by Katie May
I could’ve been wrong. Nobody had ever noticed or cared how Dylan treated me before. Not even Beau noticed half the time.
The new student had arrived with his younger sister a few weeks ago. I had immediately hit it off with the younger girl who was, as Beau pegged, a groupie. She sat at my table, chatting excitedly about anything and everything.
Her brother was slightly more reserved. I sat next to him in math class, and I knew that he was ridiculously smart. Almost genius level. It wasn’t something I would expect from him given his emo, brooding-guy look. For the most part, I ignored him, but I did catch his eyes on me from time to time, his long tongue swirling over his lip ring.
“He doesn’t matter,” I said, turning my attention away from the new student and his way too enticing eyes. The last thing I wanted was for him to be on Dylan’s radar.
As quarterback and basketball star, Dylan had the entire school under his thumb. He wielded his power like a sword, not hesitating to cut someone down. Ruin them.
He had tried it with me once before, and he had tried it with Beau.
“Come, little sister.” Dylan’s fingers bruised from how tightly they gripped my arm. “Let’s get to class.”
I woke up in a cold sweat, heart pounding in tandem to my racing thoughts. The dream had felt so vivid, so realistic. I could still feel the weight of Dylan’s arm around my shoulders, smell his acrid, rancid breath.
Why had Aiden been in my dream?
I didn’t want to dwell on that, choosing instead to get out of bed and walk to the communal showers. The hot water did little to wash away the remnants of the dream, however.
To my surprise, a fresh uniform was sitting on my bed when I stepped back into my room in only a towel. My dripping wet hair cascaded down my back, watering the wooden floors.
A simple note was tacked to the blouse.
Sorry.
-K
K? Kace?
Had he been behind my wardrobe malfunction?
Shaking my head, I hesitantly lifted the uniform as if it was a poisonous snake preparing to strike. There were no holes, no shreds, and I was shocked to see it was in my size.
Was this a trick?
Despite my unease, I found myself methodically dressing, reveling in the warm fabric and smell of laundry detergent. I had no doubt Kace had used his connections with the school to get me this uniform.
Fully dressed, I stepped out of the room and headed toward Beau’s.
The blond giant was leaning against the wall outside his door when I arrived, waiting for me. Without a word, he took my hand in his and pulled me in the direction of the cafeteria. His large hand made me feel so small and dainty. Fingers interlocked, I could almost imagine we were boyfriend and girlfriend instead of merely best friends.
Why did that thought make my heart skip happily?
“I had the strangest dream,” I said to Beau conversationally. He turned to face me, one eyebrow raised inquisitively. Explaining quickly, I recalled my dream to Beau. I told him about Aiden making an appearance at our high school, which alone was strange. I would’ve remembered someone like Aiden gracing the halls of Ravenswood High.
Beau listened to it all with a contemplative frown on his face. Only when I was done did he grab my shoulders, halting my forward progression.
His fingers lightly traced over my inner arm, writing into my skin.
Maybe not a dream. Maybe memory.
I frowned.
“It wasn’t a memory,” I assured him. “I would’ve remembered Aiden at school. You would’ve, too.”
His face twisted, deep in thought, and his finger lifted to tap at his chin.
Weird dreams, he wrote after a moment of silence.
“You’ve been having weird dreams, too?” I questioned, easily able to understand his eloquent language. Beau nodded. His brows were drawn tight, and his lips were puckered. “What happened?”
While one hand continued to tap at his chin, the other rubbed soothing patterns into my arm. His touch elicited goosebumps all over me.
With a sigh, he removed his hand and reached toward a bulletin board, pulling down a sheet of paper. It was an advertisement for support groups, particularly ones dealing with sexual assault.
Turning it over, Beau grabbed a pen from a cup near the board and began to write.
Beau hadn’t always been mute. There was a time, many years ago, when he had been loud and vibrant. A shining light. A beacon breaking apart the monotony of darkness.
