by Eva Chase
A new girl in Cade’s friend group wasn’t that unusual anyway. His guy friends brought around new girlfriends and chicks they were hoping to turn into girlfriends or at least one-night-stands pretty regularly. Maybe she’d been connected to Roseborne somehow—or maybe he’d been identified by a random observer, or a clue in an article about the beating, or a gazillion other things that might have been enough for a supernatural being to connect the dots.
Cade polished off the rest of the wrap while I thought the possibilities over. He swiped at his mouth. “Sometimes you’ve just got to put people in their place,” he said. “Show them they can’t actually get away with their shit. You remember that asshole sophomore—what was his name? Clement?”
My spine stiffened automatically. “Yeah.” Clement—the prick who’d ended up in half of my tenth grade classes, who’d started cornering me every moment he managed to catch me alone to tell me all the filthy things he wanted to do to me. Punching him in the jaw hadn’t been enough to get him to back off. The next time he’d gone straight for a grope. Unluckily for him, Cade had happened to catch that moment.
“Suspended for a week,” Cade said in a nostalgic tone, rolling his shoulders. “But it was worth it seeing him need crutches for six times longer than that. He wasn’t chasing after any girls for a while.” He caught my gaze, his abruptly intent. “I’d do it again for you a dozen times over if I had to. No one messes with what’s mine.”
His sister. His best friend. His confidant. Hearing him call me “his” had always lit a reassuring spark of warmth in my chest.
At least, almost always. In that moment, I couldn’t help thinking of afterward, when he’d found me in my bedroom, touched me with his raw-knuckled hands and said, “You’re mine, aren’t you? Show me how much you’re mine, Baby Bea.” And even though the turmoil in his expression had unnerved me—or maybe partly because it had—I’d opened up to him in every way I could. If he needed to be that close to me to be sure of me, then who was I to say no?
Now, Cade stepped toward me and raised his hand to my cheek, the backs of his fingers just barely grazing my skin. My pulse hiccupped with the conflicting desires to recoil and to lean into him and accept whatever tenderness he’d offer.
Was he mine too, really? What did I even want that to mean? The bond between us had become so tangled over the years I wasn’t really sure how to tell. He was my brother… but somehow things were much more complicated now.
I didn’t have to decide in that exact moment. A shudder ran through Cade’s body. He pulled back, his wiry muscles tensing beneath his clothes, and I knew before he said anything that the change was coming over him.
“I’ll leave,” I said, so he didn’t have to tell me to. “But I’ll be back again tomorrow. If you need anything—”
He shook his head, his mouth twisting. “Just go. I’ll—I’ll see if I can think of anything else.”
My legs locked for a second, every instinct telling me I shouldn’t leave someone I cared about when he was in distress, but the flash of his eyes as he waved me off thawed my resistance.
I should ask Ryo and the others what they’d noticed around the time they’d gotten their scholarship offers, I thought as I hurried back through the woods. If they could even tell me. I’d known how to ask Cade because it’d been easy to see what incident must have grabbed the school’s attention. I didn’t know any specifics about what had brought the three guys who’d become my allies—and at times my lovers—here.
That would have to wait until at least the morning, though. In the meantime, I had one other plan for tonight.
As soon as I’d slipped into the school building, I darted upstairs to the second floor and went to the art room. Somewhere in the last transition, I’d lost the reward card I’d been using to jimmy the locks, but I had a gift card I might never get to use that would serve the same purpose no problem. I eased it into the narrow gap by the frame and pressed it against the latch.
With a push and a twist of the knob at the same time, the lock popped open. I hustled inside. Who knew how much time I had before the staff caught on to my breaking and entering?
Where would Professor Filch keep his reference photos? I checked each drawer on the teacher’s desk, my heart thumping faster by the second, and then turned to the filing cabinet in the corner with its sprinkling of rust. Those drawers proved to be locked, but I’d learned a trick for that too that might work. Hefting the unit backward with a faint rattle of the shifting contents, I felt underneath it for the bar that would release the bolts above.
There. They clicked, and the drawers slid open at my tug. I riffled through the folders as quickly as I could. At the back of the top drawer, I caught a glimpse of faded sepia photopaper.
I tugged out that folder and opened it on the desk under the light of my phone. The pictures weren’t totally sepia-toned. The backgrounds had that faded yellow quality, but a sheen of color marked the faces, hair, and clothes of the eight student portraits inside.
I couldn’t spend the night in here analyzing them. With a flick of my thumb, I brought up my phone’s camera and snapped a picture of each photograph. I’d just gotten to the second from the last when my hand hesitated over them.
The seventh photograph showed a girl who looked, on close inspection, to be maybe seventeen or eighteen, just a tad younger than me. Her dark hair hung loose to her shoulders and her chin was raised at an angle that looked almost hostile, but that wasn’t what had caught my attention. No, it was the chain with its hint of gold around her neck, the edge of a charm just visible at the collar of her shirt. An edge that looked like the tip of a bird’s wing.
Like the necklace Professor Hubert kept tucked inside her own blouse.
