Chapter 13 Salem
CHAPTER 13
SALEM
A month had passed since her encounter with Dr. Merlin and the library episode. Between classes and her genuine excitement for learning, between getting her application for the awards ready and her apprehension for what that would mean, between trying to look for new information and falling into something akin to a camaraderie with two girls unexpectedly, Salem didn’t even realize when time flew.
She had settled into her courses and routines, all of them adding value to her life in some way or another. All freshman students in her department had lab days twice a week, and those were her favorites. Spending time learning about crime scene investigation and reconstruction was what she had always envisioned for herself growing up.
She walked out of the School of Science block and toward School of Arts after her last period, which had been a lab period, rummaging in her bag for a claw clip since her hair tie seemed to be dying under the mass of her messy bun, and ran headfirst into someone.
“Hey, watch it!”
She knew the feminine voice.
Ugh.
Lara and her posse stood in their pristine white shirts, short gray skirts with matching heels, and perfectly straight, beautiful hair glossed like it was crystalline. Salem felt envious. The group of girls before her were absolute stunners, the kind that made people stop and fall to their knees. The thing she didn’t like was that they knew it and used it to lord over other people. But she couldn’t blame them, she supposed. If that was something they had learned all their lives, it made sense they wouldn’t even blink at it.
Lara, like Salem, was a first-year, and they had known each other socially their whole lives, their parents having been friends until her father passed. Lara’s family had been at both her sister’s and father’s funerals. Meaning she knew Lara and Lara knew her, even if her new posse didn’t.
Had it been anyone else, Salem would have muttered an apology, because she had been in the wrong and not watching where she’d been going, though Lara could have sidestepped and avoided the bumping. But because it was her, and Lara had never been good to her, Salem lifted her chin higher and leveled them all with her patented disinterested look.
Lara shook her head, sending her sun-spun hair cascading in a gorgeous waterfall over her slim shoulders.
“You know what your problem is, Salazar?” She spoke in the refined tone that was a staple in their circles, soft and seemingly polite but cutting. “This, right here. You don’t care about people, and you think that makes you somehow superior. News flash! It doesn’t.”
Salem wanted to retort and tell her something like she didn’t care for her opinion, but that would be just adding fuel to the fire. Salem knew how it went, and she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from saying what was on her mind. She glanced at the watch on her wrist, a simple but beautiful piece that had been her sister’s.
She was getting late.
“Move,” she simply told Lara.
The other girl sighed loudly. “I wish sometimes it was you instead of your sister who had died. Olivia was so good. The world would be a better place with her and without you.”
One of the girls behind Lara gasped at the cruel words, and Salem braced herself inside, not letting an iota of her internal flinch be reflected outside. It wasn’t like Lara was telling her anything she didn’t tell herself every other day, sometimes twice on the weekends. If it had been her instead of her sister, the world would have been a better place, and she knew no one would have missed her. She didn’t add anything of value in anyone’s life.
“God, you don’t feel a thing, do you? You frigid bitch,” Lara spit out, and again, it was nothing she hadn’t said to her before. One time at a social event, Lara’s then-boyfriend had come on to her, and Salem had rejected his advances, going and telling Lara as a heads-up. While Salem hadn’t cared about the pass, their families had been friends and she’d felt it was something she would have appreciated knowing if the situation was reversed. Lara hadn’t, and instead she’d been on Salem’s case since then.
Salem felt an arm link with hers and looked in surprise to see Aditi by her side.
“I think you meant ice queen with more class in her finger than you have in your body.” The usually happy girl glared at Lara.
“No, I meant frigid bitch who looked exactly as she does right now at her sister’s and father’s funerals,” Lara looked down her nose at them, and turned back to Salem. “Hanging out with scholarship brats now? The Salazars have truly fallen. Such a shame.”
“Shame you missed the class when they were teaching decency,” Aditi quipped back, and Salem almost told her it was a curse. Calling a girl from the upper echelons indecent was the worst hit.
Without waiting for a response, Aditi dragged her to the side and to the School of Arts block, walking her inside. “Ugh, that bitch makes me mad.”
Salem looked at her. “Why?”
Aditi rolled her beautiful eyes. “You mean beyond her being a jerk to me when she comes to BBC and calling my friend names?”
Salem suddenly stopped in her tracks, making the other girl stop and look at her.
“You mean me?” she asked, just to confirm.
Aditi rolled her eyes again and put her hands on Salem’s shoulders. “Yes, I mean you. You’re my friend, Salem. And friends don’t let other people call their friends names.”
An odd, almost bubbling sensation formed in the pit of her stomach. The words seeped into her brain.
She had a friend and her friend had stood up for her.
That meant something to her.