That had all changed, though, after his stepfather had murdered his mother. His therapist called it selective mutism.
I called it silence. Complete and absolute silence. It was almost unnerving at times. Daunting, even. I knew that he had so much to say, but no will to say it.
Clearing my throat, I waited for Beau to hand me the slip of paper, his messy scrawl taking up the entire back.
They’re strange. Half the time I wake up not remembering them. What I do remember is Dylan, oddly enough. I remember being furious and attacking him. And I also remember him fighting back. And something with a knife. You’re there as well, leaning over me. Crying. And then I wake up.
Beau shrugged his large shoulders, and I gulped. Something about his words…
I sifted through my memories, looking for any truth to them, but I came up blank.
It was just a dream, after all. Who said that dreams had to hold snippets of truth?
I could see that it was bothering him. His eyes were abnormally large in his face, and dark shadows marred the skin beneath them.
“It’s just a dream,” I assured him, squeezing his fingers.
I didn’t know who I was trying to convince.
Me or him.
We turned at a fork in the hall, and I staggered to a stop, nearly tripping over Beau’s feet, at the sight before us.
Kelly was pressed against a wall, a young man leaning over her. I couldn’t recall his name, only that he was the ringleader from the first time she had been bullied. His arm was lightly pressed against her throat, and his eyes were narrowed as he hissed something at her.
Only when I got closer could I make out the end of his crude speech.
“…fucking freak,” he cursed, releasing her. Kelly didn’t sag in relief. She didn’t cry. She didn’t even move, instead choosing to blink up at him with wide, innocent eyes.
The boy, only a year or two younger than me, met my gaze and noticeably gulped. He glanced back at Kelly before hurrying down the hall.
The entire exchange lasted only a few seconds.
Beau made a move to go after the little shit, but I placed a restraining hand on his shoulder.
“What was that?” I directed my question at Kelly while still holding on to Beau. The girl glanced up at me. Unlike the other students, she wasn’t wearing a uniform. Instead, she wore a white dress with pink flowers adorning the belt. Her black hair tumbled loose around her shoulders, as dark as obsidian stones.
“He didn’t believe me,” she whispered. Her eyes flickered to Beau and then back to me, eyes imploring if we could trust him. I nodded once. “He didn’t believe me about the monsters.”
At that, Beau took a step forward, and my hand slid from his shoulder. He pulled me to him, burrowing his face into my hair and inhaling deeply. There was no sharp intake of breath. No confusion. No glances down at Kelly as if she had lost her mind.
“You told your bully about the monster?” I asked Kelly, blinking rapidly. Trying to piece together what exactly she meant.
I would also admit that I was confused by Beau’s reaction. Did he know about the monsters?
And if he did, how?
“I told them,” she corrected with a decisive head bob. “My men. My harem.”
“Your men?” I pulled back slightly to meet Beau’s eyes. He finally seemed just as confused as me, which did not bode well for Kelly.
He hadn’t reacted once to her cryptic comment about monsters, but the second she mentioned a harem? C
onfusion.
The girl’s smile was wistful, dreamy, as she swayed side to side.
“They just don’t know it yet,” she continued, voice raspy.
Yup. One too many screws loose.
Kelly froze suddenly. Her eyes widened slightly, almost imperceptibly, and she took a step backward.
“They’re coming,” she whispered. “They’re coming.”
“Who’s coming?” I took a step forward to counter her step backward. Tears welled in her eyes, heightening the tiny golden flecks expanding like fireworks around her pupil.
Kelly’s voice was a hushed murmur when she said, “Some of the monsters.”
The girl was positively terrified.
I followed her gaze over my shoulder, but I already knew what I was going to see. This was only confirmed when the professors marched in pairs of two down the hall. Their black robes swished around their feet; white masks reflected the artificial lighting of the halls.
My heart began to beat rapidly. The professors had never made an appearance outside of dinner and the hour just before and after. What were they doing in these halls at eight in the morning?
