Chapter 42
Snow has built up on all the windowsills like piped icing circling a cake.
Flakes of it sprinkle the lawns like powdered sugar, tufts of the stuff making little cotton candy mounds out of all the campus shrubbery, and Lake Hellebore has frozen over into shimmering, reflective hard candy.
Overnight Harker has become as picturesque as a gingerbread house.
It should be the kind of sugary beauty I capture with my half-frame, but I have no desire to savor this moment.
I hardly want to be inside of it myself—the campus has never felt so alienating.
It’s too quiet. Half the students have gone home for their own safety.
Some who have nowhere else to go or who felt for whatever reason that Harker was still safer than being with their families are hiding away in the campus’s nooks and crannies, studying for next week’s exams. You can threaten the most precious artifacts of the school—even the student body—but I guess we’ll never come between professors and their finals.
At least fifty Citadel hunters in their utilitarian navy uniforms have been called to man the campus like soldiers in an occupied city.
Harker used to be the only place I felt like I belonged.
Home, I called it that night coming back from Shiloh.
Granted, I was high as a kite on Valium, but I really felt it then, and every day since.
Now everything’s changed. Students are wary and standoffish.
Everyone knows something is wrong that the dean and the Elders can’t seem to fix.
And I have to stew in the knowledge that on top of losing my job, disappointing my family, and breaking Penny’s heart, I couldn’t save Lyra or Kitty or anyone else.
Couldn’t figure out who is brewing the syrabraxa or what horrors they have planned.
Have to fall asleep each night thinking of how stupid I was to think the White Stag—Reid’s brother—had anything to do with any of it.
How stupid I was to trust him, to let myself fall—
“Viv?” When I look up, Peter’s frowning at me from the other side of the commons couch. “Contrary to popular belief, there’s no final on the details of the fireplace.”
We’re the only two in here studying this evening, because even in the darkest times, we are still losers with no plans.
“Sorry…Just zoned out for a sec.”
“Did you even finish the practice questions?”
“Yeah.” I look down at my paper. “What did you get for number seven?”
Peter surveys his notebook. His faded Iron Man sweatshirt is folded in such a way that the playboy billionaire looks like he’s melting. “I had poison from a wyvern’s fang.”
“Hmm. I wrote supermarket.”
“…Yeah, that’s wrong.”
I drag my eraser across the page. The hallway door opens, and Peter and I both look up to hear two girls clomp inside in their snow-coated boots, bags of holiday shopping in tow.
Their hair is perfectly curled, cheeks flushed from the winter night.
They burst into peals of laughter as they hurry up the creaking wooden stairs of Elkfore.
A scowl heats my face. “Annoying, no?”
Peter looks back to the hall where the girls were. Then back to me. “How dare they bring their shopping bags into our commons? They’ll rue the day.”
“Girls are missing. The school is being sabotaged. They could show some respect.”
But he’s already back to his notebook, highlighting a new passage.
I’ve been insufferable this past week. I know it, Peter knows it, Sophia and Elliot know it.
For some reason, they continue to spend time with me, which is more than I deserve.
The fireplace crackles and snaps. Somber jazz drifts in through one of the speakers. I study Peter as he works diligently.
“Sorry,” I say after a while. “For being on edge.”
“No need to apologize. You’re having a time.”
“Penny and I call it the Big Oof.” I finger the corner of my notebook where the color is fading. I miss Hound, and I miss Penny, and I miss our sappy movie nights.
Peter’s soft smile warms the room. “Now that the exhibit’s done, where does she think you’ve been staying this whole week?”
“I told her I’d sleep at Sophia’s until she wanted to talk. In the scheme of things, it’s one of my lesser lies.”
“Maybe going out with them would have made you feel better?”
I think about Sophia and Elliot at whatever Astera bar they’re at.
Lately it feels like the city is safer than the campus.
I wonder if they’re drinking or laughing or dancing.
Neither of them grappling with the kind of sharp, stabbing self-hatred that’s eaten at me for years.
I think of the conversation Elliot and I had in the library.
About their friendship. “You think they’ve ever hooked up? ”
Instantly I regret the question. Peter’s face goes so pale he nearly glows in the dim commons light. “God, I hope not.”
“Sorry. I’m sure you’re right.”
“I try not to think about it…any more than I already do.” He winces a bit. “Which is just about every night when I’m falling asleep.”
