by Jayla Kane
But I didn’t think so. Percy, one of the only men I’d found intriguing in years, certainly hadn’t made me feel like this. No one ever had. Not until…
I needed a break from him, I told myself.
He might have his rich-boy millions to fall back on, but I didn’t. My mom made a decent business out of a failing one and practically saved our town—not that anyone would admit it—but I didn’t have her head for marketing, for sales and trends and just that general splash of panache that kept people interested in a small shop in a very small town. I wasn’t like her in almost every way, in fact—there’s no way I could imagine running off on my own right now, just to experience the thrill of being unchained. I wore my chains every day. They were a part of who I am—for better or worse, they defined me. And I didn’t have her sense about people, or her confidence in herself. I had to find a way to make it through life as I was.
Some days that didn’t bother me; I got up and a project went well, or I figured out a puzzle of some kind that had been on my mind, or I said the right words to Baby to cheer her up, and I was okay with being me.
Some days I remembered what happened and I hated myself. And I hated everything else sometimes, too, on really bad days.
But if I was going to stick around on planet Earth and be a decent sister, a good family member, a person that contributed to the world—who might, just maybe, hopefully, please-god-let-it-be-possible redeem herself… I needed to study. Harvard was waiting, and I knew that from there I could crack my knuckles and really grab onto the future; here, I had business to take care of. So let’s.
It was a relief to sink into the strange mix of tedium and excitement I felt whenever I was introduced to new classes. I was going to sail through all of these freshmen courses—I’d been reading Plato and Steinbeck and James and Nobakov since the beginning of time, thanks to my family’s bookstore addendum—but I really enjoyed them, and college was immediately different from high school. Even my honor’s English classes were nothing compared to these; I had one where the professor specialized in medieval literature, and I was really looking forward to her lectures. Nerdiness aside, I realized that the Institute was more than a bad kid club. I wasn’t going to miss out by delaying my trip to Boston, and that made me happy. Genuinely happy, which was a fleeting feeling for me most days, so I grabbed it and held on.
I walked back home, a skip in my step, and drove out to pick up Baby before my last class. I could tell Zelle was feeling down still, and a little funny, too, about our earlier conversation, because she made me another one of my favorites. I was still full from the first macchiato but I took it with me anyway, grateful for the kindness. She still had that strange look in her eye, and I knew she was missing Tristan. It brought me back to my senses, and the glow from my first real day of school started to fade.
I was happy again when I saw Baby, though; she wasn’t starting school yet, but the cheer squad began early for Varsity cheerleaders, and she spent most of her days with friends in the city before practice. She was beautiful and quick on her feet, preternaturally balanced and could flip like some kind of ninja. We talked about putting her in gymnastics when she was younger but we didn’t have enough money to do it until she was old enough to audition for cheer squad anyway, and considering we saved her the nightmare of our high school experience she was taking that popular girl thing to the bank and cashing all the checks. Baby talked to me at the beginning of the summer about what it would be like to go to all of the parties and Homecomings and whatever normal people did, but I was no use to her. I didn’t go to anything, not Prom, nothing—not ever. How could I, when all I could envision was the ending from Carrie over and over? But I didn’t want to burden her with that image, so I just listened, and it turned out that made me a good enough big sister. She did the same on the way home, prattling on endlessly about the new uniforms and how they definitely going to be too hot until November and Jackie was so rude sometimes and this and that. It was wonderfully distracting, and exactly what I needed to keep my glow.
I ended the day with a single text from Jake, thankfully not quite enough to ruin the nice, easy time I had on my first real day of classes: Tomorrow. 8, at the office.
Great, I thought, then shrugged it off. I set my alarm and went downstairs at three in the morning to make sure all of our doors were locked and sealed, then stumbled back up and got another five hours of sleep. It was as close to bliss as I ever got to come.
Tomorrow waited for me, the promise of more Jake a whisper of sin and regret in the back of my mind.
