Chapter 15 Elle #2
“For the adventure.” Lexington releases me, sliding his hands into his khaki pockets. “The start of the semester is usually pretty slow for theater majors, so I like to get as much fun in before we start play prep as I can. Professor Dupont monopolizes our time the minute auditions are over.”
My stomach churns at the thought of him, and I scoff. “Dictators are like that.”
Behind us, the revolving glass door swings open, and in walks Sutton at the head of a gaggle of students, as if summoned by the mere mention of his name.
He breezes past us, pointedly ignoring our group.
That Sabrina bitch from class is right on his heels, swinging her ponytail as they head for the study rooms blocked off by the main stairs beyond the circulation desk. She turns just before they’re out of sight, giving me a sharp look of victory.
As if she’s accomplished some great feat by getting to be Sutton’s little ankle-biter.
Big fucking deal. I bet she hasn’t ridden his hand to completion or had his cock inside her.
Nausea spins a web in my gut, something bitter boiling within.
Has she?
No, no. That can’t be right. He implied hookups were unusual and seemed to need to convince himself he wanted to be touched at all. That’s not the kind of professor who makes a habit of fucking his students.
Aurora kicks my shin. “Dude, unclench.”
I release the pressure on my teeth.
“Do you think she was looking at me?” Percy asks, a blush staining his cheeks as he stares after Sabrina.
“Definitely not,” Lexington tells him, chuckling. He gives me a sidelong glance, one that makes me feel completely transparent. “You really get under Sabrina’s skin, huh?”
“Bad habit of mine,” I say. “Mean girls tend to clash like that.”
“Are you a mean girl?”
“Depends on who’s asking.” Glancing at Aurora, I jut my chin toward the back.
She follows me into a closed stairwell, and I pretend I don’t notice the sudden chill in the air as we head up a level. The higher we go, the cooler the temperature seems to get, and I can’t help wondering about the validity of the ghost stories that swirl about here.
I’m not sure whether I believe in the supernatural or not, but certain physical anomalies make it difficult to rule the existence out entirely.
Below us, the stairwell door swings open and slams shut, and I pause, peering over the railing. Lexington and Percy stand at the bottom, heads tipped back as they look up.
Lexington shrugs. “Suddenly, going to the woods is less appealing.”
Percy nudges him, then starts skipping the steps two at a time. “You just want to bug Elle about Los Angeles.”
My face flushes as we reach the thirteenth floor, and I shove open the door, enshrouding us in darkness. Percy gropes at the wall, flipping a light that sends a row of bulbs sparking to life above an endless sea of books.
This level is sparsely populated, with us being the only visible souls around.
Like the rest of the building, the floor is decorated with sporadic dark furniture that looks like it was crafted decades ago, and the faintest scent of vinegar and mothballs clings to the air along with the cool temperature.
The windows, likely arched and double-paned like many of the other buildings on campus, are boarded up. Nothing can get in or out.
My nerves tighten like drawstrings. Maybe coming here wasn’t such a good idea, but all the curse and founding family talk has me curious, and the Obeliskos supposedly has the biggest catalog of Fury Hill’s history.
“If we go any higher, I might get a nosebleed,” Lexington says, panting by the time he gets to the top of the stairs. He bends over with his hands on his knees and glances at me, blushing. “I wasn’t being nosy down there, I swear.”
I lift an eyebrow.
“Well, okay, I was,” he admits, straightening to his full height. “But not to be weird or anything. I just heard a rumor and wanted to know how much of it was true.”
“A rumor.” I pause, crossing my arms. “About?”
“You.”
“Obviously. What about me?”
Aurora and Percy walk over to an area filled with study tables, the former dropping her bag on the top and flopping into one of the chairs. Percy makes his way to a glass display case against the far wall, studying the items inside.
“Why’d you come to Avernia?” Lexington asks, moving toward a solid wood bookcase. “Pythia says you got several highly competitive, merit-based scholarships before you graduated from high school, but you opted out of attending college to go to Hollywood.”
