Arden closed her eyes to block him out. Hating that he could so easily weasel his way back in past her defenses. He sounded sincere, and she wanted to believe him so badly, mostly because she didn’t want to lose him too.
“All we ever do anymore is fight.” Arguments between them had been rare prior to his return at the beginning of the semester. They actually hadn’t fought over anything since the first two weeks they’d known each other. Until recently.
“I want that to stop.” He reached out and tucked in a strand of green hair, letting the tips of his fingers linger over the curve of her ear.
“I do too,” she admitted, and didn’t pull away, though part of her wanted to. But that was the part that kept picturing deep blue eyes and platinum hair. In front of her were hazel and midnight, and the toe curling scent of rose, teakwood, and mahogany.
Mavek was who she had wanted for over a year now, the person she’d dreamed about, the one who’d kept her up on those never-ending lonely nights. She shouldn’t have to convince herself that he was what she wanted, and waste the energy or the time wishing for… What?
“I have a plan, Arden,” he said then, drawing her out of her troubled thoughts. “I’ve had a plan for many months now.”
Plan? For what?
“There isn’t much I can tell you about it other than that,” he added before she could probe deeper. “I just need you to trust me, all right? Trust me, and answer one thing.” He hesitated, and if she wasn’t mistaken, actually seemed unsure of himself. “Answer honestly, no matter how you think it will make me feel. Okay?”
“Okay.” She’d grown used to this automatic response to him, so she gave her assent now without bothering to think it over.
“Do you love me, Arden?” His hand shook where he still held his fingers at her ear. “Do you love me?”
She wanted to deny it, if only to punish him more, but ended up staring back, unable to miss the hope in his eyes. Outside, the supermoon glowed a bright red, seeming too close to them, too big to be real, and she wondered if it was affecting him. If that’s why he was choosing now, of all times, to finally ask her that question.
“Yes,” she told him, because it was the truth, and no matter what he’d done, she didn’t think she could stop.
The corner of his mouth turned up just before a group of Unseelie rounded the house. They were still at the other end of the drive, far enough that she couldn’t make out their features.
“I have a plan.” Mavek rushed on as she reached for the door handle, figuring their conversation was over now that they had company. “I have a plan to keep us safe.”
Arden frowned, not sure what he was getting at.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Come All Saints’ Eve, no one will be able to hurt you.”
The group of fae came closer, heading toward the street, and she saw their eyes reflecting in the bright moonlight. The moonshine lent the pallor of their skin an unnatural rosy tone. As they passed by the car, they turned their heads and gave a slight bow to Mavek, who paid them little mind.
“Come All Saints’ Eve,” he continued, “we’ll be able to be together forever.”
It should have made her happy, excited even. All it did, however, was force her to admit to herself that she no longer knew what she wanted.
“You need to snap out of it,” Tabby ordered. They were at Tollbooth’s eating pizza, but Arden’s inability to follow a conversation revealed that she wasn’t enjoying herself.
She shook her head. “Not until All Saints’ Eve.”
The Tithe was less than two weeks away now and Arden was counting down the minutes. Not exactly because she was looking forward to this all being over—which was true, in a sense—but mostly because she was terrified of the day actually coming. Of having gone through all of this for nothing.
“What if I don’t win?” she mumbled without meaning to, and then winced.
Tabby picked at her slice of pizza, tugging at the pepperoni belligerently. “I’m sorry, but you know this is already pretty hard for me, seeing as how Cole is my cousin.” She bit her bottom lip and rushed on, “And after his father… I just can’t pick sides, that’s all.”
Cole’s dad had passed away in an accident. Arden still didn’t know the details, but when she’d found out, she remembered Mavek telling her about the Erlking and how he’d punished one of his fae for allowing the family member of his Heartless to die. Having lost a parent herself, Arden understood what Cole was going through.
“I would never ask you to,” Arden assured her, opening her single-serve bag of chips. Once the bag was open, she set it back down, right next to her untouched slice of pizza.
“I’m serious,” Tabby eyed her, “this has to stop. Enough with the moping.”
“I literally drove a guy out of town, Tab.”
“And now you miss him. Yeah, I get it.” She twirled the straw in her Root Beer. “How was the party at the manor the other night?”
Arden pushed down the swell of anxiety that topic brought her. “Titania stared at me the whole time. She gives me the chills.”
“Wish I’d seen her.”
“No,” she said pointedly, “you don’t.”
“That’s what Cole says.” Tabby sighed dramatically. “So, you still haven’t met her Heartless?”
“Supposedly he’s in town, but they’re doing a better job of keeping us separate.”
“Tell me about it. I invited Cole, but he said if you were here he couldn’t be.”
“The Erlking must have warned him against having any kind of contact with me.” She shrugged. Mavek hadn’t ordered her to stay away from her competition, but this close to the actual event, she could see why the Unseelie would start getting anxious. Besides, the Heartless weren’t meant to interact beforehand anyway. Running into Cole was purely coincidental, not to mention unavoidable, given her friendship with his cousin.
