“And Courtney always plays by the rules, does she?” I folded my arms. “I’m going into this with my eyes wide open.”
“Fine.” Courtney trilled, a triumphant grin spreading across her face. “If she refuses the blindfold, she forfeits the initiation. Derek, cut that tattoo out of her arm.”
“With pleasure.” Derek, a friend of John’s and a hulking lump of a guy who looked like he should have bolts sticking out the sides of his neck, lurched toward me. A silver blade flickered in the air as he raised a beefy arm.
Jesus fuck! They weren’t kidding.
Shifting my right foot back, I slid the glass shard out of my sleeve and pressed it between my knuckles. If Derek thought he was getting anywhere near me with that knife, he had another thing coming.
Ayaz stepped in front of me, glaring at Derek. “Put that down, man. She’ll wear the blindfold.”
“No, I won’t.”
Ayaz squeezed my arm. “We all did, Hazel. It’ll be safe. I’ll be beside you the whole way there. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
I wanted to yank my arm back.You’ve already let bad things happen to me. But I didn’t have a choice. Greg and Andre were already wearing theirs, and students snaked up the narrow stone path, leading them into the forest. I pulled the black scarf over my head and let Courtney tighten it. She pulled the knot so hard I swear it pushed my eyeballs back into my head.
In the darkness, my other senses pricked, parsing every scuff of a shoe, every murmur, every crash of the waves against the rocks for danger. Ayaz rested my hand on his elbow, covering my fingers with the warmth of his palm. “I’m here, Hazel.”
Once again, as much as I fucking hated to trust anyone, I found myself leaning against Ayaz, allowing myself to take cues from the movement of his body to feel my way over the uneven ground. His fingers on mine felt warm and solid, guiding me true.
Part of me almostwantedhim to betray me, so I wouldn’t feel so conflicted about what I had to do. The other part of me – the part that was all fire and madness – didn’t want him to ever unlace his fingers from mine.
Hands shoved me forward. “After you.” Courtney’s mocking voice cried in my ear.
Ayaz gripped me as I struggled up the steps. My fingers scrabbled for the edges of the steps, feeling my way up the path. Behind me, someone kicked my calves as I struggled. “Walk faster,” John Hyde-Jones growled. My body stiffened as I caught the menace in his words.
Finally, I felt the ground even out, the rock beneath my feet give way to dirt and twisted tree roots. The air warmed as the trees sheltered us from the worst of the wild ocean wind. I hated how much I leaned on Ayaz as my feet slipped over the uneven ground, but I didn’t pull away.
We walked for miles. I called out to Greg and Andre, but club members shushed me. Apparently, we weren’t allowed to communicate. My feet ached from tripping on roots and scuffing on rocks, my shoulders strained from the tension of not being able to see. Every step I took I expected to topple over a ravine or walk onto the tip of a sharpened sword.
We stopped twice, briefly, while the students recited an incantation in a creepy guttural language and banged a drum in that uncanny rhythm that was impossible to follow. Ayaz whispered to me that Greg and Andre had both been dropped at their positions. Mine would be the last, the furthest from the school.
How sporting.
I counted my steps as we walked, attempting to make a rough guess at how far we’d come. We must’ve been right at the very edge of the school grounds, close to the sigils that kept the students trapped inside, when Courtney called out for us to stop. Fingernails scraped my face as the blindfold was torn away. “You’re up, gutter whore,” Courtney hissed.
Bright torchlight blinded me. Ghoulish faces pressed in all around, spinning me in a circle as they chanted their curses. Ayaz’s hand was torn from mine and I lost all the guys in the frenzy. Tree limbs, faces, rocky crags… they all sped past so fast I couldn’t focus on a landmark. The infernal drum beat in my ears, further disorienting my senses.
White hot pain seared my leg. I screamed, my body collapsing in on itself as the pain built like a cresting wave, blinding me until all I saw was the inside of my skull. The world faded into a single point, and I could no longer hear or register anything except the pain.
Adrift in an ocean of agony, I thrashed like a stranded beast, desperate to free myself of its grip. But there was no escape – only a cold resolve that once my body stopped being on fire I would burn every one of those motherfuckers down.
Inside my head, the god screamed, its shriek the sound of the universe tearing asunder. The ground beneath my feet rumbled in protest, but I was so disoriented I had no way of knowing if it really was shaking or if it was a product of my pain-filled mind.
Dimly, I understood what had happened. Courtney burned the back of my calf with her torch.The bitch.
“Go back where you came from,gutter whore.” Thick, lumpy hands groped my breasts, then shoved me. I toppled backward. The white lights blinked out as I was swallowed by stygian gloom. I flung out my hands to break my fall, but all I grasped was foul air.
The darkness swallowed my scream as the pain engulfed my body, and I was lost to the void.
Chapter Eleven
I fell forever, until it felt as though I were no longer falling at all but suspended in the darkness, a puppet waiting for her strings to be jerked by a cruel master.
But, eventually, gravity won. I landed hard on my back. Pain sliced down my spine, momentarily competing with the needles stabbing into my leg. I gasped for air in my crushed lungs. The god screamed inside my head and flung an assault of waking nightmares into my mind.
I don’t know how long I lay there, wallowing in the agony of the fall and the foul images the god visited on me, before my mind was able to cut through the pain and remind me there was a ticking clock on my own personal sword of Damocles.
