Chapter 10 Salem
CHAPTER 10
SALEM
She needed to speak to Caz.
It was unavoidable, really. As much as she hated his insufferable smirk, and did not hate other things about him, she really needed to talk to him and try to glean if he was useful or dangerous to her project. He was the only person aside from Dr. Merlin who had access to Merlin’s office, and she needed to get in there to see what else she could find.
The weather was odd as she waited outside the School of Arts that morning, skipping one of her own classes in order to catch him. She’d found his schedule, which was ridiculously free, on the backend online page Aditi had shown her. He would be in the library for the next hour, working on one of his paintings in the private studio in the basement. Why and how he had access to a private studio in the university campus when no one else did, she had no clue about.
There were certain things about him that didn’t make any sense at all. She had managed to read through his full file online on the same backend page, and there were chunks of data missing. Things about his past, his family, his previous schooling. Information that was available on every other profile—yes, she had double-checked—yet was absent on his. From what his qualifications were for becoming a teaching assistant, even to samples of his art portfolio, there was nothing actually concrete about him in the files.
If she didn’t know Mortimer any better, she would think they were trying to keep him a secret. Why though, she didn’t know and she wanted to find out. Unsolved mysteries and unanswered questions left her bothered. Even though her primary goal was finding the truth about her sister, something inside her, instinct, or the data points her subconscious mind had picked up that her conscious mind couldn’t explain yet, was telling her it was connected.
A flash of black emerged from the main double doors of the School of Arts.
Of course, he would break the dress code and get away with it. Well, not entirely, since he did wear a dark green jacket—the green that was mandatory for the Arts—that somehow made his tall, wide frame look even taller and wider.
The mist that had rolled in the previous night seemed to have taken over the campus. White fog swirled around her knees as she walked toward him, cursing herself for not wearing leggings with her teal skirt. Other students walked to and from classes, adhering to the dress code, a dash of blues and browns and greens.
He was typing away on his phone as he walked, a normal-sized phone that looked tiny in his hands, his thumbs moving at speed as he texted someone.
Was it a girl?
Someone he was dating?
She wondered as she walked behind him, heading to the library.
From the rumors she had heard, mostly from Aditi because she was her greatest source of gossip, he didn’t have a girlfriend. He’d been seen around campus late at night with some girls at times, but nothing anyone had been able to substantiate. Her curiosity combined with their intense chemistry and the odd back-and-forth they’d had, somehow made the idea of someone with him fill her mouth with a sour taste.
She didn’t like it.
Quickly changing the course of her path as he changed his, she watched him as he walked—not casually, as he had the last time into the woods, but straighter, with purpose. He was intent on going to the library, and she wanted to know if it was an eagerness to get to his studio or something else entirely. Moreover, she needed to talk to him and ask him about so many things, the body that had started it all, the access to the office, everything. But only if he was not dangerous. For all she knew, he could be truly assisting Dr. Merlin and be a part of whatever he was doing.
He entered the library and she followed, swiping her card through. He crossed the hall, passed the computer station, and ducked through a door behind a wooden panel she hadn’t seen before. She waited a beat, and taking a deep breath in, she ducked in as well, finding herself in a small area with another inconspicuous door, most likely leading down to the basement.
That door was almost shutting, attached to a pulley system.
Quickly jamming her hand between door and frame to keep it from locking, she stepped through and heard the door click behind her.
Small.
That was the first thing in her mind.
It was a small, tight space, with nothing but stairs leading down to a dark alcove-like area.
Salem felt her heart start to pound. Small spaces and her didn’t do well. She just needed to walk down the stairs and ignore the walls.
But the walls were beginning to close in, moving from the sides to squeeze her, squish her, suffocate her.
Memories assaulted her senses, flashes of sensory overload triggering all her internal alarms.
Dark.
Decay.
Death.
The pungent smell of a corpse and the overly sweet preservative balm.
The cold skin pressed against her.
The utter silence as night descended outside.
She needed to leave, get out into the large hall. She would do whatever she had come to do later. Why had she come? What had been the motive to put herself in the same spot again? She needed freedom, open, air.
She needed to breathe.
She turned, her hand fumbling to find the doorknob, her palms sweaty as it slipped, but nothing happened.
She was locked in.
Again.
A scream trapped itself in her throat.
She jiggled the knob again, trying and pushing and pulling, anything to get it to open up, but nothing happened. Just like last time. She had screamed for so long, screamed for help, and it had come, though belatedly.
She opened her mouth now to scream for help again, hoping someone would hear and help, but the one time she wanted to use her voice, it failed her. A whimper escaped her lips, the first in so long she couldn’t even remember the last time she had been so terrified as a grown-up.
No.
No.
She was better than this.
She was not better than this.
The fear didn’t control her.
There was nothing but terror.