“Well, he’s coming to the Halloween party next Friday,” Tabby said. “I’m making him. It’s just sad, doing nothing on Halloween, no matter how old you are.”
Arden arched her brow. “Are you forgetting that he does have plans?”
“The Tithe?” she let out a big huff of air. “I know. But that doesn’t happen until right before midnight. And you guys can’t just sit around waiting and worrying. How depressing would that be? No. We are all going to the school’s Halloween party, and we are going to have fun. Normal, regular, college-type fun.”
Arden opened her mouth to argue, but caught herself. She hadn’t initially planned on going to the party, but Tabby did have a point. If she didn’t go, she’d just be pacing at home, dreading eleven-thirty when Mavek would arrive to take her to wherever the Tithe challenge was supposed to take place. Why not try to enjoy what could possibly be her last night in possession of her soul?
“Alright,” she agreed, smiling when her friend shrieked and just about threw herself across the table to hug her. “But I’m not wearing a costume.”
“We’ll see about that.” Tabby returned to her seat and then swiveled around so that she could face the far back corner of the restaurant. “You can come too, Cato!”
The faerie had the decency to pretend he hadn’t been listening in, but they all knew better. He’d tucked himself against the wall, as far from them as possible, in a poor attempt to give them some privacy. Considering his supernatural hearing, the gesture made no difference.
“Seriously, the fact that you guys have bodyguards is ridiculous,” Tabby said. “These Unseelie take this whole Tithe thing pretty hardcore.”
“It does decide the fate of their entire species,” Arden offered. “And what do you mean? Cole has a shadow too?”
“Yeah. His name is Brix, I think? He’s really weird though. Keeps changing his face, so I never know if it’s him or not. I don’t know how you and Cole put up with the weirdness, but I’ve got to admit, I’m actually super glad that come the end of the month, this will all be over.”
“So you get w
hy I’m doing this then.”
Tabby flinched. “Sorry, A. I didn’t mean to remind you of your mom.”
“It’s fine,” Arden insisted. “Really. Seeing the Unseelie drove her crazy, and I see them every day. Trust me, you’re not the one doing the perpetual reminding.”
“Is Ainsley coming back then?” Tabby asked, swiftly changing the subject.
“I don’t know.” She’d been thinking about it, but it was an awkward time for her sister to have to change schools. “She’s halfway through her first semester of senior year. I don’t want to force her to move away from her friends and everything.”
“Do you think she’ll even want to come back?” Tabby had been there to witness Ainsley’s blow out when she’d been told she had to leave and live with their aunt. It had not been pretty.
“Honestly?” Arden propped her chin up with her hand. “I have no idea.”
“When was the last time you two talked?”
“Last week?” Arden tried to remember what they’d spoken about, but came up blank. Usually, it was just basic stuff anyway, like how their grades were, whether or not their aunt was treating Ainsley right, et cetera. The two of them hadn’t been truly close since before their mother died.
“I’m going as a cat,” Tabby said, and when Arden frowned, chuckled. “For Halloween? I was originally going as a faerie, but now… Yeah, so not going to happen. Cats are safe, there’s no way one of them is roaming around with supernatural abilities.”
“Well, actually, there’s this thing called a cait sith—”
“Do not ruin felines for me, Arden Archer.”
Arden held up both hands in surrender. “Fair enough.”
Thornbrooke College put on a big Halloween celebration for its students every year, and even though this was her first year as an official student, it technically was not Arden’s first time attending the party.
Their junior year of high school, Tabby and Cole had convinced her to sneak in with them. All of the buildings had been decorated on the inside and out, even the quad, which had been transformed into a fake graveyard complete with Styrofoam headstones spray painted gray and silver. Animatronic bats and skeletons had cackled at the opening of every door. Pumpkins with colored candles—the types with fake light bulbs that were meant to resemble flames—had lined all of the windowsills and created a trail up all of the steps.
Arden had missed going during her senior year, too busy training with Mavek for the Tithe, and Tabby had gone without her.
Which was finally taking place tonight.
The campus was already packed when she finished her shift at Howl Books and met Tabby outside the Student Center. The decorations all looked similar to what she remembered from two years ago, with a few noticeable additions, like the orange and black streamers twisting around the branches of all the trees surrounding the quad.
Students milled around in costumes, entering different buildings to explore. The school always set up a different theme in each one, and through the open doors of the student center, Arden could see white blobs hanging from the ceiling.
“Ghosts,” Tabby filled her in, noticing where she was looking. “They went all out. They have a projector going so that transparent people show up randomly on the walls. Pretty spooky.”
“How many buildings have you already gone through?” Arden asked, though truthfully, she didn’t really care. She even somewhat hoped her friend had arrived early and was ready to leave so that she could go home. Turned out, this hadn’t been such a good idea after all, and now she found herself wishing that she could just leave and pace her living room.
“Just this one,” Tabby said, dashing any chance of Arden making an exit. “Cole is still in there. He’s fascinated by the dry ice they have in the financial wing.”
True to her word, Tabitha was dressed in a form fitting black leather cat suit, complete with pointy ears and a tail. The latter was so long, she’d had to wrap it around her right wrist in order to keep it from dragging. She cocked out a hip expectantly when Arden gave her outfit a once-over.
