by Eva Chase
“Winston was an ungrateful wimp and a traitor,” Oscar snapped. “He had everything, and he threw it away for who knows what. He threw us away.”
“Oscar,” Mildred said in a weak voice.
Ignoring her, he made a sudden lunge toward me. “If you’re so concerned about the gate, why don’t you spend a little more time over there? We’ll help you find your way.”
The edge of his spirit’s light crackled against my skin like an electric shock. I winced and jerked away. With a harsh laugh, a couple of the other figures pushed toward me as well. They lashed out with glowing limbs, smacking me as I backed away with increasing speed.
One of the girls whipped around me, a searing heat slashing across my back in her wake, and I stumbled. As I caught my balance on the ground and shoved myself upright, I glanced behind me. My stomach flipped over.
They were herding me toward the gate, yes—and toward a more faintly glowing figure still standing there. Sylvie watched me with her darkly rimmed eyes, patiently waiting for me to come to her.
No. I wasn’t ready—I didn’t even know what I could say to her, how I could make any of it up to her. My pulse hiccupped, and I threw myself between two of the school’s spirits before they could close the gap that had opened up between them.
“How long does she think she’s going to run?” one of the girls said derisively as I dashed for the school building.
“You can’t keep running, not forever,” Oscar called. “There’s nowhere to hide.”
The throbbing in my wounded calf had spread all the way to my thigh by the time I reached the door. I couldn’t run much farther in a totally literal sense. I bolted inside, slammed the door shut behind me, and limped down the hall as quickly as I could manage.
It occurred to me to check to supposed infirmary first, but my quick search of the small room turned up no first aid equipment whatsoever. What more could I expect from this place? I ended up in the kitchen after all.
The press of the towel I tied tight around the wound offset a little of the pain, but it did nothing for the chaos of emotion churning inside me. Maybe I shouldn’t have confronted the former staff at all. As far as I could tell, I’d only riled them up more by making them remember past offenses. If they did figure out just how tied to Winston I was, they might not give me another chance to run.
How the hell could I help anyone else get out of this mess when I couldn’t even defend myself all that well?
A sense of hopelessness trickled through me as I hurried up the grand staircase. At least the school’s spirits hadn’t chased after me inside, not yet.
A mass of a dozen or so students filled one side of the second-floor hallway. Some of them were holding… painting canvases? Marked with sharp lines that weren’t paint at all. No, those were bits of twigs and thorns, dark and twisted, pierced through the fabric to hold them in place. I had to hold in a shiver as I recognized the remains of the rosebush I’d hacked apart.
“Come on, come on,” a guy said, beckoning for me to slip past him into the apparently sheltered area the outer students were guarding. The ones in the inner circle, who had no shields, circulated with restless murmurs.
As I hesitated, Ryo stood up in the midst of the small crowd. His face somehow both brightened and fell at the sight of me.
“Trix!” He waved his hand in a jerky motion. I scrambled through the other students to reach him and stopped dead at the sight of Elias slumped beside one of the classroom doors. The ghostly figure of a young man leaned over him, half sunken into the wall.
Ryo’s gaze dropped to my leg. A faint speckling of blood had soaked through the towel. He grasped my arm. “Are you all right? What happened out there? Did you find Cade?”
“Yeah. And his monster wasn’t all that happy with me. I’ll be okay.” I motioned to Elias, the much more urgent concern in front of us. “Your blockade here didn’t totally work?”
“We did work out some techniques for getting the ghost-things to back off,” Ryo said hastily. “Unfortunately we didn’t manage to cover every side… and the bits of the dead bush don’t seem to be enough to detach these things once they’ve got their hold on someone.”
“How long has he been out?” I asked.
“I’m not sure… Not much more than twenty minutes or so.”
My fingers curled into my palms. Of course Ryo must expect me to dive in and help Elias find his way out like I had with Jenson. But Jenson had dashed off after I’d done that. Cade had attacked me after I’d entered his vision. Was intervening even the right call?
“I don’t know if jumping in is really making things better,” I said, my voice dropping so only Ryo could hear me. “I don’t know if I’ve made anything better.” Not with this, not with destroying the rosebush…
Ryo’s golden eyes widened. He squeezed my shoulder. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, Trix. But—if one of those things grabs me, I know I’d want you with me, however you can be there. I wish I could do the same for you.”
Could I say the same? Did I really want Ryo seeing the darkest pieces of my past brought to vivid life? He might not say that himself if he’d experienced just how real and wrenching those moments were.
But every second I just stood there, I felt even more helpless. Elias had already been weakened. Better to say I’d tried than to just give up.
Setting my jaw, I reached for the apparition that was gripping him.
Chapter Seven
Elias
When Trix had explained what happened in the ghost-induced visions, I’d assumed they came on like a dream, unsteady and faded around the edges, wispy to the touch. In actuality, the room I found myself in felt as real as the hallway I’d been yanked out of. The linoleum floor was perfectly solid beneath my feet. The whir of the ventilation system carried clearly from a vent near the ceiling. The sharp scent of pine air fresheners covered up most, but not all, of the lingering stale cigarette odor that had hung in the place when I’d first leased it.
