But she didn’t seem to hear them. She pressed her fists against her temples, her voice rising to a scream. “They took it from me!”
The nurse’s tone shifted. “Get her arm.”
“Jennifer, it’s okay,” the second murmured as they reached for her, but she thrashed against their hold, crying out incoherently. Then, with a quick, practiced motion, one of them slid a needle into her arm.
Within seconds, Jennifer’s body went slack. Her head fell forward, a faint whimper escaping her lips.
Cherry’s hand found mine as the nurses carefully guided Jennifer out of the room. “I think we should leave now,” she said under her breath. “We’ve been lucky so far, but that luck is going to run out pretty soon.”
We hurried out, barely looking back as the nurses disappeared around the corner with Jennifer’s limp form between them.
Neither of us said a word as we passed the nurses’ station, just waved when one of them glanced up and smiled. The elevator doors slid shut with a soft chime, and I let out a shaky breath.
We still didn’t speak on the way down. Not when the doors opened into the lobby, not when we crossed the linoleum, not even when we handed back our visitor badges to Margaret at the front desk. I could feel her eyes on us as we stepped through the sliding doors into the cold afternoon air, but I didn’t look back.
Once we reached the parking lot, Cherry dug her keys out from her purse with trembling fingers. “Jesus,” she muttered. “That was intense.”
“Yeah, but it was helpful,” I said. “Do you remember what we were saying earlier about kismet?”
Her brow furrowed. “Yeah. Why?”
“Think about the date Jennifer told us. For the initiation ceremony.”
Cherry frowned deeper, eyes flicking to the ground. Then I saw the realization finally hit her. “The second Friday in October,” she said slowly. “That’s this Friday. The same night we planned to check out the tunnel.”
“Kismet,” I said again. “It’s like the universewantsthis to work out for us.”
She glanced sideways at me. “I guess it does seem that way,” she said softly. “But… aren’t you scared? Especially after what we just heard in there?”
I bit my lip as I considered my answer.
Before now, I’d managed to tamp my fear down to background noise, drowned out by my need for answers. But after seeing what the Dionysus Club had done to Jennifer Albright, after watching her crack in front of us, that fear was roaring back to life. It filled my chest, made my hands shake, whispered that I was making a terrible mistake. Whispered that I never should’ve set foot in Blackthorne Harbor.
But beneath the fear, burning even brighter, was that same old determination.
They'd broken Jennifer. They'd killed Cal. And I was going to make them pay for it.
17
Violet
The Chapel of Saintswas darker than I'd ever seen it.
No candles flickered at the altar. No moonlight filtered through the stained glass. Just shadows upon shadows, broken only by the faint glow of our phones as we made our way down the aisle toward the door that led to the ossuary below.
“How freaked out are you on a scale of one to ten right now?” Cherry whispered, the black cloak she wore billowing slightly as she moved.
“About an eleven,” I murmured as I adjusted the hood of my own cloak; cheap theatrical fabric that Cherry had procured from the costume closet at the theater. Underneath, I wore a nice black top, jeans, and flat black boots, and my hair was curled and pinned, makeup done in dramatic smoky eyes and pink lips. Party-ready, just in case we needed to use our cover story.
Cherry had thought of everything. If we were caught in the ossuary tunnel, we'd play dumb and say we were doing a spooky season scavenger hunt that was followed by a party. She'd even organized a fake event at the theater—a witch-themed gathering scheduled for ten, complete with a Facebook event page anda handful of theater students who'd agreed to show up and corroborate our story if needed.
The scavenger hunt was supposedly leading us to various ‘spooky’ locations around campus that contained hidden treasures. That way, we could say we'd simply stumbled upon the tunnel entrance while searching the chapel and ossuary, and then we’d decided to check it out like any curious group would.
“Almost ready?” Jeremiah asked, pushing open the door that led down to the ossuary. In his hands, he held something that looked like a tiny helicopter. “I'm going to send the drone ahead first. Just to make sure we're clear.”
I nodded, watching as he powered on the device. A tiny red light blinked to life on the GoPro camera mounted to its underside. The drone lifted smoothly from his hands with a quiet whir, hovering in the stairwell before descending into the darkness below.
Jeremiah pulled out his phone, the screen showing the live feed from the camera. “Okay, stairs are clear. Let's go.”
