Nancy snorted. “I don’t know why you guys still care who gets top of class. It’s not as if it matters.”
“It’s a matter ofpride,Nancy – a concept you obviously don’t understand. All the weed in the world won’t ruin Ayaz’s chances,” Courtney rested her head on Ayaz’s shoulder and beamed up at him in a way that made me want to gag. “Now that Trey’s lost his points, you’re miles ahead of everyone. You’ll be the first scholarship student to make valedictorian. And they say this school’s not progressive.”
Of course. With Trey and I out of the picture, Ayaz would be next in line for the top of the class, and Tillie after him. Much good it would do him – there was nowhere to go after he graduated except back to repeat the year over with new scholarship students to torment.
The monarchs packed up their things and disappeared back up the steps. Ayaz wrapped his arm around Courtney’s tiny waist, allowing her to lean against him, to brush her lips against his neck in a way that made my blood boil. Halfway up the steps, Ayaz paused, his shoulders tensed. He turned back, casting his dark eyes over the pleasure gardens.
I dropped my head and flattened myself against the bottom of the bed, hoping my covering was enough to hide me from his gaze. I counted my pounding heartbeat in my ears until I reached five hundred. Nothing. Not a sound. I dared to raise my neck just enough to peer over the side of the flower bed. The stairs were empty.
Ayaz was gone.
I was alone again.
I wasted no time in untangling myself from the weeds and racing down to the cemetery. The waves crashed against the cliffs below, shooting a salty spray through the air that razed my skin. I ducked into the protective shade of the trees. Here, the roar of the ocean disguised the crunching of my footsteps through the fallen leaves and vines that choked the ground. I swung the gate open and slipped inside.
I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly. All I knew was that these kids had supposedly perished in a fire and then climbed out of their own coffins, alive-but-not-alive. The edimmu. The revenants. The dead who had not been properly buried.
But Ms. West had raised a cadaver to life in the hospital morgue. Deborah had seen her do it. So why bury the bodies? What did that achieve?
Maybe there was some clue here. Maybe I could find the answers we so desperately needed.
I’d only ever been to the cemetery at night before, and it loomed with memories of the guys telling me what they were, what happened to them. In the daylight, the toppling rows of graves appeared less sinister – almost jaunty, like the teeth of the children in my grade school whose parents couldn’t afford braces. I dropped to my knees in front of one stone, brushing aside the weeds choking it. My fingers traced the faded lettering.
QUINN DELACORTE
The same boy whose body had seared mine against a pillar died twenty years ago. I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. Quinn walked and spoke and smiled like a normal, living person. He felt pain. He desired. Heloved. How could he not have a soul?
And how could his parents do this to him? Damon was a horrible human being, so I could understand his part. But surely his mother hadn’t wanted her son to become undead? How hard did Elena fight it? Was the care she showed for Quinn now only her way of assuaging her guilt?
My fingers scraped the stone beside it, faltering on Trey’s name, and then on Ayaz.
It was too painful to stare at their names. My chest cracked open, and out poured my treacherous doubts and my deepest fears.I might lose them. I might have already lost them.
No, don’t think about it. Focus on what you came to do.
I tore myself away, heading to the next row, pulling back the weeds to reveal more names. There was Courtney, her stone wreathed in carved flowers, and Tillie’s name written in gothic script. Beside her lay Nancy, and behind her Barclay and John Hyde-Jones. There were all the monarchs of the school and all their followers – gravestones chosen with great care for kids who were so unwanted their own parents sacrificed them to a god.
In that moment, I felt something I’d never expected to feel for the likes of Courtney and John Hyde-Jones. They attacked me and my friends because we had something they didn’t – life and love. I thought they had everything, that they couldn’t possibly know what it was like to go hungry or to not know if your mother would come home in a body bag. But for all their riches, they had so much less than I.
I might have been the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, the daughter of a whore, but I had been loved.
A tear rolled down my cheek. Surprised, I let it topple off the edge of my chin onto the back of my hand, staring at that tiny, perfect droplet as it reflected the grey light.
Mom.
Memories burned behind my eyes – Mom dancing with me before the club opened, her bright eyes shimmering as she looped a feather boa around my tiny shoulders, Mom counting out the wads of dollar bills she stashed around the house to give me enough money to go on a school field trip, Mom buying me a Big Mac and fries and watching me eat it all with hungry eyes, never taking a single bite even though she hadn’t eaten in two days, either.
Mom, crying alone in her bed at night when she thought I couldn’t hear. Her proud smile when I topped the class list every year. Hiding her bruised face behind a veil after one of her boyfriends beat her.
If she had the chance to obtain power from the god, to pull herself out of the life she’d been given, she never would have taken it, never in a million years. She would keep dancing on tables because everything she did, she did for me.
The guilt and grief that I’d buried under layers of rage bubbled to the surface, raw and primal. I rocked back on my heels, still staring at that tear as it wobbled on my hand.
I hadn’t cried for her. Because crying meant admitting what I’d done.
And if I admitted it, if I owned it, then I probably deserved to be behind the walls of Dunwich. I shouldn’t be here, free, trying to save other lives like I was Mother-fucking-Theresa.
“Fuck.” I wiped my hand across my dripping nose and damp eyes. This wasn’t what I came to do. I was supposed to be looking for answers, not wallowing in self-pity.
