Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Another person possessed with whatever was taking over Dani. The students were in danger; the staff was in danger. The thing I’d been called here to prevent had happened, and I couldn’t do a damn thing. I felt worse than useless. What was I even doing here? Why had Max brought us here?
A light hand landed on my shoulder. “You can do this,” Vern said, sliding a cup of tea toward me. “I know you can.”
“Vern, I don’t know what I’m doing—”
He put up a hand to stop me. “Now you listen here. You’re here every day, killing yourself to save that girl.
You’re doing as well as anyone could. And now what?
A little bend in the road, and you’re just going to stop?
A little stumble has never stopped you before.
At least, it didn’t stop the old Cella.”
The “old” Cella. I huff ed. The old Cella got her heart broken and smashed into a tiny million pieces. The old Cella flew into a rage and nearly killed someone. I didn’t want to be the old Cella.
“Look, now, I understand,” he said, in his gravelly voice.
“You’ve been carrying around a whole lot of hurt.
I know being here is hard, and it’s bringing up a lot of painful memories.
It’s only natural to put as much distance between yourself and what’s hurting you as you can.
” He put up his hands. “But what happened with Aaron was not your fault. Forgive yourself. Forgive Max. Take it from me—I’ve been around the block once or twice—if you don’t let go of all that hurt you’re carrying around, sooner or later it’s gonna bury you. ”
I held my head in my hands. “I’m trying. It just feels like, no matter what I do, I keep sliding backward. I take one step forward and two steps back.”
“Honey, that’s what healing is. You’re just starting to trust again, and that’s hard. But you came back here, didn’t you? That’s a giant leap forward in my book.”
He landed a kiss on my head. “You can do this.” His gaze was fixed in such a determined stare that I nearly believed him. “You just need a cup of tea and a clear head. I’ll leave you to it.”
I sipped the tea he left for me, a rich, nutty rooibos with milk and a hint of peppermint, and took a deep breath.
I started slowly. I looked up Dean Morren’s interviews with the press, watched his videos—a good portion of the nearly four hundred of them—until the sun went down outside the window. The breeze that drifted in was cool; an owl hooted. A group of coyotes barked and howled in the distance.
Dean Morren went to college, but not here, and he definitely wasn’t a member of Phi Kat. As a matter of fact, he was pretty anti-Greek life, even made a video mocking college frats after news of hazing at a school on the East Coast.
I stumbled on a clip of him from one of those prank shows where the hosts run after you on the street and shove a microphone in your face. “What’s your tattoo mean?”
Dean shrugged. “It’s just some math thing I used to be into.”
A math thing?
But still, even when it felt like it was right there in front of me, itching at the back of my skull, I couldn’t find any connection to him and Phi Kat, nor any other math organizations around the country.
I had just put my head down on the desk when Max stumbled over with a mess of notes of his own, mind maps and arrows of jotted-down questions going every which way, looking just as frustrated as me.
“This is hopeless,” I groaned. “At this rate, half the school will be dead before we even land in the right direction.”
He stared at his notes. “I think I have an idea.”
“What?” I hurried after him, but when he was excited about something, that long loping stride was a force to be reckoned with. He finally stopped in front of Maritza’s cottage.
“Dani?” I asked, “You want to talk to Dani?”
He was absolutely the last person I thought would suggest such a thing, given that every other time I suggested it, his answer had been an emphatic “Absolutely the fuck not.” Lately, he didn’t so much as stray onto that side of campus.
“I know, but Dr. R said she’s stronger now. Maybe she’ll be able to talk to us. She’s the only one who knows for sure what happened, so let’s come right out and ask her. Ask if she’s seen this symbol before.”
My hands instinctively wrapped around my torso. “I hope you’re sure about this.”
When we walked into Maritza’s cottage, Dani was awake. More surprising than that, instead of on the bed, she was sitting at the round wooden table near the kitchen. A piece of paper was in front of her, a black crayon in her hand.
“Come in,” Maritza said, “we’re just having lunch. She seems to have regained some of her strength.”
Her eyes were still ringed in purple and her arms and legs were still scarred, but color had returned to her cheeks. There was no blood dripping down her arms. I couldn’t even see any bandages.
Max’s eyebrow lifted, footsteps halting. “Are you sure about that? Is it safe, I mean? Considering last time …”
Maritza nodded. “It’s perfectly safe. She’s on a strict regimen of medication to keep her moods stable. Even more now, since Luce.” She looked away.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better, Dani,” I said quietly. She let Maritza spoon soup into her mouth, still drawing with her crayon.
“She doesn’t talk much,” Maritza said. “Her new medication makes her more docile.”
Dani stared straight ahead like a zombie. What she was doing couldn’t in good faith be considered drawing; she was etching a thick black mark into the paper over and over again.
When I touched her, she flinched. It was only slight, but I was so surprised I nearly lurched back in alarm.
I sat down in the chair farthest from her, warning bells ringing in my ears.
“That’s a nice drawing,” Max prodded. “Cella draws a bit, too. Don’t you, Cella?”
“Yes,” I said, trying and failing to mask my nervousness with a cough. “Just doodles, really. One of my objects is part of a leather journal.”
A hiccup of laughter escaped from the seemingly lifeless girl in front of us. My shoulders went rigid.
“Why is that funny, Dani?” Max asked, leaning forward. My breath squeezed in my lungs. All I wanted to do was get in my truck and never look back. But I forced myself to stay in my seat.
Dani didn’t answer. She continued scribbling, running her crayon over and over the same mark on the paper.
I looked over at Maritza, who had retreated to the kitchen but was watching with keen interest. “Does she do this often?”
“No,” she said, looking bewildered. “That’s the first time she’s laughed since she came into my care.”
Dani dropped her crayon on the table and looked down at her drawing.
What I’d thought were just random scratches across the paper I now saw were a series of interconnected and intersecting lines.
It was nothing I could read, but it had to be deliberate.
Again, I felt the flicker of something just out of reach, something I should’ve understood. I ground my teeth in frustration.
“What does your drawing mean, Dani?” Max asked.
No response.
He looked at me meaningfully. Your turn. I shifted uncomfortably.
“Dani, did you know the members of Phi Kat?”
No answer.
I opened to the picture of Dean Morren’s tattoo and slid my phone to her. “What about this symbol? Have you seen it before? Or this one?” I swiped to a picture of the marking over House Torlaine.
Her eyes flicked over the phone, and her grip on the crayon tightened. She scribbled harder than ever on her paper, hand flying over the page.
I pushed forward. “It’s all over campus. We can’t make heads or tails of it, but you know what it is, don’t you? It was in your notebook. Did you draw it?”
She held the crayon so tightly I could see tiny cracks running up its side.
Maritza’s voice hitched up an octave. “Maybe that’s enough for one day. I don’t want her getting all riled up.”
I bit my lip, a hazy memory surfacing of the dream I had featuring Dani, where she’d desperately wanted to tell me something. “What about … ‘Perhaps you will succeed, perhaps you will cause terror’?”
Dani’s eyes flashed, burrowing straight into mine. I saw what could only be called recognition in her eyes.
“What does it mean, Dani?”
Dani started rocking back and forth and muttering to herself. Her voice was too low for me to make out the words. Maritza backpedaled, knocking into the wooden manger scene.
The symbols on Dani’s paper were larger now. Big sweeping letters with circles at the bottoms. Now I could see the pattern formed by the interconnecting lines.
“Ring letters,” I said, tracing a finger over the lines. “I’ve seen these characters before. They say they’re the letters of angels.”
Dani stopped. Her eyes flicked up to meet mine so fast I nearly fell backward. She laughed, a guttural sound. “Or demons.”
Max took in a sharp breath. Maritza screamed, but we were so close now, so close to uncovering everything. If I could just—
“I know how the other students treated you,” I said, the words flying off my tongue. “Did they hurt you? Did you try a spell to get back at them?”
She scribbled faster, her crayon flying across the page. Over and over, she traced the letters, carving into the paper until she went straight through to the table.
“Cella,” Max warned.
“Tell me. Tell me what it means. Who did this to you?”
Her murmuring quickened. First just a whisper, then louder and louder.
“Go on with your Magic spells and sorcery. Perhaps you will succeed,” she hissed, “perhaps you will cause terror. These books are banned. They are forbidden. Stray not from the path; wear not a ring; cross not your heart. Look not from the light.”
“I think that’s enough,” Max said, reaching for my hand.
“What do you think, Cella, would you like to join me?” she whispered, her fingers curling toward me. A grotesque grin spread across her face. Max lunged, wrapping an arm around my waist to pull me back.
“Cella, get out of here!”