It’s as if my throat picks up the icicles outside and nestles them against my vocal cords. I force out a platitude. “What a beautiful way to honor your friend.”
“You won’t mind,” Falyn says, “since you broke it off with Chase. He’s ours now, to do with as we please. Chase will always follow our instructions. Those boys may think they have control over the school, but they haven’t for quite some time. Remember that when you’re tempted to choose sides.”
“Aw.” Willow points to my untouched meal. “Lost your appetite, sweetie?”
Violet lays a delicate hand on my shoulder. “Do you need some water?”
“She needs a new life.” Falyn snorts. “Because this one’s about to get so brutal for her.”
15
The forest must be listening, because as a complement to the incoming Winter Formal, Briarcliff is blanketed in snow for the first time this year.
I’m woken by the seeping cold through my window, as if Jack Frost has come through the cracks with his long, gnarled fingers, gripped my shoulder, and whispered in my ear to look outside.
Shivering, I sit up, wrapping my comforter around my shoulders and shuffling to my single window, the sun rising white and pale over the glittering, untouched snow of Thorne House’s backyard.
The glass is hard, frigid ice beneath the pads of my fingers as I lean in closer to better see the snowdrops clinging to trees, weighing down the branches and stifling the morning bird calls.
My lips pull wide in a smile.
I’ve been waiting for this—for my first sight of snow. I whirl from my window, padding around my room with eager feet as I dress in Briarcliff’s winter uniform of thermal tights, a plaid skirt, and a long-sleeved, white button-down shirt, throw on my winter coat, and slip on my boots before grabbing a to-go coffee and skipping out into the silent hallway.
I didn’t even check the time, but with the beginning sunrise, it must be close to 6:30 AM. No girlish titters can be heard from the other side of the closed, locked doors. I don’t run into anyone during my trek down three floors, not even Moira, as I swing through the side exit and trek through virgin snow to the back of Thorne House.
Clouds of my breath and the crunch of my boots lead the way, until I pause next to a first floor window, cup my mittened hands close to my mouth, and sip my coffee while taking in the muted sounds and glaring white of Briarcliff Academy’s winter makeover.
With nothing but an acre of thick snow at my horizon, sparkles winking with the rising sun, it’s easy to fall into a meditative state, to close my eyes and breathe in the cold, unfiltered air of the nearby forest. I’m immersed in the brief pleasantries of a season that mainly brings blizzards, subzero temperatures, and gray, drab skies, and I’d much rather face the calm of an impending snowstorm than mull over the havoc Winter Formal could bring.
Or the disaster that my time here at Briarcliff has become.
I thought I’d have the upper hand by becoming one of them, but not really being one of them, yet the Virtues test me at every turn, hoping I’ll fall, ensuring I’ll prove my weakness.
Newly-formed icicles on the windowsill beside me crackle against the reflected sunlight, beginning to thaw, and I stare at the uneven spears, my cheeks frozen and my exhales heated, wondering if tonight will finally be the moment I can reduce the Virtues’ hold on this beautiful, deadly campus, by finding enough proof in their temple to bring them to their knees.
Is it possible? Would the Virtues store such damning documents? Piper thought it was. She may have died for unrelated reasons, but she was on to something, hiding codes in her diary and planting founders’ letters in obscure texts where only someone like her could follow the clues.
I could finally get answers, like why Ivy is looking so broken and sallow since becoming the Virtues’ princess, or why Emma won’t tell me what she did that warranted so much torture from a group meant to protect her.
If they won’t—or can’t—tell me, then I’ll break into the temple while they’re all at the dance.
With the sun glinting above the tallest evergreen trees, I turn my back on the majestic view and plod to the front of the dorms, December’s morning bite gifting me with more energy and resolve than a cup of coffee.
The week passes like a frostbitten dream, classes going on as usual, the dining hall—for once—uneventful. On Thursday afternoon, many of the senior girls leave campus at lunch to either drive into Providence for hair and makeup, or have a glam squad come to them in their dorm rooms.
