This time, I really am going to be sick. “And she started with Ivy.”
Emma spins to watch me as I fly into our bathroom and dry heave into the toilet. When nothing comes up and my stomach proves its dire emptiness, I rise, wiping my mouth with a hand-towel.
“Now you’re aware of Sabine’s motives and how she can so easily manipulate. Even the Noble King isn’t aware of the influence Sabine wreaks inside this school and out. My only question is this.” Emma comes up to the bathroom, folding her arms, but looking upon me with desolate wisdom. “What is she planning to do with you?”
25
I greet the next morning with a massive headache and roll over to check the time with a wince.
The over-extension of my body, my mind, my emotions last night shouldn’t come as a surprise, but I’d argue that I shouldn’t feel like a 90-year-old woman creaking out of bed at the crack of dawn.
Then it hits me.
Chase.
He doesn’t have a morning to greet. His time consists of preventing his black environment from seeping into his soul.
Picturing how the rest of this day is going to go, I don’t think I’ll be able to take my mind off his suffering in order to properly listen to Professor Dawson in calculus.
“Morning,” Emma says as I pull my door open. She lifts a mug.
I garble a sound close to yes, please, and yank the hot coffee from her hand.
“You gonna be okay today?” she asks.
“I’d rather ask you the same thing. Are you okay after what we talked about last night?”
Emma purses her lips. “I doubt you or I will be able to focus on our studies while my brother is buried in a basement.”
I nod, and my shoulders finally relax. Out of everyone, Emma gets me the most. “Let’s not go through this day alone.”
“You mean…” Emma arches a brow. “We’ll have each other’s backs?”
“Maybe.” I flap my hand. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Thank you.”
The room goes quiet. I stare at her.
“For last night. For everything.” Emma continues, “I thought I knew what to expect when I returned to Briarcliff, and I gotta say, you weren’t it.”
I give her a half-smile.
“But it’s been easier with you—if you can call what we’re going through easy. I don’t have a lot of friends, and I’m not saying you’re, like, my bestie or anything, but it felt good to tell you my story last night and not have you judge me. There hasn’t been anyone like that in my life, not since Piper, and—”
“Emma.” I lay a hand on her shoulder. “I like you, too.”
Emma fights off a smile. “Yeah, yeah.”
She pushes my hand away and absconds into her room.
I snort, buoyed by this small moment of normalcy, but Briarcliff doesn’t award an average day without a price.
A knock sounds at our door.
“Hey,” I greet Ivy, but she brushes past me, her cheeks flushed, and her hair tangled. “What’s … up?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t be at school yet.” Ivy tears off her winter coat and tosses it on the couch. “Is Emma here?”
Emma pops her head out of her bedroom. She takes one look at Ivy and says, “What’s wrong?”
Ivy turns to me instead. “Have you ever looked at past Briarcliff yearbooks?”
“That’s random.” I arch an eyebrow, but answer. “I was thinking of looking up Howard Mason at some point but haven’t gotten the chance.” I lean forward, resting my forearms on the counter. “Why?”
“Well, after you found those news articles Sabine saved about your mom, it got me thinking.”
Emma comes out of her room and stands beside me. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she was taking a protective stance, her suspicions of Ivy coming to a head after last night. Emma says, “I figured the mystery stopped at Callie’s mom having an affair with Sabine’s husband.”
“Me too, or so I thought,” Ivy says. She thumps her backpack on the counter and unzips it. “But Sabine is rarely that surface-level. You assume she wants one thing, until she turns it around on you at the very last second and slits your throat, amirite?”
Emma makes a sound of agreement. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”
“I went to the library as soon as it opened.” Ivy pulls out a yearbook, the silver foil flashing 2002. “To look up Sabine’s class.”
Ivy cracks open the yearbook, both Emma and me hovering behind her shoulders. She flips it until she finds the graduating class. Her finger lands on one photo in particular. “Look.”
I squint. Then, I hiss in a breath. “That’s Lynda.”
“Yep. And there’s more.” Ivy flips to another page, points to another teen.
Emma says, “And Mr. Harrington.”
“Makes sense,” I murmur, “Since Sabine would’ve been pregnant with Piper around this time.”
Picturing Sabine as a teen mom is an entirely different image than the one I have of my own. Mom had me at nineteen, but she didn’t have a rich boy to fall on or a billion-dollar furniture company to inherit by forcing his hand.
Except … wasn’t Sabine part of an oil family? Moriarty Oil, that’s right. So, why would she—
The answer comes to me in a harsh wave. She made deals behind the Nobles’ backs, Emma had said. Starting with Nobles who’d automatically graduate to top positions in the country. She married one.
Sabine started her control of the Nobles early, using Piper as her first weapon.
I blink out of my fugue when Ivy finds another face, to which I say, “Daniel Stone.”
Then, with the slow, careful push like the triangular pointer on a Ouija board, Ivy lands on one last photo.
I stumble back as if scalded. “That’s—that’s not possible.”
