Chapter 28
For a moment, Mallory can’t process what she’s looking at.
Can’t absorb the images that sway in front of her eyes, inconceivable and cruel.
Three out of four walls are covered—floor to ceiling—in heavy black ink.
Swirls and jagged lines, harsh angles and hooks.
Arranged in patterns, almost like sentences.
The symbols in the ritual book in her vision, the one used during Lily’s exhumation.
Drawn, in fury, on Ezra’s walls.
And on the fourth wall, one word in English.
Her name, over and over. Just like on the planchette—
JULES JULES JULES JULES JULES JULES JULES
“Mal.” Saskia snatches her hand. “What the fuck?”
“No,” Mallory wrenches out. Denial grips her, fierce and swift. “He didn’t do this; he wouldn’t have—”
But then, her gaze slides to the floor, and her breath catches again.
Black candles line the wooden floorboards, some tipped over, others upright. Ash is scattered everywhere, soot clawing at Mallory’s boots. And all around the candles, a fat white circle sketched in chalk. Just like the one Ezra drew for her night after night.
Only this one is fuller, more opaque. As though Ezra pressed so hard the chalk snapped in two. Mallory kneels, peering beneath the bed. The circle continues all the way to the other side of the wall, looming and menacing.
“What is that?” Saskia whispers beside her.
“It’s a chalk circle, he—”
“No.” Saskia gestures farther beneath Ezra’s bed. “That.”
A rush of air barrels from Mallory’s lungs as she sees what, exactly, Saskia is pointing at.
Something round and metal, approximately a foot long, peppered with black divots and holes.
A drain. From when Ezra’s room was a morgue? But—
“Why would a morgue need a drain?” Mallory asks, and Saskia grimaces.
“Probably to, like, empty the bodies of fluids. During embalming.” She shudders, tugging Mallory’s arm. “I think we should go.”
But Mallory doesn’t move, the back of her neck prickling. She can’t explain why, but she just has a feeling: There’s something below the drain.
“Help me move the bed,” Mallory says.
“Did you hear what I just said? Don’t tell me you want to look down there.”
She turns to her. “I have to.”
Saskia’s face flashes with apprehension but she nods reluctantly. They pull the frame away from the wall, and Mallory drops back to her knees to bend over the drain, working her knife into the edges.
The drain cover dislodges with a pop—and Mallory immediately screams as a tangle of centipedes and silverfish spill out.
Saskia shrieks alongside her, and they both scramble back while the bugs—each with scaly bellies and skinny, fast-moving legs—slither over the floorboards before disappearing beneath the door.
“No, no, no,” Saskia begs, clawing at her. “Please, let’s just go. There’s something wrong with this room.”
Chest heaving with loud, arduous breaths, Mallory eyes the drain. It’s dark now, as though waiting. Beckoning.
“We’ve come this far,” Mallory says. “I’m not turning back.”
She clenches her jaw before plunging her hand inside.
Saskia screams again but Mallory just closes her eyes as her fingers slip through sludge and slime.
Something slithers over her knuckles and her entire body trembles, but she reaches lower and lower until she’s lying flat on the floor with her cheek pressed against cold wood.
She makes contact with a hard object, tugging it loose.
A red box. A little smaller than a shoebox.
She glances at Saskia, something unspoken shifting between them. As if they both know the second Mallory opens the lid, she won’t be able to pretend Ezra is a victim anymore.
Mallory uncovers the box—and her hand flies to her mouth.
“What the hell?” she says, fingers shaking over a white handkerchief with lace trim and violet flowers, stained with blood. The one Arden cleaned Mallory’s hand with the night of auditions.
The one Ezra must have taken when they weren’t looking. Squirreling away the scent—the taste—of his mark.
Cold sweat descends Mallory’s neck as she sorts through the rest. The ribbon with her cut hair. Her class schedule, folded up. A pair of underwear she didn’t even know was missing. Mallory’s face flames with heat, and her stomach twists as she pulls out—
Her school photo. From last year.
Before they even met.
