by Jayla Kane
I started laughing, but it wasn’t a happy sound—I sounded like I was swallowing glass. Hunter was staring at me, his eyes hard, and I started shaking my head. “She just said—she said—”
“Jake, I’m so sorry,” Raven called out, Zelle helping her to stand, her arms wrapped protectively around her. “I’m sorry.”
And then I saw Zelle’s face.
“What the fuck is that?” I pointed at her, at her expression. “What the fuck is going on, Zelle?” She rounded on me, her eyes furious.
“You have no right to treat her like this,” she hissed, but I just continued laughing.
“Oh? She murdered my brother.” I staggered towards them, and she took a step back, shielding Raven with her body and fraying her bottom lip with her teeth. Zelle is a little curvier than Raven, but she doesn’t have much meat on her otherwise. She’s the quiet one, though, and from the look on her face I knew she knew something—something Raven didn’t. “Didn’t she? Didn’t we just spend the last four years hating each other because she lied to me—my best friend in the whole world, the girl I thought I was going to fucking marry—she lied to me the day of my parents’ funeral and then she fucking ghosted me. Because she murdered my brother. Right Zelle? Right?”
She was staring at me, her eyes ticking back and forth between Hunter and I. He stood shoulder to shoulder with me, the two of us staring down at her.
But she didn’t give an inch until Raven stood up behind her. “Zelle?”
Silence. The wind tore through the trees, the sound of it like the roar of ocean waves, crashing against a barren beach. The roses that marked my brother’s grave thrashed the ground, tangling into snares.
“I saw what you did to her,” Zelle said quietly, “and I stopped feeling sorry for you a long time ago.” I stared at her, my heart racing. “I felt guilty at first, but not after her freshman year.”
“What did you do, Zelle?” Raven was staring at her too, now, the four of us in a stand-off by the unmarked grave.
“Tristan isn’t dead,” she said, and lightning zagged across the ground behind her, dragging a long, twisted finger through the trees of the Orchard. A spark lit, and smoke and fire filled the air in seconds, then swept over us as the wind carried it away. I waited for the inferno to blast over me, but nothing came. Just wind, and more lightning, sparks of it everywhere, wicked and lovely. The storm was around us, everywhere, but there was no rain—just lightning, just the rattle of thunder in the atmosphere.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice empty of regret as she stared me down. “I just know he’s coming back next week.”
“What?” Raven gaped at her sister, her eyes the same dark blue as the boiling sky above us. “Zellie… What did you say?” Her sister spun on her, unapologetic.
“He didn’t die, Raven,” she said, “although maybe he should have.” She twisted on me, her face a snarl. “There’s something bad in the blood. The Warfields are fucked. You should never be alone with them. Never.”
“Watch it,” Hunter rasped, but she didn’t even look at him. She looked at me, dead in the eye.
“Your brother is alive. When you see him, tell him I said fuck you.” She wrapped her arm around Raven’s shoulders and stalked off, heading towards the driveway.
Raven stared at me over her shoulder, her eyes red, and then shuddered and turned back to her sister.
It was a long time before they disappeared down the end of the road.
And even longer before I could move.
Chapter Twenty
Raven
It took us almost an hour to walk all the way home; it used to take less, when we were younger, when we ran and giggled and skipped. This time, I fought just to stay upright for most of it, for my legs to work at all. When we finally got to the house my tears had dried up and I was staggering less, but still leaning against Zelle for support. We went in through the back way and she helped me up the stairs to the kitchen, ignoring Baby’s echoing hello from the coffee shop as we passed before sitting me down at the round table we used for meals. She wordlessly made me a cup of tea and set it down, the steam rippling in front of my face as I stared down at the scratched wooden surface.