I slide my fingers over the spines of a few books, noting the dated encyclopedias. Picking one up, I aimlessly thumb through the pages, scanning the entries about my ancestor Cronus Anderson, whose strange actions during a tuberculosis outbreak caused him to become a pariah.
Cursing his bloodline forever in the eyes of Fury Hill’s residents.
Do the choices we make really have such extensive consequences?
“Higher education isn’t for everyone,” I tell Lexington. “And choosing to work instead isn’t an unheard-of phenomenon. Lots of people go straight into the workforce or take gap years or live off their parents’ dime.”
“Not people who applied for college,” he says. “Not those who wanted to go.”
My pulse thickens in my throat. I don’t want to talk about this.
Don’t want to dive into how I spent years out west trying to make a name for myself, and even when I tried to do what others told me worked—so many swore up and down you could get a part if you made enough film executives feel good—I came up short.
Seven years and nothing except a little exploitation to show for it.
The embarrassing thing was that I was good. Acting is the only thing I’ve ever taken seriously, performance the one discipline I indulge. But out there, everyone was good.
So I started to feel like I wasn’t. Not comparatively. Despite the logic of not wanting to base my talent on the success of others, I couldn’t help it. Every time a friend of mine from the community acting company I’d joined got a part and I went jobless, something in me died a little.
Something vital that I’d been relying on my entire life to get me through the dark thoughts. The memories of my brief time here when I was seventeen and my understanding of the world changed forever.
That feeling propelled me to drastic measures. Favors, bribes, whatever else I needed to do to get work, because I was too afraid of failing. Too afraid of the memories swallowing me whole.
Acting was how I pretended to be someone who wasn’t consumed by inaction, fear, and envy. I wasn’t the girl who’d gotten lost in the woods or who witnessed something vile. Acting was my escape.
Until it wasn’t.
When you sell out, your connection to the medium dies.
So does your spirit.
Lifting my chin, I glance at Lexington. No way am I telling him all that. “I applied to satisfy my family. My dad is obsessed with us having options.”
“And why is that, I wonder? To make sure you’d never be stuck in one single place—similar to the way his mother was decades prior?
” Lexington gravitates closer, looming behind me as I scan the paragraphs under Cronus Anderson’s name.
“The way your ancestor tried to trap the people of Fury Hill here?”
A chill skates across my skin, pulling goose bumps to the surface.
One of the six founding family members, Cronus is attributed with the conception of Avernia as a learning institution…
…survived the consumption crisis…
…no records of the death of Cronus Anderson…
…destroyed in a fire…or perhaps intentionally erased…
…often blamed by residents for having taken advantage of the situation to gain ownership of the school and town.
Frowning at the page, I wonder how someone manages to survive tuberculosis during a time when vaccines and antibiotics didn’t really exist. Was my ancestor’s immune system just stronger, or is it possible that the next paragraphs—ones that talk about blood drinking and night walking—hold some sort of truth?
Is that why Avernia is equally terrified and enthralled by our bloodline?
The curse says that having three descendants of Cronus Anderson on campus at once will bring instantaneous destruction, but it doesn’t say how.
Do they think we’re vampires?
I’d laugh if it wasn’t so fucking ridiculous.
What kind of people would believe something like that?
Or do they just cling to their suspicion because inviting us in would be like forgiving Cronus’s sins? Is it possible for people to be so afraid of change that they’d go to great lengths—threats, kidnappings, and even murder—to keep it from happening?
One entry under Cronus’s name is marked out, and I squint through the pen lines, trying to decipher what it says.
The words widow and Dupont are legible, making me think back to what Sutton said about our families having history. But when I turn to the Duponts’ pages and comb through dozens of entries about their economic and charitable contributions to the town, they don’t mention the Andersons at all.
In fact, it becomes abundantly clear that the Duponts are Fury Hill’s Kennedy family. The entries go on for pages, gushing over their accomplishments and implying they can do no wrong.