Mallory slowly crumples the photograph in her fist.
“He planned everything from the start,” she says. “He knew. He knew his father’s society wants me dead.” She swallows. “Ezra wants me dead, too.”
“Mal,” Saskia says, “we’ll come up with another plan. We’ll—”
She falls quiet as she spots the final object in the box at the same time Mallory does.
A brass and ruby butterfly locket.
The locket Mallory’s mother had given her. The locket she’d lost.
The locket, she understands now, Ezra slipped off her neck while she was trusting him to keep her safe.
“Oh god,” Saskia says, a hand on her arm. “Mal.”
Wordlessly, Mallory unclasps the chain and fits it around her neck. For a moment, she stares wordlessly at Ezra’s bed. The same bed where he stroked and kissed her, turned her into something wild and feral, his to tame.
It was never real at all.
A bubble of laughter escapes her mouth. Then another.
And another. Mallory laughs and laughs and laughs because of how fucking na?ve she’s been.
He’d told her, he’d said she was his ticket to freedom.
But it was never just about nailing a production.
Never about her presence at a historical preservation society’s meeting.
It was her body. Her heart.
An offering.
And for what? To make his father happy? For what?
Her hoarse laughter sails through the shadowed air. Tears gather in her eyes. And Saskia just stares in horror.
“What in the world,” she starts, “could possibly be funny right now?”
“He fucked me in this bed. The things I let him do to me—” She buries her face in her hands. “And all this time! All of this! Under the floorboards!” A fresh round of dark, brittle laughter rattles from her. “Oh god, I hate him. I hate him so fucking much.”
“Let’s go.” Saskia attempts to grab her again.
“I’m fine.” She’s fine, she’s fine, she’s fine. She killed a rabbit, had sex with a monster, but she’s fine, she’s—
Her cackles taper to silence, like a valve suddenly shut.
Saskia studies her, clearly worried. “Mal?”
But Mallory doesn’t answer. Simply snatches the knife from the floor and stands.
This is no longer war.
It’s fucking treason.
Mallory marches toward Ezra’s closet. Flings the doors wide.
“Mal—”
With a growl, Mallory rips shirt after shirt, slashing the fabric to ribbons.
She tosses each torn garment to the floor, stomping them into mottled, dirty shapes.
She hears Saskia saying her name, but her hands move faster than her thoughts, unable to process the weight of this betrayal.
She briefly imagines setting fire to the entire room, maybe every memory, too, until she’s scorched Ezra from history.
Until there’s nothing left for her body or heart to remember.
“Mal, stop it,” Saskia pleads. “Stop!”
Finally, Saskia just gathers Mallory in her arms, and Mallory crumples against her.
“I trusted him. I could have loved him. And he lied to me over and over and”—Mallory swipes at her tears—“none of it was real. He set out to break me, and he did. He did.”
Saskia rubs her back in slow circles, holding her as she cries. Each stroke of her hand is soothing, comforting, but when she speaks, it’s in a blistering whisper.
“Fuck him.” Possessive rage clings to her words. “Ezra Pierce can rot in hell.”
“I think,” Mallory replies, “he’s been there for a while.”
But there’s no satisfaction in the words.
She stares at the torn black fabric at her feet.
The hunger for vengeance that raged inside her a moment ago has been replaced with despair, another low-grade fever settling in.
She can feel herself weakening against the dark thing that lingers inside these walls.
Perhaps, she reasons distantly, Ezra has already won.
And then, she catches sight of a framed photograph, face down in the closet. Wiping her eyes, she bends to retrieve it. Shards of glass slip loose, as though Ezra smashed the frame in a fit of anger before tucking it out of sight.
Mallory blinks at a younger Ezra, his father, and an older man. And she remembers.
“This same photo was in Ezra’s dad’s office,” she murmurs.
Saskia peers at the third man in the picture. “Ezra’s grandfather?”
“It must be,” Mallory says, flipping it around. “Wait. There’s something in here.”
She removes the backing, finding a slip of paper inside. Scratchy handwriting covers the page, yellowed from the sun.
