and eating boring truffle macaroni for the fourth day in a row.”

  ‘Boring?’ I mouth incredulously.

  “You have cream on your mouth,” Sadeen drones to me as she walks up, her hijab a pastel lavender flower print and matching perfectly with her bejeweled flower earrings. She sees me staring and sighs; “Purple sapphires.”

  “Whoa.” Slack-jawed, I wipe my lip off. “Real ones?”

  Sadeen shoots a look to Chunhua, who shrugs lightly. “What? Pierce is new. Give her a break.”

  Sadeen rolls her onyx doe-eyes and flounces away wordlessly to greet the other girls walking into the room. I turn to Chunhua.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “You’re not supposed to ask if things are real,” She whispers. “It’s rude.”

  “I was just curious!”

  “Being curious is pointless. It’s always real.” Chunhua motions around at the room - the gilded wallpaper, the clocks that look older than time itself, and the painted-angel ceiling. “Duh.”

  “Duh,” I repeat to myself, quietly, as the girls start to shuffle in. Ten of them - no, like, twenty. Thirty? They keep coming, filling up the whole room, clinking plates and silverware and laughing as they take their seats, some of them sitting on couches and footstools and be-tasseled cushions on the floor.

  Chunhua finally stands up, clapping her hands. “Are we all here? Awesome. Sadeen, can you roll out the list?”

  Sadeen gets up and clears her throat, reading off her phone. “We have ten complaints this week, and fourteen praises. I’ll start alphabetically.”

  She inhales primly, and I expect something even and calm from her, but her exhale comes out livid, her whole face curdling in a second. It goes red on the edges, her broad nose and pretty mouth carving in righteous anger. She shouts something in French, the words echoing off the horned walls like a battle cry.

  There’s a pause, and I think everyone’s just as stunned as me to hear such venom coming from pastel-coated, proper Sadeen, but I’m dead-ass wrong, because the room suddenly erupts in giggles and cheers. Sadeen brims with brimstone, terrifying and inspiring all at once as she nods at Chunhua. Chunhua crosses off something on the pad on her lap, and I lean in.

  “Uh, what did she say?”

  “Mikael Baumann needs to be strung up from a very high spot by his testicles. More or less.”

  “That was the guy who snapped that girl’s bra strap, right?”

  “Yup.” Chunhua nods, and with extra gleeful flourish writes a -10 next to Mikael’s name on the pad. Sadeen continues yelling out perpetrators and their crimes, the crowd of girls cheering every time. And every time, Chunhua tells me it’s some dude who’s done some slimy thing. And I get it, about the third time Sadeen yells ferociously. This ranking…it isn’t just a ranking of who’s prettiest and hottest and coolest. It’s a warning system. It keeps everyone - especially girls - aware of which dudes are shitty. Which ones don’t hesitate to do shitty things. Which girls too; which ones steal stuff and lie and cheat off papers.

  “I’m surprised you guys get mad about cheating,” I whisper.

  “Oh, we usually don’t.” Chunhua says lightly, crossing off another person and putting a -5 to their name. “Not all of us have, like, the time or patience to do things for real. We all cheat sometimes to get past super hard tests we just don’t get, or whatever.”

  “Then why -”

  “But if you get lazy about it - ” She interrupts me. “ - then you get docked. Cheat away. Just don’t make it obvious, or the professors will start to suspect all of us. You know?”

  “Aha.” I pluck another sandwich. “Now I get it. The best classes, the best teachers, the best cover-ups.”

  “Exactly.” Chunhua smiles.

  At some point my name comes up and the whole room pivots their heads at me as Chunhua grins. Sadeen sniffs out something in French, and a polite clap goes around the room.

  “Ten points up!” Chunhua leans in. “Which means you’re now…187th! You’re actually moving around! Most just sit where they are on the list until they die. Or graduate. Whichever comes first.”

  I try not to openly shudder at the image of the red-eyed man that drifts through my brain. “People die at Silvere?”

  “Noooo!” She flaps her hand. “I was kidding. It’s just sometimes, they go missing, you know?”

  “Like Julien.”

  “Yeah, he’s the most famous one.” She nods. “Mostly because of Von Arx. She got the whole valley to look for him for ages, or something. There was a girl five years ago - uh, Candace? - but people think she just ran off with her boyfriend because her parents were dickholes. And there was a girl before that, in the eighties. Then Julien. And then the guy before that in the fifties. It’s like, one every couple years. Like a curse.”

  “Satané,” I whisper.

  “Yeah.” She sighs. “That’s what the villagers say. If people like us go missing, it usually means ransom. But you never see anything about it in the newspapers, or on TV. Pretty sure Von Arx pays off everybody
to keep quiet.”

  “Everybody?”

  She nods. “The media, the family of the missing. Everybody.”

  “But what about the police?”

  “Yeah, you’d think the police would be interested in systemic kidnappings at a place like Silvere.”

  “Aren’t they?” I ask.

  Chunhua shakes her head, stylish fan-bun bobbing. “Nope. They just leave it all to the school’s private security. Apparently they’ve been around since the place was founded as like, knight templars. But it’s like, if you can’t stop people from being kidnapped, then what kind of private security are you, you know?”

  “And your parents still send you here?” I frown around at the gathered flock of girls. She looks at me like I’ve sprouted an extra seventeen ears.

  “Duh. It’s Silvere.”

  “Duh,” I echo begrudgingly.

  Silvere’s sterling reputation aside, she’s got a chilling point. Those security guard guys I saw in the forest, with their suits and rose-cologne, were huge. They could stop anybody doing anything, I’m pretty sure. So why don’t they? If it’s a pattern of kidnapping, they should be more than ready for it.

  Unless.

  I swallow lead.

  Unless they’re letting students get kidnapped.

  I can’t stop seeing the gold-beak mask, hanging on the wall.

  But why would cultists kidnap rich kids? For money? Kinda fuckin’ pointless in a place already chock full of money. Or maybe that’s how they got the money in the first place! Ransom them back to their parents! I’m deep up my own Sherlock ass when the next girl Chunhua announces gets more than just Sadeen’s impressive fury - this time the whole room vibrates with the booing, the jeering.

  “Uh,” I start. “What’s this one about?”

  “It’s a girl who, you know.” She looks at me like I should understand completely unspoken words. Which, fair. “Ciel. Helene slept with him this summer. On her family’s yacht. And filmed it and like, passed it around her friends as, you know. Proof. Or bragging, I guess.”