Which had been just a couple of weeks ago, based on that smell and the guy standing in front of me in the midst of the few desks set up in the office so far—all of them empty, the employees gone home for the afternoon. I didn’t remember what I’d been doing here in the early evening before Bryan had stormed in, but it wasn’t hard to guess. Filing extra paperwork, going over the figures for the day, charting out new plans… Getting a new business off the ground required a hell of a lot of work, especially when you were spending a significant portion of your day at college finishing your degree.
I hadn’t seen Bryan face to face—only here and there in the halls, at a distance—since we’d had this conversation in reality. I’d forgotten how worn-down he’d looked then: his normally pressed button-up shirt wrinkled, the collar askew. His pale hair fell across his forehead at erratic angles rather than slicked back straight. My gut twisted.
But this was exactly why I’d done what he hated me for, wasn’t it? Because he’d let himself slide; because he’d been spiraling downward faster than I’d felt comfortable predicting outcomes from.
He’d been my best friend since we ended up sitting next to each other in seventh grade, both of us jockeying to earn the top marks and win the most honors, but in a way that’d left us invigorated rather than trying to strike each other down. I hadn’t wanted him struck down—I’d wanted a real challenge. The times he’d bested me, there’d been nothing shameful about it, because I knew how hard he’d worked for the victory.
And then he’d just… stopped working. Stopped even trying.
When he stepped closer, another smell reached my nose: the tang of alcohol. Bryan swiped his hand across his mouth.
“I can’t believe you really did it,” he said. “After everything we talked about, everything I put into it… This was my idea as much as it was yours, Eli.”
What were the arguments I’d given him back then? That I’d come up with the initial spark, so he’d really only spun off from my inspiration? That
I’d been the one really willing to put in the time and legwork when push came to shove? I couldn’t remember the details, six years later. Only the way he’d shouted at me with insults meant to cut and then stomped off. That and telling myself afterward, with nearly solid confidence, that I’d made the right decision and his outburst only proved it.
None of that mattered now. I’d hurt him—wounded him deeply—and if I’d had my head on straight, I’d have seen that at the time. All the same, the need to explain my actions somehow rose up inside me so fast I couldn’t hold the words back.
“I just wanted to get the business up and running so badly, Bry,” I said. “I didn’t enjoy leaving you out. But you weren’t ready, and it was starting to seem like you might never be ready—”
“My mom died out of the blue six months ago,” Bryan cut in. “My dad went off the deep end with grief. How the hell did you expect me to be thinking about financial analyses and employee retention at a time like that?”
I winced. “I should have cut you more slack. I admit that. I was too much in my head, focused on the larger goals. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You didn’t want me to hold you back. You figured you’d outgrown me, that I wasn’t worth your time or consideration anymore. I saw you do it to so many other people we hung out with, but I thought I was better than all of them. I thought we understood each other.”
The way he’d framed it wasn’t so far off from my thoughts at the time. I’d taken the ideas we’d worked on together and gone off seeking investors and resources on my own as soon as it’d become clear he wasn’t in any state to talk about the plans.
I could have kept him on board—I could have written him into the documentation so there’d have been a place for him if he was ready later. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t wanted to risk that he’d end up dragging the company down.
“I had a lot of messed up ways of thinking.” I groped for the right thing to say. “It was how I learned I had to be if I was going to live up to my grandfather’s expectations. He was always pushing me forward, wanting more and more from me…”
“Don’t blame this on anyone except yourself. You decided to screw over your best friend. You decided to throw away eight years of working our asses off beside each other.”
“I know. I know. I’m just trying to show you it didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t maliciousness.”
Bryan snorted. “Oh, that makes it so much better. You simply couldn’t bring yourself to care about anyone other than yourself. I guess that explains everything. Sure, sure, go on your way now that you’ve given your justifications.”
“I’m not—”
A shape flickered into being at the edge of my vision. My gaze twitched to the side.
Trix had appeared by one of the desks at the edge of the room. She caught my eyes immediately, her expression tight with worry. The slight raise of her eyebrows asked a clear question: Did I need her help to get out of this?
Just seeing her brought me back to the real present—to all the things I’d figured out about myself and my life at Roseborne. So maybe I had needed her, if only just to remind me. The rest I should be able to do on my own.
No explanation was good enough to be worth harping on it. That wasn’t what Bryan deserved from me. I shot Trix a stiff smile to say I was handling the situation and turned back to my former best friend.
“You’re right,” I said. “Forget all that. What really matters is that I’m sorry—for how it all went down, for putting my interests ahead of yours, for not being there for you when you were going through a hell of a time with your family… You contributed a lot to the foundation of the business. I shouldn’t have cut you out. I was being a selfish, judgmental ass.”
Bryan frowned. “And is you saying that supposed to make it all better? I hope you’re not asking me to forgive you just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
I shook my head. Trix was watching us, silent and still. I didn’t love that she was witnessing the end of this confrontation, but she deserved at least a glimpse of the damage I’d done in my life before Roseborne.