Chapter Sixteen
Jake
I looked at the phone in my hand, feeling icy sweat gather on my spine: Tonight, 10 pm. Party central, formal dress. Bring your plus one. As if I could forget the first text they sent, the one warning me to get ready. Something about it made my blood run cold, but I wasn’t sure what caused it; I had a bad feeling. No idea why. Nothing about the Society screamed ‘good idea’ but that certainly hadn’t kept me from signing up. I knew Raven would, so I did; I knew I was a good fit for the Master of Games, and anyone with any goddamn sense knew it too. But something made me nervous… Maybe because it was at the Vault? I knew the Society wouldn’t do anything to disrupt the tentative shifts of power playing out at the moment—there were still new people filling in positions, had to be, as the graduates moved on and more fresh meat moved in to the Institute—but they tended to keep the Vault as a place for rituals, as ridiculous as that sounded. And if they were having a ritual so soon… They usually held them on the new moon, and tonight was bright and luminous. Something was off.
“What’s going on?” Hunter pulled me out of my thoughts, and I turned to look at him.
“Nothing,” I said, but he just sat there, in that Hunter kind of way, his eyes boring into mine. Hunter and I played rugby together sophomore year of high school. He’s not from Ashwood; technically, I’m not sure he’s from anywhere. The place where he grew up has no name, and if you have any damn sense you would never find yourself there, not for anything or anyone. But I’ve been out to the old Black farm several times, pulled him out of fist-fights with the old man, kept him from dropping out once or twice; Hunter is my best friend. He doesn’t like games, not like I do—he doesn’t have a lot of patience for what he calls ‘rich kid bullshit.’ One of the many things I love about him. But in this case… I wasn’t sure what to say.
Hunter isn’t in the Society. He barely got into the Institute, but he works hard and our teachers respected that, so he got in with their recommendations after I managed to pay some people to fudge his record a little bit. No one here needed to know about his conviction for assault; it was three years ago and he was a juvenile, anyway. Ask me if I feel bad about it.
“Jake,” he said, his deep voice more intense. I sighed; what was I supposed to say? He seemed to understand, though, and stood up. “I wish there was something I could do to help you with this shit, man,” he said, and I swallowed. Hunter is not the sentimental type. Not at all. “Don’t get too fucked up, alright?”
“I’m not going to get fucked up,” I said, but he just snorted as he stalked through the room, towards the hall. He didn’t have a dorm, slept in the truck sometimes, slept here when I didn’t have company. Hunter would probably be perfectly content sleeping under the trees in the Common, or maybe in them, high above us; he was a ghost when he wanted to be, and I knew no one could find him if he didn’t want them to.
“You’re already fucked up, Jake,” he said, closing the door behind himself with a bang, and I blew out a long breath and stared at the ceiling for a minute. Hunter and I didn’t talk about girls. He didn’t like the way I worked; he had a younger sister that he was close to, and protected like a daughter—which made sense given who their father was and what he did. But Hunter, for all his brutishness, was prone to fits of gentlemanly behavior I had no time for. If I hadn’t been there the night before last and he had, I’m sure he would’ve whipped those fuckers from Delta j
ust for the fun of it if he happened to hear Raven tell them to let her go and they didn’t. Immediately.
And he hated Raven.
He was the only one who knew. In high school I let people think she was just a Creepy Keller, and that’s all the justification I needed, most of the time, to persuade them to make sure she had nowhere to sit in the cafeteria, or to suddenly drop into silence during discussions in class so teachers would single her out more. And Raven isn’t exactly an easy person to like, in a lot of ways—she’s not hard to like, either, once you know her, but I made sure she didn’t get the chance to make a good impression. She has a temper, she never backs down, and she’s a bad liar. Obviously. But she’s smart and she doesn’t mind letting you know, and she has no idea when she brushes up against a social boundary. None. You could say she doesn’t have any class, but that’s not it, exactly; Raven just doesn’t care about a lot of the things people expect eighteen year old girls to care about, and she can’t pretend worth a shit.
