Chapter 4
Two awful surprises. That’s what this day had brought Charlie.
First, a pair of dead bodies.
Second, her least favorite person in all the eight realms combined.
She thought she’d be ready to see him when the time came.
That all the horrible things Elias had done would pool together in her mind, twisting his face into something detestable, something she could barely stand to look at.
And it was true that she could barely look at him …
but not for the reason she’d anticipated.
No. Even knowing what she did, Charlie couldn’t deny the truth:
Elias Everhart was beautiful.
More beautiful than she remembered. Painfully so. With a chiseled jaw and bright green eyes, he had the type of face that rarely existed outside of Photoshop. If she looked at it for too long, she feared it would blind her.
She should be glad he was here. Now, she wouldn’t have to seek him out to exact her revenge. She’d often lain in bed, eyes shut, picturing the look on Elias’s face when she finally found him. When she arrived on whatever doorstep he was haunting, newly trained in combat and ready to take him down.
But she was nowhere near ready for that. She’d thought she would have months or even years before she saw him again. Not three measly weeks.
“Hey,” came a loud whisper from one table over, startling Charlie and causing her to look away from Elias. It was Mary Welsch, a girl in the grade above whom Charlie had known since preschool. She leaned over in her chair, eyeing Charlie curiously. “Isn’t that your boyfriend?”
Charlie was saved from having to cobble together a reply by a sudden roar and the clatter of a chair hitting the floor across the room. She whipped her head around to see Mason charging across the cafeteria. He hit Elias in a full-body tackle, sending them both rolling to the floor.
The entire cafeteria gasped. Several people screamed.
“You bastard,” Mason hollered as he sat upright, pinning Elias down with both knees and raining punches onto his face and torso. “How dare you show your face here? How dare you come back and act like nothing happened, like—”
Charlie was on her feet and sprinting toward them before she realized what she was doing.
Lou and Abigail were close behind, followed by a squawking Henry, who sounded thoroughly offended that Charlie had left him at the bottom of her backpack when there was excitement to be had.
He skittered under tables while the girls wove through them, ducking around chairs and knocking into backpacks as they barreled toward the front of the room.
Down on the floor, Mason was still assaulting Elias with his fists. For his part, Elias had only covered his face with his arms in self-defense—an odd move, since he was ten times as strong as any of them.
When the girls reached the fight, Charlie grabbed one of Mason’s shoulders, Lou the other, and they hauled him backward.
Once he was up on his feet and too far away to land any more punches, Lou wrapped her arms around his chest and Charlie around his stomach.
Mason struggled to get back to Elias, but they managed to use their combined strength to hold him back. Just barely.
“Let me go!” Mason yelled, thrashing against their arms.
“How about,” Lou grunted, keeping a tight grip on his chest, “you stop being an idiot before you get sent to the principal’s?”
“Screw the principal,” Mason said.
“Right,” Lou said. “And screw your baseball scholarship, too, huh?”
At those words, some of the fight seemed to go out of Mason. He kept struggling, but there was no urgency to it.
Down on the cafeteria floor, Elias spat red onto the tiles.
Blood trickled from his left nostril, and a faint purple had already begun to blossom under one of his eyes.
“Some welcome,” he said to Mason, smirking through the dark red pooling over his thick lips.
He didn’t even glance at Charlie. “What happened to us being best pals?”
“You’re an asshole,” Mason said.
This only made Elias grin wider.
“Boys!”
Two minutes too late, Mrs. Waterstone, the scatterbrained chemistry teacher who usually supervised lunch, arrived on the scene. She ushered students dramatically aside, as if there were a tightly packed crowd surrounding the fight, when in reality barely anyone had left their seats.
“Break it up!” she hollered, waving her arms over her head. “Break it up right this instant!”
Lou rolled her eyes. “You missed the boat on this one, Mrs. W.”
“Right.” Mrs. Waterstone smoothed out her skirt, straightening. “Well. Principal’s office. Both of you.”
“But he’s the one who assaulted me,” Elias said, waving a hand at Mason. “I didn’t even throw a single punch.”
“Regardless,” said Mrs. Waterstone. “Dr. Matsson will want to see you both to discuss this matter.” She reached down to try to lift Elias up by his shoulders before quickly realizing he was too heavy. Her hands retreated awkwardly before clapping twice. “Off you go, then.”
Mason was still breathing heavily under Charlie’s and Lou’s grasps, his anger barely contained.