“Well?”
“You look like a slutty cat,” Arden said.
“Great! That’s what I was going for.” She leaned a bit forward, adjusting the neckline of her suit so that her breasts popped over the edge a little more. Then she looked at Arden in her black jeans and crimson sweater, and sighed. “I think I have an extra pair of ears in my car.”
“No.”
“No, what?” Cole walked through the opened doors and joined them at the top of the steps. He’d also gone with black, having tucked his jeans into shin high boots. His shirt had a picture of a skeleton’s ribcage and spine, though it was sleeveless.
“Seriously?” Arden couldn’t help but ask. Sure, she hadn’t gone in costume at all, but really? “Why bother trying at that point?”
“Ouch,” he said evenly, not affected in the slightest. “It’s not like I could come in some complicated get-up, not when we both have to be somewhere in less than four hours.”
“And that,” Tabby crossed her arms and made a slashing downward motion like a referee at a game, “will be the last we speak of the Tithe, got it?”
Arden and Cole shared a look, and then ended up nodding in the affirmative.
They’d both had time to cope with what was to come, but this was all still relatively new to Tabitha. The least they could do was placate her one last time before everything changed on them. Yet again.
As the three of them began wandering toward the science building, Arden started thinking about all the changes they’d already gone through over the course of their friendship. First, it’d been just the two of them, Tabby and her. Then Cole had arrived and suddenly their duo had become a trio. She and Cole had dated, making Tabby the couldn’t-be-helped third wheel more often than not.
Then Arden’s mom became sick, so Cole had dumped her and fled. But in a twist of fate, before they could become a duo once more, Mavek had entered the scene. Arden had become even more cold and aloof than she used to be, and her relationship with Tabby had taken a hit as a result.
“We lead complex lives,” she speculated once they were halfway down the main hall of the building.
The school had adopted a mad scientist theme, complete with bubbling colored liquids in beakers set on lab tables, and skeletons dressed in lab coats posed as if conducting experiments. Sometimes the clear string holding up their arms and keeping their heads angled was invisible in the lighting. The sickening smell of burned wood and melted Jolly Ranchers permeated the air.
“You just now coming to that conclusion?” Cole snorted derisively, and Arden came to an abrupt stop.
“You don’t have to be such a dick about it.”
“Um, guys…” Tabby glanced between the two of them.
“I’m not.” He spun on his heels to face her.
“Just like you weren’t being a dick when you left without a word?” Arden was just as surprised by her words as the other two were, regretting them the instant they came out of her mouth.
“And,” Tabby pointed into one of the lab rooms containing a table with punch, “that’s my cue. I’ll be in there when you two are done.”
Arden tried to tell her not to go, but Cole beat her to it. Tabby ignored the plea and left them standing alone in the hall surrounded by fake cobwebs and streamers.
“I texted you,” Cole said after an awkward moment passed between them. He sighed, knowing that was not the correct response, and leaned against the wall as if all the energy had been sucked out of him. “I wanted to tell you in person, I really did.”
“Then why didn’t you?” His departure still hurt her. “I never let people in, Cole, even before my mother got sick. You knew that.”
“I didn’t want to leave, Arden. You’ve got to believe me.”
She scoffed.
“Really. It wasn’t my idea.”
“Really?” she repeated venomously. “Then whose idea was it?”
; “Mavek’s,” he spat, straightening angrily. The truth of it was written in his eyes, in the anger and the hurt pooled there. “He’d seen us together a few times at the hospital. He threatened me, so I left. I’m sorry, Arden, but I was never meant to be a part of this world.”
For a split second she felt her betrayal shift—she’d need to discuss this with Mavek—but then the rest of Cole’s words reached her and she scowled all over again.
“Was it a threat or was it a suggestion?” She couldn’t help but ask, already guessing the answer. “I bet it wasn’t hard to convince you, was it? You got to ditch the crazy girlfriend and her baggage mother and get to your dream school quicker.”
“He told me I should go,” Cole elaborated. “He said that his world would infect me if I stayed. I took that as a threat.” He met her gaze head on. “I lost you too, Arden.”
“Poor you.” Her sarcasm did nothing to mask the fresh wave of fury that swept over her.
“I know it wasn’t right,” he confessed. “I know that. And, look, I ended up stuck in this nightmare anyway, so karma was on your side.”
“I’m starting to figure out,” she took a deliberate step back the way they’d come, “that no one is on my side.”
“Arden, wait!”
Ignoring Tabby’s call, Arden kept walking, picking up the pace when her feet hit the quad. She needed to get far away from the science building and Cole. Her skin felt too tight, and she absently tugged on the collar of her shirt.
As if not fighting for her wasn’t bad enough, Cole had also gone and shattered another one of her illusions toward Mavek.
Mavek. Who’d apparently had a hand in getting rid of her boyfriend, in singling her out, in making her feel lonely and afraid. Worthless. If Cole was telling the truth, then the one person Arden had clung to this past year had actually been the one to tear her down.
Had he purposefully done this to her?
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