by Eva Chase
A knife, and… A pinching sensation formed farther back, behind the thump of my heart. Like a petal crinkling, a stem shuddering. A taste like decayed rose flooded my mouth. I had to clamp my teeth together to hold back the urge to vomit.
I’d gotten out, but not in a way that had made Roseborne totally happy. Somewhere out there, my rose was fading.
Chapter Eleven
Trix
I stumbled out of Ryo’s vision of his family, and my back smacked into Elias’s chest. He gripped me by the arms from behind—he was the one who’d yanked me out. My head spun as I took in Ryo slumped on the desk, the ghostly figure of his mother still holding him in her grasp. Hadn’t what I’d said to him been enough?
“I have to go back,” I said, shifting forward.
Elias’s grip tightened just slightly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to interrupt, but—”
He tugged me to the side, and I realized we had extra company. Another translucent figure had passed through the wall: a young man, maybe seventeen or eighteen, with carefully combed blond hair and… one of those maroon school uniforms the spirits who ran this school all wore. The kind I wasn’t sure had been worn by anyone since 1927.
Something about the guy’s face stirred a quiver of recognition. Had I seen him in the yearbook too?
He couldn’t have been looking for any of the three of us. He shouldn’t have been. Our grandparents hadn’t even been born when he’d have worn that uniform. But he was making his way—more slowly and uncertainly than the other apparitions I’d seen, but still with a clear sense of purpose—around the teacher’s desk, his gaze fixed on me.
Elias let me go when I went still, but he stayed next to me, his hand a reassuring warmth on my side. “It was obvious as soon as he came in that he was heading for you. I don’t know why, or if he’ll actually grab you. I just didn’t want to find out what would happen if he did while you were still mixed up in Ryo’s ghost.”
Yeah, that might have been even worse than the visions usually were. We weren’t really meant to be able to slip into each other’s encounters at all. A collision between two could have been disastrous.
I edged to the side, and the ghost adjusted his course to follow me. There was no denying that it was me he was after. It didn’t make any sense. All of the other apparitions we’d tangled with so far had been people from our lives—and not just any people, but people our actions had made a profound impact on. Some kid from nearly a hundred years ago didn’t fit the pattern at all.
Maybe he wasn’t part of the same pattern. Maybe a different sort of ghosts had been freed by my shattering of the basement rosebush as well. My mouth went dry, but I stopped backing away, propping myself against the side of one of the student desks instead.
“I need to find out why he’s coming to me—what he wants,” I said. “There’s got to be a reason. It might be something that helps us figure out how to escape this place for good.”
“Or he could hurt you,” Elias pointed out, his stance tensed.
“I think I’ve got to take that risk. There are a whole lot of other things here we already know will hurt us if we don’t deal with them soon.” I looked to Ryo, trapped in his own ghostly conflict, and my stomach twisted. “When Ryo wakes up, tell him I’m sorry I couldn’t see the whole thing through.”
“He’ll understand,” Elias said. “He—”
Before he could say another word, resolve hardened the features of the ghostly boy. He leapt across the last few feet between us and drove his filmy hands into my abdomen. Elias’s voice, the room, and everything else around me whipped away.
With a jolt, I was outside. Outside on the lawn behind the main school building, standing in its shadow at the edge of beaming late-afternoon sunlight. I’d never seen a sky that clear and blue over Roseborne in my present reality. The breeze carried no hint of roses today, only freshly mown grass and the chatter of the students lounging around the pool or sitting in lazy clusters across the lawn.
All of those students wore the same maroon uniform as those in the yearbooks—the one worn by the eight who’d transformed this place into its present horrific state with their bizarre ritual—although many had shed their jackets in the warm air. I’d been sucked back nearly a century into Roseborne’s history. Why? How?
I glanced down and realized it wasn’t just the people around me who were from the distant past. The body I saw wasn’t my own at all. It was clothed in its own maroon uniform, filled out in very different places from my normal figure. No breasts, no hips, and I wasn’t going to dwell on the unfamiliar equipment I was abruptly aware of between my legs.
I wasn’t Trix in this vision. I wasn’t me. I was a boy—a slim, kind of gawky boy…
The realization hit me like a splash of cold water. This was Winston Baker, my probable great-grandfather. I’d caught glimpses of memories that seemed to be his before. Apparently enough of him was still in me that his ghosts had come looking for me as well as my own.
Apparently enough of him was in me that it’d worked. Did that mean now I had to work out his issues too?
When I raised my head, sucking in a breath to steady myself, I spotted the boy who’d pulled me here chatting with a couple of friends in one of the nearest clusters. He glanced my way with a narrow look as if he thought I might try to join them and was pre-emptively warning me off. Real friendly.
What had Winston done here? What did I need to make up for? How the hell was I supposed to get out of this situation when I only had the vaguest sense of the history?
Several other students joined me in the school’s shadow, distracting me from my panic. Not just any students—my seven co-conspirators. Oscar shot me a brilliant smirk that didn’t reach his hardened eyes, like a welcome and a threat all at once. Mildred came up next to me with a softer smile and handed me… one of the bows from the Archery room? She was carrying one of her own too—they all were.