Ezra, I have always been proudest of you. You hold the world in your hands. Don’t ever underestimate what you’re capable of.
—Grandpa Jacob
Mallory reads it several times before the words sink in.
“Jacob,” she says. “The man who cut out Lily’s heart, the man who bound her to a demon. He’s Ezra’s grandfather. The one that lived past a hundred. It all makes sense, it—”
“Oh my god,” Saskia breathes.
Mallory glances again at the symbols on the walls, regarding them with new understanding.
They’re the same symbols, Mallory finally realizes, as Ezra’s rings.
The rings his grandfather gave him as a present.
A fresh wave of terror washes over her at the JULES JULES JULES on the wall. A tiny word that once put wild butterflies in her stomach, but now only feels like a threat.
“That’s why Ezra’s father is so interested in the curse,” Mallory says.
“His historical preservation club isn’t a club at all.
It’s a cult.” She slams a gaze to Saskia.
“Whatever this demon is, they must serve it, be connected to it, and Ezra—he’s not just next in line to take over his father’s real estate business. ”
“He’s next in line,” Saskia whispers, “to be the cult’s leader.”
Mallory flings the closet doors shut. “We have to get out of here. Now—”
Her words are swallowed by a thunderous banging against the interior door.
“Ezra!” yells a deep voice. Another flurry of knocks. “Ezra, open the door this second.”
Another thinner voice adds—
“Sir, sir, this is a dorm! You can’t barge in here!”
“Do you have any idea who I am?” the man roars back. “I built this school.”
And Mallory goes perfectly, entirely still. The sweat on her neck turns ice-cold, the puncture wounds suddenly stinging.
Saskia grabs her hands. “Is that…?”
Mallory nods, frozen. The room seems to darken to a tenebrous, wintery black.
“Ezra’s father.”
Victor pounds the door again. “Ezra! You can’t hide from me forever. You can’t—”
“Sir! Please! I’m going to call campus security!”
Saskia snatches Mallory’s arm and tugs her toward the back door. “Take this,” she says, pressing the knife into Mallory’s palm. “I’ll go around the front in case Victor sees us. He wants you, not me. Go through the gardens, take the shortcut. Meet at my dorm.”
Mallory shakes her head. “Sas, we shouldn’t split up.”
Saskia shoves them into the night air before dragging her close, their foreheads touching. “Whatever is going on in that fucked-up Pierce family, you are at the center of it. That man will kill you.” Saskia’s eyes search hers. “I won’t lose you. So fucking run.”
Surrendering, Mallory rises on her tiptoes and presses her lips to Saskia’s. She does it hard and fast, in case.
In case.
But then she nods, slipping the knife into her coat pocket. Saskia becomes a snowy blur as she darts around the side of the building.
And Mallory breaks into a run.
She kicks up dirt and leaves as she sprints toward the gardens, hopelessness mounting with every step.
She thinks about the blue house, about stretches of copper-soaked afternoon with her mother, playing make-believe.
Her mother’s chestnut hair beneath the yawning sun, the freckles on her face when she didn’t wear makeup, the way something would twinkle in her eyes whenever she told a story.
But the bright images collide into others, blending with the stale smell of cigarettes, the rote sound of cleaning at two a.m., the dullness of boarded-up windows. As if they’re all one and the same.
Mallory races faster, attempting to outrun this strange, unidentifiable emotion. Like being homesick, but for a time, not a place. A time when she didn’t know the meaning of grief, didn’t know how it can burrow into your bones and live there, become a part of who you are.
It’s only when she’s surrounded by thorns that she realizes she’s run directly into the hedge maze.
And at the awareness, Mallory skids to a violent halt.
The midnight air is thick around her, the starless sky unforgiving and black. Her breath bursts in graying clouds as she whirls, trying to figure out how she got here.
She doesn’t hear the footsteps behind her. Doesn’t feel the shadow looming at her back.
Doesn’t notice she isn’t alone until Ezra’s hand clamps over her mouth.
Turning her scream to silence.