Chapter 12
YELENA
“That fucking snake skeleton…” I shudder.
Galina and Arianna laugh as we all traipse across campus toward the academic buildings together.
“People get so creeped out by John!” Galina giggles. “I think he’s cute.”
I turn to her, making a face. “John?”
Ari rolls her eyes. “Long John Slither,” she grins. “It’s…kind of his nickname.”
Our current topic of conversation is rating the creepiness factor of the four clubhouses.
Personally, I love living at Morvaine. But a lot of people, including Galina and Ari, consider it to be hands-down the creepiest place on campus, just because…
well, okay, it’s a haunted-looking mansion in the middle of the woods.
I get it.
But me, I’m more weirded out—by a mile—by the former library where the Ouroboros Society lives.
It doesn’t just look creepy. It is creepy.
I mean, it’s literally a two-hundred-year-old former library and natural history museum that sat abandoned on the edge of the woods for like forty years until some extra-generous former Ouroboros Society member footed the bill to have The Atheneum made livable.
But “livable” isn’t the same as “would live there”. The library part is fine, I suppose. But the museum part? Gives me the creeps.
The place is still full of old displays of taxidermy animals, animal parts preserved in formaldehyde, various bugs and plant samples behind glass.
And the abso-fucking-lutely creepiest exhibit is the full-sized skeleton, forty feet long, of some prehistoric snake that's suspended from the cavernous ceiling when you first walk in.
Aka: Long John Slither.
Galina laughs. “Hey, you live in the Disneyworld Haunted Mansion. I don’t understand how you sleep there.”
“Like a baby,” I grin. “Because there’s no Jurassic Park snake guarding the front door.”
“Yeah, just restless spirits of the undead,” Arianna snickers. “Way better than an ancient skeleton of something that doesn’t exist anymore.”
I laugh with them, partly to cover the nervous shiver that ripples down my spine. Truth be told, I have been a little rattled since I saw that lipstick message on the mirror in the locker room.
LEAVE THE DEAD WHERE THEY LIE.
I mean…obviously. Because that’s fucking freaky.
For a while I expanded my potential explanations to include the drama department. Galina is peripherally involved with some of the shit that goes on over there, and I can safely say—with love—that theater kids are fucking weird.
But no. Damiano’s room was ransacked, and whoever did it left a note calling him out for stealing police evidence written with the same lipstick and in the same handwriting as the one in the locker room. It was no accident that I walked in there and saw that.
That message was meant for me.
As if I'm not already on edge enough, waiting for Achilles to jump out from behind every corner.
To grab me.
To whisper “good girl” into my ear and get me mortifyingly turned on in a ridiculously short amount of time.
To chase me, or order me to hand over my panties to him… God, I still cannot believe I did that.
I’ve also been a little on edge being on campus with so many people from the Drakos and Kildare families, ever since Angelo Santoro boasted about building vertically on the building he and my dad bought.
Dad promised Ares Drakos that there’d be nothing looming over Dimitra Drakos’ estate.
And then his own business partner goes off the rails and makes an announcement like that?
Achilles, clearly, wasn’t too happy about it.
I’ve managed to avoid crossing paths with Lochlan and Ronan Kildare, so all good there.
And I had been avoiding Selene and Isadora Drakos, but then I ran into them yesterday and they were really cool about the whole thing.
They said they totally understood that it was beyond my control, and no, they held no grudge against me.
The last person I was worried about, almost more than the Kildare brothers, was Noor Drakos, Achilles’ cousin who’s also president of The Ouroboros Society.
Not because she’s scary, but because I’m incredibly intimidated by her.
Apparently she’s a literal genius, and to be president of one of the four clubs as a junior is almost unheard of. She’s also captain of the girls' soccer team. If all that wasn’t enough, Noor’s father, Achilles’ uncle Deimos, is Greek, and her mother Dahlia is half-Persian, half-French.
Needless to say, Noor herself is gorgeous, with deeply tanned skin and crystalline blue eyes that pop from behind thick black lashes. I, along with probably every girl at Knightsblood, am also insanely jealous of her shampoo commercial level hair.
But I can cross that fear off the list now, too. I bumped into her when I went over to meet Galina and Arianna, and she was super understanding about the whole thing.
So I guess I don’t have to be scared to go visit my Ouroboros friends.
…Except for that fucking snake, that is.
“Well, hard pass from me on living at The Spire,” Galina shivers. “No way.”
“Yeah, forget creepy,” Ari mutters. “That is hands down the scariest place on campus to live.”
No argument here. The old guard tower and lighthouse perched on a jagged piece of rock jutting out of the ocean is only accessible by a small stone causeway bridge that crosses from the main cliffs.
