18. Scary Monsters
Scary Monsters
Desdemona
I’m on my back in a dark place—there’s a mouth between my legs, and wet sucking sounds like squelching mud and the deep vibration of a masculine voice humming in contentment, and I’m so pent-up, so close, so ready that I could scream, fight, beg.
“Not yet, love.”
The face between my legs is ghostly, a pale skull with a scar and two black pits for eyes, and in the middle of those pits, pinprick stars, searing white glows.
“Soon.”
I shake my head, tight and aching with need, and I fall back, writhing, spreading open to—
“Are you going to Benjamin’s party this weekend?”
My eyes snap open.
Spearcrest’s library materialises around me: towering bookshelves and gleaming bronze railings and glossy plants. Then the desk, covered with books and notepads and pens. And then, across the desk, a frowning face, eyes as green as the banker lamp between us, Emerald Carver.
“What?”
I sit up in my chair, heart hammering, squeezing my thighs together over the dull, throbbing ache between my legs. As if it’s not already embarrassing enough that I fell asleep while studying, did I have to dream about him? Well, not so much a dream as an anxiety-induced nightmare.
A nightmare that’s left me uncomfortably, humiliatingly wet.
This is all Elias’s fault. This was probably his plan all along. He said he wanted to get to know me, but what he really wanted was to get under my skin. And now that he’s lodged in there like a splinter, how is that supposed to—
“That spineless worm, Benjamin Montgomery,” Emerald is saying, like she’s bringing up a perfect stranger instead of the boy we’ve both spent the past seven years trying to beat out of every academic leaderboard in Spearcrest. “Are you going to his Halloween party?”
I can tell she’s distracted because she keeps looking at her phone. Emerald is never on her phone. She only has two modes of being: studying or unconscious.
“I thought you didn’t go to parties,” I say, heart still beating erratically.
Stop thinking about him. You’re only giving him what he wants.
Just like he gave you what you wanted…
No.
I’m here to study, to build my actual future.
Emerald’s two copies of Othello sit next to one another on the smooth-worn leather surface of the desk: one that’s for all her own annotations, and one that’s filled with ideas she stole from Benjamin when she hacked into his student portal to sneak a look at his essays.
Emerald’s notebook is filled with her cramped, tidy writing, but my laptop screen has gone dark from lack of activity. I’ve never fallen asleep while studying before. I wouldn’t have, if it wasn’t for—
“I’m asking if you’re going,” Emerald snaps, glancing up from her phone. “Stop avoiding the question.” She narrows her eyes suspiciously. “What’s got you so distracted lately?”
“Nothing—I said I’m going!”
Emerald raises her eyebrows and smirks.
I drop my gaze, tapping my laptop awake.
“Are you?” I ask, a little more measured.
“Why should I?” she sneers. She locks her phone and shoves it away from her, almost sending it spinning off the desk. “That’s exactly what he wants me to do.”
I sigh. She’s in just as much trouble as I am, she just doesn’t even realise it yet.
“Then don’t go?”
“And let him win?” She scoffs. “Absolutely out of the question.”
He’s already won.
Emerald and Benjamin have been at each other’s throats for years now. When they both got selected for the prestigious Spearcrest Apostles Programme for academic excellence, we all thought it would finally be the end of it—the ultimate proof that they both won, after all.
But it’s starting to become obvious that whatever this war is between them, neither of them is winning.
“So you are going?” I say finally.
“I have to,” Emerald says. “But he’s planning something. I can just tell.”
“He’s not going to poison your punch.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him to do so,” she says darkly. She suddenly crosses her arms. “I take it you’re going with Lennox?”
Heat creeps into my cheeks, because the mention of his name brings it all back through the floodgates: the night at the Cyprian, the Inquisitor’s sly, mocking post, Elias sitting in my desk chair and spreading my legs, his wet thumb sliding back and forth in a slow, steady rhythm, his voice like a cold touch when he told me to stay away from scary monsters—like he’s not the scariest of all monsters.
Like I’m not going to end up on his arm on Halloween.
“That’s a yes, then.” Emerald slides her tortoiseshell pen between her lips, teeth clicking as she nibbles the tip. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen your face so red.”
“It’s too warm in here.”
Not quite a lie. It’s sweltering in the library, the lights dim and almost distorted, and I’m sore and restless with tiredness. I’ve not slept well since that catastrophic afternoon in my study.
“Only because your cheeks are radiating so much heat.” Emerald tilts her head. “Does Julian know you actually like Lennox?”
My heart stutters, the burn in my cheeks deepening.
“I don’t l—”
I interrupt myself. No. This is part of the plan, isn’t it?
Even if it’s not quite true. I don’t like Elias. He’s not the kind of person you can like. Liking is gentle and neutral; nothing about Elias invites neutrality.
“I don’t see how it’s any of his business,” I say quickly. “I don’t care what Julian thinks.”
“Hm,” Emerald says, with a pointed glance at my cheeks. Then she adds in an annoyed tone, “He seems to be under the impression that you’re getting back together at the party.”
“I don’t know what could possibly have given him that impression.”
Emerald lets out a dry laugh. “What do you do to these guys, Dess, to get them so obsessed?”