Jake sat here, with me, when we were children. Most of the time we played at his house—the grounds were incredible, and all we had here was a small front yard; what might have once been a lawn in the back was now a greenhouse, attached to the storeroom for the shop. He sat next to me, and sometimes we did homework, or played Chutes and Ladders, or drew pictures of the monsters he was convinced lived in the Orchard. I couldn’t believe… “Why, Zellie?”
She didn’t answer me, instead focusing on pouring a steaming mug of tea for herself, and then she sat down in her usual chair, her eyes focused on nothing.
I waited.
She owed me.
At the very least, she owed me the truth—she needed to tell me why I lost everything that day, why it was so goddamn important I carry a lie around inside, eating away at me—eating away at my very soul. “I thought I killed him,” I whispered, staring at her. Jake’s words echoed back to me: how could you do this to me? How could you live with yourself?
I hadn’t. Not really. I’d lived with his petty torments; I’d lived with my suffering, wore it like armor to keep me away from a life, a real life, one with more than a single friend—I’d foregone so many things, so many things that earmarked the passage of a teen-age girl into womanhood. I thought I wasn’t worthy. I thought I was a murderer. I deserved to be alone.
“Well, you didn’t,” she said bluntly, staring down at her tea. “I sent you around to the other side of the garden, do you remember?”
I did. I remembered everything. She didn’t look at me, just nodded her head as if she heard what I was thinking. “Nobody came.”
“No, no I knew they wouldn’t.” There weren’t that many people left in the house after the funeral. It was a small, private affair, most of the crowd dispersing after the Warfields were interred at the family crypt, at the old church down on Thorn Avenue. “Nobody was going to be outside that day—it was rainy, and cold. Do you remember?”
“Of course I fucking remember,” I growled, and her eyes cut towards me, as if understanding for the first time that I might not be okay with what she’d done. Zelle raised her head and gazed at me, embers sparking to life in the depths of her dark eyes. “Tell me what happened, Esmerelda. Now.”
“I went over to him, and he woke up.” She blinked, and I watched as she flicked through the scene in her mind, the images almost palpable before us, laid out like a movie as she spoke, her voice hollow. “He said… He said a bunch of bullshit, actually, and I told him he’d hit his head and he needed to go to the hospital.” She gulped, her eyes suddenly damp. “And then he said no—no, Lucas would be after him. He needed to go now, and come back later for Jake. He needed help.”
“Help for what?”
“He thought Lucas was doing something bad,” she said carefully, her brow knitting together. “He thought… He said some crazy shit, Raven.”
“What crazy shit?” You don’t have the right not to tell me now, I thought at her, rage beginning to pulse out of me in waves. Zelle could sense it, her tone growing defensive, and she jumped as if I’d spoken the words out loud.
“Shit about mom, Raven, okay? Shit I knew was crazy. But the shit about Lucas…” She frowned at me. “That, I believed. Still believe it, honestly—you know what he is.” Everybody did, everyone that spent any time in that house learned sooner or later that Lucas was a monster. He didn’t play nice when the doors were locked and the lights went out. “Tristan told me he had to get help, get Jake and maybe even Morgan out of there, or something bad was going to happen. And I believed him.”
“So you just… You what? You just watched him walk off into the trees? What the hell, Zelle?”
“No,” she snapped. “I… I had to find a way to make sure you wouldn’t tell people
you saw him out there—he was only supposed to be gone a little while,” Zelle said again, reading my face correctly. “And you have to remember, Rae, I was fucking fourteen years old and I—”
She swallowed, staring at me.
I remembered.
She loved Tristan. Loved him like I loved Jake. Loved him enough to believe every stupid lie he told her, loved him so much she sacrificed my happiness for her own.
I had never been so keenly aware of Jake’s feelings until that moment—never truly empathized with his pain. Sympathized, sure—felt the sting of it in my heart, the barb so deep I could never dig it out, not even now. But this…
“What happened, Zelle?”