“Jesus, Peter.”
“I’m kidding,” he says with no conviction.
“Why don’t you tell her?” Peter makes a face, and I make one back at him. “I’m serious.”
“As am I. I’m a homeschooled orphan with a penchant for fictional characters. On what planet does a girl like that go for a guy like me?”
I guess I know what he means. Peter’s eager, hopeful, too intelligent for his own good. I’d never call him a nerd, because I love him, and because nerd has a certain sniveling, academia-obsessed connotation, but maybe, lovingly, I’d call Peter a dork.
“Your mom homeschooled you?”
“She valued knowledge over everything else. Felt like she could educate me better than our ‘crummy’ public school system. Honestly, I think she just wanted to keep me close.”
It’s such a sweet sentiment, my heart twists. “I’m sorry you had to lose her.”
Peter’s gaze falls to his notebook. He doesn’t speak for a minute as the fireplace snaps and licks. Then he tells me quietly, “It’s my own fault.”
His words drop a weight on my chest. “What? Why?”
“She’d taught me everything about hunting. And yet when she was staring down a Brood demon, when he was taking her soul”—Peter shudders out a breath and rubs his eyes—“I just stood there. Watched it happen.”
“Peter…” I can’t think of anything else to say. My stomach churns with a familiar pain. “How old were you?”
“Eight. I’ll never forget his face. The sound of his claws clicking together…He let me go after. Told me living as a cowardly hunter was a worse fate than being a turned demon down in the underworld with her.”
The image of a young Peter, grasping at his mother’s lifeless body before she crumbled to ash, rips my chest in half. “You were mortal. You were a kid. There was nothing you could have done.”
“Is that what you tell yourself? About your dad?”
“It’s different.” I lower my voice even though I know we’re alone. “I’m an aeon. I had all my abilities then. I should have been able to help him. I should have gotten to him in time…”
“Can you imagine what it was like for them? To train us to fight, knowing they’d have to leave us one day?
Knowing their job was to set us up for the same fate?
At least you’ve done something with all your dad taught you.
Fought deviants, saved people…” Peter’s laugh is solemn and rueful.
“I can’t even tell a girl I’m into her.”
As my heart twists, I wonder if on some level Sophia already knows how he feels. Anyone can see the way Peter looks at her. “She really cares about you, you know.”
“I know. But honestly, Elliot was right that day when he said Kitty was my only friend. Ever since she…” His mouth turns down. “Left, or didn’t leave…After her and my mom, you guys are all I have. I wouldn’t want to mess that up.”
I know what it’s like to give something a try and have it go cataclysmically awful. In fact, I have my pick: attempting to date Reid, trying to solve the mysteries of this place, losing the job I kind of actually liked…
“Shit.” I stand up and grab my phone and bag.
“What is it?”
“I was supposed to get my things from the Windsor before they close for Thanksgiving.” I check the time. It’s nearly six. “I’ll just gateway in and be right back.”
“All good. Me and about six thousand pages of notes will be here waiting for you.”
I study Peter and his kind eyes, and I find I mean it when I say, “Lucky me.”
I trudge through campus in nothing but an oversized sweater and a short skirt, shivering until my teeth’s clacking annoys me so much I leave my mouth open like I’ve got a bad cold.
I left my long coat in the commons, but I’m in too much of a rush to go get it.
And, candidly, feeling a little too masochistic.
I deserve the biting air on my legs. I want to feel as miserable physically as I do in my hollow center.
An image of Fiona, leaving for the night, passing my cluttered desk on her way out, twists my stomach.
I can only imagine her inner monologue: Viv can’t even make it on time to get her things after she’s been fired.
Good riddance. The thought of her disappointment makes my eyes burn. Or maybe that’s the howling wind.
When I get up to the sixth floor of the Windsor, prickly, anxious sweat beads at the back of my neck. All the office lights are off but one. I should’ve known.
“She finally shows,” Fiona calls out. I have no idea how she knows it’s me. Perhaps she’s memorized what the labored, panicky breaths of a disappointing assistant/sister-in-law sound like. Would be niche, but I wouldn’t put it past her.
I just want to get this over with.
“Hey,” I say, stepping into her office.
But to my deepest displeasure, my mom’s sitting on Fiona’s leather couch, and Nora’s perched on her desk.