by A. R. Kahler
It was little surprise, then, when—halfway through spring term last year—Ethan pulled me into a closet in the ceramics studio to show me a ladder leading up to the roof. We’d spent many late nights out there, bundled in thick coats and watching the stars turn. We’d even seen the aurora once, and in that moment I figured that if heaven existed, that’s what it looked like.
Chris and Ethan were already there when I arrived. With everyone at dinner, the studio was empty: Not a single throwing wheel was taken, and the silent air was chilled and smelled of clay. I tried to push down the idea of Mandy’s ghost lingering in the corners, working eternally on the project she never got to truly debut. It didn’t work.
“About time,” Ethan said, giving the splattered clock on the wall a knowing look. Everything in this room was coated with clay, some of it probably from the early days of Islington.
“I’m two minutes late,” I said. “Elisa was making small talk.”
“Whatever, boss,” Ethan replied. Chris just chuckled to himself, watching us with amusement.
“Shut up,” I told him, and pushed past them toward the back room.
The closet stored all the old equipment and clay: Potter’s wheels were stacked together beside rain barrels filled with water and hidden clay. A single bare bulb hung from the ceiling, but I didn’t bother clicking it on. Chris closed the door behind us and I flicked on my tiny keychain flashlight, a must-have when living in the woods.
There was a metal ladder in the far wall, hiding behind a few cardboard boxes. Ethan moved toward it and shuffled the boxes aside, trying to be quiet but ultimately failing.
“You sound like a drunk rat,” I muttered. I kept an ear near the door, straining to hear if anyone was coming in to finish work.
Ethan just grumbled something under his breath. Then, after another shuffle, said, “Got it.”
“Ladies first,” I said, gesturing to the now-clear ladder. Ethan rolled his eyes and began climbing. He pushed open the small door at the top and climbed the rest of the way out. Then he leaned over and whispered “clear,” before disappearing again.
I looked at Chris.
“He’s taking this Mission Impossible thing way too seriously,” I whispered. “Of course it’s clear. It’s the fucking roof.”
Chris chuckled, which made me feel warm; I shoved the feeling aside and gestured him toward the ladder.
“After you,” I said.
He winked.
“Enjoy the view,” he replied. I smacked him on the shoulder.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t, in fact, enjoy the view when he climbed. His ass looked quite nice in those jeans. From an artistic perspective, of course. He had good musculature.
Before I could start feeling like a perv, I grabbed the first rung and climbed up after him, making sure I didn’t look up until he was on the roof.
The view of the sky from up here was gorgeous, but it didn’t really give any perspective on the campus; the art building was only two stories tall, and the surrounding pines and dorms were much higher. The flat roof was relatively cleared of snow, thanks to the heating running through it that kept everything from accumulating.
Ethan and Chris were crouched low. There wasn’t much out here in terms of light pollution, and night was already closing in thick, but the last thing we needed was for security to notice shadows moving about on the rooftop.
“Tell me why we’re here again?” Ethan asked.
I hesitated. They were risking their educations to be up here with me, but I couldn’t tell them the full truth. If either of them knew about the drawing or the dream, they’d call me insane and cart me off to the school counselor.
“I just want to see it,” I said. “I want to know what happened.”
“The body will already be gone,” Chris said. He caught himself and swallowed hard. “Sorry. I mean Jane. She won’t be there.”
“I know,” I said. “But I still want to see. If there’s a reason they’re locking it up, I want to know.”
“This really is like Scooby Doo,” Ethan muttered.
“Can it, Scooby,” I said. Then I shuffled along the roof, tracing the hallways below in my mind until I reached the painting studio, Ethan muttering the entire time that he was clearly Shaggy in this equation.
Light streamed from the skylight, and I gave a quick thanks to whatever gods were listening that someone had left the lights on—I hadn’t even considered that before. Ethan and Chris were right behind me, silent as ghosts, save for the occasional kick of pebbles across the slabs.
I took a deep breath, then crouched only a few feet away from the edge of the skylight. For some reason, standing there, waiting to look at a scene I feared I’d already seen in my journal, I felt naked. Exposed. Like the whole cosmos was breathing down my neck, waiting for me to discover some dark secret. I tried to shake it off as nerves but couldn’t lose the feeling. What if there was blood, or if Jane was still in there for some reason, staring right up at me? This was the moment that would tell me if my fears were confirmed, or if this was all some big delusion. Was I ready for that truth?
Ethan put his hand on my shoulder. I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“You ready for this?” he asked. He didn’t ask if I wanted to leave, though I knew he was thinking it.
“Yeah,” I said. I’d have to face this some time. Class would go on. In a few days, I’d be back in that studio, painting and pretending a body hadn’t rested at the foot of my easel. The thought made my skin crawl.
I moved to the edge of the window and looked down.
A thick ring of black paint encircled the space within the easels. It stared up at me like an eye, like a portal to Hell itself, the void within blank and white and crawling with memory. No body. Of course there was no body. But there were notecards on the ground at strategic locations, no doubt pointing out evidence of some sort. Seeing it brought a sick feeling to my chest, a tightening of revulsion like the cogs of some terrible torture device. My vision tilted to the side and I stumbled back.
