Chapter 14 Salem
CHAPTER 14
SALEM
Long hair floated in the wind in slow motion, strands spread wide, hanging in the air like hair didn’t. Bloodied feet were lifted a few inches off the ground, hovering over the concrete like gravity had lost
hold on the physical matter.
But it held Salem rooted in place.
The cliff loomed dark before the raging sea. Moonlight illuminated the area in an eerie glow. All senses, except the visual, were muted.
The girl with her back to her lifted her arms and turned, floating in the air to see her.
Salem tried to take a step back in surprise but couldn’t move.
Rot covered half the girl’s face, skin peeling off, exposing bones where flesh should have been, rendering her once beautiful face horrid. Her mouth opened, as though to say something, and more flesh dropped off.
Salem watched in horror as Olivia reached her hand out to her, a snarled scream rising from her throat as she extended her reddened fingers for help. Fingers on the extended hand began to rot rapidly, as though the air around it had turned acidic, and Salem tried to raise her arm, trying to move and get to her so she could make her safe.
“Olivia,” she voiced, calling out to her, trying to understand what was happening. “Olivia, talk to me!”
“Sss… ssa… ssal…” her sister’s voice warbled, unable to form her name, she guessed.
“Yes, it’s Salem,” she encouraged her, watching her sister decomposing right before her eyes. “Tell me.”
“L… ki… ll.”
Nothing was making sense.
Out of nowhere, a bolt of huge, dark vultures descended from the sky, vultures like nothing Salem had ever seen before. They began attacking Olivia and ignored Salem, taking her sister’s hands, stomach, and neck in their beaks.
Salem stood frozen in terror as they dragged her sister higher in the air, dragged her back away from the cliff, leaving trails of blood behind on the ground, until she was right over it, hovering in the air.
And then they dropped her.
The moment she went out of sight, Salem’s body unfroze, and she ran to the edge to look down, scared of what she would find.
The beach was empty.
No vultures, no bodies, no nothing.
Salem stood up, confused, and turned to go, and suddenly she wasn’t on the cliff anymore. The lighthouse was behind her.
She was standing not on the cliff, but on the rocks right underneath the lighthouse with a view of the cliff and the beach. How?
But she was waiting for something, someone. She was scared, agitated, but excited to meet them.
What?
Who?
This wasn’t what she was feeling. Salem was feeling confusion, not fear. She looked down and saw a man’s clean, dark hands attached to her body instead of her own. She wasn’t in her body. She was in someone else’s—and could discern it was someone else’s emotions she was feeling. Those of a man.
Who?
A scream pierced the air and she saw someone jump from the cliff, hitting the beach below. She began to run, to get to whoever it was, to check if they were alive, but this time the vultures had her arms in their beaks, one of them with its jaw around her neck.
The man’s neck.
She began to struggle, to escape, and saw the rotting version of her sister come up behind one of the vultures, looking at her with her eyes plucked off, hollows left behind, screaming one word she heard clearly in the air.
“DON’T!”
Salem jerked awake in her room, her chest heaving from the vivid dream she’d just experienced. Sweat covered her body even in the chill of the night, her blanket thrown somewhere on the floor, her hair plastered to her neck.
The clock ticked on her desk in the silence.
She took a deep breath in and calmed herself, deliberately bringing her racing heart rate down, pressing her clammy palms to her cheeks in an effort to center herself.
After a few minutes, once she was breathing normally, she made her way to the shower in the dark, stripped off her pajamas, and turned on the faucet, keeping it cold.
As she stepped under the spray the icy temperature made her jerk before she adjusted to it, her mind slowly clearing as it awakened itself more and more. It was a trick she had discovered after the first few dreams—cold showers brought her back to reality much sooner. She took a quick one, and stepped back out. Doing her ritual, she wrapped a towel around herself and turned on the light above the mirror.
Her eyes looked puffy, red, capillaries standing in stark relief against the white, the gold minimalized under the expansion of the pupils. She was sleep-deprived, and though she could take medication for it, she didn’t want to. Medication made her senses dull.
Rubbing her eyes and yawning, she began her morning routine, even though she had no idea what time it was. She brushed her teeth, dried her hair, moisturized her skin, and finally, when there was nothing else left for her to do, she went back out into the room.
The clock ticked and she looked at it.
4:13 AM.
The butt crack of dawn.
Sighing, she pulled out one of her journals and sat down on the desk, quickly recording the dream as she remembered it, knowing it would slowly fade as the day went on. She had started doing it—keeping record of the dreams to refer to, even though she knew they didn’t mean anything—right after they had started happening. Keeping data was a habit she had internalized, so it didn’t even surprise her anymore.
