20
ELLE
A weekafter my encounter with Sutton in the forest, I drag Aurora, Lexington, and Lucy to the Apollodorus in the hopes of uncovering more about the Anderson curse and Fury Hill’s lore.
“Ugh, I don’t like this,” Aurora mutters.
I shoot her a dirty look as Lexington shimmies open the door to the basement stairwell. We’d gone to the Obeliskos first, under the impression that all the archives and important town information were kept there. According to one of the student aides, though, an older part of the collection had been moved after some sort of vandalism incident. I’m not sure whose call it was, but when I asked Lexington if he could get us access, he’d been very excited about the prospect.
Comparatively, the librarieslooksimilar with their dark wooden and carpeted floors that creak beneath every step, the ebony and oak furniture that looks as if it’s been here since the school’s founding, and high ceilings with various colorful murals painted on them.
Walls of bookcases, locked doors, and empty study rooms decorate the main levels, and while the Apollodorus is smaller in size, it feels somehow even more haunted.
“No one is forcing you to be here,” I tell Aurora as she grips Lucy’s biceps, half hiding behind her smaller frame.
“You promised doughnuts,” she whines. Her French manicure digs into the sleeves of Lucy’s black long-sleeved shirt.
“Doughnuts? She told me there was a sign-up for a reproductive rights walkathon,” Lucy says, narrowing her blue eyes.
“So I didn’t want to go down here alone,” I snap, crossing my arms. “Sue me.”
“You guys are gonna scare the ghosts,” Lexington says, holding the door open for us.
“Not funny,” I mutter.
“Wasn’t a joke.” Though his smirk contradicts his words. He nudges me forward with an elbow, and I glare at him.
Swallowing over a knot in my throat, I lean past the doorway, peering down at the spiraling descent into the underground. The stairwell itself is dark, with seemingly only one dim wall sconce per level, and endless.
“Can we go already? I don’t think we should prolong this.” Aurora huddles close to me, breathing on my shoulder. Her hands find the back of my sweater, tugging, the thick scarf around her neck bumping against me.
“What are you looking for exactly?” Lexington asks as we head down, taking each step slowly as if they might give out at any moment. “Town lore? The archives are pretty boring, so you’ll probably want to go for founders’ journals or even the oldDelphic Pagespaper.”
“Paper?” I ask. “That gossip site was a print tabloid first?”
“Oh yeah. It only went online maybe a decade or so ago? I have no idea who made the shift—some undergrad, most likely—but when my mom was a student here, Pythia’s musings were printed and posted front and center in the dorms and on all the Lyceum’s bulletin boards.”
I hum, gripping the wobbly railing to steady myself. The picture I saw of the cave in one encyclopedia flashes through my memory, and I wonder if a Pythia of the past captured it.
Maybe that’s why the photographer’s name had been redacted.
We pass one floor, and I can practically hear Aurora’s teeth chattering every time the plumbing in the walls lets out a groan. Goose bumps pepper my skin even though I’m no stranger to old buildings, since the Asphodel where I grew up was a remodeled hotel.
Not to mention my dad’s shady past pretty much guarantees some level of bloodshed happened there, though neither of my parents talk about that part of their lives at all. Still, not talking about things doesn’t mean they didn’t happen, and the internet does have articles from early in their marriage.
Plus, what they won’t say, sometimes my aunts and uncles will.
“Do all founding family members attend Avernia?” I probe.
“Historically? Yes.” Lexington purses his lips. “Though I guess your dad would be the exception there. While not well received, your ancestors before him were still permitted to attend school—so long as it wasn’t more than one at a time.”
“Because of that stupid curse, right? What exactly do they think me and my siblings are going to do to them? Surely we know vampires aren’t real.”
“That’s what they want you to think,” Aurora mutters.
Lexington tosses her a smirk. “It’s hard to say what people think the curse in manifest will look like. Cronus was rumored to have drained townspeople of their blood, so maybe they do think you’re all vampires. He also married the Dupont widow after the other founding patriarchs died, so some believe there were extramarital activities happening there. Dude was knocking off the seven deadly sins like they were on his bucket list.”
The Dupont widow?My heart thumps faster at that revelation, but I force myself to remain calm.