“I convinced you that I buried him,” she said; she had. She’d found a shovel while I loitered for an hour on the edge of the garden, waiting, desperately hoping that at any moment she would reappear with Tristan, pale and pissed, leaning against her shoulders. Instead, I finally wandered back and found her patting the ground, covering the thick roots of new rose bushes with clods of fresh earth. She stared up at me from where she knelt, her face smeared with dirt, her eyes red, and I knew. I believed.
“I gave him everything I had—two twenties, a phone card with ten minutes on it,” she said, staring bleakly down at the table. “He didn’t tell me where he was going. He just said they needed help, and he’d be back by the end of the week.”
“Almost five years ago.”
“Yes.”
“But you said he’s coming back—”
“I don’t know why,” she suddenly said, the brutal undertone telling me how she felt about his return. “He just wrote and said—”
“He wrote?”
All those letters… Those pieces of paper she refused to recycle, the mail she burned. I thought… She saw me put it together and nodded, her teeth piercing her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. “It took him a month to get in touch. I was about to tell everybody—that’s when the search was in full swing, and nobody knew for sure where or when he was last seen.” She met my eyes then, full on. “Just like he planned—like he told me. If you thought he was dead, nobody would need to know he’d just run off during the funeral. They’d think he was taken, while the estate was still reeling, and be waiting for a ransom. Nobody would look too hard because the idea of him ditching on the day of his parent’s funeral—”
“You guys really talked this through,” I said, hatred lacing my words. Zelle stared at me.
“I believed him, Raven. I thought—”
“You told me what you thought,” I snapped.
“Nobody started the search in earnest until almost a month, and by then he wrote me,” she said, watching me, her voice hard. “He said he couldn’t tell me where he was, but that he was safe, and he was sending someone to make sure Jake was too. He said not to tell you, please, because he needed more time.”
“How nice, that the two of you had your cozy little story all worked out, while I was convinced I was a murderer,” I snarled, my voice low and deadly. Zelle’s eyes sharpened.
“It dragged on,” she said softly, “and on. And he never came back. And you… You lost Jake, and I thought I should tell you—tell you both…” Her eyes grew dark again. “But then you started high school and he began torturing you and I thought, fuck that guy. Fuck them all.”
“But what about me?” I stared at her.
“I knew you’d go back to him,” she said, her voice flat. “I knew you’d tell him everything, let him back into your heart immediately, no matter that he’d done such terrible things, treated you like trash—”
“He thought I killed his brother!”
“So what if you had!” Zelle erupted out of her chair. “Do we owe them so much? Are they so much more fucking special than us? You’re a kid, you push him down—it’s an accident,” she hissed, staring at me. “But what he did… What Jake did…” Zelle shook her head at me, rage pouring out of her. “That’s not an accident. That’s deliberate—they’re cruel, they’re monsters, Raven. They’re evil.”
“So you let me think this terrible thing to… To keep me away from him?”
“Not at first,” she said, standing upright, her chin high. “At first I did it for Tristan—he didn’t give me a return address,” she said, only one false note of defensiveness in her speech the entire time. “He just sent letters, letters I could never reply to. So I waited, and I waited, and I waited—and by the time I was ready to tell you, I saw what Jake was—how he treated you, and I just…” She shook her head at me, tears welling in her eyes. “I wanted to spare you the pain of loving him,” she whispered, “and now I know… I know I was too late.”
“You had no right,” I hissed. “You had no right to do this to me.”
“I had every right!” Zelle screamed the words, the room shaking around us. I felt a wave of pain tumbling out of her, excruciating and stony, and stood up too. “I had a duty! I had to protect you—”
“You let me think I killed someone!”
“Someone who deserves to be dead!” She raged, the horror of her words so intense that both of us were stunned into silence.
“You can’t mean that,” I whispered, but she just stared at me, her eyes lifeless, flat and cold, and then slumped into her seat.
I left her there and went upstairs. Shut the door to my room. Sat on my bed, and remembered. Remembered everything.