“But Kingsward Hall,” Galina sighs. “I’d live there in a heartbeat.”
Arianna grins. “Well, yeah,” she laughs. “It’s a palace. What a brave choice.”
Ari and I giggle when Galina rolls her eyes. Then she stops and gets one of those “thirst looks” on her face usually reserved for her MaskTok men.
“Shit, there’s my daily reminder that I’m going to Hell.”
We both turn to follow her gaze.
“Ungh,” Arianna moans. “Same.”
The man walking through the garden beside St. Aldric’s Chapel is probably about thirty, with dark hair and almost supernaturally bright silvery-gray eyes.
He’s also easily six foot four, and even though I’ve never seen him wearing anything but either black clerical robes or jeans and a long-sleeved henley when he’s working in the church garden, it’s clear the man is yoked.
Combine all that with a face that would make Henry Cavill jealous, and, well…
Guess I’m also going to Hell.
“I can’t tell if him looking like that is a mockery of the idea of religion preaching to ignore temptation, or a legit test by a higher power,” Galina sighs.
“Testify,” Ari mumbles, still staring at Father Hale, St. Aldric’s resident pastor.
Galina elbows me. “When even Ari gets hot and bothered by a guy, you know he’s hot.”
Arianna rolls her eyes. “Hilarious,” she mutters as Galina gives her a hug.
Ravencroft Library isn’t quite as creepy to me as The Atheneum, what with the lack of nightmare-fuel snake skeletons, and shark stomachs sitting in three-hundred-year-old formaldehyde.
But it’s still a dim, dusty place that feels like it should be filled with spellbooks and grimoires, not modern textbooks.
The three of us set up at an old wooden table, a brass and green-glass lamp in the middle casting golden, muted light and deep shadows across our books.
Galina and Ari have a test on Napoleonic Europe to study for, and I need to start my research for a paper on the United States’ role in financing World War Two.
“Let me see, dear…”
At the circulation desk, the head librarian Delores knits her silvered brows as she clacks away on an ancient computer keyboard. “Ah, yes, we do have it.”
Thank God. In plotting out my essay, I’ve realized I can’t for the life of me find the notes I know I took in class a week ago when we were discussing William Jansen’s Uncle Sam: Banker to Europe…which of course has been out of print for seventy years and isn’t available anywhere online.
Mercifully, however, Ravencroft has a copy.
“But it’s not up here.” Delores frowns at her screen. “It’s in the lower stacks.”
Crap.
As if the upstairs of Ravencroft wasn’t dark and moody enough, the lower stacks in the sub-basement are, unsurprisingly, even more so.
I thank Delores for the call number she’s scrawled on a slip of paper, let my friends know where I’m going, and then head to the marble and brass staircase leading down into the bowels of Ravencroft.
A shiver ripples up my spine as I reach the bottom of the staircase and step into the heavily shadowed lower stacks.
The whole library is old, but down here, it honestly feels like you’ve taken a time machine to the 1800s.
Everything is old wood and stone walls, lit with those same brass and green-glass lamps.
My shoes sound unnaturally loud on the marble floor as I quickly make my way toward the back of the stacks, clutching Delores’ note in my hand. It’s rarely crowded down here, no surprise. But it becomes clear as I hunt for my book that I’m alone right now.
Cool. So glad I spent the walk over here talking to my friends about snake skeletons and haunted houses, and ruminating over lipstick notes scrawled on mirrors.
Eventually I come to the row of ancient, dusty shelves where I’ll find my book.
The stacks down here are claustrophobically close together, the space between them just wide enough for a single person. This row dead ends at another shelf of books against the wall, making it feel even more closed-in.
My eyes scan the shelves to the left and right of me as I make my way down the row, until I’m almost at the very end of it.
“There you are,” I murmur, relief washing over me as I see the book I came for.
I’m too short to reach it, but there’s a rolling ladder on a metal rail nearby. I roll it over, climb a few steps up it to snag the book…
And then I smell it, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and sending a chill down my spine.
Mint. Clove. Masculinely spicy.
Achilles.
“And there you are,” his dark, gravelly baritone growls.
My body tenses and then goes stock still, the needy, dark thing inside me winding tightly around my core and my breath catching as I feel his dark presence billow in behind me like a storm cloud.
My throat feels tight, like there’s a hand wrapped around it, as I slowly turn to glance over my shoulder.
He fixes me with his dark, piercing gaze, his uniform jacket straining around his bulging upper arms as he reaches out to grab the railings of the rolling ladder on either side of my knees.
“And now, little prey,” he growls quietly, “you’re going to turn around, sit your delicious ass on this ladder, and spread your fucking legs for me like a good girl.”