I hated him. I hated the way he looked at me, as if he saw through everything, even though he knew nothing whatsoever about me and Blake. The way he said his name, as if marking his territory. The way the phony cordiality of his expression transformed into something darker with every second I stared at him. The way that nothing mattered to him. Not me, not Zoe, not Davie–not even his own friends. I hated him and I wanted to watch him burn. The lot of them. And I wanted to set the fire right now.
‘I know what you did,’ I said, as calmly as I could. ‘I know you made June jump off that roof somehow. I know you did something to Paulina too–and then you made her keep quiet about it. I know you killed Professor Edwards because you found out he’d agreed to talk to me. I know you’re responsible for what happened to Davie. And I know you let a whole swarm of birds into my room to warn me off. But you want to know something? You can forget it. I willneverstop.’ I broke off, breathing heavily, staring into his blank face, which was bathed in the wan, rain-smeared glow of the moon. There was a faint twitch at the corners of his eyes, nothing more.
‘These are rather wild accusations,’ he answered with his usual composure. ‘They sound a bit–and please don’t take this the wrong way–but they sound a bitcrazy. Zoe did tell me you tend to get obsessive.’ He took a step towards me, lowering his voice. ‘We talk about it a lot, you know? She’s worried you’ll go overboard. That things might end badly. For you.’ He raised his hand as if to touch me, but before it reached my throat I slapped it away.
‘Threaten me all you want, I don’t care.’
‘I’m not threatening you. I’m reminding you that you have no proof, and that no one’s going to believe some poor girl with a vivid imagination.’ Ashton smirked. God, how I was itching to wipe the grin off his face.
Instead, I forced a similar expression to my own lips. I wanted to get a reaction out of him, at least–something that showed me he didn’t feel untouchable. Because he wasn’t. Nobody was. ‘You’ve got no idea how public opinion works, do you? It’s not aboutproof. It’s about attention. I’ll go running to every talk show in the country if I have to, email every single newspaper, contact every conspiracy blog–and I’ll tell them the exact same story, over and over again. It doesn’t matter how much of it turns out to be true. I just need enough people to believe it to make life really fucking awkward for you. Can’t really have a secret society if the whole country’s talking about it, can you?’
‘Mmm.’ Ashton tilted his head side to side, vertebrae cracking. He said nothing else, only clenched and relaxed his fist, repeatedly. Even though he wasn’t touching me, it somehow felt that way. I felt a prickle inside me: a tingling that started just between my ribs, burning unpleasantly as it spread.
I lifted my chin fiercely, trying to ignore the twinge. I felt my muscles cramp, I teetered slightly, then my senses began to blur, my vision.
I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them again, Norah was standing next to Ashton. Her red hair was in a braid, her watchful eyes on me. ‘Ashton,’ she said softly, with an odd note of warning. ‘She doesn’t belong to you.’
He let out a snarl, but took a step back. As he moved away from me, the panic in my chest subsided, leaving in its place the tender feeling of a sore, an uncomfortable but bearable wound, as if something were scabbing over. Notonmy body, exactly, more… inside it.
I still felt nauseous. What I really wanted was to sit down, or at least lean against the fence. Instead, I forced out a snort. ‘Seriously? I don’t belong to anybody, which is why I can do whatever the hell I want. And believe me, I’ll do whatever it takes to bring down the League of Starlings once and for all.’
Ashton’s nostrils flared, but he managed to compose his face again into its mocking sneer. ‘You seem flustered, my love. Perhaps you need to be prescribed a sedative. There’s a good hospital nearby, I could give you a lift?’
And then it happened: something in me short-circuited. I wanted to scream, I wanted to start hitting, but instead I rose up onto my tiptoes and spat in Ashton’s face.
He didn’t flinch, he only blinked and stared at me. Two, three seconds, then the muscles in his jaw began to churn. He wiped the back of his hand roughly over his cheek and loomed in over me. ‘That was a mistake, Moth,’ he growled.
The same moment that Norah lunged towards Ashton, somebody wrenched me back. Blake’s face appeared before mine–just briefly, then he wrapped an arm around my hips and picked me up. This time I did start hitting, and maybe I even screamed, maybe… I couldn’t tell. All that registered was Ashton’s gaze boring into mine, and Blake’s grip, which didn’t relax until we had left the pitch.
