Chapter 11
The semester ends, gray days passing, strange and sullen and slow.
Harker’s students mourn the tragic loss of their beloved dean, and I bite my tongue until it bleeds.
Penny and Hound get a new dorm room down the hall with two twin beds so Hound can have one all to himself.
I turn in my final essays with Peter’s help because he is an angel and I am unable to sleep without dreams of scorching pain in my back and puddles of Reid’s blood.
I take morose, wintry photos that reflect my mood.
Harker’s bell tower buried under thick slabs of snow.
The courtyards and alcoves of Old Campus bare of students who have gone home for the holidays.
I argue with my mother about missing Christmas because I’m “difficult” and then spend the winter break with my friends reading every single book in the library on dark magic and how to remove spells from hosts.
When we come up empty, Fiona gives us a key card to enter the archives and we search there too.
When that leaves us dog-tired and sore eyed, we spar and watch movies and avoid Fiona’s watchful eye to troll the city at night, looking anywhere and everywhere Reid might have gone.
Asking around. Showing my photos of him to strangers. Nothing.
The day before classes resume I wander under delicate snowfall past all the professors’ cottages.
Each one is locked up for the holiday break.
Even Fiona’s, though she’s here almost every day.
I can’t help myself. I let my boots crunch in the soft powder until I’m standing before Reid’s home.
Icicles dangle from the eaves. Snow lines the windowsills.
A finch is picking at something on the roof.
I draw nearer to a dark windowpane and try to peer inside. When the sun’s glare makes it impossible, I cup my hands around my face and press close enough to fog the glass. I can just spy his wooden desk. The one he stitched me up on the first night we kissed.
My hand brushes his lightly and his needle stalls before my skin. “If you get fired, who’ll bully the students into becoming decent fighters?”
Finally, a dimple curves in his cheek. “That was almost a compliment.”
As if conjured by the memory, I feel his warmth through the frigid glass. Smell lemongrass and evergreen. Can almost see a flicker of movement inside the cottage, where that desk sits. But just as my heart catches in my throat, I recognize the reflection of the finch, flying away.
“Do you think he’ll ever come back?” I ask the group that night, not a soul on campus outside the five of us.
Laurels of dried holly and spruce wilt on the mantel, the holidays long since passed.
Elliot’s made a mean fire in the cozy Elkfore commons, and Penny’s put on an album filled with wistful nostalgic melodies.
“You can’t think like that,” Penny says, lips chapped and nose runny from the frigid air outside. She puts down a plate of gingerbread and brushes crumbs off her hands to place her letters on the Scrabble board before us. They read JOLLY. “Fifteen points.”
“That’s so on brand,” Elliot muses from the leather couch, some cowboy video game on the screen over the crackling fireplace. When Penny leans over to grab new tiles, he swipes what’s left of her dessert.
“How’s this for on brand?” Sophia says, placing her word next. COCAINE.
“There’s no way that’s a valid Scrabble word,” Peter says.
“Are you challenging me?” she asks with a devious grin, her bare legs casually draped over his lap.
“No,” he sighs. “Have your fun. You’re all done for when my turn rolls around.”
“I think it is you,” Sophia says, poking her toe into his ribs, “who is done for.”
Peter catches her delicate foot in his hand and squeezes until she squeals.
My heart twinges. “Is everyone avoiding my question?”
Elliot turns from his game despite the neighing horse on the screen, his mouth still full of pilfered gingerbread. Peter and Sophia look up from their fit of laughter.
“No,” Peter says, sobering. “Of course not.”
“Yes,” Sophia admits. “But only because we don’t have any better answers than we had a week ago, or the one before that.”
“Reid is free,” Penny says. “That’s what matters.”
“I know. And I should just be happy he’s alive…but I miss him. What if he’s fled the country? What if I never see him again? You’d think he’d send a letter or something, right?”
“He’s on the lam,” Elliot says. “He’s not going to involve you in that. I’ll bet our usual twenty he finds a way back here before it’s warm again.”
He sticks out his palm for me to take, but I’m too dejected to shake on it.
“Reid will return to Harker when it’s safe,” Peter agrees. “For him and for you. The best thing we can do is continue to work on getting that”—Peter nods at my back beneath my oversized black sweater—“out of you and into the hands of the Elders.”