“Holy shit,” Emma says, her eyes as wide as the mugs we’ve forgotten to drink out of. “Callie, your mom went to Briarcliff?”
“No way.” I shrink away, like the yearbook is about to rear up and bite me with traitorous fangs. “That’s someone else named Meredith Ryan. It has to be.”
“But her face,” Ivy supplies, lifting the book so I can see. “She looks just like you.”
The denial shrivels inside my throat the longer Mom smiles back at me. “She never told me … she never … how could she not have said anything about attending an elite private school?”
“Callie,” Emma says. “Your mother kept a decades-long affair from you. She was murdered in a way that seems personal, and her killer has never been caught. And now she attended an exclusive school she never mentioned. Looks like your mom didn’t tell you a lot of things.”
“But why?” My voice cracks. “We lived in a one bedroom and shared instant ramen for years. We told each other everything. She was my best friend—my only friend for so, so long. I trusted her. I—I loved her. How could she have…?”
I trail off, the rest too difficult to comprehend.
“Callie.” Ivy grabs my attention by gripping me by the shoulders. “That’s not all.”
“What?” I ask, pressing my hands to my cheeks. The ground tilts, Chase is below dirt level, and my mother, the only person I trusted in the world, is a certified liar. “What could be worse than that?”
Though it clearly pains her, Ivy turns back to the yearbook. “There are so many players in this class, I had to look at the underclassmen, too. Just to be sure I’m not missing anyone. And here. In the eleventh grade. Do you recognize this guy?”
Ivy lifts the yearbook again, and I force the papery lump in my throat to dissolve.
I look.
When I do, the lump comes back twice its size.
Emma leans over me and asks, “Who’s that?”
I lick my lips, but they’re so cracked and dry, I only cause a sting of pain. “That’s my stepdad. Peter Spencer.”
26
I flex my hand above my notebook, the pen bouncing across the page. The new his
tory professor drones on, and up until now, I’d been furiously taking notes. Who knew such desperation would provide copious amounts of energy to focus, my ears tunneling to the professor’s voice and my handwriting following suit?
It was easier to avoid Chase’s empty chair that way.
The vicious noise between my ears quieted down, and the images of my mother’s Briarcliff Academy yearbook photo became a backyard blur in my head.
That is, until the bell rang.
I jolt, glance around, blink. Then pack my things like everyone else.
A heavy hand hits my shoulder the instant I stand. Tempest leans forward, his breath hot. “Are you done fucking around in our lives? Chase asks me to do him a solid, and I do, only to find out hacking security systems are pointless when the head honcho is already aware of the hamburglars. You not only put my boy at risk, but me, too. I don’t like being duped by pretty faces.”
I stare straight ahead, but his breath wafts strands of my hair near my cheeks. My voice comes out steady through the intimidating shivers. “I’ll be done when you people stop fucking around with my life.”
Tempest backs off, and I regain my own oxygen. “That supposed to mean something, possum?” he asks.
Shoving the textbook in my bag, I say, “Not to you,” and storm away from him.
Tempest doesn’t follow, but I’m forced to pass James, then Riordan, both with flat, predatory stares.
“Chase should’ve laid you to waste the minute he got the chance,” Riordan mutters.
“She must have a lollipop pussy,” James replies, “for him to take a day off for her.”
I slam my hand on the doorframe. “If you idiots had the decency to really learn about your stupid club, if you’re so protective and proud of being members, then you should recognize the stink. It’s not Chase’s fault, but it’s not mine, either.” I hiss, “Figure out your shit,” before exiting the room.
I storm down the hallway, furious and already wishing for hindsight. I should’ve told them what Sabine is doing to the Virtues. Should’ve told them what Ivy will go through—again—on the first Tuesday of the coming year.
Except, when I snuck into the Nobles’ ritual room, there were those women in purple robes. I recall the look on James’s face as he presented those women to the new initiates.
James won’t care and is probably well aware of Sabine’s embellishments to the Virtues, and while Tempest and Riordan were hooded and ambivalent when the women shed their cloaks, I doubt they’d give a shit, either.
It’s up to us girls to put a stop to this. And it’s up to me to figure out why my mother cloaked her past in the same secrets that are shrouding me now.
I spin the lock and open my locker, transferring my texts for the next class, but I pause when my phone lights up on my shelf.
Lynda.
Snatching it, I press the green button before I think too hard on it. “Lynda, I need you to—”
“Hey, girl!” Lynda trills on the other line. “I’m in labor!”
“I—huh?”
“Blair’s coming a week early! Your dad’s driving me to the hospital now.”
“Shit,” I breathe out, and Lynda laughs.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, this pain is easy-peasy considering the bulldozer I’ve been carting around in my belly for 38 weeks. I’ll take a few hours of screeching cramps over one more week of this waddle I’ve got going on—oh. Oh, here comes another one!”
“I—should I come?” All thoughts of the past dissolve as I picture my future—my sister. “I can get on a train and be there by tonight—”
“Cal, we’re fine!” my dad calls out. “Finish your exams. I don’t want you missing out on this semester!”