Stone walls shifted to become velvet lined wood. Smell of paint shifted to become the smell of funerals. Adult hands became smaller as she tried to push against the wood in front of her.
To no avail.
She pressed her forehead against the door and squeezed her eyes closed, her chest heaving, her heart pounding, blood rushing through her ears, lungs burning as taking a breath became the hardest thing in the world.
She felt something press into her back, and couldn’t discern if it was real or a memory. She kept her eyes closed and tried to dispel it, tried to remind herself that she was in the present, she was a grown-up, she would make it out. She just needed to calm down.
She couldn’t calm down.
And then she heard it.
A voice.
That voice.
Of rumbling seas and raspy smoke. Uncontained. Uncontrollable. Untamed.
Free.
The one that shifted the molecules in her space and vibrated against her skin and tingled in her brain.
His voice, penetrating through the fog in her mind.
“C’mon, little asp,” she heard him say against her ear, feeding it right into her brain, and she sucked it down, changing its chemistry. “Shed your skin for me.”
She blinked her eyes open, thrown off by the bizarre request, and felt herself being led a few steps somewhere more open. The air became lighter but she was pressed to something. A cold wall. Reality came back to her slowly, second by second.
She was pressed against the wall inside the room, her hands flat against the surface, and he was behind her.
He was behind her.
The shivering in her body shifted in tonality, intensified somehow, something else taking over as she realized it was the first time in her life someone was witnessing her vulnerability. She felt him exhale, his chest constricting. Her body instinctively rose to maintain contact with his, drawing a breath with his opposite movement. Whatever he was doing, it seemed to ease the access of air to her lungs. His hips pinned her to the wall, rendering her practically immobile, the difference in their heights even more pronounced as his breaths washed over the top of her head.
One of his hands came up on the wall as he leaned against her fully, and she watched it, her emotions shifting too. Masculine, deep-toned skin decorated with beautiful, artistic tattoos that she knew extended up his forearms, down his wrists, to the back of the hand, down to the knuckles. A few designs she recognized, like a skull and some numbers, but mostly they were seemingly patternless swirls. A few paint smudges around the tips of the fingers.
Her hand looked dainty in comparison—lighter, softer, tinier.
His hand next to hers. She didn’t mind the sight. It fascinated her, distracted her.
She felt his other hand snake into her hair at the back of her head, inside her messy bun, fingers spearing the curls and gripping the back of her skull in a wide maw. Salem dragged a breath in as he tugged at her strands, tilting her neck back, making her arch her spine to accommodate the stretch.
Her vision tilted and she blinked as his face came in, her breath catching in her throat as she saw him so close, so close she could see the little shadow on his jaw and the same swirly patternless tattoo peeking from underneath his dark collar. His hair fell forward as he leaned, their gazes locking together.
“Fuck,” he cursed, and she agreed.
This was electric, whatever this was. She felt it, and evidently he did too.
She felt zapped, her body humming a buzzing song she didn’t know, sensations coursing over her skin, leaving behind a wake of goose bumps and pebbled flesh. Her breasts, pressed flat against the door, felt heavy.
Was this basic biology? Body chemistry? His pheromones somehow triggering a response in her brain and vice versa?
He smelled like paint and petrichor, a combination so heady she felt it get to her with every inhale, and she dragged in deep breaths full of him, letting it infuse her lungs, seep into her blood, ravish her whole body.
She’d had a fumbling experience with a boy once in high school, a few kisses here and there, nothing that inspired poetry in her thoughts and these reactions in her being. And she hadn’t even touched Caz. It was him who was touching her, holding her against him and the wall, and she felt like a live wire falling into the sea.
The residual panic she had felt still seeped right at the edges of her consciousness, as did the walls trapping her in. But he was bigger than them, taking up more space and attention, and as long as she focused on him, smelled him, saw him, breathing was manageable.
His gray flint eyes roved over her face, and it was odd, the way she was positioned, trapped between him and the stone with her head falling back, watching him almost upside down.
He leaned forward. “Next time you panic,” he murmured against the side of her head, his breath warm, smelling like mint and coffee, “I want to see it.”
Salem blinked, unnerved by the closeness, unsure how to react to his words. He was different when it was just the two of them. He seemed more unhinged, as people said of him. In class, when he was bickering and sparring with her, it felt like a show, like a dance they did and had done many times for the viewership of an audience. This, in private, was different. More real. Which was why she didn’t really know what to say to him when he said bizarre things like that.
“I wasn’t panicking” escaped her, and even she didn’t believe it. She had been panicking and he had witnessed it, and she doubted he was gentleman enough to not call her out on it. Her voice, though, was thankfully devoid of her earlier scare. She tried to settle her face into the unfazed expression everyone expected from her.
“And I don’t want to kiss you,” he stated bluntly. “Neither is true.”