I was so immersed in how to infiltrate the Virtues’ temple without being caught that I neglected to plan for any sort of beauty regime, until my phone chirps in my locker. I set aside the textbooks I was switching out for my next class, reading the incoming text with a hesitant twist to my lips.
Lynda: Surprise, sweetie! I’ve sent NYC’s best to glamify you for your first, amazing dance. We’re so proud of you. Your dad sends his best and encourages you to skip your afternoon classes (I think he’s experiencing a bit of pregnancy brain too, so let’s take advantage!). He even says to invite some of your friends if they haven’t already booked for hair and makeup. Oh yeah—my glam squad is waiting in your room!
I lean against the neighboring locker, rereading Lynda’s text. I hadn’t mentioned a word of the dance to them, and she thought of all this? Immediately, I’m filled with guilt. Guilt over not being a typical high school kid excited for a school dance. Guilt because I haven’t asked Lynda about her pregnancy since I was dunked in the Briarcliff Lake, and she’s ready to pop any second.
Me: You think of everything! Thank you. I’m leaving right now (but don’t mention that to Dad. Hearing that my ditching is actually happening might make him change his mind). How’s my baby sister doing?
Lynda responds immediately: She’s enrolled herself in Krav Maga. Can’t wait to get her out of the wrestling ring she’s built in my stomach. We’re still on track for a Christmas due date, so don’t you worry yourself tonight. Just have fun and tell me all about it tomorrow.
Smiling, I pocket my phone and cut through the academy’s halls until I’m outside the pavilion and on the pathway to the dorms.
That freshly fallen snow I’d been marveling over this morning has rapidly overstayed its welcome, the plowed walkways turning into black-gray sludge under students’ shoes and the wind making the sunny day seem like a lunchtime picnic in the Arctic.
I keep my head down and hood of my jacket up for that very reason, avoiding more icicles on my eyelashes. It’s at that exact moment, with the blinders of my hood and the jerky movement of a light jog, that a hand grabs me at the elbow to twist me around.
I squeak, the soles of my shoes scraping over slippery sludge, but ball my free hand into a fist and swing.
“Jesus!”
Chase ducks just in time.
My breath billows out. I scan the walkway, wondering if we’ll be noticed. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I—?” Chase collects himself. “You almost clocked me in the jaw.”
“I’m jumpy.”
“They won’t schedule your third trial during the day.” Chase shoves his hands in his coat’s pockets. On him, the December day looks like he’s just broken off from a passionate kiss, his golden skin flushed with rose, and his lips red slashes against the white of our backdrop.
“Tell that to the dead rats in my locker a few months ago,” I say. “You shouldn’t be talking to me.”
Chase dips his chin. “All I’m doing is making sure you’re ready for tonight.”
“I think so.” I sigh. “I hope so.”
“Go with what we talked about. What Emma’s run you through. We should be fine.”
I haven’t seen Chase in almost a week, and I’m praying my eagerness to see him, to trace every angle of him with my eyes, isn’t obvious. He’s been speaking through his sister, as they meet at their lake house most nights to discuss how best to break into the Virtues’ tomb without notice. Evidently, P
iper told Emma where she found Rose Briar’s letter, and how there were many more, as well as other artifacts outlining the secret society’s creation.
Piper. Helping Emma. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.
I raise my brows. “You sure we have the right decoys?”
“Practically every chick will be in some sort of white dress and we’ll be in tuxes. We’re covered.”
I gnaw my lower lip. “And the masks?”
Chase nods in the direction of our dorms. “Emma has them. You can thank Ivy for that.”
“I will.”
I’ve unintentionally mirrored his posture by stuffing my hands in my pockets and hunching over, when all I want to do is burrow into his warmth and beg him to take me away to his lake house. Somewhere safe. With him.
My nails dig into my palms as I fight the blooming frustration. “Is that all?”
Chase arches a brow. “You can run along, possum. We’re done here.”
