Until it wasn’t.
When you sell out, your connection to the medium dies.
So does your spirit.
Lifting my chin, I glance at Lexington. No way am I telling him all that. “I applied to satisfy my family. My dad is obsessed with us having options.”
“And why is that, I wonder? To make sure you’d never be stuck in one single place—similar to the way his mother was decades prior?” Lexington gravitates closer, looming behind me as I scan the paragraphs under Cronus Anderson’s name. “The way your ancestor tried to trap the people of Fury Hill here?”
A chill skates across my skin, pulling goose bumps to the surface.
One of the six founding family members, Cronus is attributed with the conception of Avernia as a learning institution…
…survived the consumption crisis…
…no records of the death of Cronus Anderson…
…destroyed in a fire…or perhaps intentionally erased…
…often blamed by residents for having taken advantage of the situation to gain ownership of the school and town.
Frowning at the page, I wonder how someone manages to survive tuberculosis during a time when vaccines and antibiotics didn’t really exist. Was my ancestor’s immune system just stronger, or is it possible that the next paragraphs—ones that talk about blood drinking and night walking—hold some sort of truth?
Isthatwhy Avernia is equally terrified and enthralled by our bloodline?
The curse says that having three descendants of Cronus Anderson on campus at once will bring instantaneous destruction, but it doesn’t say how.
Do they think we’re vampires?
I’d laugh if it wasn’t so fucking ridiculous.
What kind of people would believe something like that?
Or do they just cling to their suspicion because inviting us in would be like forgiving Cronus’s sins? Is it possible for people to be so afraid of change that they’d go to great lengths—threats, kidnappings, and even murder—to keep it from happening?
One entry under Cronus’s name is marked out, and I squint through the pen lines, trying to decipher what it says.
The wordswidowandDupontare legible, making me think back to what Sutton said about our families having history. But when I turn to the Duponts’ pages and comb through dozens of entries about their economic and charitable contributions to the town, they don’t mention the Andersons at all.
In fact, it becomes abundantly clear that the Duponts are Fury Hill’s Kennedy family. The entries go on for pages, gushing over their accomplishments and implying they can do no wrong.
They’re the chosen family, one entry says.
Chosen for what, though, isn’t explained.
Two hands grab my waist, and I jolt forward, fear racing through my veins. The encyclopedia drops to the floor, its thud echoing through the quiet room. My head knocks into the bookshelf, and I wince, heart pounding as Lexington steps back, laughing too loud for a haunted library.
“Shit, sorry,” he says, wiping a tear from his blue eye. “That was just way too easy.”
I glare at him. “Asshole. Is that any way to treat the descendant of your town’s Dracula?”
“Why?” He leans in, grinning wide, his handsome face ensconced in shadows from the overhead lights. “Gonna bite me? Teach me a lesson?”
Percy snorts from across the room. “Classy.”
My hands shake as I bend, reaching for the book, which has fallen open to a random page toward the back. The encyclopedia runs from A through D, with a section highlighted by someone who checked it out previously.
It’s a photograph of the caves carved into the White Mountains, deep within the Primordial Forest.