Salem blinked again, thrown off by his declaration. “Why don’t you kiss me?”
He stayed silent for a long beat. “There can never be anything here.”
That confused her even more. She tried to turn to look at him properly and he effortlessly stilled her movement.
Salem looked up as he tugged an errant curl that had escaped her loosened bun, his eyes alight with something heavy, his pupils blown. He took her glasses off, ones she’d even forgotten she was wearing.
“Stay still,” he said, the first words he’d said to her.
She complied, as she had even back then, not knowing why, and he took something out of his pocket.
A pencil.
The same pencil he had threatened someone bodily harm with.
She swallowed as he dragged the tip of the pencil over one curl, tracing its shape slowly, completely focused on his action before putting the tip on the outer corner of her eyebrow, too close to her eyes.
She didn’t blink, her eyes moving over the concentrated look on his face. Not as he traced her eyebrows, her eyelids, her nose, her parted lips, down her chin, the slope of her neck, to the edge of her shirt.
Her heart was thundering right there, just a few inches below his pencil.
With danger, with desire, she didn’t know. He was an unknown, his motives unclear, his reactions uncertain. For all she knew, he could be directly involved in some of the deaths or know something about them; he could be killing people on the side for a special shade of crimson paint; or he could be involved in none of it. And for some reason, her twisted brain found the mystery of him even more attractive, like the opposite of a moth drawn to a flame, drawn to his darkness she could feel calling to hers.
She remembered she’d followed him because she’d wanted to talk to him, but standing there, after a surprising panic attack and an even more surprising return to reality, with his undivided attention hitting her like a drug as he traced her form, like he was committing her to memory, words strangled inside her.
She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, closed it again.
“I asked you not to move,” he said in a wry tone. “You can speak.”
How chivalrous of him.
Salem licked her lips to wet them, tasting the honey lip balm she used. “What do you mean there can’t be anything here?”
A side of his beautiful mouth curled. “Do you want something to be here?”
“No,” she told him.
His smile became the smirk she abhorred. “Then don’t worry your pretty little head about it.”
“What about the dead girl on the beach?”
“What about her?”
“Did you know her?”
His eyes flickered over the skin he had just traced something on, and he erased it before putting the tip over her jaw again. “Yes.”
“Do you know how she died?”
A shrug.
Salem looked at his form, weighing the words in her mind, wondering how and if she should let them escape.
“Did they make her do it?”
Still.
The pencil, his hand, his entire body, everything stilled.
The tip right against her eyelid.
His eyes locked with hers for the first time since he had begun his tracing, the lightness of his face replaced by something severe, something intense. The switch was flipped and this version of him, the dark prince of the underworld as she imagined, as she’d dubbed it, was equally terrifying and thrilling. “Who?”
Salem kept her mouth shut, hoping her usual technique of waiting the other person out would work with him, even though it hadn’t in the past, that he wouldn’t call her bluff that she didn’t know anything. She waited patiently, watching him closely for reactions and micro-expressions, but he gave nothing away, nothing beyond the silent intensity.
Seconds turned into minutes, neither of them breaking the silence or their gazes. Salem realized that he wouldn’t give in to her usual methods. He was different, his reactions told her so, and she would have to try different methods with him to glean information.
She snuggled up to him, closing the minuscule gap between them, and gazed at him from underneath her lashes in a way she thought was sexy, ignoring the crick in her neck from keeping it tilted for so long. “Tell me,” she whispered, trying to make it sound sexy like she’d seen in movies. It was pure science—a lower timbre, a huskier texture, a breathier sound, all combining together to make a seductive combination.
A corner of his mouth twitched. “Cute.” He tapped her nose with the pencil before moving it down her neck, this time not stopping at the edge of the shirt but going past it, curving over the rise of her right breast, which she became acutely aware of as the tip wandered closer and closer to her nipple, that was peaked and jutting like a beacon calling a ship home.
He stopped right at the edge of where her areola began, without even knowing, and leaned closer to whisper in her ear, pouring that voice straight into her veins like a shot of her favorite drug, converting her to an addict in the making.
“I can do sexy a lot harder than you, little asp. Be careful what games you play with me.”
Something vibrated against her hip and she panted lightly, unaware of when she’d begun to draw such deep breaths in or closed her eyes.
The vibration came again and she opened her eyes to see him take his phone out, his eyes tracing hers for a moment, before looking at whatever message had come through.
His jaw clenched and he ran a hand through his longish hair, pushing it back.
“Listen to me, and listen hard,” he told her seriously. “If you know what’s good for you, don’t follow me again. This is your second pass.”
And then without another word, he moved away and pushed the door open, leading her out, locking it behind him, leaving her standing there wondering what the hell had just happened in the last few minutes.
Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.
—Stephen King, The Shining