I loved all of those things about her. All of those traits—flaws or virtues, really, depending which end of her temper you were on. Even in the beginning, when the pain was so raw, I would watch her flare up at a distance and it would bring a smile to my face, knowing she was lighting in to some jackass. I didn’t like the people that became the means to my end, and it was nice to know she fought. Fought like hell.
Why were they summoning us?
I wondered who else was on the Council. Percy was the Song; he hadn’t been hard to find. Hunter was doing re-con for me, checking out who else was out there, but I knew that Raven would probably be better at some of that—she’d read every damn book ever written on the Society, probably more than once. I still wasn’t sure I remembered all of the names they gave themselves; the only one I needed to know was the Sineater. The only position given to a girl from ‘the working classes,’ even in her first year, the only one Raven was sure she could attain. There was something called the Rose, and another thing called the Maiden, too; I had no proof they were women, though, and with the Society you couldn’t tell. They didn’t like women too much—even though the Maiden and the Rose were both potentially female, I didn’t think either position had been filled by a woman in… Ever, maybe. And sometimes they just weren’t filled at all—I saw the page for the Rose in the book when they were finding a new page for me, and it had five names on it, instead of the thirty or forty I saw for the Song. There were more like that, too, but I wasn’t able to read them… Not all the words were in English, for another thing. The title on my page wasn’t Game Master, either; it was Magi. Giant, absurdly elaborate script, barely legible. I felt kind of swanky because I got my own page and then realized something was off, again, because the book was old, and there were no added pages. I knew for a fact Tanglewood was the Master of Games last year, and his name wasn’t anywhere to be seen—neither was a mark to remove it, or any ragged edges indicating a hastily disposed of page.
The Society was fucking creepy.
I don’t know if all the shit Raven read about them when we were kids was real; so much of it sounded like bullshit, or like old scary stories handed down from one ancient townie to another, that I wasn’t prepared for how genuinely fucking weird the actual Society was. But looking back… Either they’ve been doing some excellent PR for a very long time, or they’re creeps. And have been, since before Ashwood existed and the twelve families decided to meet up here and be freaks together.
And now they wanted Raven to show up at the Vault.
Raven wanted to see the Vault more than anything, although I don’t know when her curiosity about it shifted from ‘entertaining and tease-worthy’ to ‘desperation.’ If she wanted to use me to get to it, this little excursion would do nothing but ensure that she needed my help. When it was full of the Society, and the Council in particular, she’d realize how dangerously impossible her desire to privately dig through their library really was.
I got up and headed over to the office. I could hang out in there for a bit, waiting for her; it might give me a minute to—
“No,” I said out loud, stopping in my tracks.
I needed control. I needed to not be what I was, the last time I saw her—I needed to make sure this was nothing more than a meeting between your average Game Master and Sineater, who hated each other more than anything, sure, but also had this long, involved history and really just wanted to—
Fuck.
I sat back down for a minute and forced my heartrate to slow down.
As I saw it, the real problem with taking Raven to the Vault was exposing her to them. My horrible, beloved little bird, vulnerable. Everywhere else, she was mine and mine alone, but when the Council was there--even though she was a member--I doubted she would be treated deferentially. And if Percy was any indication… Well, Sineaters in the past had borne the brunt of their Game Master’s attention, sure, but it wasn’t unknown for others to need to unburden themselves. And I wasn’t having that shit. Fuck no. If a single one of them tried to…
I gritted my teeth and stood up, snatching my jacket off of the hook in the wardrobe and shoving my arms through the sleeves.
I needed to calm down.
In those circumstances, we could talk it out, I was sure—the way Percy and I had. That was perfectly civilized, wasn’t it? That was a delightfully fucked up agreement between a pair of delightfully fucked up gentlemen, right? I could arrange more of those, if need be. I was the fucking Game Master—manipulation and schemes were in the damn job description.
