Chapter Ten Cousin, I charge you
CHAPTER TEN
Cousin, I charge you
“CAREFUL,” HE WHISPERED, “OR THEY’LL find us.”
Seeing Kasem now, months after that night in the alleyway, set my nerves on fire.
Here he was, in one of the richest schools in the country, while I’d been fighting migraines and visions for the last three months.
I wanted to scream.
I wanted to grab him by his silver-spoon collar and show him just how that night had taken everything from me: my friendship with Jojo, my ability to control my powers, my chance to escape Westfield’s hold.
It was all because of him—because of Kasem.
But even calling him by his name felt wrong.
We’d had no formal introduction, no moments cementing our connection other than the twisted rungs of death that stood between us.
And my mind was reeling.
Had it all been a vision? The hedges coming to life, the figure at the end of the maze with pupilless eyes. Was Kasem my attacker or my savior? And how could I possibly come to terms with what I’d just witnessed, what we’d both seen?
There was a voice in the distance, from farther off in the maze. Honey’s voice. She’d followed me to the courtyard. But then the voice of a man joined her giggles. Their chorus of whispered laughter heightened to moans. She wasn’t following me. She was stealing a moment with someone in secret.
“What just happened?” I whispered, straining to look at Kasem, afraid to move or use my hands in any way, lest I be pulled into another psychic vision. “You saw that. Tell me you saw that. The maze. It was alive. And that person—”
He quickly pulled me into a corner at the maze’s center, where shadows and foliage obscured our presence. Then he took off his blazer and put it over my head, using the sleeve to wipe my face.
It smeared with red.
The fresh traces of my blood.
I dabbed the blood dripping from my nose with my fingertips. In an instant, the world around me flashed into scenes from my past.
Kasem tightened his grip on me, wiping my blood from my hands.
“Why would you do that again?” he said, a mixture of annoyance and fear in his voice.
Gasping, I pressed my eyes shut, trying to orient myself.
“I was just trying to see something.”
I’d never gotten visions when I touched my own skin with my burnt fingertips. But when they’d touched the blood dripping from my nose, I’d somehow channeled into my own lifeline and seen visions of my past and future all at once.
“You ran into the statue. I caught you before you fell.”
He gestured behind him to a stone statue depicting a man in a military uniform carrying a stack of books.
The statue stood on a raised platform. Westfield’s lily emblem was engraved in its base, along with a nameplate that had rusted with age, the words barely legible, if not for the initials: KSJ.
Kent Saint James. But Kent’s statue had no hoodie in sight, though its pupilless eyes were just as cold and eerie as those of the figure I’d seen in the maze.
I shook my head. “No, there was a man—a man without eyes. I was trapped in the maze, and he was coming toward me—saying something about blood debts. A warning. And you grabbed me and pulled me to safety before he could—”
I couldn’t finish my sentence. He’d meant to kill me. Whoever the figure was, he hadn’t intended for me to make it out of his part of the maze.
“You must be remembering wrong,” Kasem said. “You hit your head rather hard.”
“I know what I saw,” I snapped.
He looked down at me, his gaze cool, irritation bleeding into his expression. His russet eyes trailed from my wrist to the cowrie shell bracelet. His bracelet.
“Really?” he said. “Because I don’t think you do.”
He was lying. I could see it in his eyes, see it in the way he held my gaze firmly, waiting for me to simply agree. What had just happened—it was a thing of nightmares. But I knew it was real.
Before I could interrogate him further, two figures emerged from the maze, joining us in the center: Honey and the older brunet guy from earlier.
Kasem and I tried to press ourselves against the foliage, but it was only a matter of time before they’d spot us.
At the moment, though, Honey and the man were preoccupied, laughing and whispering to each other.
The brunet pulled her into the center of the maze, pushing Honey against the statue as she ran her hands up his shirt.
She moaned when his lips found the curve of her neck and his hands explored her thighs.
I looked away, but Kasem tensed beside me as he watched.
“Wait,” Honey whispered. “I think there’s someone there.”
“It’s just us.” The man lifted her shirt over her head, exposing her lacy purple bra. But she pushed him away, ducking from his hold and approaching where Kasem and I stood in hiding.