“How could I expect you to forgive me?” I said. “You were a great friend, the closest one I ever had, and I threw that aside the second it got a little inconvenient. I’ve realized that I threw away far too many things that were more important than I let myself believe while I was chasing the idea of being a success. Which is even more stupid because that idea wasn’t totally mine. Part of me was just trying to make someone else happy. I know how fucked up that was.”
“So, what now?”
I swallowed thickly. “I can’t do anything for you from here, Bryan. If I get out of this place, I’ll track you down and see if there’s some way I can make it up to you. But I can promise you that I’m already challenging my old ways of thinking, the lessons my grandfather hammered into me, in every way I can. I want to change. I don’t want to be that guy who had you storming in here, not ever again. And if I can’t get past it, well, then I’ll die here without hurting anyone else, and that’ll be totally fair.”
“Elias,” Trix said quietly, her voice a little choked. I didn’t let myself glance over at her. Holding Bryan’s gaze was hard enough. He stared at me as if he wasn’t sure how to respond to the words I’d just said. Then he eased back, turned, and walked out the door of the office.
Did that mean I’d succeeded in whatever test this was supposed to be? I couldn’t find it in me to feel triumphant about that.
Trix skirted the desk and came up beside me, taking my hand. I clasped her fingers with mine. Before she could say anything, the scene around us rippled away into darkness.
I lurched back into reality, my eyes popping open to stare up at Trix and Ryo braced over me. I’d ended up sitting on the floor in the hallway, leaning against the wall. Other students stirred around us, some of them still holding the canvas-and-bramble shields Ryo had come up with. A spark of genius, really. I had to give him credit for that. He might act like a slacker, but he had a quick mind under the go-with-the-flow attitude.
Trix let out a shaky breath and leaned in to hug me. I returned the embrace, unable to resist her touch or the warm citrusy smell that clung to her.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I was worried—I wanted to be with you in case there was anything I could do—I guess you had it under control.”
“You don’t need to apologize.” I let go of her so I could push off the wall and leverage myself onto my feet. Then I touched her face, looking down at her. “You did help, just by being there. I got a little off track, and you reminded me to get on the right course.”
“I’m sure you’d have gotten there anyway,” she said.
“Hey.” Ryo touched her side, his gaze intent as he studied her face. “You’ve been doing plenty, Trix, really. No one else can even try to help people once they’re caught up by the ghosts. When I try to grab those things, it does squat.”
Her head drooped. “What I can do hasn’t made much difference. They just keep coming. And the staff—what they’ve turned into now, anyway—they’re watching it all thinking it’s great that we’re going through even more torture.”
She leaned into his touch just slightly, but that was enough to set off a flare of jealousy in my chest. A large part of me had been clamoring for this girl to be mine, just mine, from the moment we’d first connected. All the unkind thoughts I’d had before flitted through my head—about whether the guy in front of me or Jenson, wherever he’d wandered off to, were even worthy of her attention or affection.
I closed my eyes for a second and shoved all that away. Hadn’t I just promised my former best friend that I was doing whatever I could to change? The competitive spirit, the conviction that I was owed more than anyone around me—those were relics of a past I’d sworn I wouldn’t repeat.
Something had obviously shaken Trix’s confidence. I should focus on that. When I looked her over, my attention stopped on a makeshift banda
ge wrapped around her calf. My stomach lurched.
“You’re hurt.”
Trix looked down at the wound as if she’d forgotten it. “It was… Things got a little tense with Cade. And his beast form has sharp claws.” She gave me a slanted smile. “One more thing I need to hash out with him when this is over.”
If we could get through it in the first place. Why wouldn’t she be struggling when even the guy she’d leaned on most of her life was lashing out at her? When her connection to the school and its history put her in the very center of this conflict, where none of us could support her as much as we’d have wanted to?
We could do better than lashing out like her foster brother had, at the very least. We could offer the opposite of what he’d dealt out. Maybe it wasn’t a ticket out of here, but if we steadied her convictions, it’d be worth it to demonstrate how much she meant to us, how eager we were to be with her, united.
How much we were willing to set our selfishness aside to give her a momentary escape into adoration.
I craned my neck. A couple more ghosts were gliding along the edges of our little crowd, but I didn’t recognize either of them. My jacket still lay on the floor by the bannister, the brambles we hadn’t made use of heaped there.
I glanced at Ryo and Trix. “Are either of those ghouls here for one of you?”
They peered at the figures, Trix bobbing up on her toes. “Nope,” she said as Ryo shook his head.
I tapped the other guy’s shoulder. “Grab my jacket with the rest of our broken rosebush?”
Ryo cocked his head at me. “What are you planning now?”
My body balked for a second before I said the words, but I propelled them out anyway. “I think while we have a bit of a breather from these intrusions from the past, we should collaborate by giving Trix a reminder of just how much we’re here for her, in every possible way.”
Chapter Eight