But just the thought…
And there was the problem. The thing that Hunter wouldn’t say. Raven did have me fucked up. Completely.
I hated what had happened between us.
I wanted to do it again.
Worse—I wanted more. I wanted to clamp my hands on her delicious tits while she whimpered and slam my whole cock into that tight, so tight pussy—I wanted to fuck her so hard she felt it whenever she moved the next day, a stripe of pain that flashed up and down her spine that told her again and again as she walked around with my cum deep in her belly: you’re mine, Raven Keller. You belong to me.
I was losing my goddamn mind.
I once loved Raven—I loved her still, as much as it killed me. I could feel it, gnawing away at me. But this… This maddening desire, that was new. Even in high school, full of hormones and sloppy with sex, I hadn’t been this brainless when it came to her. If we’d ever been able to be around each other, maybe I would’ve been—I don’t know. But this… This was insanity. This was an illness.
I thought about it constantly, the way she felt, inside, the way she tasted, the sounds she made. I looked at that picture on my phone, but I couldn’t stomach it more than once; I knew her too well, understood the painful twist of emotions on her face too much—I was feeling them myself. Disgust, rage, and that need, that hunger, the one painted all over her perfect pink lips. Fuck me. I don’t think Hunter was right—I don’t think I could get more fucked up.
It was seven thirty when I made it to the Office and went inside. I left the door unlocked and sat down, trying to think of what to say. I wanted to pretend I had a good reason for asking her here so early, but the truth was that I just wanted to warn her. Shut your fucking mouth, Raven. Don’t make them notice you. Lay low. But all of that would basically ensure she started blabbing as soon as we got there, asking questions I knew would end up badly—for me, maybe, but most likely for her. And then for me, when I murdered anyone that hurt her.
Goddamnit.
She showed up at five till, ever the devoted student. When she came inside I watched her stare at the desk for a second and part of me—that starving part, that part that wanted to rip me open from the inside—almost told her to come and put her hands on it, like she had the night before last. But I managed to shut my mouth, and she sat down in one of the chairs and stared back at me, quiet and watchful as ever.
“Hey Bird,” I said, and was relieved to hear my voice sound
indifferent at best. I didn’t need her to know how much what was happening kept me awake at night. “We’re a little early—the Society wants us to go to the Vault at ten.”
“Why?”
“No idea,” I said, and spread my hands open in front of me, palms up. “Kind of the point of a secret society, I imagine? You’re the expert though. You tell me.”
Raven watched me quietly for a minute, then pulled her knees into the chair, sitting cross-legged with her chin on one balled fist. “I don’t think Percy has anything to do with whatever happened to make you think someone in the Society is after you.”
I wondered if she wanted to talk about what happened the other night, if there was anything to say.
“I don’t want to talk about your boy-friend,” I told her, and she rolled her eyes. “But if we must, we must. Do you have a reason for thinking this? Or are you just too enamored with him to—”
“Percy doesn’t have a strategic reason to mess with you,” she said. “He wanted to be Game Master, sure, but because they offered to make him the Song he didn’t really care.”
“The Song is just a mouthpiece. It doesn’t have any power,” I pointed out, but her mouth thinned into a firm line.
“And the Game Master does? So far I feel like you’re just using the leverage the Society gave you to… To boss me around. You don’t have any power either, I don’t think.”
“Well, you tell me what the Game Master does in the research? I’d love some pointers,” I told her, and she huffed out another sigh and sat up straighter. I enjoyed the pause that broke up her self-righteous speech entirely too much.
“They’re vague, in a lot of instances,” Raven said, her eyebrows drawing low as she thought about it. “I looked over my notes last night. There have been a couple big movements that started because of the Game Masters, in a way—the Institute wasn’t integrated, and it didn’t allow women for almost a century. Game Masters organize what some might call protests, and others would call a show of might—parades that devolve into rioting, as an example. That happened in the sixties.”