My mind flashes back to Elias walking out of the head girl study. That was almost two weeks ago—I’ve not heard a word from him since, no summons to his bedroom or my study, not so much as a text.
My voice comes out soft and bitter. “Not all of them.”
If I have any power to make anyone obsessed with me, then Elias is impervious.
Or maybe his desire is just like everything else in his life: coin-operated.
The party looms darkly over me for the rest of the half term, wearing Elias’s face.
It casts a smirking shadow over my classes, my studies, my essays, my tennis practice, even my sleep.
It’s only with the greatest dread and reluctance that I agree to go costume shopping in London with Emerald and Mira—who both seem to have an agenda of their own when it comes to the party.
Guess I won’t be the only schemer there, at least.
“I don’t want to see you in another white dress,” Emerald tells me with a level of aggression that’s frankly uncalled for. “This is our last Spearcrest Halloween—I want you in the sluttiest little outfit imaginable.”
She grabs a shiny black dress from the rack, so short it might as well not have a skirt at all. I scoff, but when she hands it to me, I hold it up to my body and glance at the mirror, mind flashing to Elias. How would he react if I turned up in something outrageous?
I don’t like the dress, but I would like to wipe that mocking smirk off his face, for once.
“Julian would have a heart attack,” Mira says with a little giggle.
With a shudder, I shove the dress back on the rack and throw Mira a little grimace.
She couldn’t stand out more against the garish colours and golden tassels of the costume shop if she tried.
She’s dressed in a classic Mira ensemble: a deep blue tweed two-piece, pristine cotton socks and pumps.
Her long hair, dark and smooth as black agate, is kept back from her doll-like face with a pearl-studded headband.
She looks like a gossip magazine It-girl—Spearcrest’s own perfect queen bee.
And she never has anything bad to say about anyone.
Emerald—not so much.
“We can only hope,” she’s saying, flipping through racks of velvet corsets. “If we managed to get rid of that asshole, Birnam, then we can get rid of Julian, too.”
My stomach flips, and I almost drop the Venetian mask I’ve just picked up. I glance at the girls, praying they didn’t notice my reaction.
“Poor Birnam,” Mira sighs. “Crazy, what happened to him, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” says Emerald, picking up an acid-green dress and holding it up to her body. “Everyone knows what a little creep he is. He had it coming.”
Emerald doesn’t know how right she is, and for the first time since I discovered what my brothers did, I wish I could tell her. The entire truth, all of it. She’d probably understand.
But if she didn’t, you’d have betrayed your own brothers for nothing.
You know you can’t risk that.
I try to keep my tone calm and curious when I speak up, half-heartedly pretending I’m considering between two masks.
“Is he still in hospital?” And, without waiting for an answer, as if this is more gossip than anything else, I add, “Did they ever find out what happened to him?”
Mira shakes her head. “No. His parents are absolutely furious. They just can’t do anything until he’s out of his coma.”
I suppress a shiver and shrink into my jumper, pulling my sleeves over my hands. It’s oppressively hot in the crowded costume shop, but I’m trying to hide from a cold that’s already set deep into my skin.
“If their precious little baby boy doesn’t wake up, they’ll want North’s head on a platter, I bet,” Emerald says, shaking her head. “If only someone was brave enough to tell them what a disgusting freak their son really is.”
Except that nobody is. Not Emerald, not the twins—not even me.
“The Inquisitor has been saying that all along,” Mira points out.
“The Inquisitor isn’t brave, though,” Emerald replies with a sneer. “He’s just as much of a coward as anyone else. Throwing stones and hiding his hands.”
My eyes fall on the pale mask in my hand, the dark painted eyes and mocking smile. Elias’s words echo in my mind. I speak before thinking.
“What makes you so sure the Inquisitor’s a he?”
Mira and Emerald both turn towards me. Despite the stark difference in their looks—Mira’s brown skin and black hair and pretty little two-piece and Emerald’s pale complexion, vivid red hair and chunky blazer over a tight dress—they have matching expressions of surprise on their faces.
Then Emerald lets out a sharp, annoyed laugh.
“No chance the Inquisitor is a girl.”
Mira’s big brown eyes, wide and innocent as a deer’s, swing from me to Emerald, who’s walking on the other side of her. “Why not?”
“Because.” Emerald throws back her hair. “The Inquisitor thinks he’s better than everybody else at Spearcrest. That’s the kind of arrogance only the male of the species could possess.”
And with that, Emerald spins off towards the changing rooms. Talk turns back to the party, to outfits.
Birnam, just like the Inquisitor, is just backdrop noise to Emerald and Mira, lost in the clicking of hangers on racks, the spooky pop songs crackling through the air.
But I’m too distracted to concentrate on shopping, fingers sliding over lace trims and metallic silks and fleshy vinyl.
My mind feels like a book with too many pages, and every chapter is a reminder of failure.
Ophelia’s silence. The bloody signet ring. Birnam’s inert body and his angry parents. Elias and our deal and his mocking smile and his fingers between my legs, drawing something out of me I didn’t even know I was capable of giving.
The Inquisitor, waiting to watch us all fall and finally—me.
Years spent working hard, serving the school, becoming a prefect, a tennis champion, head girl.
All reminders of just how far I have to fall.