Chapter 5
Iwake to pain.
At first, it’s a dull pressure behind my eyes, the kind that comes after too little sleep or too much cheap wine. I try to move, and the ache sharpens so violently a groan slips from my throat. My hand flies to the side of my head. Gauze brushes my fingertips. There’s a bandage around my forehead.
For several seconds, I lie perfectly still beneath the sheets in my dorm room bed, trying to understand why my skull feels like someone split it open. Then I notice my arm. A deep, throbbing pain pulses beneath the sleeve of the oversized sweatshirt I’m wearing.
A sweatshirt that isn’t mine.
I don’t own anything this soft. It’s made from expensive cashmere, all black with SALEM’S FALL UNIVERSITY printed across the chest in gold letters.
Carefully, I pull up the right sleeve. A clean white bandage circles my upper arm. My heart begins to pound. Something clearly has happened to me, but I can’t remember what. I search my mind and find only pieces.
Darkness.
Cold air.
A knife.
I suck in a breath and nearly choke as it all comes back to me. The three masked men standing in the woods, holding me hostage. They cut me, held a knife to my throat, and threatened me to leave Salem’s Fall. I thought they might kill me.
I grab my phone from the nightstand and stare at the lit screen.
Sunday, 6:17 p.m.
Where the hell have I been the last forty-eight hours?
More faint memories rise through the fog. Fluorescent lights passing overhead. A man carrying me. My head resting against his chest. He’d smelled nice. Expensive. Masculine.
A nurse leaning over me. Hands warm and efficient as she cleaned blood and stitched me up. Someone standing just beyond her shoulder. Watching me. Fingers brushing a strand of hair from my face with an unexpected gentleness. Then, later, someone tucking me into bed. A voice low near my ear.
Please… leave before it’s too late.
I close my eyes, trying to hold on to the voice, but the memory dissolves before I can place it. Did it belong to one of the masked men? Or was it someone else? A caring stranger, perhaps?
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and study my room for clues. My boots from Friday night sit neatly beside the desk. My backpack rests beneath the windowsill, still zipped. A brown paper bag, some gauze, and what looks like infirmary discharge papers are on my desk.
I pick up my phone again and search through the call log. No outgoing calls after Friday afternoon. No emergency call to 911. Nothing to my mother.
A wave of nausea rolls through me, and I set the phone down before I drop it. That’s when I notice the smell. Something sour hangs in the room, faint but unmistakable, like something gone rotten.
I glance toward the trash, thinking maybe I left spoiled food inside, but it’s empty.
It must be coming from somewhere else. Perhaps something dead inside the walls or down the hallway.
An old building like Hallowell Hall probably has rodents, and with my luck, one recently crawled somewhere within smelling distance and decided to die.
A knock sounds at the door.
I freeze, every muscle in my body tightening. My mind immediately goes to the men in the forest. Is it them? Did they return to finish the job they started?
“Jack?” a female voice calls from the hallway. “It’s Wren. Are you in there?”
Relief rushes through me.
“Come in,” I say, my voice sounding scraped raw.
The door swings open and Wren steps inside, carrying a small white bakery box. The warm scent of chocolate chip cookies reaches me before she does. The polite smile on her face vanishes the moment she sees me.
“Oh my God!” Her expression tightens with concern. “Jack, are you okay?” She walks toward the bed and sits at the edge, wrinkling her nose. “Wait, what’s that smell?”
“I think something died in the walls,” I say, propping myself up with pillows, leaning against them for support as a wave of dizziness moves through me. “Shockingly, it doesn’t even make the top ten list of my problems right now.”
“I heard you were in the infirmary. I wanted to check on you. Thought some cookies might help.” She drops the white box at the foot of the bed. “Jack,” she says slowly, “what happened?”
I press the heel of my hand against my temple and internally debate how much I should tell her.
I don’t really know Wren. She seems nice enough, but she’s basically a stranger.
Trust has never come naturally to me, and it certainly doesn’t now after just being kidnapped and attacked by three masked men in the woods.
Still, so far, Wren is the only person on campus who has shown me any kindness. And maybe I do need an ally. Maybe Wren can help me. I certainly haven’t gotten very far on my own.
It goes against every one of my survival instincts, but I decide to tell her everything. Not just about the kidnapping outside the library, but all of it, including Josh’s disappearance and the real reason I’m here in Salem’s Fall.
After I finish, Wren reaches out to give me a hug, careful not to jostle my injured arm. “I’m so sorry this happened to you,” she says softly. “We need to call the police.”
My stomach knots. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“What do you mean? We have to report this.”
“If I do that, the police will start asking questions. They might find out I enrolled here under false pretenses so I could investigate Josh’s disappearance. The university could send me home.” I start to panic. “I can’t leave yet.”
“But, Jack, this is dangerous. You must see that, right?” she asks. “If something bad happened to your brother, it could happen to you too.”
The words sting even though they’re reasonable.
“So what? I’m just supposed to give up?” I ask. “Let them get away with it?”
“Maybe there’s nothing you can do.” Her voice softens. “Maybe whoever took him is too powerful.”
The room goes quiet as I let myself consider the possibility that she may be right. I came here believing determination would be enough, but I hadn’t counted on masked men with knives.