A childhood that was never lonely, even though we were hated and ridiculed—a childhood full of laughter and love, because of the bond between our families, the soft space where we fit against each other, Jake and I, protected from the world. From loneliness, from boredom. Always safe with one another.
A ruthless ending. One person after another ripped out of my life—out of Jake’s life. Leaving him utterly alone, and poisoned by grief.
While I… While I swallowed my guilt, bit by bit, becoming feverish with it—growing grim and tangled inside, like white roots spindling through my insides, the seething pain of it… My whole life, devoted to seeing what was in the Vault, clinging to fairy tales just so I could fix it. Fix everything.
And I made my deal with the devil. I got into the Institute, I became the Sineater.
I became Jacob Warfield’s plaything, to ruin, to release. To adore, to drive mad.
All for nothing.
Now I knew: my entire life, all of the decisions I made in the last five years… All for nothing.
Chapter Twenty One
Raven
I waited four days to hear from him. I went back to classes immediately; I didn’t know what else to do. It wouldn’t do me any good to skip Harvard now, and I wouldn’t be allowed through the gate if I didn’t ace everything at the Institute. I tried to pay attention, to work on everything and organize my notes and outline the papers that would soon be due, but it was like pulling the teeth out of my head. Everything was a whirl of garbled nonsense, tedious, slow, difficult to maneuver and painful, eventually, to try. Finally I couldn’t take it any more and I texted him.
Please meet me at the Office tomorrow, 4 o’clock.
Please.
I knew he didn’t have any classes then. He studied harder than I’d realized, the brief glimpse I had of his actual life resonating as true, and I figured he wouldn’t be partying—maybe he’d already heard from Tristan. I knew I couldn’t track down Hunter; he was a ghost, always had been. I tried keeping eyes on him in high school when I couldn’t find Jake, and gave up when it was just easier to follow around the main target. I could’ve implored Percy for help, but this was personal. It had nothing to do with the Ashwood Society, and I didn’t want to involve him.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I texted Jake, and waited. And waited.
Finally, I just decided to go there and see if he came.
When the time rolled around, I was sitting outside of the Office on the floor, where I’d been for a half hour. It took another twenty minutes before I heard footsteps slowly plodding up the endless stair
case, the heavy footfalls reverberating all around the empty foyer where I waited. I stood up, my heart beginning to race.
It was him.
We stood there, staring at each other for a full minute before he slowly walked past me and unlocked the door. I followed him inside, the plush carpet swallowing his steps.
He looked tired. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his mouth had a grim set to it, as if he were doing something distasteful. When he took his seat behind the desk, I stood there dumbly, wondering if I should sit in one of the chairs.
“I thought you might be at Harvard by now,” he said quietly, and I shook my head. He wasn’t looking at me, his gaze somewhere distant, somewhere not in the room.
“Have you heard from him yet?”
Jake looked at me then, his eyes flashing with anger. “Do you think if I had, I would tell you?”
“Wouldn’t you?” I took a step towards him, my hands balling into fists. “Did it occur to you that this might have sucked for me, too, just a little bit?” I hadn’t spoken to Zelle since that day; hadn’t even looked at her. Baby was frantic, Mom kept telling her sisters fought, but I didn’t have the urge to ever speak to her again. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen between us. “That betrayal you felt—I was betrayed too… In some ways, honestly, it might have been wor—”
One look from him stopped that train of thought. Fine. He could win our pity party hand-off. “The betrayal I felt?” He narrowed those lovely eyes at me; the sky outside was pure blue, tranquil and turquoise, and his eyes refracted sharply in the natural light, green and brown and gold and silver. “Past tense?”
I swallowed. “Tristan’s alive—”
“Yeah, that,” Jake said, staring absently at the desk again. “I’m happy for him,” he said softly. “I… I can’t say I’m not. I…” He bit his lip, exhaustion all over his face. “Anyway. No concern of yours, I’m afraid.”