Elias remained on the floor. His eyes stayed on Mason, hunger gleaming at their edges.
Charlie knew he could taste the fear vibrating off the onlooking crowd.
Knew that it only fueled him, made him stronger. He was relishing this moment.
After a few breaths, Elias struggled to his feet. No one offered to help.
“But what the hell is he doing here?” Lou asked for the third time as she paced in front of the principal’s office. “It’s been three weeks since homecoming. Why show up now?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said, also for the third time.
She and Abigail were sitting on the floor of the empty hallway, backs against a row of lockers. Henry skittered across the floor nearby, kicking a wad of discarded paper like a soccer ball.
Abigail wasn’t listening to Lou. Once it had become clear that the boys wouldn’t be reemerging from the principal’s office anytime soon, she’d taken out her physics textbook and started on that evening’s homework.
Charlie, on the other hand, was too agitated to do anything but tap her foot nervously while watching Lou pace.
“I bet you fifty bucks and a ham sandwich that it has something to do with Maddie and Milo,” said Lou, voicing the very thing Charlie was most worried about. “It’s too much of a coincidence.”
“I know,” Charlie agreed, glancing down the hall to make sure nobody was coming. “The only question is—”
“—was he the one who did it?” Lou filled in, pivoting on her heel and starting back across the hallway.
“Exactly.” Charlie’s foot increased in speed, tapping loudly on the shiny white tile.
“And what did he even tell the administration when he showed up?” Lou pivoted again. “Hey, sorry I was gone for three weeks. Had to pay a quick visit to the underworld?”
“I’m sure he had some excuse all packaged up and ready to go.” Tap, tap, tap. “Or else he just used that horrible possession thing that he did to you to get them to let him reenroll.”
Lou shuddered. “Probably.”
Tap, tap, tap. “Does this mean that Loki sent him?” Tap, tap, tap, tap. “Or did he come on his own, just to torture us some more?” Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap—
Without looking up from her textbook, Abigail shot out a hand and clamped it down on Charlie’s foot. “We’re not going to learn anything until they’re done in Dr. Matsson’s office,” she said. “So would you two please put a lid on it? I can barely focus on Newton’s third law.”
Lou sighed and turned to start pacing back down the hallway. But before she could take another step, the door to the principal’s office swung open. Elias and Mason emerged together, Principal Matsson just behind them.
As soon as Elias stepped into the hallway, Henry abandoned his soccer ball, darting over to Charlie’s side and tensing his tiny body as if in preparation to strike.
“—could get this resolved without issue,” Principal Matsson was saying, one hand on Elias’s shoulder, the other on Mason’s.
He looked like a proud father congratulating his sons on a game well played, not a principal finishing up a disciplinary meeting.
“You’re both exemplary members of the senior class, and I would hate to think there’s any strife between you. ”
Charlie and Abigail rose slowly to their feet, trading looks of confusion with Lou.
“Thank you, Dr. Matsson,” Elias said. “We sincerely appreciate it.”
“Right,” said Mason belatedly. He cleared his throat. “Thank you, sir.”
Dr. Matsson squeezed their shoulders once, then released them. “Study hard, boys. I’ll see you both later.” He started to close his office door, pausing halfway. “Elias?”
“Yes, sir?” Elias asked.
“It’s a pleasure having you back.”
Elias smiled. “Thank you, sir.”
With a warm nod, Dr. Matsson shut the door, leaving the five of them alone in the empty hallway.
Lou was the first one to ask, “What the Hel was that?”
“What was what?” Elias asked innocently. Dr. Matsson had clearly helped him clean up his face, but he’d missed a few flakes of dried blood. Plus, the bruise beneath his eye was only getting worse, darkening like the night sky.
Unfortunately, neither of those things even made a dent in his otherworldly beauty. If anything, he looked even more rugged, more dangerous. Just looking at him made Charlie’s stomach feel like it had been set on fire.
No, she reminded herself. No, no, no. It doesn’t matter how handsome he is. He’s a monster.
She might be in a tailspin over his presence, but he hadn’t even spared her a glance. Not when he stood in the entrance to the cafeteria, not after the fight with her brother. Not even now, when she stood less than five feet away. It was as if she were invisible.
Beside him, Mason looked pale and confused, like he’d seen a ghost in Dr. Matsson’s office.
“What was all of that?” Lou waved a hand at the door. “Exemplary members of the senior class? Mason nearly killed you in front of the entire school!”