“Hello?” she said, stepping forward and covering her bra with her arms.
When she spotted Kasem, a surge of emotions clouded her expression. She seemed speechless at first, but then she gathered herself.
“Kasem?” she whispered. “Is that you?” Her eyes widened, and relief pooled in her gaze as she took him in.
Her voice, how Kasem’s name sounded leaving her lips, sparked my memories of the stabbing. I realized it then: Honey was the girl I’d spoken to that night, the one Kasem had been talking to on the phone.
“Angelica’s been looking for you,” Honey said. “Should you be walking around? It’s only been a few hours—”
She stopped mid-sentence when she spotted me cowering in Kasem’s bloodstained blazer.
“How long has this been going on between you two?” Kasem said, but Honey was already pulling me away from him, the look of horror clear in her expression as she made her body a physical barrier between the two of us.
Moments later, the older man joined Honey’s side. He glanced at Kasem’s bloodied blazer and Honey’s protective stance.
“Well, look who it is,” he said. “I’m surprised your brother’s not here, covering up for your mess like he always does.”
It took a moment for Kasem to register the man’s words, but when he did, the icy look in his eyes was chilling.
“Ojore’s your puppet,” he said, “not mine.” He glanced behind Honey and the man. “Although, I wonder how he or the Board feels about you being with his ex-intended. You’re a tenured professor. And this is how you represent our school?”
“Honey can make her own decisions about who she sleeps with,” the man answered. “And I represent Westfield better than you or he ever could, cousin.”
He said the last word like it was a slur, like the thought of the two of them being related was some sick twist of fate.
Yet, in my mind, they might as well have been speaking in another language, one strained by history and bitterness.
I tried to decode the meaning beneath what they were saying, and yet, one word kept drifting to the surface.
“Ojore?” I repeated. A name and a question, all at once.
“I believe you know him as ‘Jojo,’” Kasem said. “My older brother. He’s a researcher here at Westfield.”
And there was my answer: the bracelet, the letter in Jojo’s car, the way he’d been so strange and distant when I’d asked about Westfield’s heir at Louisa’s booth in the mall, and now here at the university.
Jojo had never spoken of his family before, and yet his cousin and his brother both stood before me in the flesh.
This entire time, everything I’d thought I’d known about Jojo was a lie. He wasn’t some impoverished historian or a vagabond with no family or name. Here was a statue dedicated to the Saint James line, and Jojo was a descendant of them; they were the heirs to Westfield.
“He didn’t tell you, I presume?”
“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”
On the other side of the maze, the professor tossed Honey’s shirt to her.
“I suggest you worry about yourself,” he said, speaking to Kasem.
“Focus on your graduate thesis and your teaching assistant work. Or maybe nurse that flask you always carry with you.” He gestured to my bruised nose and the blood staining Kasem’s blazer.
“How will you and your brother explain this to the president this time? Another accident, Kasem?” he said, his voice seething.
“Has the statue come to life? Did it attack you both?” His recounting of events wasn’t correct, but it was closer to the truth than what Kasem had tried to make me believe.
“You put the Saint James name in the mud.”
“And yet, I never sink it as much as you do, Alaster,” Kasem returned, emphasizing the man’s name in the same mocking tone that Alaster had called Kasem “cousin.” “This didn’t just happen. Don’t tell me it started when she took your classes.”
Splotches of red warmed Alaster’s cheeks. Honey’s too.
“Would both of you just stop?” Honey said. “I’m standing right here. You don’t have to talk over me like I’m invisible.” She was teary-eyed now, and when she turned to Kasem, he at least had the decency to look ashamed. Alaster didn’t seem to care.
“You’re on probation already,” she said to Kasem. She pointed to me and the blood-streaked blazer I was holding. “Do you really think you can risk getting caught in something like this?”
Then she spun to face Alaster. “And the state ruled what happened an accident. You can’t keep blaming Kasem. He’s grieving just as much as we all are. Let’s just leave and pretend none of this happened. Ojore told me he and Henning are doing orientation tours, and if she sees us like this—”
But then she froze, glancing in the opposite direction from where they’d come.
There were footsteps. A horde of them, and they were heading in our direction.