“Whoa,” Chris said, his arms catching me before I could fall on my ass. “Careful there.”
I glanced back at him, my heart thudding a thousand times a minute.
“Thanks,” I said. I pushed myself out of his arms. “Vertigo.” Which was a lie. I wasn’t scared of heights. I was just fucking terrified. I took a slow breath and went back to the skylight.
“Do you think she moved it?” Ethan muttered. “The still life. Do you think she moved it before she died?”
“Must have,” Chris answered. “Nothing else has been touched.”
For a while we just crouched there, staring down at where our classmate and friend had lost her life not a day before. My heart didn’t slow down. The circle burned into my mind, along with the words scrawled along the top.
The Tree Will Burn
It was one thing to worry that you’d had a premonition about something. It was another entirely to realize that premonition had been correct. My pulse was heavy and fast in my veins, my breath a beast I couldn’t control. I was linked to these deaths after all. And that circle . . .
Maybe I hadn’t run far enough away. The ghosts of my past were still here. And they weren’t just haunting me—they were striking out.
“It wasn’t her,” I said after a moment.
“What do you mean?” Chris asked. Ethan made a noise in his throat, like he was agreeing with me but wasn’t certain why.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the black circle.
“Look at the paint,” I said. “The circle is hers—the flourishes at the edges are exactly like she’d do. But that’s not her handwriting.” I’ve seen those words before, hidden in the pages of my notebook. But this wasn’t my doing, just as it wasn’t my handwriting.
“She was going to kill herself, Kaira. I don’t think she was worried about perfect cursive.”
“No, Elisa was right. She didn’t kill herself.”
“So who killed her?” Ethan
asked.
Chris sat back. I was still transfixed by the circle and the words above it. I could see the ghost of Jane, almost, splayed out against the white, her hair a fan around her head and her eyes open in confusion.
Who killed you? I whispered inside.
She didn’t answer, of course, but the sudden gust of wind sent chills down my spine.
“I don’t know,” I finally replied. “But there’s no blood. It doesn’t look like there was a struggle. But there’s no way she killed herself.”
“That doesn’t sound possible,” Chris said. “If she didn’t kill herself and it wasn’t a murder, why would she draw a circle and just drop down dead inside it? And who would write that and then not report the body?”
I didn’t say anything. Helen was the one who found her, but she was innocent. Helen wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Someone or something else had been in that room. But whether they’d forced Jane to draw the circle or done it themselves, I had no idea. All I knew was it wasn’t a suicide. And it wasn’t a simple murder. This was something beyond mortal doing. I knew this. I’d seen it before.
Only this time, I wasn’t the one who’d accidentally called down the gods.
We parted ways after coming down from the roof. The ceramics studio was empty and the whole of the arts building felt like a tomb. I think we were all reeling from the weight of our discovery; we needed to process. And we artsy types often processed best on our own.
Ethan left us outside the building to go wait for Oliver’s practice to finish, and Chris walked me back to my dorm before giving me an awkward hug and returning to his. There was something so distanced about that parting, yet also heavy with closeness. We’d shared something big, and that both bound the three of us together and forced walls between the spaces. I knew, as I watched Chris walk down the road to Rembrandt, that things between us would never be the same again. And seeing as things with Chris had only just begun, I had no clue what that would spell for the rest of our . . . friendship.
But I knew one thing: These suicides weren’t natural. They weren’t human. And I knew precisely who to talk to to figure it out. It was time to talk to Munin.
“How was dinner?” Maria asked from behind the desk.
I had to intentionally keep myself from getting defensive or wondering if she somehow knew what I’d been up to.
“Pretty good,” I said. “Cookies for dessert.”
“As always,” she said. Then another girl came in from one of the halls and asked something about the Internet, so I took the opportunity to bail.
I wandered up to my room where Elisa was hard at work on calculus and, feeling guilty for not actually getting any work done, pulled out my own academic homework. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but getting wrapped up in essays meant I didn’t have room to think about Jane or the circle or the strange correlation to Brad’s death. Or what I was going to do about all of it.
I knew the risk. I knew what toying with the gods would do.
But if someone was meddling in things they shouldn’t, I needed to figure out how to stop them. Before they made a few deaths look like mercy.
• • •
Elisa left around nine to go sleep over with Cassie. She kissed me on top of the head when she went and handed me the last cookie from our old package.
“For luck,” she said with a grin, then walked out, already in her panda pajamas.
I did work for a little while longer. A part of me considered calling Ethan, but I figured he’d be busy with Oliver. Then I considered calling Chris, which was stupid because I barely knew the guy. Still, the fact that I even considered it made me feel strange. I knew I couldn’t fall for him, not without spelling disaster. But a part of me—the part of me that remembered how his hand felt brushing mine, or how his eyes looked past all my walls—wanted to. It wanted to very, very badly.
I pulled out my notebook and a pencil that wasn’t charcoal and left it on the shelf. Just in case my dreaming mind decided to divulge any more information. My brain was a cesspool as I lay there in the dark, staring at the shadows stretching along the walls. Jane and Mandy were both dead, and there was no way any of this was a coincidence. But how it was related to me . . .
