“I can’t believe I wanted to have dinner with you,” Liam said in mock offense. Then he winked.That wink. She shivered again. “See you around, Morgan.”
Once he was gone, Ellory tried to stop smiling, if only becausehe clearly knew the effect he had on people and was delighted that it worked on her. She failed hard until she remembered that she had not come here for Liam Blackwood.
She grabbed a slip for African hair braiding and moved on.
Ellory started in the psychology section, wading through Jung and Vygotsky and Thorndike until she found titles on repressed memories and auditory hallucinations and general cognitive psychology. Next, she pulled books on neurophysiology in the medicine section, books on past lives in the occult section, and a Moleskine notebook from the writing section. Finally, she spread her haul across one of the tables near the back of the store, many of which were already bursting with people taking advantage of the outlets and Wi-Fi, and prepared to take detailed notes that she could copy into her Word document later. She only had the money to leave the store with the Moleskine, but each book came with an index that helped her focus her skimming to relevant paragraphs only.
That familiar rush energized her, the sense of rightness that came with chasing down a lead like a golden retriever in pursuit of a ball. It was a high she couldn’t replicate with quantitative political research or social choice theory, though she’d spent the last month and a half trying. She wanted to become Elle Woods or Annalise Keating, getting her thrills from picking the scorched remains of her opponents’ arguments out of her teeth as she won another case, but she wasn’t even in law school yet and she could feel herself fumbling.
Investigative journalism—though itself inherently political—felt like wading through the muck to unearth a clean nugget of truth. It was shining a light down a dark hallway. It was giving a voice to the voiceless. Politics felt like reaching into the grime to find another, filthier layer underneath. It was the slow erosion of long-heldmorals for short-term gains. It was constantly choosing theleast awful optionuntil there were none left.
But political science would keep the lights on in her apartment. Journalism would only give her four roommates all sharing the same fork over the last bowl of ramen for years before she had a spare dime to put in her savings account.
Doyou want to be a lawyer?
Annoyed by the direction of her thoughts and the intrusion of Hudson Graves, Ellory gathered up the books to return them to the shelves. She had to pay for the Moleskine, and she had to find Tai. Her stomach growled, a reminder that she’d had nothing but overnight oats for breakfast, and though she could still taste faint traces of the honey and Greek yogurt she had mixed in, that was no substitute for a full meal.
But as she passed the local-interest section, she slowed in consideration. Here, the shelves boasted books about Warren University and Connecticut as a whole. It was a long shot, but maybe she would find something about Warren being built behind a deadfall or in the center of a fairy circle—something that turned it into the kind of liminal space where she could slip more easily into a shadow world. It sounded ridiculous even as she thought it, but the sound of that incessant buzzing and the sight of those teeming shadows drove her deeper into the stacks. Dread pooled in her stomach, but she clenched and unclenched her fingers as if she could massage the terror from her epithelium.
Ellory froze when something caught her eye.
?.
On the otherwise-empty spine of a book, the letter was written in gold and surrounded by a circle of silver ivy leaves—the same stylized ivy that surrounded the Warren University crest. Shetugged the volume from the shelf, frowning when she saw it was another reference book about the school’s founding. Her fingers ran over the symbol before she flipped it open, searching for something she didn’t have words for yet. Whatever it was, she reached the end without finding any sign of it.
Ellory went to put the book back and paused. The hole it had left on the shelf was shadowed, but there was a flash of something corpse pale within. Switching the book to her nondominant hand, she reached inside, her fingertips catching on a torn edge of paper. She tugged it free of the tape keeping it affixed to the back panel of the shelf. Only a quick fumble kept her from dropping the book when she saw her own handwriting on the paper, which was nondescript and lined like she’d torn it from a notebook.
She didn’t remember writing this. She couldn’t even remember a time she’d come down this aisle before.
hudson will h?lp, the note read. The singlee, like the one on the book, like the one that had been on her neck, was backward.
Ellory crumpled the paper in her fist as her rising unease was swallowed by furious disbelief. Thishadto be a joke. Of all the absurd things that had come to define this school year, leaving herself the advice to rely on Hudson Graves for any kind of help had taken this one step too far. He obviously wrote it. Maybe the entire salon was in on it. There was an optical illusion on the mirror that made her see ink where there was none. He’d learned to forge her handwriting and left this note in her favorite store.
And all the rest? Coincidences and a stubborn need to see beyond the veil. She’d created a story out of nothing.
She was such anidiot.
“Ready to go?” Tai asked, appearing at the mouth of the aisle holding no fewer than three graphic novels. “Or are you buyingthat first?”
Ellory realized she was still clutching the book. She switched it to her other hand to hide the paper and moved away from the shelf as casually as she could. Her wrath—at herself, at Hudson Graves, at herself again—built like a storm, and her body coiled like lightning about to strike.
Tai lifted an eyebrow. “You look even less chill than you were before we got here,” she observed. “Maybe we should have had lunch first.”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay, snappy. Come on, then.”
Ellory glanced back at the hollow in the shelf where the book had once been and felt another hot rush of anger at Hudson Graves. She would get her answers, one way or another. Whether he survived the questioning was a different story.
10
For someone so popular, Hudson Graves was often alone. He disdained company the same way he disdained everything else, stalking around the campus like a tiger with his fitted peacoats and pointed stares. Trying to find him at first proved an exercise in frustration. Every professor claimed he’d just left. Every teammate claimed he’d called out of practice. Every so-called friend told her to mind her own business.
Ellory wasn’t desperate enough to show up at his house uninvited, so she kept prowling his usual hangouts and glowering at the unanswered text she’d sent him that morning. He’d left her on READ, as if she’d broken some unspoken etiquette rule by using his number for anything other than its designated purpose. The mass of contradictions that was Hudson Graves made it even more unlikely that she had truly been the author of the note claiming he could help her. He was as helpful as a match was to an oil spill.
Ellory had once thought him to be everywhere—especially places she didn’t want him to be—but it was almost dark when she stumbled over him in the bowels of the Graves, surrounded bybooks that lined his lone table like an electric fence. He was on the second floor, or the seventh floor, depending on how she decided to count. Here, only one level up from the basement she avoided, there were so few students that it was almost like a private stadium. The entire space smelled faintly of decaying flowers, a stench both musty and saccharine that burned the back of her throat and the inside of her nose. And it was silent, the hollow kind, a lack of sound that made sure its absence was felt. The carpeting even swallowed any noise from her heeled ankle boots.
A chill caressed her spine. She kept walking.