“That’s not…” Chase isn’t asking for an apology for my snippiness, but I feel the need to explain. “I’m stressed. Worried. The Virtues keep coming at me with underlying threats, and I feel like the worst is yet to come.”
Chase replies with a low undertone. “It probably is.”
“Tonight, at the dance,” I say quietly. I force myself to continue, though I’ve avoided asking him this question almost as much as I’ve tried not to run into him. “Falyn said you’re going to make a speech.”
His eyes grow shadows—difficult to do in such a pure, glaring landscape. But in a blink, they’re gone.
Chase lifts his hand from his pocket, toward me, but thinks better of it and shoves it back in. He murmurs, “Your feelings are written all over your face.”
I cast my gaze to the side. “It’s okay if you talk about her. I’m not jealous.”
Chase’s voice is so soft, I only hear it because it’s carried by the wind. “I’m not talking about jealousy.”
I blurt out, “Are you making a speech about Piper because the Virtues told you to?”
“They have their reasons, but I have mine. I’m not their mindless toy, Callie, as much as they’re trying to make you believe it. Whatever they’ve said to you, it’s only the half-truth.”
I search his eyes, amber encased in glass. “You’re not doing it under duress? It’s your choice?”
His breath comes in small clouds. “Tonight has to run smoothly. This is part of it.”
“You’re avoiding the question,” I whisper. “They’re forcing you. What do they have? What is making them so powerful around here?”
One side of Chase’s lips tics up in a miserable smile. “That’s what tonight’s about, too. Answers for you and my sister. Let’s not screw it up.”
Chase spins on his heel, but turnabout is fair play. I grab him at the elbow. “Why do I feel less like a Virtue initiate and more like Howard Mason the longer I put up this charade? He broke into the Nobles’ tomb and wrote about what he found. But then it stopped. His last written words were ‘help me.’”
Chase stares me down, rigid and unmoved. “What are you getting at?”
“You’re meant to be on my side. I’m doing this stupid thing of staying away from you and being a good little initiate because you’ve assured me you want them taken down, too. But there’s so much left unsaid. If you won’t tell me everything, and neither will Emma, how am I supposed to trust that tonight will be okay?”
Chase rests a hand on mine. “Howard Mason is not dead. He’s perfectly fine. And you will be, too. Take comfort that this has been going on long before you enrolled. Your presence at Briarcliff accelerated our plans but didn’t create them.”
I say, firmer, “I swear I’m not checking out.”
“You’re scared. Understandable. But we have your back.” Chase smiles, and for the first time today, it feels like real emotion he’s directing toward me. “I hear you have a room full of powders and gels and shit. Go and get ready. Have fun and try not to look so spooked. I’ll see you at the dance.”
He pries my fingers off gently, and I take a step back, lengthening the distance between us.
“For the record,” he says over his shoulder, “I wish you were my date.”
Hugging myself, I watch his retreat, his blond hair ruffling with the breeze. He strides unhindered through the flattened, slippery snow on the pathway to the academy. I turn in the opposite direction, holding on to the pretense that everything he’s said to me is his honest truth.
16
I can smell them before I see them.
A waft of sweetened, chemical fumes hits me when I reach my floor. That sharp, nostril-singeing scent of baby powder and hairspray vapor that seems to have followed me from Meyer House in NYC.
It’s not a terrible smell, exactly, but one I associate with Lynda’s many summer gatherings when I stayed at her luxurious Upper West Side townhouse with Dad. I’d be holed up in my room, pretending deep interest in a paperback and not focusing on the fact that I was imprisoned, while down the hall, Lynda laughed as her stylists regaled her with hilarious stories, a full face, and gorgeous hair.
I unlock my door with blatant wariness.
“Callie!” a male voice booms in my direction, making me jump. Today, of all days, is not the one to approach me with a yell.
“H-hi,” I stutter out, shutting the door behind me.
I’m immediately engulfed in a superheated room, filled with enough salon tools and foreign products to make an Upper East Side socialite melt.