“Reapers,” Kelly whispered, petrified. Her tiny body was shaking as if electricity coursed through her vines.
Reapers?
I didn’t dare reply out loud, afraid that anything above an unintelligible murmur would bring the professors’ wrath down on me.
Reapers.
I mulled the word over in my head. Something about it stuck, tattooing itself onto the deepest recesses of my brain.
Reapers.
“Why are they here this early?” I whispered, pressing myself to the wall as they passed me.
This close, I could see how similar they all were. Almost identical. Same height. Same dark clothes. And, at least in this batch, the exact same masks.
Kelly gulped. For a long moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer. A ball of lead settled in my stomach mixing with the churning chasm of nerves.
When she finally responded, her voice was a breathy whimper.
“Because someone tried to escape.”
19
Bianaca
There was a palpable tension in the air. Something thick and dark, settling over the students like a tar. It clung to their skins, their pristine uniforms, their slicked-back hair. It made all the whispers and fidgets diminish like a flame being blown out until the large room was still and silent. The only sound was our own shoes pounding on the linoleum tiles.
The shortcut Kelly had led us to had worked. Surprisingly, we had arrived before the masked professors.
But everyone knew that something was about to happen, something that would alter our lives forever. Was it a feeling, perhaps? The type of feeling you get when you are standing in a crowded room with eyes caressing your back? The type of feeling you get when you know there is a monster beneath your bed and no one else believes you?
The air was too thick, too polluted, as I moved toward the table in the direct center of the cafeteria. Kelly branched off, but I didn’t look to see where she was going. Tanner, Aiden, and Kace immediately glanced up when I arrived, their conversation halting. Tanner’s eyes perused my form, as if checking me over for injuries, while Aiden narrowed his eyes into thin slits. Kace seemed nonplussed, humming beneath his breath and not at all bothered by what was about to go down. I was beginning to wonder if something was wrong with Kace mentally. One second, he was curled into a ball and the next he had a singularly beautiful smirk pulling at his full lips. His change in attitudes was giving me whiplash.
“What did you do?” Aiden hissed darkly before I had even sat down. Beau moved to sit beside me, his large arm landing comfortably and protectively over my shoulders. Tanner’s eyes twitched at that, but he didn’t comment.
“Me?” I scoffed. “I didn’t do anything. Apparently…” I cast a quick look in both directions of the cafeteria. It was silent, yes, but I knew that if I kept my voice down, no one would hear us. I leaned across the table until my face was inches from Aiden’s. “Apparently, someone tried to escape.”
I gauged his reaction carefully, marking every tightening of his eyes, every downward pull of his lips, every color draining from his face.
His expression did all that for only a second before it was replaced by his customary apathetic mask.
But I had seen it. A theory I hadn’t even realized I had was only confirmed.
“Shit,” I whispered, stunned. “It was you, wasn’t it? All of you.” I purposefully glanced at Tanner and Kace so they knew which “you” I was referring to. And then my eyes slid to Beau who was staring intently at the tabletop, color rising to his cheeks. There was no mistaking the guilt in his eyes.
And that guilt slammed into my gut with the force of a bowling ball. I was the pin being pushed over, landing straight in the gutter. Betrayal. That was what this felt like. Knife after knife being slashed across my skin, embedding itself so deep that nothing could remove it. I was just waiting for one of those knives to hit an artery or my heart.
“Beau?” I whispered tersely. I stared at my best friend, the man I had been in love with for years, and I only saw a stranger. His tall frame was huddled over the table as if he could somehow disappear from my prying eyes, but I still saw him. I always saw him.
But unlike the comfort and love he usually evoked, I only felt pain.
Whatever he was going to say, whatever rebuke he was going to give, was interrupted by the professors striding into the cafeteria. As was their usual, they took positions around the perimeter of the room. Caging us in. Herding us.
I wished I could see their faces behind those masks.