They’re the chosen family, one entry says.
Chosen for what, though, isn’t explained.
Two hands grab my waist, and I jolt forward, fear racing through my veins. The encyclopedia drops to the floor, its thud echoing through the quiet room. My head knocks into the bookshelf, and I wince, heart pounding as Lexington steps back, laughing too loud for a haunted library.
“Shit, sorry,” he says, wiping a tear from his blue eye. “That was just way too easy.”
I glare at him. “Asshole. Is that any way to treat the descendant of your town’s Dracula?”
“Why?” He leans in, grinning wide, his handsome face ensconced in shadows from the overhead lights. “Gonna bite me? Teach me a lesson?”
Percy snorts from across the room. “Classy.”
My hands shake as I bend, reaching for the book, which has fallen open to a random page toward the back. The encyclopedia runs from A through D, with a section highlighted by someone who checked it out previously.
It’s a photograph of the caves carved into the White Mountains, deep within the Primordial Forest.
Beneath the photo is a caption colored in neon yellow: Tenarus Cave, leading to the pits of Tartarus within. Death’s Teeth sightings abound—photo taken by [redacted] just days after last known Ceremony of Life. Not pictured: missing student pulled from Lake Lerna, thought to be involved in secret.
I blink down at the page. There’s no date, so it could have been anytime.
Crimson drips onto the page, blotting out the photo before I can get a closer look to confirm my suspicions.
I know that cave. That symbol, some sort of three-headed beast, painted above the entrance.
Those eyes—even if they’re missing. I’ve been seeing them every night for the last eight years.
Dread settles deep in my gut; I barely notice when Lexington touches the top of my head, drawing my attention to him.
He stares down at me, pressing a finger to my hairline. “Fuck, you’re bleeding, Elle.”
Aurora comes over, shoving him out of the way as she hauls me to my feet. “This is why you shouldn’t prank people.”
He rubs the back of his neck, giving me a sheepish look. “My bad. I thought she realized what I was doing.”
“Ew, she got blood on the encyclopedia!” Percy moans, appearing in a crouching position beside me. “They’re gonna have to burn this now.”
I touch the cut on my head, instantly nauseous from the red staining my fingers. “S-sorry.”
“Are you going to pass out?” Aurora asks, grabbing my hand so I can no longer see the blood.
My head swims, the image—now painted in crimson—making me dizzy. I don’t answer.
“Is she okay?” Lexington leans in, tilting his head at me. “Should we have her lie down?”
“No, she just needs some air and to be cleaned up. I’ll take care of it,” Aurora says.
Percy frowns. “But the book—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lexington cuts in. “I’ll take the heat for destruction of campus property. You go get fixed up.”
“They have handwritten accounts of this stuff anyway,” Percy adds after a moment, though still a bit horrified. “If you ever want a primary source, just ask the librarians downstairs for a historical journal. There are a ton. Although I think they might have moved some of them to another library.”
I nod, letting Aurora lead me to the stairwell. Once we’re outside, she has me lean against the wall until I can see straight again.
But even then, my mind keeps spinning on an endless loop, stuck on the picture of that cave.
Quincy told me to stay out of the woods, but… It wouldn’t hurt to go look during the day, right? Ghosts only come out at night or in creepy old buildings.
“We should go to health services,” Aurora says, looping her arm through mine. “You’re probably fine, but no way am I telling Uncle Kal if you have a concussion and don’t get it checked out.”
Silently, I roll my eyes. Everyone acts like my father—a former physician for the Mafia—is this big, terrifying man just because he has an undetermined body count.
Most of the adults we were raised with have violent, bloody histories that no one talks about, though, so I’ve never understood why my dad was considered the scariest of them all.
Though given what lengths I’ve gone to to avoid disappointing him over the years, I can’t really judge that much.
Either way, I’m barely listening as she drags me from the Obeliskos, too busy thinking about getting to that cave.