I took the bow automatically, grasping it and then slinging the sheath of arrows she also offered over my shoulder. “Ready?” she murmured, and my head nodded of its own accord. The panicked chill crept through my chest again. What the hell was going on? Could I even control what happened to me—to Winston—in this vision?
The other students had noticed us gathering. The blond guy whose ghostly form had approached me stood up with his friends, his lip curling into a sneer. “What are you freaks doing now?”
“They think they’re all going to play Robin Hood,” a girl near him said with a haughty laugh.
Other emotions bubbled up inside me—ones I couldn’t connect to my own mind. Anger and frayed resilience and an urge to strike out; a conflicting queasiness in the pit of my stomach. Winston’s emotions from back then.
He’d wanted this and yet he hadn’t.
“Almost like Robin Hood,” Oscar said, raising his bow with an arrow already strung. “Except rather than stealing from the rich, we’re going to cut right to the chase and simply take you down.”
In the space of a heartbeat, he pulled back the string and let the arrow fly. The girl didn’t stand a chance. The arrow stabbed straight into her chest with enough force to propel her backward a couple of steps. She swayed and crumpled with a gurgled gasp, blood blooming across her white blouse.
Oh, God. The rest of us lifted our bows at the same time as if on cue, Winston included. The boy beside Oscar shot his first arrow straight through the skull of a girl who’d just started to scream. Mildred let hers fly into the gut of a boy who sprang at us as if he thought he could fend off our attack with his bare hands. The others marched forward to take closer shots. My feet, as Winston, moved in time with them even as my mind recoiled.
So, this had been the first blood spilled. Our blood and theirs, Oscar had said. Taking their sick revenge for the bullying they’d received. Transforming that violence into the power to torment other bullies and supposed villains across the stretch of a century.
Making Roseborne’s new students
play out their grand victory tradition in the Archery room, none of us knowing the horrible act we were really repeating. I wanted to puke.
The other students scattered across the lawn with shouts and shrieks. No one else ran at us. Another arrow and another whipped through the air; another body and another slumped on the ground. Winston’s arms moved of their own accord, releasing his arrows into the back of a fleeing boy, the neck of a girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The fury and the nausea twined together inside me—inside him—in a searing churn.
“Don’t let him get away,” Oscar called out to the rest of us with a jab of his hand. Then another jab, in a different direction. “She hasn’t paid yet.”
The others followed his orders as if he were a general leading an invasion. We spread out, stalking across the field, picking off the students before they could reach the shelter of the school. More shrieks, more blood, more sickening thuds of bodies hitting the ground, on and on.
I tried to close my eyes, but Winston wouldn’t do more than blink. The effort I put into straining at his arms, trying to hold them back, didn’t budge him.
How the hell did I stop him? How did I get me—us—out of this if he was intent on acting out the exact same horror as before?
The lawn was littered with bodies now, red rippling across the bright green grass. One girl had tumbled into the pool. She floated there, face down, blood spiraling around her across the rippling water.
I swung around, my breath hitching, and there was the blond boy from the math classroom. Somehow I’d ended up between him and his route to potential safety. Blood dappled his shirt sleeve from when he must have tried to help one of his fallen friends. As I jerked my next arrow up in his direction, his legs stalled. His hands flew into the air.
“Please,” he said, all the arrogance and spite drained from his voice. There was nothing left but raw fear. “Please.” He didn’t seem to know what to add to make his case.
Winston hesitated. I didn’t know if he had then or if he only was now, with the decades of reflection that had obviously at least partly changed his views on what he and his companions had done on this day. His hand wavered, the queasiness that belonged to him as much as me surging to the base of his throat.
I grasped that chance with everything I had in me. “Don’t do it,” I said. His lips didn’t move, but the words echoed through our shared head. I had to hope he could hear them. “It’s bad enough that it happened once. You left this behind. You decided it’d been enough. You can change what you do this time.”
“What the hell are you waiting for, Winston?” Oscar hollered from somewhere behind us. “Give that prick what he has coming to him.”
Winston’s fingers twitched. I swallowed hard and felt his throat bob. “Don’t listen to him. He’s a power-hungry asshole who roped you in to this massacre to make it easier for himself. You don’t owe him anything.”
“It’s because of him I’m still here at all,” Winston murmured.
“It’s because of you that I’m here at all,” I said. “Because you left. Because you picked life and love and making a family over tormenting people. You forgave the people who made you miserable—forgave them enough to let Roseborne go. You can forgive this guy enough to let him go now.”
My heart thumped at an erratic rhythm. I wasn’t sure whose emotions were fueling it more. Then, in one sharp motion, Winston yanked down his hands. He dropped the bow and arrow on the grass and exhaled in a rush, his gaze holding the blond boy’s.
“I’m sorry. This isn’t who I thought I was going to be. I won’t go through with it again.”
Oscar let out a sputter of anger, and the blond boy took off at a run—and I didn’t get to find out whether he’d actually make it to shelter in this rewound sequence of events, because the next moment, the vision chucked me out. Away from the lawn and the sunlight and the bodies speared by arrows, through a rush of darkness and back into the math classroom with its chalky smell and two worried pairs of eyes staring at me.
