CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“WE WILL BE APART FOR a while. Will you be alright?” James’s words found Elliott in the dark of Knox’s cramped, dusty hen house that had to work as a split bedroom for the night.
Knox hadn’t told his wife they would have permanent company.
He needed to find a way to deliver the news to her. “Are you awake?”
Elliott mumbled, “I’m awake. I can’t sleep at all. Are you alright?”
“I’ll be fine when this is over.” James pulled the tatterdemalion curtain that separated the two of them within the straw-strewn grounds.
A few hens and chicks clucked around them; the reek of horse manure was as thick as a hand on their skin; the freezing wind rattled the worn floorboards and clattered the thin chicken coop walls.
Elliott tightened the overcoat around himself.
James handed the threadbare quilt over to Elliott.
After all, James wouldn’t sleep there for long. James needed to return to Banebury before Yule Eve. He decided that it was best that he returned to keep meticulous records of AEscwulf College–footage recordings, audio tapes, and extensive documentation. Anything that could give him leverage.
He couldn’t do that from a dim and distant farm in Kodiak, Arkansas.
James intended to document the professors that supervised as he deconstructed a new body, the benefactors that attended the cabal congregations, the provost that held the private convocations for graduate cabalists, and the line of frightened students expected to dissect human subjects for entry into political power.
The clandestine cabal required a certain insensate psychological pathology to endure the task of ritual torture.
The students needed to be trained to keep silent on illicit matters, coerced into dark proclivities themselves. Exactly as their predecessors before them.
Extortion. That was the true oldest tradition of AEscwulf College. Not alchemy.
Alchemy was merely a pretense. The students endured blackmail that could be weaponized at any time in their political future.
In exchange, they were given an eternal fraternity with politicians, philanthropists, billionaires, celebrities, and public figures. Famous figures with even darker, more abhorrent secrets.
James would complete the anatomizations, the transmutation procedures, and reconstitution examination without issue. That didn’t concern him. Instead, James repeated his question from earlier after he realized Elliott hadn’t answered him. “Will you be alright if we’re apart?”
“How long will you be gone?” Elliott sat up on his elbows, squinting into the moonlit dust. In the corner, the flock of chicks rested beside an agriculture tractor; the hens laid multicolored brown, blue, and spotted eggs in their nests; the barn cat began to stir before the dawn.
Elliott was certain he smelled like livestock.
He could endure the barn. However, he dreaded being left on his own.
He tended to incidentally get himself hurt from night terrors, screaming awake, tearing his vocal chords.
Every time he was trapped in the throes of terror, he cut his hand open. He could barely remember how.
Earlier, Knox Pearson had frowned when James insisted on sleeping beside Elliott. An expression of cold judgment crossed his aged features at the sound of it. He didn’t tolerate the thought of Elliott sleeping beside a man because he needed to be watched at night. None of it seemed natural to him.
It would weaken Elliott to enable his trauma.
Knox understood the trauma involved. He’d gotten through it himself. However, James had enough muscle to wrest Elliott from the night terrors, keeping him from sleeplessly pounding his forehead into the wall to make the nightmares end. The image of Arthur Newton etched in his corneas.
If that was what it took to keep Elliott safe from injury, then James would do that.
“I will need at least a month and a half. Is that alright, Elliott?” The College will be angered by the burnt corpse. A new body will be required. James could handle the fury of the institution. Not that they would ever find out that he was the one that burned the body. “Is early February fine?”
“Can it be a week instead?” Elliott hated how fragmented his voice sounded. How much he needed him. His bicolored eyes were stressed. “I can’t sleep without someone for longer than a week. Not after we…Not since…”
Not since we killed Lucien. We left him for dead.
No, we weren’t even kind enough to leave him for dead.
Elliott wasn’t certain he could survive the night. His throat was raw, inflamed. He could still feel the full weight of Lucien on top of his lower abdomen in the iced snow.