My exams? “Oh shit, exams are next week.”
I envision my father’s deep, drawn-out sigh. Lynda says, “Exactly, hun—ooooh. Faaaaaaaack. Okay. I’m good. Come when exams are finished. Once Blair’s out, she’s out, but she’s not going anywhere. And I’ll be able to introduce you two in much better conditions than aaaaaaaaaaaaagh!”
I grimace and hold the phone tighter against my ear, as if that could help. “Okay. As long as you’re sure.”
“I didn’t get you into Briarcliff to coast by, Callie,” Lynda says, panting. “You get those A’s, then come meet a B. Goddammit, she’s a bitch!”
“I can’t wait,” I say, “though I figure I also got into Briarcliff because I’m my mom’s legacy.”
Lynda breathes heavily into the phone. “Um, what, hun?”
I respond with a grim smile. Her words are too carefully placed between her gasps.
She knows.
“Can you put Dad on the phone?”
“Sure. I need to recline and scream now. Bye, love.”
“You got this, Lynda.”
“All good, Cal?” my father asks when he comes on the line.
“I should ask you the same thing. You ready to be a baby-daddy?”
He gives a shy laugh. Pete came into my life when I was nine, and I doubt he’s been around a kid, since. “I hear the whole afraid-to-hurt-the-baby is natural and will go away after the first fifty diaper changes in a day.”
I can’t help but smile at the true terror in his tone. “You’ll do great. And you’ll be there for Lynda the entire time. That’s something my mom didn’t have.”
“Ah, Cal.” Dad’s voice goes thick. “If I could’ve been there for her, too, I would’ve.”
“But you didn’t know each other back then, so I get it.”
“That’s right, honey.”
“Well, good luck, Dad. Facetime me once everything goes well.”
“Will do. Love you.”
“You, too,” I say through a forced smile, ensuring the feigned brightness transmits through my voice.
Then I hang up and toss the phone into the locker with a thunk and slam my locker shut.
I clued Lynda into the unraveling of their lie, and I caught Dad in the same, sticky web.
Lynda may be screaming her face off at the moment, but once things calm down, let them figure out how much they fucked up in that one, simple conversation.
27
The sheer intensity of the stars in the black sky tells me that it must be close to midnight, but sleep was never an option.
I chew my lip, watching the night grow darker and darker, lights on the student paths flickering out one by one, and the night security’s flashlights bouncing against the white snowdrifts less and less.
He has to be out by now.
Chase, not my sister, but yes, I do see the parallels in both scenarios. If I really wanted to think about it, I could postulate about a newborn being dragged from the black into a new life, and Chase being pulled from the pit because of old traditions, but I’m not interested in getting philosophical.
I just want him.
Unable to hurry-up-and-wait any longer, I shoot from my chair and don my winter gear, prepared to wait outside Rose House all night.
I grab the thickest scarf I own and wrap it around my face while clomping into the main room, until I come to an abrupt halt, and not by my own volition.
I look down at Emma’s hand, firmly encased around my puffy jacket as she slams it against my chest.
“What the hell?” I ask.
“Where are you going?” Emma retorts.
“To—” see Chase, but from the look in her eyes, I’ve been caught doing something stupid. “I don’t want him recovering alone,” I finish lamely.
“He won’t. He has his friends, probably even my dad. You won’t be welcome there.”
She’s right, but it doesn’t lessen the pain of hearing it.
At my expression, Emma moderates her tone. “You care about him. And I’m sure he wants to see you, too. But you guys can’t do this anymore. Not until we understand why Sabine and Daniel want you two apart.”
The ends of my scarf flop over my hands. “Because he’s Piper’s, and I can’t compete with a secret society’s soulmate,
in life or in death.”
“It’s true no one can escape the society, but that reasoning is off,” Emma muses. “My dad following Sabine’s every whim is off. He’s a horrible man, but he has excellent business sense. He’d never approve of what she’s doing with the Virtues. He’d see it as devaluing currency. Diluting assets. And because of that, I don’t think he has any idea what she’s up to.”
My hands drop to my sides. “Does that mean your dad has no idea what Sabine did to you?” You never told him? Is my next question, but I wisely keep it to myself.
“No. He and Chase have no clue. I’ve made certain.”
“But, why?”
“Because, despite what Sabine’s done to the Virtues, they’d try to keep the society. Restore it, make it beautiful again—whatever. I don’t want that.” Emma’s eyes go hard. “I’ve worked my ass off to regain their trust and get back at Briarcliff to destroy, not repair. Those two noblemen would only get in my way.”
I see her point but my heart sinks for Chase. He’d want to know. Perhaps if he did, his whole perspective would change and he’d see the truth of these societies. The deadly, irrevocable poison seeping into us.
I ask, “Does that mean you don’t think he truly understands why Chase and I can’t be together?”
Fiend (Briarcliff Secret Society Series Book 3) Page 20