CHAPTER ELEVEN
“THIS IS BULLSHIT.” JAMES SEETHED with fury over the plates of rich, marbled tenderloin served with succulent veal, though Elliott knew what he truly meant was bullshit.
James aesthetically retained the charismatic allure of Bruce Wayne, but his voice darkened in hatred.
“It’s a violation of humanity. It’s immoral. It’s savagery.”
For the annual Winterfyllet dinner, AEscwulf undergraduates were sailed in and out of the Raedwine Refectory on carved rowboats.
The millpond of swans flowed into the refectory on seas of white lilies beneath their elegant white feathers, inspired by the gothic castles of Styria in honor of Carmilla.
Atmospheric, high candles seemed to reach toward the cantilevers with woodwork built from Austrian craftsmen. Tapestries of Cleopatra with the asps to her bosom, as detailed in Carmilla, were exhibited around the entrancing refectory.
Opulent, white-gloved servers presented the second course that held more sumptuous meat with a tint of northern long-eared bat blood.
The animal blood was unsettling, but one must eat, the professors remarked.
Fabas indulcet fames. Hunger sweetens the beans.
The refectory was crowded, even on Samhain night.
The atmosphere felt warm with the body heat of scores of students that exited out of the rowboats.
The panoramic windows gave view to the snowscape in the distance.
Yet James’s words were icier than sleet beginning to sheet around the vaulted glass windows.
“You care about ethics?” Kitty asked innocently in the buttressed hall. She’d seen James break every law and rule of the old college.
“When it’s not an act of unspeakable horror,” James hissed, and a vein pulsed in his brow, right beneath a lock of moonlit hair. “These snakes will murder the victim that needs them most. They’re hailed as the future.”
His voice rose over the din of clattering forks and scraping spoons. His outrage mounted over the lines of tired college students.
Snow clung to their Moncler down jackets and Patagonia fleece. There were damp Arc’teryx boots dripping in the lines from the millpond stream.
“These scum save themselves, pampered at night, knowing the only reason that Finch will lose his life is because his lungs are weaker than theirs. He’s their scapegoat.”
A violinist stopped mid-air. The fanged servers paused. The weekend party chatter died a slow miserable death. A sophomore gasped out loud, yet it did not deter James when it should have.
“What if there were several sick students, what would happen then?” James’s ire climbed ever higher over the air of shocked silence.
No one was permitted to speak against the hibernal ceremony; Sheriff Sangerfield’s department was only twenty miles away.
It was grounds for academic removal and immediate dismissal from the premises.
Regardless, James staked his golden eyes of fury into them all.
“Will they be forced to fight to death in order to earn the right not to be chosen for execution?”
“Survival of the fittest. Very enticing concept, my dearest James,” a voice said behind him. James glowered at the senior elector, Lucien Montclair. “Why risk the healthy students for a boy soon for death anyway?”
The muscle in James’s jaw quivered in rage, like a deadly arrow nocked in a crossbow. Elliott grasped his hand before it raged towards Lucien’s face. Lucien’s eyes glanced down at Elliott’s palm covering James’s fist in his lap. “Am I interrupting?”
Kitty sputtered with awe. “Are you Lucien Montclair? The rector’s protégé?”
James spat. “He’s a glorified errand boy. Lucien doesn’t even know the difference between the rector’s anus and his heel.”
In the Raedwine Refectory, where students ravaged their five-course meals within the knife-shaped curve of the Marlborough Mountains, James was risking a fiery row with his peers if they heard him insult the rector there. Let alone the provost.
Most of them were not mere students.
They were the daughters of diplomats.
The sons of dignitaries.
The children of ambassadors.
Their expulsion would be headline news and a national disgrace abroad. It would mean the premature end of their political careers, not in the least the termination of their trust funds and the collapse of their political affiliations they’ve spent years forging in the institution.
Former President Nixon sat for dinner with the provost and the rector.
Former President Reagan sent letters to the provost through the rector for the State of the Union.
Former President H.W. Bush was an outspoken advocate of the ceremonies in his time.
The university rector was a vindictive, punitive man drunk on his direct power from the government.
The rector was the head of the graduate institution–AEscwulf University.
Rector Braith Rawsthorne was the reason newer television sets never found their way to the town for long.
In 1981, he banned the personal computers that connected the other regions of North America together, which kept them isolated.
He severed the hospital shipments of the permanent artificial heart in 1982.
He stated it was an extraneous cost. The rector would have no hesitation to send a letter to the provost to ban the students from their only chance at a highly-funded political campaign or a free education.
No one would risk their career future–federally blacklisted by AEscwulf College–because of James’s mouth. There were orphans that had to gather their weight for the winter while they could.
The orphans already were treated as a burden to the affluent town, where they were considered a year older than they were in order to make them eligible for the ceremony at twenty-one. Even if they were only twenty.
The Crucian League was benevolent to accept Elliott with the scholarship for all orphans and foster children. None of the students, least of all the foster children, held the societal status to challenge the rector and his electors. None of them could afford a four-year degree elsewhere.
