Chapter 19
“You sure you searched every corner on campus?” Penny asks as she sketches Sophia, who sits stoic, regal, and topless on our dorm room floor holding a bowl of grapes. Hound dozes soundly between them.
After learning that the Elders might be as corrupt as Deacon implied and that my mother is being courted by the man who plans to kill me and end the world, I really could have used a win in the form of finding Reid somewhere on campus.
But we have officially exhausted every single option.
I detach my face from its dent in my pillow. “We covered every nook and cranny.”
“Elliot made me hike all the way up to the amphitheater and crawl along the stands looking for trapdoors,” Sophia says to Penny. “I have the skinned knees to prove it.”
Penny’s face twists when Sophia moves, and I watch her eraser scrub across the page.
She’s been sorely missing a creative outlet since being forced to abandon her job as an elementary school art teacher.
I keep offering to swipe her sketchbooks and supplies from the apartment, but everyone agrees it’s too risky to go back there.
“Maybe he was here but he’s not on campus anymore,” Penny suggests. “What if he was sick of running and went after the High Thane himself?”
I decided against telling my friends about Caspar.
Until this syrabraxa is out of me, revealing his real identity to anyone would only put them in more danger.
And me in more danger. God forbid one of my friends is brought before the Elders or runs into Caspar again.
It’s information that could cost them their lives just for knowing.
I wonder if that’s why Reid never told me.
Thinking of him and the secrets he’s kept worsens my mood.
“Maybe…” I muse. “You guys checked the lacrosse houses?”
“Every room,” Sophia says. “Dungeons too.”
I cut her a questioning look and she shrugs, quickly popping a grape into her mouth. “Landon had a key.”
“So that’s actually happening?” I didn’t tell her about our brief interaction at the Citadel.
What would I even say? He may or may not have been delivering Deacon’s blood to the Elders?
Instead I go with, “Welcome to the dating Combat Instructors club. I hope it goes better for you than it did for me.”
“No dating. Just kissing,” Sophia says, cracking her neck.
Penny’s brows furrow, and her eraser gets to work once more.
I press my lips together. “Stay still, Soph.”
“What about Peter?” Penny asks quietly.
A streak of tension slips through me. Sophia and I don’t usually talk about the Peter-size elephant in the room.
Just like we don’t talk about why Sophia’s never shown any interest in a relationship or why she dropped out of high school or why she has such a penchant for sex with strangers and party drugs.
Sophia respects my dark, twisty shit by never speaking of its existence, and I do the same for her. That’s girlhood, right?
Sophia’s brows knit in faux confusion. “What about him?”
“He’s handsome,” Penny muses. “He obviously cares about you—”
A genuine laugh bursts from Sophia that I’d think was cruel if she didn’t follow it with, “You think I’d inflict me on one of my best friends?”
Something about the phrasing is so cutting it cracks my heart. I didn’t think anyone was capable of my brand of self-loathing until I met Reid, but it looks like I’m drawn to a variety of people who can’t see how wonderful they are.
Penny puts down her pencil. “Sophia…”
“I’m serious. Peter is the best person I know. After you, of course.” She glances sidelong at me with no real remorse. “Sorry, babe.”
I give her a look like Please.
“Peter deserves someone half as decent,” she says to Penny. “A quarter, even.”
“You are decent,” Penny says with the kind of steadfast sincerity only a teacher of children can pull off.
Sophia holds Penny’s gaze for a beat, as if Penny might be some kind of prophet who could speak truth into the words. Then she pops another grape into her mouth. “And you are very cute.”
Penny huffs. “If you eat all the grapes, we won’t have any left for the portrait.”
“I can call Elliot to drop some off on his way to the Marksmen house?”
When she moves for her phone Penny grimaces.
“I’ll call him,” I tell her. “You keep doing”—I study the bowl of grapes and Penny’s notebook—“whatever this is.”
But Sophia stands and Penny gives up, tossing aside the sketch pad. “We have to get dressed anyway. Party’s in less than an hour.”
Right. Valentine’s Day. I let my head fall back into my pillow.
“I actually have a great dress for this,” Penny says, standing too. Hound wakes and stretches as if included in their plans.
“Viv,” Sophia says, “you could probably wear your devil dress from Halloween.”
Images flood my mind of the night I’d worn red for Reid. The way he’d stared at me right there in our dorm room doorway. The first time I’d held him—hugged him out of sheer appreciation. The way his broad shoulders tensed beneath my hands…
“I’m not gonna go.”