There was a crackle of electricity before the mechanical voice reverberated through the loudspeaker.
“There are two rules. One, you follow all instructions and go where the professors tell you to go. Two, you never, not ever, try to escape. Failure to follow these rules leads to the immediate expulsion of said student.”
There was a long, pronounced silence as everyone waited with bated breath. I knew my own heart was working overtime, attempting to put blood back into my pale face and frigid hands. Fear like no other clamped around my heart and refused to relent its iron hold.
I may have been pissed at Beau, I may have hated Aiden, Tanner, and Kace, but the last thing I wanted was for them to face the same fate as those other students. Sacrificed…to a monster. My tongue felt like lead in my mouth. I was watching a car crash in slow motion, knowing inevitably that everyone was going to die but being unable to stop it.
Each heartbeat tugged, pulled, pounded, until I feared it would break free from my ribcage. Ice slithered up my spine.
And then the mechanical voice spoke once more. “Jessica Feeney, Tiegan Mayn, and Jeffery Heart.”
The next few minutes were chaos. A girl, her dark brown hair cascading around her shoulders and framing her sharp green eyes, jumped to her feet and immediately ran toward the cafeteria door. Two men from separate tables came as well. A professor lunged for them, but one of the men stealthily side-stepped and landed a punch onto his—her?—shoulder. The professor didn’t even flinch, instead grabbing the student by the scruff of his neck and pulling him up off the ground. His feet dangled in the air as the professor showed a considerable and completely ethereal amount of strength.
“Tiegan!” The girl, Jessica, more than likely, screamed. She immediately turned toward him, but another professor cut her off. Before the brown-haired girl could blink, something was jabbed into her neck. A needle.
She collapsed to the ground unceremoniously, the professor not even bothering to cushion her fall.
Jeffery, the only one of the trio left, glanced cautiously from side to side. He looked like a cornered, rabid animal as he was herded against the wall. His body shook, tiny beads of sweat dripping down his face.
“Please,” he whispered hoarsely, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. One of the professors calmly glided toward him and wrenched hi
s arms behind his back. Jeffery let out a pathetic whimper, but he didn’t fight. He knew, as well as everyone else in the cafeteria did, that fighting back was futile.
The large cafeteria doors opened, and the professors exited, single-file, their new treats slung over shoulders or dragged by their feet.
The macabre, demented scene only lasted a few minutes. The second the doors closed, chatter resumed as if it had never stopped. As if three students hadn’t just been carried away. As if death didn’t await us all like an ominous, bloated storm cloud threatening rain.
Aiden let out a long exhale, his hands unclenching from around the edge of the table.
“What the hell?” I whispered, shaking. The scene replayed in my mind with vivid clarity. Every desperate cry. Every tear trailing down faces. Every otherworldly movement by the so-called “professors”.
Around me, the other students were acting as if they were fine. Laughing. Talking. Flirting. As if it was any other day.
“It’s the drugs,” Kace said, surveying me from beneath his fringe of dark lashes. “We told you. Without the antidote we gave you, you would be just like them. Oblivious to the horrors of the world.”
“I don’t understand,” I whispered honestly. My hand instinctively sought out Beau’s, and I held it in an iron vise. I knew my nails were digging into his skin, but if I hurt him, he didn’t complain.
“The drugs in the food,” Aiden began, nodding toward his plate of pancakes, “are unlike anything we had ever seen or even heard of before. It makes it so you see things through a different lens, a different perspective. Instead of three students being brutally attacked and ripped away, the other students instead saw the principal reprimanding them and calling them down to his office. I don’t know how it works.”
“Is it…” I almost felt silly for the question I wanted to ask. Almost. But I forged ahead anyway. The answer would do nothing for me. It wouldn’t pacify my rage for what I had just witnessed. It wouldn’t be the balm my soul needed to survive this nightmare. But an answer was an answer, and it was something I was desperate for. “Is it magic? Paranormal?”