Chapter 20
Peter is going to be pissed. Landon was right; the watchtower soars higher than even the planetarium, and the hike up the spiral staircase to its peak is nothing short of treacherous.
Even more so in these boots. Times a thousand when I already had the spins.
My quads and heart are pulsing in rhythm by the time I reach the top.
I nearly collapse onto the dust-riddled floor but settle for slumping against a wall and inhaling cobwebs.
The view, though, is staggering. Past crates and burlap sacks gathering mildew, a circular window twice as tall as me looks out over the entirety of campus.
Rows of moss-covered professors’ cottages and redbrick historic buildings.
The mountains that insulate Harker are capped in snow, which glistens pearly white in the moonlight.
The glass is half shattered, rendering the room frigid as ice as the expansive, twinkling night sky drifts in, the sight as much a death trap as a vision.
I think of the planetarium, just a few feet from here. Our faux date. The intimacy we’d shared. My heart twists for Reid so hard I grow dizzy. “Reid,” I call once I’ve caught my breath.
Silence, save for the skittering of mice.
“Reid, it’s Viv!”
My palms twitch with adrenaline, my vision blurred and misted with something that doesn’t feel like me.
Go home, kitten.
It takes me a moment to realize the voice is my dad’s. I’m coherent enough to know it’s the alcohol talking. To know I’m imagining things that aren’t there. That doesn’t change the way it seizes me—I still go frozen as the dead. “Dad?”
You need to hunt, he tells me. Before you get sicker.
Lesson learned: No more mixing alcohol and syrabraxas. I ignore the sweat clinging to my brow. The white-hot tension corkscrewing into my gut. “Reid!” I scream.
Two more times as I crouch and peer into every crate and box.
“Reid!” My voice cracks. My knees wobble.
Nobody can hear me.
Nobody can hear me because nobody’s here.
Everything Sophia and Penny said was right. Everything Deacon said. Reid doesn’t want me. He’s left me behind. And why should he have done anything else? I’m weak, I’m dying, I’m losing my mind.
I’m all alone.
“Fuck!” I kick an empty crate as hard as I can and watch through racing breaths as it sails into a wall and clatters to pieces. My pulse thunders in my veins. Dust clouds. Rodents scurry.
And a sound.
A noise, coming up the stairs.
I whirl, mind fuzzy, heart in my throat. “Who is that?”
The steps grow closer. My body tingles. My back—a deviant. A deviant I know.
Kill him. Spill his blood.
Pale hair. The color of milky starlight. Simmering eyes of that soft, winter blue. Cherries, clove, and cigarettes. It takes me a second to sputter out the word. “Deacon?”
The sharp lines of his face are limned by shafts of moonlight dripping in from the enormous window behind me. For a beat he only studies me, watchful. Curious. As if trying to figure out what’s different. Can he tell I’m fucked-up? “What’re you doing up here, Vivienne?”
“Me?” I’m still shaky, and so lost. My vision turning his smooth skin a hungry red. “What are you doing here?”
He shrugs like I should already understand he comes and goes from Harker as he pleases. “I told you. Sometimes I have business at your Citadel. Was just leaving when I saw you stumbling up the stairs. Curiosity got the cat.”
I don’t know if he’s talking about me or him.
“What kind of business do you do for the Elders?” Before the words are out, something as satisfying as it is horrific clicks into place.
“It was your blood.” I cross my arms and try not to wobble in my knee-high boots.
“That’s why you have that special coin and your own gateway into the forest…
That’s how you bypass the wards. They let you, because you give them your blood. Why?”
“You’re wasted.”
“Is that why no hunters ever bust Fever Dream? You trade a piece of yourself for your home’s safety?”
“Drinking’s not so good for that curse you got there.”
“What does it do for them?”
His eyes linger on my sheer tights and heeled boots. “Better question’s why’d you come up here in that little getup?”
“I was at a Valentine’s Day party.”
Deacon’s mouth turns suspicious. “You don’t go to parties. You’re not fun.”
“I’m plenty fun,” I hiccup.
“Jesus Christ.” His broad hand moves down his face in exasperation. “Come on,” he says, motioning for me to take his hand. “Before you topple right out that window.”
But I take another step back, nearly tripping over a coil of moldy rope. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me why you give the Elders your blood.”
Deacon’s eyes sweep past me to find the expanse of shattered glass. “Now is not the time, nor the place, Vivienne. You’re drunk and need to stop backing toward—”
“I’d rather go to hell than listen to you.”
“If you were free of that pesky spell, I’d take you up on that.”
But I shake my head. He’s full of it. “I like how you think you’d actually be able to kill me.”
One side of Deacon’s mouth curls up in a cruel smirk. “I like how you think one day I won’t.”
“So you’re saying I’ll be free of this spell eventually.”
“That’s one way to look at it. A bit heavy on the silver lining for my taste.”
“What can I say?” I stumble backward. “I’m big on silver.”
“Vivienne,” he groans, aggravated, eyes still on the busted window behind me. “Will you just come with—”
“My name is Viv. And I’m not leaving.” I pout. “Why don’t you try to glamour me again? You remember that? The first night we met?”
His brows lower, mouth curving in a twisted, sensual grin. “Do I ever.”
“Sick fuck.”
“You and I both know I can’t glamour a hunter.”
“You just hoped I’d be so desperate not to be discovered that I’d pretend to be mortal and suck you off.” My words slur as I plant my hands on my hips.
“It was more of an invitation to play along.” He shrugs, shameless. “I thought you were kind of into it.”