“I really thought they were going to hurt me,” I whisper.
I stare down at my shaking hands and then I see it again. The black stone gleaming in moonlight. Dark as night. I’d seen someone wearing that ring before, my first night in Salem’s Fall.
“Silas.”
Wren frowns. “What?”
“One of my attackers was wearing a black stone ring.” My heart starts pounding. “It was Silas. And I bet Rowan and Van were the other two assholes with him. They knew my name. They knew about Josh.”
“I don’t know, Jack,” she says hesitantly. “If those guys wanted to scare someone, they have people they can pay to do it for them.”
“It was them. I’m sure of it.”
The blood drains from her face, and she looks genuinely frightened now.
“You can’t tell anyone what you suspect,” she says, her voice dropping, and I lean in, my chest tightening at the fear in her tone.
“No one ever punishes the Heirs. You’ll be accused of lying, harassing them, trying to damage the university.
They’d have you removed from campus before dinner.
Anyone who goes up against the Heirs loses, especially if they go up against Silas.
” She presses her lips together. “And I would know. I’ve known them my whole life. ”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t hate me,” she exhales nervously, “but Van is my cousin.”
I glance at her cheap, worn shoes and the thrift-store T-shirt hanging from her narrow shoulders. She looks nothing like the wealthy women at SFU who parade around campus with designer handbags dangling from their arms.
“You’re a Hawthorne? But… you work as a janitor,” I sputter, immediately apologetic. “Sorry. No offense.”
“None taken.” Something bitter crosses her face. “My mother is a Hawthorne—technically—but our branch of the family tree was cut off years ago. Van’s side inherited the money, the name, everything that mattered. Mine got the privilege of being reminded we’ll never measure up.”
“But he’s so… horrible. And you’re nice.”
“Trust me,” she says. “I’m nothing like Van.”
I want to believe her, I really do. But nothing in Salem’s Fall is what it seems. Wren herself warned me of that my very first day on campus.
She’s a Hawthorne. Van’s cousin. Maybe the Heirs sent her to check on me.
Maybe they want to know how much I’ve learned or what I remember.
I’m beginning to understand why Josh warned me not to trust anyone here.
“Well,” I say, forcing a weak smile. “Thanks for checking on me. And for the cookies.”
Wren’s expression falls. She heads for the door, looking hurt. “You really should think about leaving, Jack,” she says and walks out.
I manage to sleep away the rest of Sunday.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I tear off the bandage on my head, leaving a tender knot beneath my hair and a faint smear of dried blood near my temple.
Thankfully, the bandage around my arm is still in place when I wake the next morning, clean and professionally wrapped.
According to the instructions left on my desk, I’m supposed to return to the infirmary in seven days to have the stitches removed.
As my morning alarm blares, I sit up carefully, testing the dizziness.
The room sways only a little before settling again.
I start to get dressed for class when the smell from yesterday hits me again—even stronger now.
I pull a long-sleeved flannel shirt over my head and cover my nose against the thick, sickening stench hanging in the air like spoiled meat.
It seems to be coming from Eleanor’s half of the room.
I take one hesitant step closer, and it gets worse.
I follow the smell all the way to her wardrobe, where it’s strongest, and crouch down beside it.
That’s when I notice something strange. The base doesn’t sit flush with the wall.
I hold my fingers near the narrow gap and feel a cool draft slipping through.
Gritting my teeth, I push the wardrobe to the side, its wooden base scraping several inches across the floor as a narrow door appears behind it. The brass latch is dark with age, but the wood around the frame has been scratched recently.
My heartbeat quickens.
What the hell?
I think back to Wren’s warning my first day on campus about my room being older and the rumored hidden passageways in the walls. Apparently, that part wasn’t just a rumor.
Still, that alone isn’t particularly odd. Old New England houses often have things like secret servant corridors and storage voids left over from generations of additions. That’s probably all this is. Something a bit creepy to discover but quite ordinary.
The smell rolling through the door is almost physical now, coating the back of my throat and forcing tears into my eyes. I reach for the latch, and the door opens with a low groan, darkness waiting on the other side.
I use the flashlight on my phone to illuminate a cramped passage barely wide enough for one person.
Rough stone walls press in on either side, the ceiling sloping sharply above a set of narrow wooden steps leading into what looks like an old access corridor hidden between the floors.
My beam catches something pale at the bottom.
At first, my brain refuses to understand what I’m seeing. The phone shakes in my hand, the light revealing even more—a bare forearm, dark hair, the twisted outline of a woman’s body crammed against the stone.
A scream tears out of me and I stumble backward, slamming into the open door hard enough to jar my injured arm. Pain flares, but I barely feel it.
The woman’s face is turned toward me. I recognize her from the room assignment emails.
Eleanor.
Multiple wounds cut through her neck and the front of her shirt, as if someone stabbed her over and over.
Her hands lie open, every fingernail broken, blood dried beneath them and along the stone beside her, deep scratches marking the walls as if she fought to pull herself forward or claw her way out.
She’d been alive long enough to fight. Long enough to understand she was going to die.
I barely make it to the trash can before I vomit.