His cheeks were still reddened and scarred from the cuts and scrapes of the frozen riverside. His cheekbone had fractured open the icebound surface when Lucien had attempted to drown him face first.
Elliott swallowed. “If I need you in a week, would you return for me?”
“I’ll always return for you.” James didn’t even need a minute to consider it. “I’d return every night, if you needed me.”
Elliott choked back a cry stuck in his throat. “I’m sorry that I–God–I can’t believe we did that to him–” He grasped his face in his shaken hands. Hands he couldn’t recognize anymore. All he saw was blood on himself. “How could we have done that to him?”
“Don’t internalize it, Elliott. The winter sacrifice is resolved. Every year it happens.” James ran his hand through the underclassman’s hair. “Don’t waste time with regret or remorse. Both regret and remorse will kill you in time, if you allow it.”
“How can you be so calm?” Elliott dried his eyes on his sleeve. He tried to sound stable. “You can talk to me, if you need to. You’re always there for me, James.” He spoke earnestly. “I want to be there for you.”
James grazed his thumb over the tender skin of Elliott’s palm. “I’m fine, Elliott. I promise. I’m happy you’re alive. All I care about is being here with you.”
“Even in a smelly barn?” Elliott chuckled. His eyes a bit wet.
“As long as I’m with you,” James responded, though he could’ve done without the troughs for swine and the endless clucks of chickens.
It was the first time in years they were going to be apart for an extended period of time.
Even James wasn’t exactly sure what to do with himself without Elliott.
In his freshman year, James used to leave open the first-floor window at Winterthur Hall, and Elliott would sneak through the window and he would fall into his bed, exhausted.
On the nights where Elliott was sleepless, he hummed and drummed all night, restless, keeping in constant motion. James would lift the comforter for him to rest closer beside him. Settled against his ribcage, Elliott would finally fall asleep. His snores warm against James’s ear at night.
James was used to having someone beside him. He preferred the scent of Elliott even to his own. Elliott’s scent was a warm reverie of meadows, rainfalls, and honeys. Impossibly romantic. He typically didn’t like those types of romantic scents, but he was fond of the notes on Elliott.
After a couple of hours that December, Elliott gazed into the angular shadows. “I can see Lucien behind my eyelids. I can’t make it stop.”
“I know.” James was the same way the first time he’d taken a life. “It will fade over time.”
For most people, it would lessen and cease. Elliott was not most people.
Visibly, Elliott was traumatized by the death of Lucien. The grisly memories of Mr. Newton’s death emotionally scarred him. He would break on his own.
He needed him.
James hated to leave him, even for a week, let alone the months he needed for the spring trimester.
James reminded himself would be free before the summer, then he could be with Elliott again. He’d spend every night with him again. It’d be like they’d never left each other’s side. After that, it was only his senior year of college left that they’d be separated.
“Here, eat.” James brought over his plate from dinner. “You’ll feel better.”
James had ground sleep medication into the mashed potatoes. When Knox stopped at the gas station, James had pretended to buy flu medication instead.
“You didn’t eat the dinner?” Elliott asked.
“No, I saved it for you. Eat something, Elliott.”
The mealy mashed potatoes had gone cold, the asparagus was stale, and the gas station ham was as solid as tungsten, but it was a full meal. Elliott hadn’t eaten since the day before the hibernal ceremony. James had covered it so the chicks wouldn’t pick at it, therefore it was fine.
“You don’t need it?”
“No.” James lied to him, “I ate the casserole on the train.”
After all, James needed to focus on more than dinner.
He had a harder burden ahead of him. It would be entirely on James’s shoulders to sell that he had nothing to do with the disappearance of Lucien Montclair.
James would be the primary suspect, if there was an investigation, after he had infamously stabbed Lucien in front of dozens of witnesses the night of Samhain.
Not to mention, Lucien had now killed James’s best friend as far as everyone knew, therefore there was a motive. Motive. Means. Opportunity.