He’s right. He’s always right. That’s why it’s extra shameful that I never told him or anyone what happened to me at the Cineplex or the Manor.
The way the syrabraxa caused me such pain I was forced to kill.
Not that I would have left any of those Brood alive, but the lack of control was more than concerning.
Even though a lifetime of fearing that I was a vicious killer has taught me to keep my bloodlust to myself, I know I should tell at least Peter.
He’s been working harder trying to research ways to get this thing out of me than even Fiona.
To her credit, though, she’s been slammed with assuaging the fears of hundreds of parents, preparing Harker for our next semester, and organizing everything for the Astera City Foundation Against Crime Gala.
It’s hosted annually by the Windsor, and this May will be the fiftieth one.
It’s the most important night all year in the Half City and where my mother will announce her mayoral campaign.
Fiona’s also married to my sister, Nora, who runs the foundation, so that’s three full-time jobs.
When I peer back up at Peter, he’s taken his turn. “LOOMING,” he says proudly. “Sixty-four points with the seven-letter bonus.”
Sophia and Penny release sighs of defeat. My chest grows ominously tight and I shift my focus to the dreary hues of blue outside the fogged window.
“You did warn them they were done for,” Elliot says.
Yeah, me especially.
Three days later classes resume. Students swarm the commons and the medieval-style dining hall to keep out of the biting cold. I’m glad to have warmth and bodies and noise back on campus, but I do miss the solitude of an empty, frostbitten Harker. It better suited my mood.
As we trudge through clean, fresh snow on our way to the coliseum, I pull Peter aside. “Can I talk to you?”
His eyes narrow. “I’m not writing your essay on ogres for Crowley.”
“No, no. When Deacon and I went after Reid at that sex club place, I had a sort of…episode.”
Peter makes a face of alarmed disgust. “With Deacon?”
“Oh, god, no.” I shake my head until I give myself whiplash. “Jesus, Peter, is that what you think of me?”
His relief is palpable. “Forgive me.”
I lower my voice further when Matt Peverell, a round-cheeked jerk and fellow first-year, trots past us with his douchebag friends.
“No, I’m talking about the syrabraxa. You know how it amplifies my aeon abilities so I can sense deviants with more accuracy?
I think it amplifies my aeon bloodlust too.
I had this moment—this almost…breakdown—where the pain in my back was so bad…
I felt like had to kill or I was going to go—”
“Insane?” Peter supplies.
The word goes bitter on my tongue like the skin of a grape. “How did you know that?”
He doesn’t dally around the point. For a guy who questions his own bravery, he’s nothing but courageous when he says, “My research may not have provided us with a cure, but I know a bit about the history of the spell now. What it does to those who wield it—the madness…It’s the same fate for hosts who are never killed. ”
If I’d wondered as much in my head, it’s significantly worse hearing it aloud from my human encyclopedia of a best friend.
That thing in your back will drain you in three months. Maybe four.
“Maybe you’ve lost your mind already—”
Deacon had known. He’d meant the syrabraxa would drain me of my sanity, not my life.
“How long ago did you figure this out? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Peter scans the last stragglers rushing toward the grim, rising columns of the snow-coated coliseum. Class has just started. “It was the first week after the holidays. I wanted to have good news to share before I gave the bad.”
My defeat is vein deep. Reid’s gone—if he’s alive, I have no way of knowing when he’s coming back. And if he’s not alive…
Well, if he’s not alive, soon I won’t know the difference. Driven to madness by this abomination in my back. Lost to the world, lost to my sanity, a shell of the person I once was, who was just becoming less of a shell of a person in the first fucking place.
“Deacon said I had four months max,” I say quietly. I wonder how he knew that. The better question is if I have anything to offer him in return for more information.
“Seems that way, based on my research. But it’s been hard to nail down an exact time frame. And now that the break is over…”
With all the students and faculty back, Fiona’s been forced to make almost all corners of the campus professor-access-only until she and the Citadel are sure there are no disciples of Driscoll’s on campus.
That means even though she gave me a key card, we can only go into restricted areas when nobody will see us doing so without her.
But another thought has burrowed inside my mind like critters skittering beneath the snow.
The last time I encountered someone whose mind had been drastically altered…
I’d assumed she was just mentally ill…that I’d imagined her saying anything about a Thane.
Blamed the valium and let it go. But perhaps I’d had it all wrong—