The gods require blood.
The thought flickered through my mind, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it.
Brad deserved it and you know it, hissed my inner voice. He raped you. He would have done it again, too. Maybe to you, maybe to someone else.
“No one deserves to die,” I whispered to the darkness. Outside the window, a raven fluttered past.
But in your eyes, in that moment, he did. Munin’s voice rang in my head like a judge’s gavel. I couldn’t tell if he was mocking or praising me for it.
I squeezed my eyes shut to block out the bird, but the darkness behind my eyelids was home to a far worse scene. Munin was the bastard bird of memory; his magic was far more cruel than mine. He wouldn’t let me forget. Ever. And as the darkness behind my eyes closed in, the memory of the night I’d lost myself filtered back.
I was curled on the tiles of the bathroom, orange light filtering through the window. Steam clung to my naked, raw skin, made my lungs rasp. I’d spent a good thirty minutes under the scalding water, trying to get clean, trying to burn away Brad’s fingertips and kisses, the scent and taste and stick of him.
It hadn’t worked.
So I rocked there against the cool, slick tiles, trying to find numbness. Trying to find a place outside of myself, a place Brad couldn’t violate. A place I was safe.
But I knew—I would never be safe. I would never be whole or clean again. Brad was just another reminder that I was unloved and unworthy. My friends didn’t give a shit. My real parents had given me up when I was born. Even though I had a new family, they couldn’t put me back together; I was broken from the start. No one could love something that was broken.
The reality was a bell that pushed the shadows away: Nothing in my life would change. I would always be Kaira the outcast, the girl who never fit in and never felt safe. Nothing I did would change it. I was damned, marked from the very start.
The only thing I could do was end it.
As I grabbed the hair shears from the vanity, I cursed Brad under my breath.
“Who’s weak now?”
He told me I’d never be strong enough to get rid of him, that I’d always come crawling back, that this was all my fault. So I would make sure I never got the chance to screw up again. I would never crawl back. And I would never let someone else hurt me.
I cut long and deep. I barely felt the blade pierce my wrist; steel slid through flesh, gentle almost, a stark contrast to how Brad had entered me. The only similarity was the tears. I couldn’t stop crying. By the third slice my face was as wet as my forearms. But I didn’t want to risk recovery. I didn’t want to show that weakness, the hope that maybe someone would rescue me. No one would rescue me. I wasn’t worth rescuing. Not after what he’d done.
My hands shook. I forced myself to stay standing. The room swam around the edges, shadows shifting, sinking, sucking me under.
“This is for you,” I hissed. I stared into my eyes in the mirror as I said it, unsure if I was talking to Brad or myself. I had been weak. I’d let him do this to me. And now I’d never be weak again.
The scissors dropped from my useless fingers after the sixth cut. I braced myself against the sink, let the blood swirl down the drain. I didn’t want Mom and Dad to have to clean up too much.
I kept staring at myself as the room inked out. Watched my eyes as they shuddered, as my whole body trembled. And when I couldn’t stand any longer, when I felt my knees collapse and the floor rush up to hold me, I kept watching the mirror. Because the mirror wasn’t showing my eyes anymore. A girl reflected back. A girl with purple eyes and raven’s hair, her pale flesh glowing like a moon.
The room churned with darkness and feathers, shadows seeping into everything.
“Yes,” the girl replied. “But not yours.”
I laughed then, because I was dying. Or I was dead. And this was ridiculous because death was supposed to be scary, not a naked teenage girl with a bird on her shoulder.
“Why?” she asked.
She didn’t need to say more. I knew everything she meant in that word.
“Because he hurt me,” I said. I still couldn’t move. My blood pooled around me and my limbs were numb. Finally. Numbness felt like heaven. And still we talked there, on the tiles of the bathroom, as the world floated orange and red and black.
“This is your revenge?” she asked. “To give in?”
“What else could I do?”
She smiled.
“What would you do? If you could do anything? Be anything?”
“I’d kill him.” The words fell from my lips like bullets. I knew, the moment I said it, that the deed was as good as done.
“As you will, so shall it be,” she said. “His death will be in your honor.”
“What’s it matter?” I muttered. The room was spinning now. I tumbled down the whirlpool, a stupid grin slashed on my face. “I don’t have any honor; I’m already dead.”
“Your time has not yet come,” came a voice, deep and resonant like the movements of the shadows in the darkest depths of the ocean. It wasn’t the girl. It was the bird. “Your death will serve a greater purpose than this. When the gods battle, you will be their sword and shield. You were born for greater things.”
I laughed. This was hilarious. I was dying, and these hallucinations were every dream of grandeur I’d ever had. Too bad they were lies. The girl leaned down and placed one hand on each of my wrists, right over the cuts. Her hands weren’t cool like porcelain. They burned.
“Blood for blood,” she said, her smile widening. “An exchange. A gift.”
“Remember what we have done for you,” Munin said. I knew his name in a flash of insight. We all knew his name. We just never remembered. “When the time comes, when we come calling, remember this exchange. Remember this power.”