Had she or someone else stolen it from this girl? Was it tied to her power somehow? I squinted at the picture in the tiny pool of artificial light, and an eerie impression crept over my skin.
The girl’s hair was styled very differently from Professor Hubert’s, and it wasn’t quite as dark a brown. I didn’t think her eyes were the same shade, and the shape of her face was softer. But her gaze had a piercing quality that felt familiar in a way that ran through me down to my bones.
She couldn’t be the same person, right? From the look of the photographs, they’d been taken several decades ago, and I’d have placed Hubert in her forties. I never would have noticed any resemblance at all if the necklace hadn’t caught my eye.
But then, who could say what was plausible when supernatural powers were in the mix? This girl could have been a long-ago relative… or some strange magic could have carried her across the years and reshaped her features.
A faint groan emanated through the building. My body went rigid where I stood. It might not be anything other than the foundation shifting, but I shouldn’t have lingered here as long as I had. Any second one of the professors would burst in and catch me.
I snapped pictures of the last two photographs as quickly as I could, shoved them all back into their folder, and wiggled that into its spot at the back of the filing cabinet. Tucking my phone into my purse, I slunk to the door.
No sound carried from outside. I’d been in here at least fifteen minutes. During my last cycle, the dean had caught me in his office in less than ten. Professor Marsden had interrupted Jenson playing one of the music room instruments in no more than two. Surely one of them would have noticed I’d disturbed the school’s security by now. Was someone waiting out there to catch me in the act?
I waited too. As the minutes slipped by, a growing tickle of excitement expanded through my chest. No one came.
I eased open the door and found the hall on the other side empty. As far as I could tell, no one was stirring in the whole school.
As I crept down the hall to the dorms, the tickle rose higher, tinged with anticipation now. I’d managed to shake the staff’s power to wipe my memories this time around. What if I’d managed to escape more of their magic than that? By all appearances, they could no l
onger detect when I snuck into places I wasn’t meant to be.
Imagine all the things I could do under their noses now.
Chapter Eight
Trix
“Do they have what you’re looking for in here?” Ryo asked.
“I’m not sure yet.” I dug through one of the toolboxes on the shelving unit in the maintenance shed off the side of the school. We’d already poked around through the equipment in the carriage house but hadn’t turned up anything I thought I could use in there. “If I’m out of luck, I guess I’ll make do with a knife from the kitchen or something.” There was an axe leaning against the wall near the cot, but that was probably too big and unwieldy for this specific purpose.
A whiff of dust wafted up from the toolbox. I couldn’t restrain a sneeze. Ryo grinned from where he was standing by the door, which we’d left ajar so he could keep watch for any staff or students I didn’t trust coming this way. “Obviously you’re the first person to bother trying to fix anything around here in a long time. Well, if you can call carving a hole in a wall ‘fixing.’”
“If I carve it right, I’ll fix a whole lot of things,” I muttered, moving to the next shelf.
I hadn’t slept much last night, my mind spinning with the possibilities of being able to take covert action without the staff catching on. The one thing that was clear to me was that the school’s power was tied to that underground rosebush. If I could cut off the source, then no one should be able to stop us from leaving. I could hope the curses that gripped all the students would fade too.
But to get to that twisted plant, to figure out the best way to tackle it, I had to get back into the secret basement area. As far as I knew, it had only one entrance, and that was secured by a heavy padlock. I’d only managed to break through the door before in a hasty, desperate maneuver involving one of the shields from the suits of armor—a maneuver I couldn’t replicate, even if I’d thought I could manage that without alerting the staff just from the clatter it’d make, now that they’d removed those shields.
So far neither I nor the guys had come closer to getting our hands on the key to that padlock. I wasn’t willing to wait around assuming that we eventually would. But if I could have enough time to myself undetected, there was another option.
The secret basement stood next to the regular basement we students had access to for laundry duty and other chores. All that stood between one and the other was a single concrete wall. If I could chip away a passage just large enough for me to squeeze through without it being discovered, I’d have access to the staff’s creepy base of operations.
How thick could that wall be? A foot? Two at most? If I could just get my hands on a halfway decent—
“Ah ha!” My hand closed around the handle of a sturdy-looking chisel, the whole tool solid metal and almost as long as my forearm. A speckling of rust colored the surface, but nothing serious. I brandished it for Ryo’s approval. “Now we’re talking.”
I’d already tucked the hammer I’d found into my purse. I set the chisel in with it. The end poked out, but I could cover that with my arm.
Ryo gave me a light clap, still grinning. “It certainly doesn’t look like anyone will notice they’re missing.”
“Nope. The trick now is going to be finding a spot to tackle the wall where people won’t notice the hole.” I wasn’t optimistic enough to think I’d pull the whole scheme off in a single night.
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”
I let out a rough laugh. “I wish I felt like I did.” The doubts that I’d been grappling with along with my plans surged up. “What if I do get caught, and they manage to wipe my mind this time, and I lose even that advantage? What if I pull this off, and everyone’s just stuck the way they are now instead of it helping them?” I might condemn Cade to a lifetime as a monster if I handled this wrong.