“That was your way of hitting on me?”
“Don’t sound so scandalized. You know you’re a knockout.” I make a retching noise and he chuckles darkly. “Time to go, Vivienne.”
I know I’m stalling. Reid isn’t here. I know that.
But the weight of it is like an anvil. What if this was the last place to look?
What if this is really the end? And I don’t answer to Deacon anyway.
This is my school. My search for Reid. He should be cowering from me.
“I already told you I’m not leaving. You can, though.
Maybe hit the blood drive again on your way out? ”
“Do you want me to manhandle you?” His eyes gleam red and wicked. “Is that it? All you have to do is ask.”
I ignore the way his words heat my blood.
Something else is brewing in the vodka-soaked edges of my mind.
Hit the blood drive again on your way out.
His coin, his gateway—his way of entering the school deposits him in the heart of the Fickle Thicket.
If he really does come to Harker to give the Elders his blood, there’s no reason he would have had to come inside the walls of Old Campus to leave. Not unless he was…
“You were looking for me.”
Deacon scowls. Crosses his arms. “What?”
Triumph sings below my skin, stirred in with my bloodlust and my fury and my inebriation.
I teeter from boot to boot. “You said you were passing by, but your coin opens a gateway pretty far from this tower. Were you looking for an ass kicking, or did”—another hiccup, another stumble—“you just miss me really bad?”
His hawk’s gaze doesn’t leave the window behind me. “You take one more step—”
“Will you miss me when I’m gone, lover boy?”
I’ve never seen Deacon’s face so cruel. “You are insufferable. Why would anyone fucking miss you?”
And I don’t know if it’s the liquor in my bloodstream or not finding Reid or the fact that I’ve been asking myself the same question all night or my rising, splitting bloodlust, which is always mixing up anger and need and sorrow.
Or maybe it’s just frustration that I am continually in the orbit of this villain, and the knee-weakening pain cresting in my back the longer I go without killing, but I just can’t take it a minute more.
Rip him open, the syrabraxa tells me.
I rush forward and punch Deacon as hard as I can in the jaw.
Deacon staggers back, hand massaging his chin. When he peers up at me, it’s with a look of sheer mischief on his face. “Glad to see not even booze can touch that right hook.”
But the punch helped. Just like that day in Penny’s parents’ bathroom. The pain in my back quiets a little. My need cools to something lukewarm. Manageable. He’s a deviant, and I’m a hunter. This is what we do. “Could land one on you in my sleep.”
Deacon’s lips curl. “Think I’d like that.”
“Come and get it, then.”
He moves for me with a punishing glint in his eye. Violence incarnate. It’s a rush, pure and desperate in my veins as I brandish my daggers for the fight.
“There she is!” a voice calls out. Flashlights flood the storage room. Deacon and I whirl in tandem, hands raised for combat, breaths racing. Confusion and shock whirr through me when four hunters wearing the crest of the Citadel march inside, blades and bows aimed not at Deacon, but at me.
“What’s going…” But I don’t finish the sentence.
The hunters part, allowing a figure to emerge before them.
Dark hair, clean-cut. I try to make sense of the sight.
The warmth in Landon’s eyes from earlier is gone, replaced now with something cold and triumphant.
“Our conversation…” I will my mind to stop swimming.
“This room…” Had he set me up? “Why did you send me here?”
“Had to get you alone.” His eyes rove over to Deacon. “Or close to it.”
“So you laid a trap because you knew I was looking for Reid? Sent me somewhere I wouldn’t have already searched? Fine, you got me. I care about my boyfriend.”
Landon only glares. “Not quite.”
Unease coils inside me. “What is going on?”
“You can’t believe the Elders’ suspicion was quelled just by seeing your back.”
Deacon’s eyes slice to mine. Sour vodka rises in my throat. “I—”
“All kinds of magic could have hidden your scar. They need the truth. And they knew I’d be able to get it for them without any of your fellow classmates or the dean interfering. I’m sorry, Viv.”
“Not yet you aren’t,” Deacon growls.
“There’s no need for threats, fourth-year,” Landon assures him.
“No harm will come to either of you if you cooperate.” For a moment I’m shocked he has no idea what or who Deacon is.
But then it hits me—of course he doesn’t.
The White Stag’s identity isn’t known anywhere outside of seedy Asteran circles like the Manor.
“Cooperate with what?” I ask.
Landon motions for the hunters around him to lower their weapons, and they do so.
I pay close attention to every move of Deacon’s.
But I already know he isn’t going to hurt anyone.
If Deacon wanted these hunters dead, it would already be a bloodbath.
His blood, theirs. He’s waiting to see how this plays out. What Landon plans to do.
“It’s in your best interest too, Viv. The chance to clear your name. Follow me.” Landon motions to the two of us. “And we’ll get the Elders an answer one way or another.”
Neither Deacon nor I move our feet. “Where to?” I ask.
Landon’s eyes narrow with dark curiosity. “Don’t worry. If you aren’t the aeon, you and your friend have nothing to fear.”
“Fine, then,” I say, grateful for all my years as an A-plus liar. “We’ll go with you. But all I did was try to track down my missing boyfriend. I’m not an aeon. You’re going to feel like an idiot.”
Landon doesn’t look like he’s lying when he says, “I really hope you’re right.”
It’s not until he’s looked away, gesturing for his men to restrain us with iron chains, that I cut my eyes to Deacon.
“Don’t hurt anyone,” I mouth. “Trust me. I have a plan.”
I hope by the time we get to wherever Landon’s taking us, that’ll be true.