Once we were on the other side of the fence, he set me back on my feet. ‘Mabel, calm down!’
The football field was a blur of gold-tinged green in my peripheral vision, but I was still seeing red. ‘Calm down? Davie’s in hospital and I don’t even know how bad it is! If he’ll ever be himself again! And all because your friends are a bunch of megalomaniacs who don’t give a shit about anybody else!’ My eyes were burning. Maybe I was crying, but everything was itching and throbbing and scratching too badly to focus on that. My face was still wet with rain, but I wished there were more of it. I wished a whole flood would come bursting forth between us. I couldn’t bear to look at him. I couldn’t bear how pin-sharp his outline was, even in the dark, because all my attention was bent on him. I couldn’t bear that Iwaslooking at him, that I saw and felt him so clearly and yet had the sudden sense I didn’t know him at all. None of this made sense. Who he was didn’t make sense with who he wasfor me.
‘Victor was also killed in that accident,’ he reminded me, his voice subdued.
For a moment, I paused. It was true, of course. Blake had lost a friend today. Only… why couldn’t you see it on him? He looked grave and tense, but not distressed. I knew everybody grieved differently, but Blake didn’t even seem upset. There was no sign of shock–in fact he seemed maddeningly self-possessed. The composure in his eyes was as intolerable as the smirk I’d just seen on Ashton’s face, because both were testament to the same fact: they couldn’t care less that Victor had died.
‘Right. And you’re all so broken up about it, aren’t you? That’s why your friends are over therecelebratinglike nothing’s happened.’ I shook my head in disgust. ‘You guys really don’t give a shit, do you? How can you act like this?’
Blake was silent for a moment, then he took a step towards me, seeking my gaze. ‘I thought you said I wasn’t like them.’
I thought so, I wanted to say, but couldn’t bring myself to. The past tense would mean acknowledging something I still didn’t want to accept: I realised now that I’d been wrong about him. Blakewasmixed up in this whole desperate nightmare. How could I deny it any longer? Even if he hadn’t told the others about my conversation with the professor, it was enough that he was here. With them. Whatever he thought of his friends’ actions, as long as he stood by them, he was one of them, and if I tried to convince myself otherwise, I was just lying to myself. And I wasn’t a good liar, was I? No matter how much I wished I was right now. It was time for the whole truth.
‘I spoke to Aspen,’ I blurted.
Blake stared at me, baffled. ‘What?’
‘She showed up at your flat just as I was leaving. And we talked. About you. About what kind of person you are. And were.’ My voice broke, the shards embedding themselves in Blake’s cheeks. The muscles in them tensed visibly, and he drew back.
‘What did she tell you?’
‘You already know,’ I said. And now so did I. Aspen had been telling the truth. Including the truth she couldn’t admit to herself, because she loved her brother too much. In the end, that was what love did, wasn’t it? It stripped you of the power to think rationally. Too see the obvious. You gunked up every mirror you held up to a person with a collage of the thoughts and feelings you wanted to associate with them. You only saw what you wanted to see. What youhadto see in order to love that person unconditionally.
Nobody was perfect. We all made mistakes, we all had flaws. Mistakes could be one-offs or unintentional, but flaws were inherent in our character. They were inside us, in what we might call… the soul. We all had them, and they made us human. Yet there were some faults that could not be justified, that could not be shrugged off with an, ‘I love you because of your flaws’–or even an, ‘I love you despite your flaws’. They were too great, too hideous, too all-consuming. What Aspen had implied was exactly that: a flaw that ran deep into the soul.
My body was on fire, my mind a whirl. I wanted to hug Blake and I wanted to push him away from me, I wanted to scream at him and I wanted to cry, I wanted to ask for his help and I wanted to order him never to look at me again. My head was spinning, my heart was in tatters. How much of it was even real, how much illusion? All those glimpses behind the curtain: were they all a sham? Blake had said they were all too real–but what if that was just another lie? What if everything had been a lie? What if the things Aspen had told me earlier were the first truths I’d ever heard about Blake Ames? It couldn’t be. Because if that was the case, then none of what had passed between us meant anything. It had never meant anything.
‘Is it true? Did you… did you do it?’