James had a death-related motive to be involved in the disappearance of Lucien Montclair.
James had the means of harming him, as he’d proven before in October.
However, James had the lack of opportunity in his favor.
After all, James had thousands of witnesses to account for him at the winter play while Elliott had been ‘killed’ by Lucien five miles north. James couldn’t have possibly been in two locations at once.
Lucien was simply missing.
“Do you think you can handle all of it?” Elliott asked him. “Everyone’s questions about the disappearance?”
James smirked. “I’ve handled everything before now, haven’t I?”
James was more concerned about Elliott’s nightmares. Elliott took the death of Arthur Newton harder than any of them.
James noticed that Elliott’s wounds from the strangulation were already reopening, spreading a river of blood down his shirt. His bandages were a mess.
James laid Elliott down, removed the bandages, and treated him with a medical kit from the toolshed. James whispered in the quiet air. “You know I care for your soul—”
“James,” Elliott whispered as he felt his shirt unbuttoning, his trousers tightening, the whispers over and over again.
“Say it,” James ordered him in earnest. His voice thickened with sincerity. “So I know you understand. That you believe me.”
That I am capable of protecting you.
Everything would fall apart if Elliott didn’t believe him. If Elliott unraveled and confessed to it all, it would only lead to a catastrophic outcome for everyone.
James didn’t even ask Elliott to believe in him; only to believe him, which Elliott did both without needing to be asked. He believed him. He believed in him.
James felt Elliott’s voice hitch at the motion beneath the quilt. The sting of antiseptic, the barb of sterilization, the sharpness of the sutures. Everything James had learned from the cabal was used to stitch Elliott back together. “You will protect my soul. I know that.”
“I will,” James helped him out of the rest of his shirt, his trousers.
He freed the underclassmen from his sweat and perspiration with a dry cloth.
Elliott was exhausted and overheated, fumbling with the last buttons.
As he drifted to sleep, James murmured to him.
“Even at the cost of my own, I will protect your soul.”
“I will protect your soul in return, James. No matter how far apart we are.”
James gave him a faint smile. “Se anche tu vedi la stessa luna, non siamo poi così lontani.” If you, too, see the same moon, then we are not that far away.
That was the promise James Wilde made to himself after he ruined Elliott’s life five years ago.
Half a decade ago, James had chosen him.
Finch hadn’t wanted Coach Marshman to know that they were headed to the Coelnoe County Country Club to meet with recruiters to accept any bribes the scouts had to offer them.
Knox refused to meet the recruiters with mud all over himself from walking, and he asked James for his father’s vehicle.
However, the coach would’ve easily recognized James’s father’s McLaren.
The entire town would’ve recognized the high-powered model.
His newest supercar wasn’t even available on the market yet.
Therefore, James had a better idea. He knew there was a boy that he’d been watching for weeks and the kid explored nature with his teacher who left him with the truck for hours.
A boy with mismatched, fox-brown eyes. A boy with a kind countenance.
With the right convincing, his friends would have the boy’s truck.
Like with anyone else, all James needed to do was give the boy his direct attention for a handful of minutes.
He never anticipated the car crash.
James was the reason Elliott’s life fell apart. He was the reason Elliott was traumatized beyond repair. James never knew anything of Elliott’s home life. That Orthodox Easter, James saw him asleep outside on the street where a woman shut him out and changed the locks in forty-degree weather.
From then on, James vowed to stay at his side.
He swore an oath to right the tragedy he caused.
If the moon was above them, then they were not far from each other. James would reach him.
Then the murder of Lucien Montclair occurred, and instead of a twinge of conscience, James only knew that he would commit even darker atrocities if he had to. If it meant Elliott would be spared.
Therefore, James ran his mind through the moments of the December 22nd hibernal ceremony, from start to finish, to ensure he didn’t forget anything.
He recalled everything from 2:00 AM when the hibernal ceremony concluded to 5:00 PM when they boarded the train out of Connecticut.