“Okay.” She blinked rapidly, trying to dislodge whatever was stuck in her throat. That was an odd reaction too.
The other girl gave her a bright smile, one that immediately turned her face so radiant it made up for the rare sunlight in this place. “Good. Now let’s go before Melissa kills us. You know how impatient she can get.”
Salem nodded. Melissa was the most impatient, impulsive person she had ever met. But she was nice too.
“She’s our friend too, you know?” Aditi supplied, as though on the same train of thought. “Ever since we dragged her drugged ass uphill. It was a bonding experience, though she doesn’t remember shit about that night.” The words ended on a giggle.
Salem felt her lips twitch at the memory. It had been a wild night. The bonfire, the dares, the hike up to the residential block with a semiconscious girl. Even though she had begun to look into the drug and ask around about it, it hadn’t borne any result. But truth be told, it wasn’t hard for rich boys to get them from seedy suppliers. She knew of cases all around the world and Melissa had been one of the lucky ones that night to have friends take her back safely.
She realized with a start that she had made some memories here already, ones that she remembered with more fondness than she did the ones before Mortimer.
The School of Arts block came into view, two tall towers of the castle stretching out with a massive wall and a double door entrance, a huge, round fountain at the front with sculptures of wings and limbs and weapons, and monstrous faces frozen in shock and horror, spewing water into the surrounding basin.
It was the only block with a fountain that big and detailed, and Salem always found herself looking at it longer before they went in.
Salem had been there several times a week over the last month, mostly to wait for Aditi and Melissa after her classes got done, since her schedule had her getting free a half an hour earlier than theirs and it was getting too chilly to wait for anyone outside for that long.
Melissa had been the one to match their schedules and suggest Salem come to meet them there. It was something new that had been added into her routine, meeting the girls and going into town, to one of the other popular cafés—about twenty minutes on foot. With them talking about classes and stuff, and Salem adding to the conversation here and there, twenty minutes felt like ten.
It was a novel experience for Salem but one she was happy to add into her routine. It felt nice, even if she didn’t say much, to be with these two girls who had somehow adopted her into their circle and not asked her to change.
“My dad’s calling,” Aditi looked at her ringing phone. “Give me a sec.”
While the girl walked a few steps to the side to talk, Salem stood in the foyer and looked around.
The first time she had entered this part of the castle, she’d realized how different it was from her side of it. While the School of Science had a foyer area that split into corridors that led to staircases and elevators, the interiors were done with notice boards and certificates on the walls, feeling cool and minimalistic. School of Arts was on the opposite end of the spectrum.
It was a museum of young talent, a gallery that could rival the best in the world, a maximalist display of the excellence of human creativity.
The foyer was a large, massive hall with giant staircases at each end that led up to the higher floors, each landing visible, and four doors tucked behind those staircases, out of sight.
Everything, from the walls to the domed ceiling, was covered in art. Even the architecture of the interior lived up to the name of their department. It was in baroque style. She knew because she had heard her father talk about it on a property with a client once. The ceilings were painted with murals and visions, from angelic to demonic, from natural to artificial, from light to dark, everything given a space, a vibrant range of colors and strokes that changed every few square feet, like a mosaic of different styles and artists combining in a mishmash of eccentricities, displayed there forever.
Beyond the ceiling, artwork hung on the walls like in a museum, the smallest being no larger than her palm and the largest in the center almost fifteen feet across. The frames were just as stylized— ornate and metallic, bronze, copper, gold, alloys, shining with every metal sheen known to mankind.
Sculptures and statues greeted any visitor from the entrance to the staircases. Huge chandeliers hung from the tallest ceilings in any of the castle blocks, fire sconces in wrought iron were bolted to the walls in places, more for décor now than for practical use.
A simple map of the building hung front and center, hand-painted in watercolors, marking off different departments and classrooms.
Everything inside was warmth, almost an overload for the senses.
And surprisingly, she loved it.
She rubbed her hands together to warm them, and felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
It was him. Caz.
She was familiar with the sensation now.
Turning her neck, she looked up the staircase and saw him gazing down at her from the first-floor landing, casually leaning on the railing and watching her like the lord of his domain.
The Psycho Painter , whose paintings she was told weren’t displayed in the space, and yes, she had asked.
She hated the way her insides responded to him, his particular brand of stimulus laced with something that made her stupid, like a drug affecting her neurons and making her react in odd ways. Ways like trying to follow him even after he’d told her not to. Ways like speaking in class just to engage him in a heated debate that led nowhere. Ways like trying to dig up information on him through not-so-legal means even though it had nothing to do with her case and everything to do with him.
Caz van der Waal was an enigma, an unknown variable in her equation, an unsolved mystery, and she had always loved and hated those in equal measure.