Yet, James gripped his silverware as if they were weapons of war. “Finch Hudskin is dying, and that is why you cowards will send him for your ceremony.”
Kitty whispered the laws of the institution. “You’re eligible for the honorarium this year. Please, don’t do this.”
James forced himself to calm down; he untied his expensive bow tie. A swan fluttered in the distance. The flutists and clarinetists delivered their enchanting swan song to the autumn.
However, Lucien stole a morsel of the nineteenth century chocolate. He curved his impetuous mouth around the confection.
“Listen to the girl,” Lucien condescended, patting James’s shoulder. “Even she has the basic sense you need, Wilde. Finch will gasp his dying breath and there is no reason another one of us should die instead. Why let two deaths happen for a welder?”
“Your death should happen,” James fumed in hatred beneath his breath, trying and failing to control his righteous anger.
Finch had been James’s friend longer than anyone in his life.
“Every year, all of you stand by and witness as a student is put to death in the name of that sadist tradition–and you do nothing. You are complicit in their killing.”
The entire reason James worked himself nearly to death to become a senator was to gain enough influence to end the rituals. With money and fame, he could speak the language of the government power structure, but he couldn’t do that if none of the students even supported their own liberation.
He couldn’t enact any sort of change without strength in numbers. He cursed beneath his breath as he removed his batwing cuff links. “Spineless fucking cowards.”
Lucien appeared outwardly unaffected, though Elliott noticed Lucien’s teeth were set tight at the accusation of cowardice. “Provost Tytheridge would never allow us to question the sacrifice.”
What he truly meant to say was their wealth class would never allow it, either.
The ceremony kept the younger generations in line.
The older generation lived in fear that the younger generation would remove them from power and return the power to the labor class, effectively eradicating their own economic class. The first era without a wealth class.
“The provost is slaughterous and callous. By definition, he’s an execut–” James held his breath at the last second, feeling Elliott squeeze his knuckles as tightly as possible.
James forced out a short breath of restraint.
He kept the word executioner between his teeth.
“Finch is a single child. You’ll devastate his parents and his aunt. Don’t you even care?”
“Finch is nearly twenty-two,” Lucien retorted with an air of dismissal. “Two decades is generous in his condition. He was fine when he was an enforcer on an undefeated team; but he isn’t a star hockey player any longer. This is an act of mercy for his lungs in the upcoming harsh winter.”
“Then this winter you should have no trouble offering yourself at twenty-one, a few months shy of twenty-two yourself,” James sniped at him.
He disregarded the third course of venison from the servers, his voice intensified.
“There are twelve other electors, you are not necessary in the college. Your precious letters can smolder with you.”
Lucien leaned towards James’s ear with impertinence.
“Why deny you the opportunity to volunteer yourself, James? Everyone knows you ache for death.” Lucien stepped closer.
He straightened James’s dark bow tie, tightening the knot.
“However, it would be a shame to not see your beauty in the tragedy recitations. Therefore, I will warn you to be grateful that you were not selected instead. Heretic.”
Heretic? Elliott questioned.
James snorted, then swallowed his scorched Austrian coffee. “Keep your gratitude.”
“It’s a victory not to be chosen, Wilde, remember that. You must’ve forgotten what victory felt like when your arm went through a windshield.”
“At the cost of your soul and mind, the survival is a Pyrrhic victory at best.”
A wicked smile stretched Lucien’s thin lips. “It’s a Cadmean victory, it’s a Pyrrhic victory, no one cares after midnight. They’re simply grateful to survive. Except Finch Hudskin, of course.”
James speared into his tenderloin with more violence than necessary. “Get bent.”
“If you’ll do the honors, Wilde.” Lucien polished the undergraduate professor assistant pin on his chest. James ignored him as though he no longer existed.
Thankful, Elliott pressed a hand against James’s back, relieved he kept himself seated in the end. Beneath his hand, Elliott felt his erratic, angry breaths rising and falling in his tight chest. Elliott reassured him, “We will think of something to save Finch. I swear it.”
At that moment, Lucien should have left. He’d already won. James had backed down instead of threatening Lucien or Provost Tytheridge himself. Lucien had tasted his precious victory over the indecency of sending a young man to die simply because he was incurably ill. He had won.
A professional opera singer emerged in the waters, beautified in enchanting makeup and attired as Carmilla herself, a soprano’s serenade in her throat. Lucien could have easily departed the refectory in a victory aria.
Instead, Lucien touched his palm onto Kitty’s dyed hair. “If you ever need a mentor, the rector’s office could use fresh skin. You can lick envelopes for me with that soft tongue of yours after.”
Elliott knew then that James would lunge for him. Elliott was right beside him, ready to fracture Lucien’s teeth himself with all of his strength. Except, he did not expect James’s dinner knife to thrust straight into Lucien’s abdomen.
He did not anticipate that James would bleed him.