I clutched at the desk I’d leaned against, catching my balance. The blond boy’s ghost had disappeared. So had Ryo’s mother. He’d made it through—he was standing in front of me now, a hopeful smile crossing his face as our eyes met. Beside him, Elias was still frowning with concern.
“What happened?” Elias asked. “What did he do to you? It looked like he affected you the same way the other ghosts do.”
I nodded slowly, reaching to take Ryo’s hand as I did. I wasn’t sure if my squeeze of his fingers was more for my reassurance or his. The tangled emotions that had wrenched through me while I’d been inside Winston’s past self had fallen away, leaving only my own revulsion at the scene I’d been forced into re-enacting, but I knew what I’d felt. I knew how completely his essence had overwhelmed me. I just didn’t know exactly what it meant yet.
“That ghost came for Winston Baker,” I said. “I don’t know how or why, but I’m pretty sure Winston—part of him is with me. Inside me.” My mind tripped back to the moments when that heady energy had risen up inside me before, mine and yet not, bringing memories and unexpected certainty. “I think maybe he’s the power I’ve been able to use against the rest of the staff.”
As soon as I said the words, the rightness of them reverberated through my chest. Yes. It hadn’t just come from him—it was him: his spirit, his will. He wielded just as much power as the other spirits here when I managed to ignite it.
Now if only I could figure out how he and I could shut his former companions down completely.
Chapter Twelve
Ryo
Standing there in the middle of the classroom, Trix looked so determined and yet shaken at the same time that I had to restrain myself from grabbing her in an embrace. I doubted a cuddle was what she wanted while she was trying to work through this revelation, but the sense I had of her own power and the memory of her telling me she loved me brought a swell of emotion into my chest that was difficult to ignore.
We’d already stolen more of a private interlude in this room than I could have expected. We had problems—big problems—that needed tackling now.
“What exactly did you see in the vision if it was Winston’s past, not yours?” Elias was asking, brisk and to the point. He wasn’t letting himself get distracted by mooning over the strength in this girl, but I couldn’t resent him for that. I’d seen the adoration in his expression when the three of us had come together just a short while ago.
Trix bit her lip. I knew before she spoke that it hadn’t been anything pleasant.
“I saw what they did to the other students,” she said. “The ones they crossed out in the yearbook—and more on top of that, it had to be. They… They must have had an archery club back when Roseborne was a high school, and they brought out the bows and arrows and just shot a whole bunch of the kids who were hanging out on the lawn after classes. They killed them. So many people…”
Holy shit. No wonder she looked unsteady. I gave in to my impulse in part, tugging her closer to me so I could slide my arm around her waist. She leaned into me just a little.
“If they weren’t afraid to spill their own blood, I guess it’s not a surprise they were happy to do it to other people too,” I said.
“Yeah. I’ve gotten the impression the other students were pretty awful to that group. Like, to the point of physically injuring them. But still…” She shuddered.
“And your Winston went along with it?” Elias said. “How did you—or he—get out of the vision?”
“He was pretty angry at the students they were attacking too. And Oscar—the guy who presented himself as the dean to us—was pushing the rest of them hard. But I think Winston was torn about it. He didn’t feel happy hurting those people. And he hesitated when he could have shot the one guy. I managed to get through to him at least a little, to talk him out of replaying the whole thing. That must have been enough to release us.”
I rubbed her back. “It’s amazing that you managed to
influence him in the moment. If you could convince him to back down, maybe you can sway the others.”
Trix ducked her head, the orange strands of her hair falling across her face. “I don’t know. He’d already made the decision to leave once, to separate himself from Roseborne. The others have stuck it out. I tried talking to them before, and they didn’t care about anything I had to say.”
“Well, maybe they do the right thing or maybe we force our way out of here without any help from them.” Elias crossed his arms over his chest. Even without his suit jacket and with his shirt lightly rumpled, he made a commanding figure. “We could start searching the staff offices. They could have left behind something that’ll give us a clearer idea of how to take them on.”
His legs stiffened just for an instant as if he’d held himself back from teetering. The suspicion crept through me that despite the airs he was putting on, he hadn’t completely recovered from his collapse. His rose might still be dwindling.
Trix frowned. “I don’t know. I think the spirits were pretty careful not to keep anything too personal or important inside the school, except in that basement room. I searched the dean’s office and came up empty. Although Professor Hubert—Mildred—did have those pictures with Winston in them.” Her gaze turned contemplative. “I think she liked him. Maybe even had a crush on him. It kind of looked like those feelings hadn’t completely gone away when I mentioned him to her.”
Was that why she’d let Trix make friendly with her in the past week—because she’d sensed the connection? I wasn’t sure we’d ever find out for sure. But the thought led me to think of the other person we should have been looking out for.
I wasn’t sure I could call Jenson a friend, exactly. He’d never seemed to respect me all that much—but then, I hadn’t respected me all that much for quite a while. He cared about Trix, and Trix cared about him, and just like with Elias, that mattered. I’d found some common ground with our sort-of math teacher. Having another mind in the mix could only help, and Jenson’s was definitely sharp if nothing else.