After the library incident or whatever that had been, she had cornered him again the next day as he left the Arts block, and the bastard had simply held the top of her head and pushed her aside like she’d been a fly he had to swat. She remembered standing on the path completely aghast, realizing that a few people had witnessed it and stared at her, and inching her chin higher and walking away.
The next time she tried to talk to him, she’d done it more privately after class, but to no avail since he had started talking to other students.
After that she’d given up trying to approach him for a while and focused on other things instead, so imagine her surprise when it had been him giving her attention.
At first when she had showed up in his block, he had assumed it had been for him.
“Couldn’t stay away, little asp?” he had asked, that annoying smirk twisting his lips and an unknown look glinting in his eyes that traced every visible inch of her lazily, almost sluggishly with fever.
She had looked him up and down like he was inconsequential, raising a haughty eyebrow. “Who are you, again?”
His eyes had heated at that, a wild glint coming into them. “Ask me again when your nipples aren’t begging for my mouth.”
That had been so inappropriate, but not surprising coming from him. He had no sense of propriety or politeness in his body. He was crass and crude and cruel.
Salem had immediately crossed her arms, cursing the white shirt that had betrayed her body’s reaction, and he had chuckled, walking past her.
Cryptic, confounding, arousing bastard, that’s what he was. Anytime they had a personal interaction, the tension between them built until it became palpable. He gave her riddles and non-answers galore, and while a part of her enjoyed playing the game, the back-and-forth stimulating her brain in a way it had never been before, another part of her considered stealing some sort of truth serum chemical from the lab and making him answer just a single question properly. She wouldn’t do that, of course, but there was no harm just thinking it.
Soon after that though, he’d seen her with Aditi and Melissa and stopped approaching her in the foyer. She didn’t know if she liked that or hated it even more.
Speaking of, Aditi came to her side, her phone call done, and looked up to where he was standing, watching her unabashedly.
“This is such weird foreplay,” the girl muttered, and Salem broke the staring contest she’d unwittingly engaged in and turned to her side.
“What do you mean?” This wasn’t foreplay. It was play of some kind, sure, just not the fore kind. They couldn’t even talk to each other without wanting to walk off or do something regrettable.
Aditi rolled her eyes again. “For a smart girl you can be so stupid sometimes, Salem,” she said, with no venom in her tone. “That hunky chonk of a man stands there every freaking day at this exact time. Why?”
Salem didn’t want to think of it. She shrugged. “Maybe he just likes the spot.”
Aditi sighed. “Oh, my na?ve little flower. Maybe he just likes the view,” she suggested. “He knows this is our schedule, and he stands there and stares at you. And it’s not just here. Don’t think I haven’t heard about what you two do in the psych class. One of the girls on my floor tells me it’s like watching a mating dance, the way you two go off at each other. But even aside from that, it’s just the way he looks at you, like he’d eat you alive if he could. If he wasn’t so hot, it’d be really creepy.”
It should have been creepy, but it wasn’t. And that had nothing to do with his general hotness, and more to do with him. Though they had met in dubious circumstances and he had always had a slightly deranged air around him, it didn’t make her feel slimy. It didn’t fire off warning signals in her body and make her gut feel heavy with trepidation. And she, out of all people, knew what creepy felt like.
Stay in the present.
She bit the inside of her cheek, shook it off, and glanced up.
Only to be brought up short.
He wasn’t alone.
For the first time in the month that it had become their routine, he wasn’t alone on the landing.
“Who’s that?” Aditi echoed the question in her mind. “She’s gorgeous. I don’t think I’ve seen her here.”
And it was a she. A she who was standing too close to him. A she who was smiling up at him. A she who was placing a hand on his bicep, a bicep Salem had never touched.
Salem wondered what that hand would look like cut away from her dainty arm.
And then something worse happened.
He raised his hand and tucked her hair behind her ear.
The same hand that he had fisted her hair with, the same tattooed fingers that had traced her curls, the same arm that had held her immobile.
Something cold, cold settled deep within her gut, her blood turning to ice, the chill straightening her spine, the ice so cold it felt like it was burning her from her inside, rendering her organs black, making her want to excise them from her body.
Maybe she was the frigid bitch Lara had accused her of being.
What the hell was happening to her?
“Okay, we hate her now,” she heard her friend say, and turned to face her.
“Why?” She raised a brow, letting the ice within her radiate outside. “Who cares?”
Seeing Melissa heading their way, she ignored Aditi’s knowing look and muttered a “let’s go.”
She ignored it all the way to the exit, until she turned around, just once, to see the landing was empty, both him and his she gone.
Oh, fuck him.
Salem Salazar didn’t care.
Yeah, fuck him.
“I cannot ?x on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”
—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice