CHAPTER 14 #3
The girls raced into the cold dark. The scattered drumbeat of high heels on stone echoed from buildings and statues.
Julia was the first of the pack, outpacing them all with a runner’s easy stride.
She swerved into a side street, her gown a blood-hued flicker in the dark.
Venetia tore off her fox ears with a savage smile and sprinted straight down Scholar’s Road.
The other girls scattered like a shoal of nervous fish.
Emma watched them flit into one side street and another.
She was already tired. Her lungs stung in the icy air. Perhaps she could leave the Turnbulls to their games. Then the tinny cry of the horn came again.
The boys were coming.
Her pulse thrummed. She was the only one left hesitating. She would be the first to be caught.
An idea came to her with the suddenness of divine inspiration. She doubled back. The Senate House was locked at night, but the gates were low enough that a child could climb over. She might even get to the pub first.
Just one drink, she promised herself, and then home.
Nat would be watching a film in his room.
He’d already been muttering about his costume for The Life of Tolstoy’s cast party.
She suspected he was in front of a Werner Herzog classic, attempting to cut out a Russian military cape in the style of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.
Perhaps she could even be back in time to stop him from slicing off a finger or two.
She set a steady pace, and the pillars of the Senate House soon loomed before her.
It was dark and echoing inside the colonnade.
Generations of scholars had added carved plaques and marble statues until the whole complex looked like a strange stone menagerie.
Emma shuddered as she skirted a man with a boar’s head, a screaming deer.
A towering merman reminded her of the bearded statue on the riverbank, from the first time she’d been out with Jasper.
And then Jasper was there. Not in the rolled-up jeans and bare feet of her memory. In the red coat and white breeches of a hunter.
He leaned against the statue with a satisfied grin.
“How did you know?” asked Emma. Her words echoed off stone eyes, stone horns, stone tails.
“I guessed. I was lucky.”
“Aren’t you going to call the other hunters?”
“No, silly. I haven’t had you alone all night. Come here.”
“What about the game?”
He gathered her to him. Gone was the scent of cotton and clean boy.
There was wine on his breath. There was cologne on his skin, a cloud so thick she finally recognized what it was.
It was money, that smell. The dark wood of paneled studies in stately homes.
The leather of a luxury car, gleaming new.
The smoke at the end of a cigar. It made a stranger of him. Someone older, more assured.
“Caught you,” he slurred.
He surged forward and mashed his mouth against hers. The column was ice against her back. Emma closed her eyes, tried to summon the golden magic of the cathedral roof, the way his fingers had felt like small flames flickering across her skin. It was no use.
“Stop,” she said. “Sorry, I’m sorry, could you stop a moment—”
“Em-ma,” he moaned into her neck.
Now she felt the way her neck was twisted, with his hands holding her head in place and pressing her into the column. She couldn’t breathe.
“Jasper. Jasper, wait.”
“Fine, fine.” He lifted his hands in exaggerated obedience, releasing her. “You’re confusing me, Emma. I thought this was what you wanted.”
She looked down, uncomfortably aware of the blank where she should be feeling desire. Or embarrassment. Or anything except a tired longing for bed. Her own. Alone.
“I’m sorry. I thought I wanted—I do, it’s just…”
He took it as an invitation and pulled her against him with renewed fervor.
It was worse than before. He was crushing her.
She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t think.
Move, she screamed at her stupid legs, her lazy arms. Just move.
Her traitorous body remained still, a doll, a shell.
It was as though she watched floating from somewhere above.
The beautiful boy sheathed one hand in the tangled hair of the girl in his arms, pulled her face to his.
She was limp, insignificant. She was nothing in his grasp.
He stopped, breathing hard, and switched his attention to the front of her dress, twitching and ripping in his haste to undo the buttons.
She woke. Her blood screamed; that was the only way she could describe it. A song of bared teeth and fury echoed through her, curling her fingers to claws. She wrenched at Jasper’s wrist.
He jerked in shock. They stared together at the welling crescent marks on his arm, the blood on her nails.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I’m sorry—”
“You keep saying that,” he slurred.
“But I am.”
He advanced on her.
“Fox.”
It was soft, like an insult. He was staring at her with unnerving intensity.
“Fox.”
He raised his voice, still not looking away.
“Fox.”
The sound echoed through the colonnade, bouncing off the pocked stone tiles.
Foxfoxfoxfoxfoxfox.
The first halloos filtered through the night air.
Jasper smiled, and it held no kindness.
His coat was red. His boots were tall. And his eyes were hard.
He stepped toward her.
She ran.