The dreams had started coming soon after her father died, and they’d been coming more or less every week since then. But they used to be more abstract, a lot more vague, and much, much less gory.
Since she’d come to Mortimer, they’d somehow become more vivid, more detailed, more intense. She had seen the cliff and lighthouse frequently enough that it didn’t disturb her much. It made sense—her brain now had visual references for things it hadn’t had before.
It was the immobility that did surprise her, though, as she wrote it down. The feeling of not being able to move, the dream paralysis seeming incredibly real. Maybe it was her brain’s way of coping with being helpless as time passed and she didn’t get any clues. Maybe it was something else. She didn’t know.
The vultures were new though.
Her pen paused as she tried to remember them, the memory already slipping away, how they looked, what they did, how many there were all becoming wisps she couldn’t quite seem to catch.
Why vultures? she wrote on the pages. Is it because they are scavengers and feed on dead flesh, and there was rotting flesh in the dream? Is it because I was reading up on rates of decomposition before going to bed? Or is it something else? Why did my brain use vultures and not some other bird of prey instead? There has to be a reason to it, right?
Her fingers paused again, hovering over the page, trying to remember what Dream Olivia had said to her aside from the final word.
“Lkill?”
That made zero sense.
Sal, maybe for Salem. Kill at the end, maybe a separate word, maybe not.
But L?
What the hell was that?
She pondered over it for a few minutes, and then, exasperated, she shut the journal, put it back in its place on the neatly organized shelf, and got dressed, opting for warmer clothes. The weather had turned colder in the two months she had been at Mortimer. Though the rain had stopped, the gray skies and crisp winds had become a staple.
Once ready in a plaid skirt with leggings and boots, a tank top and zipped-up jacket and a scarf, she threw her hair up in a messy bun, put on her glasses and watch and earrings, grabbed her phone, and left her room.
The building was all quiet, as was to be expected at the time of the morning. She exited, finding the same on the dimly lit streets. Nothing would be open for hours, the whole town a ghost town for a while. Not knowing where she was heading, she slowly started walking down the street.
The main university gates came into view, as did the security guard station on the side. She nodded to one sleepy guard and walked out the smaller gate, passing BBC and beyond. The guard knew her by face, since she was pretty much walking out every other morning. If he thought it strange, it never showed.
Her restlessness hadn’t found relief in the last two months. If anything, it had only increased over the previous few weeks, and for reasons she hadn’t anticipated.
One, she had no clue about anything anymore beyond what she’d had when she’d come to the university. She had hoped, especially in the beginning, that she’d be able to find something out, but she hadn’t. And for some reason, at every turn she had tried, it had felt like something had blocked her. Maybe her own rotten luck.
Two, she had no evidence against Dr. Merlin, nothing proving anything was remotely wrong with him except her own instinct. She had tried to find dirt on him but only seen clean records and high praises. She had tried to talk to him again but he had completely ignored her outside of class, avoiding any appointments she tried to make, rushing from his office any time she tried to catch him, redirecting her to his infuriating TA for any doubts. Though she did catch Dr. Merlin looking at her with that smug smile sometimes. And she had tried to gain access to his office but that had been impossible because of reason number three.
Three was Caz.
Caz, the bane of her existence, the thorn in her side, the delirium in her blood.
Two months. Two months since she’d met him on the beach. Two months of him absolutely, intentionally driving her up the wall, and it wasn’t an easy feat. Salem Salazar did not get ruffled, but somehow he had gotten under her skin. She didn’t know if it was his voice, his personality, his bizarre behavior, or a combination of it all. But somehow, the man had managed to intrigue and irritate her to the same degree, enough to keep her brain guessing which way it wanted to swing.
And it had only built and built until suddenly, he had touched another girl’s hair.
That had given her pause.
She had not done whatever she had been feeling.
She’d left with her friends and then just gone to her room and tried to mull over why she had felt that way, and realized it could have been nothing but a jarring break in their routine. Maybe that was why she’d been unnerved. Or maybe she hadn’t liked him talking to another girl, hell if she knew why.
So, she’d decided to ignore his existence, to ignore his words in class and refuse to even look at him. And when she tried? He was there harder. Not speaking, not doing anything, just existing in her periphery, in her vicinity, watching her, mapping her, memorizing her like she was an ode to something.
And for two months, it built.
Built and built and built.
To the point where she wanted to either rip her own hair out or rip his face off.
He refused to talk to her about anything with a straight answer and when she decided she didn’t want to talk to him? He was every freaking where that she turned.