Forget that Peter and Fiona have had no luck learning how to get this thing out of my back, and that Fiona hasn’t heard anything from the Elders on Caspar, and that the film from the silver camera won’t be ready until tomorrow morning…
Reid is somewhere on campus, somewhere right within my reach, and he’s not with me.
And I know it’s cheesy, but it’s Valentine’s Day.
I know he has a good reason. That he’s keeping me safe, or he’s injured, or he’s spelled and unable to move or speak…but there’s no way around the pain of it. I miss him so much my chest aches. Which—shocker—does not put me in a party mood.
“You can’t stop living because of everything going on,” Sophia says, sliding on a very small, very watermelon-colored dress. “We have to do fun college things while we can. We spend enough time worrying about the fate of the world as we know it. Or at least, you do.”
Penny nods emphatically, changing into a bubblegum-pink babydoll dress of her own. “Sophia’s right.”
“I will do fun college things with you guys, but I don’t want to go to a party celebrating love. That feels…uniquely masochistic.”
Sophia nods, accepting defeat as she returns to the closet to hunt for the right heels. But Penny just opens her mouth and then closes it again, twisting her fingers in the hem of her dress.
“What, Pen?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Penny.” I sit up, Sophia’s oversized band T-shirt sliding off my shoulder. “Spit it out.”
“He’s…not here.”
Ouch. “I know that.”
“And he should be.”
“I’m aware of that one too, thanks.”
Penny shakes her head, and her blond hair ruffles like the feathers of an agitated bird. “Never mind.”
“No, I’m sorry. Tell me please.”
Penny chews her lip until Sophia looks over and gives her a nod of encouragement.
“I’m annoyed with Reid. He’s supposed to be your boyfriend.
He’s supposed to take care of you. Back at Fever Dream, that first night I met him, Sophia said he’d never hurt you.
But he’s hurting you right now. All he’s done is send you a camera? Something just doesn’t add up.”
It’s not too different from what Deacon said to me. That Reid doesn’t want to be found…But it hurts coming from someone as endlessly understanding as Penny. For her to be annoyed at anyone is…rare.
“He sacrificed his life for me that day at the docks,” I say quietly. “He withstood torture to keep Finn from knowing my identity. To stop Finn from going after my family or this school to get to me. He put himself in danger to send me that camera…”
“Fine, he’s a martyr,” Sophia says. “Doesn’t make him a good partner.
He’s been free from Finn’s clutches for almost two months, he’s been here on campus, and has made no effort to find his way back to you.
” She must see something broken on my face, because she comes to sit on the edge of my bed and puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Viv, you know we will skip this party and mope with you all night, but I’m just not sure Reid deserves your moping right now. ”
And maybe it’s because I just can’t spend another night lying in my dorm, staring up at the wooden eaves outside my window, thinking of why Reid has left me here all alone, but I stand up and begin hunting through my side of the closet.
I bypass the devil dress to throw on a black mini with a high neckline, a pair of sheer tights, and my knee-high boots, all with the speed of a quick-change artist. I slip my daggers into their holsters so fast I almost nick my skin.
All of a sudden I need to be free of this room.
Free of sorrow and longing and the sinking feeling that my friends are all seeing something I can’t.
The Marksmen house glows pink and swirled, lit from the inside out like a jack-o’-lantern filled with cotton candy.
It sits smack-dab in the middle of the wide avenue of lacrosse team houses, surrounded by frostbitten trees and drying hedges.
The white brick isn’t as pristinely maintained as the Strikers’ place, but there aren’t trash bins and dead branches cluttering the entry like at Bat and Blood, stepped over by slovenly first-years who still think someone else is coming to do the job.
“You made it!” Elliot roars with glee, beer sloshing from his pink Solo cup. A festive VDAY antenna headband like the kind you wear on New Year’s Eve pushes his hair back from his flushed face.
“We gotta catch up,” Sophia shouts in my ear above the thumping bass. She moves through the fray to plant a perfect red lipstick kiss on Elliot’s cheek and steal his cup. “Where’s Peter?” I hear her ask, but I’m already headed for the kitchen. She’s right; I need booze.
The air is thick, each room packed with hammered lacrosse boys and glitter-faced girls. Red halter tops, white booty shorts…I never regret wearing black, but sweat’s already clinging to the back of my dress where the thick, dark fabric rubs against the scar tissue on my spine.