“You’ve arrived!” The owner of the loud voice bursts forward, his round body, dressed all in black, bouncing toward me like an Addams’s Family beach ball.
I say this affectionately, as whenever I crossed paths with Davide during my rare exits from Lynda’s guest room, he’d greet me exactly this way, his small lips pursed between bronzed teddy-bear cheeks. “Ça va?”
“I’m doing well,” I say, angling my head to accept his air-kisses. “Thank you for coming all this way.”
“Anything for Lynda. And at Briarcliff, no less! Lucky girl. This is Suzanne.” He points to a twenty-something blonde girl, laying out supplies on a fold-out table they must have brought with them. “She will help.”
Davide leans closer, cupping a hand to my ear. “Is your, ah, how do you say, roommate, joining us? We met her, she let us in, but…”
I search Davide’s face for signs of horror, or plain shock, upon meeting Emma, but see none. Instead, his dark eyes are alight with eagerness, his expression open and sweet. “I do not know if she wishes for us to touch her.”
“I can ask,” I say, more out of politeness than in hopes of a positive outcome. Knowing Emma, she’ll have locked her bedroom door from the inside.
“Please do. We shall wait. You two can get ready together, yes? Friends love getting ready together.”
“Sure.” If you can call Emma and I friends.
After heeling off my boots, I head to Emma’s side of the dorm, which is ominously quiet when I knock.
To my surprise, she opens her door almost immediately, but only enough to showcase her narrowed, brown eyes. “You have uninvited, very fragrant guests in the kitchen.”
“My stepmother sent them over.” I say the next part in a rush. “Would you like your hair and make-up done, too?”
Emma’s lashes flutter. She purses her lips.
I try not to react to her visible hesitation or show any keenness whatsoever. “Would you like to? Lynda said she was more than happy to cover my friends.”
“What about Ivy?”
“Ivy’s meeting me here in fifteen minutes. Eden, too. They’re happy to do all of us.”
I hear Davide squeak behind me, but if I only ask for the basics, they’ll totally have time for the others. It’s lunchtime, for God’s sake.
Emma’s brows lower. “I don’t. I mean…”
“I’d love to do this for you,” I say.
It’s the wrong thing to say. Glowering, Emma m
oves to shut her door, but I slam a hand on the wood before she can succeed.
“Alas, my little night-blooming cereus,” Davide says to Emma as he comes up behind me, poking his face over my shoulder. “Come join us. You will be missing out on oh-so-much fête.”
Emma nails him with a glare, but Davide doesn’t so much as shudder. She says, “I’m not going to the stupid dance.”
“I did not say that was a requirement, ma chérie. Half the fun is getting ready, yes? Drink champagne with your friends—I won’t say a thing—make bonne memories while you still can. This is your senior year. While you may not dance to-and-fro, you will regret not having my hands upon your face.” Davide grows serious. “I am the best in the business. There has never been a woman I haven’t made into a goddess, and I shall not back away from this door until you step out of it.”
Emma retreats farther into the shadows of her room. “Go away, French man.”
“Hmm. A challenge, then.” Davide lifts a canister of hairspray from his toolbelt. His eyes grow small. “I can spray you from here, chérie.”
Emma looks to me for support, but I shrug. “Talk to the man with the weapon, not me.”
Silence stretches between the three of us, until Davide, with an expression of stone, presses the pump in two warning bursts.
Emma winces, but I note the wavering tremor in her lips as she tries to fight off a smile. “Fine. But only because you’re threatening me with aerosol poisoning.”
Davide breaks into a wide, luminous grin while I step aside so she can come out.
Emma waltzes into the main room, her chin raised regally, but her eyes are hard and flat as marbles as she comes into the light, like she’s expecting Davide and Suzanne to comment about her scars or tsk that there’s not enough product in the world to make her beautiful.
My chest tightens, because the Emma I saw in old pictures, the one before the attack, and the fire, and the Virtues, would’ve loved to be treated to a makeover before a dance.
Fiend (Briarcliff Secret Society Series Book 3) Page 13