She went to the library? He happened to have a studio in the basement and just happened to walk past whatever aisle or table she was at. She went for a walk? He just happened to be strolling somewhere close by and “accidentally” crossing her path. She went to her classes? He was always there in the one they shared, sitting in his corner, goading her into little debates that she refused to be a part of, throwing challenges with his eyes that were getting harder and harder to refuse and walk away from. Not a day passed that she didn’t catch a glimpse of him or him of her, and in a university as big as Mortimer was, it could only be a coincidence so many times.
He was doing it deliberately. Why? She didn’t know and she couldn’t find out because he refused to talk to her like she was some kind of pariah.
He alone was responsible for the spike in her otherwise normal blood pressure.
Two months of this. Of running her around in circles, of him keeping her at a distance but not letting her pull away, and it was driving her mad.
Something had to give.
Something had to snap.
Something had to break.
Shaking her head at herself, she walked alone on the cobblestoned street, dimly lit with a streetlamp every few steps, fog making it even dimmer, enveloping her in a cold hug.
She wrapped her arms around herself as she continued walking and tried to remember the last time she had been hugged. It had been at her father’s funeral, where her mother had clung to her for a few minutes before finding another shoulder, and Salem had received a line of polite, perfunctory hugs.
She saw Aditi hug other people sometimes, and knew it was her own air of aloofness that kept the other girl from doing the same to her. She knew she’d get a great hug if she asked, but she didn’t know how to ask.
And deep down, she wondered what it felt like—a good, warm, tight hug that could release endorphins in her body and relieve her stress for a bit. Maybe even give her a few good hours of sleep. Maybe even make her happy. Was she even capable of that? It was quite possible there was something broken in her system that would keep her from feeling that even if she experienced the good hormones. She couldn’t really say for certain, since she had never tested that hypothesis.
She probably never would. She could not imagine allowing anyone that close to her that intimately.
But what if you don’t have to allow it? a voice inside her whispered. What if someone just took?
Memory, of being held immobile between a warm body and a solid wall, came to her. He hadn’t waited for her to allow him physically close, he had just stepped in and bent her as he’d wanted, and she’d let him, vulnerable in the aftermath of her panic attack.
She hadn’t ever before felt as… alive, as aware of herself as she had then.
Or since.
She wondered idly what it would be like without the variable of the panic attack, if that level of intimacy or recreating that feeling was possible and achievable for her outside of it.
But she forced herself not to remember it, to think about him. He’d made it more than clear that had been a fluke of some kind, and he was playing with her like a toy, nothing more.
In the fog and in her thoughts, Salem lost track of time, walking much farther than she’d realized before a tall structure loomed in the distance, piercing the white mist around it.
The lighthouse.
Before she could take a step forward, a voice came from somewhere in the fog, a masculine voice she hadn’t heard before.
“You shouldn’t be out here alone so late.”
Salem squinted as a dark shape came closer and closer, until she could make out one of the guys she’d seen around campus a few times in gray uniform, the one Aditi had danced for at the bonfire, the one who had been with him.
“Or early,” she corrected him. “Depends on the perspective.”
He walked closer, his large frame coming toward her, and Salem felt herself tense, not knowing what to expect.
“C’mon. I’ll walk you back,” he said, in a voice she would now associate with the fog, as he started back in the direction she’d come from.
She stood where she was, watching his retreating back. “I’m sorry, but who are you?”
He stopped, a few feet away from her, and turned to face her. He was handsome, in the very classic, traditional sense of the word, and reeked of old, old money, and she was old money.
“Baron Nathaniel Whitmore,” he introduced himself, walking back to her and extending a gloved hand. Whitmore. She knew the name from somewhere, the word itching at the corner of her memory, but couldn’t put her finger on it. Must have been one of the endless string of families she’d encountered at social events. She wouldn’t be surprised.
She shook his hand, her upbringing taking over. “Salem Salazar.”
His hand squeezed hers. “I know. You’re quite popular.”
She lifted an eyebrow. She would’ve used “notorious” instead. She had a reputation in their circles after all.
“Both as a Salazar and as—” he gave her a small grin “— goldengirl01 ?”
Salem froze, her hand in his, and stared at the boy with new eyes, apprehension leaking into her bones.
How the hell did he know of that?
She hadn’t heard or thought of that name in years. It had been buried and forgotten.
Could he have been the teenage boy she had met that night eight years ago, the only one who could have possibly known that name and her in the same breath?
No. Baron was too posh, and the teen boy had been rough.
Carefully withdrawing her hand, she took a step back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Baron chuckled. “Sure, you don’t, Salazar.”
And he began to walk back.
And even though she didn’t want to, even though every single part of her wanted to run in the opposite direction, Salem took a deep breath, steadied herself, and followed, suddenly reminded of the night she hadn’t thought about in years.
Love will ?nd its way
Through paths where wolves would fear to prey.
—Lord Byron, “The Giaour”