Ryo stepped up to me and tucked his arm around my waist. “You’ve got this, Trix,” he said in that gentle, mellow way of his. “The fact that you’ve already managed to pull this much over on the staff is amazing. I’m honored just to be here watching.”
I rolled my eyes at the effusive praise, but at the same time I couldn’t help smiling. I’d admitted those doubts to Ryo because I’d known he’d reassure me, hadn’t I?
The thought brought a weird wave of emotion with it, guilt and uncertainty rising up under the relief. Who was I to go looking for comfort when I owed it to at least one person here to make things right because of what I’d done? Ryo didn’t know the worst parts of me—he couldn’t know more than fragments of my history. I could feel that I’d never let myself reveal more than that.
And who was he, really? Cade had warned me against him. I didn’t know what had brought him here or what curse he was operating under. Maybe I hadn’t wanted to know because it was so much easier to survive here when I had someone I could turn to, but that was the kind of thinking that got you screwed over.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Can I stop you?” Ryo teased, but a shadow crossed his face as if he suspected where this conversation might go.
I had to phrase the question right so that he could answer it. It’d become clear during my time on campus that Roseborne’s students couldn’t outright say what they believed they’d been brought here for or how they were being punished for those actions. But more general questions about their past were fair game, even if those ended up leading to the same answers.
I let my hand come to rest on Ryo’s arm as I spoke, where I’d be able to feel his response in his body as well as watch it. “You’ve hinted before that you’ve got a lot on your conscience. What was so bad about your life before you came here?” What awful thing did you do?
The muscles in his arm tensed as I’d thought they might, but he kept holding my gaze. “You don’t remember any of that? We talked about it once, at least some of it—but it was a while ago.”
I shook my head. “Everything before the last time is still pretty sketchy.”
“Well…” He dragged in a breath and exhaled slowly. “If you want to know, then you should. I wasn’t trying to hide it, I just… don’t like talking about it. I can’t even tell you how ashamed I am when I think back to those last few years, not that feeling bad about it makes up for anything.
“It’s a pretty mundane story, really. In high school I was bored and started hanging out with some friends who were into various recreational substances. The drugs added a little spark when things were dull. But I tried harder and harder stuff, and ended up hooked—meth is fucking brutal. It turns you into a vicious, heartless person.”
As he spoke, my own stance had stiffened. Ryo let his hand slip from my back as if he were afraid I’d resent the contact. He looked away for a second before meeting my eyes again. “I stole all kinds of things from my family. I said horrible things to them I can never take back. I destroyed every real friendship I had, sometimes over and over, in more ways than one. I—”
I tightened my grip on his arm, and he stopped with a questioning expression, braced as if prepared for me to berate him for his sins.
My throat had closed up. I had to swallow hard before I could speak. “I know what that looks like. My birth parents—I don’t remember a lot from back then, because I got taken into foster care when I was five, but I know the drugs meant more to them than I ever did.”
Ryo’s eyes widened. “Shit. I didn’t know—you didn’t tell me that before.”
I guessed I’d never been comfortable sharing that much when it’d seemed I’d only known him for a matter of days rather than the months I knew it was now. I hesitated over my next words. “I’ve had friends who got caught up in that kind of life too. It’s not— It’s awful to watch and awful to be around. I’m glad I didn’t know you then. But you’ve obviously found a way to be more than an addict too, and that matters.”
It wasn’t like me. I’d hurt someone with nothing more than my own emotions and selfishness screwing with my
head.
For a second, Ryo didn’t speak, only gazed down at me as if he didn’t know what to make of that statement. Then he leaned in and kissed me, quick but hard. He left his head bowed next to mine afterward.
“I’m trying,” he said, the hoarseness in his voice deepening. “Meeting you helped me see that I could do something that mattered for someone else, even here… even if I haven’t gone about it in the best ways all the time.”
My gut twisted. If he realized how messed up I was…
Even the person who’d cared about me the most hadn’t been able to stand keeping me this close for very long.
I forced myself to put on another smile as I eased back. “I’m not going to complain. Compared to how everyone else here has treated me, you’ve been a saint.” I hefted my purse, much heavier now with the tools in it. “But I’d better get on with my mission before anyone wonders why we’ve been hanging out in here so long.”
Ryo searched my face as if he suspected there was more to my abrupt shift in topic than I was letting on, but he didn’t push. He never did, did he? He was just there, waiting for me to open up in my own time. Trusting that whatever I offered him then would be worth it.
We parted ways as we came into the school. I headed straight down to the basement on the left-hand side to consider my options, a perfect excuse to bury the emotions prickling inside me even deeper.
The basement hall the students had access to was short, just a few rooms branching off from it. The laundry room at the bottom of the stairs stood to the right—the same direction as where the staff’s secret basement lay. No one was using the ancient machines in there right now. I wandered in and scanned the room.
The far wall would be the one I needed to chisel my way through. A row of three industrial-sized dryers stood along it. That might be just what I needed. I crouched down in the musty-smelling space beside one, set the tools out of view behind it, and then gave the machine a testing heave.