“Loyalty,” I said.
“But the spirit is gone.”
My hand, wrapped in Sebastian’s handkerchief, was starting to throb. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We’ve become ordinary,” Xavier said. “We think we incorporate them, but they’ve incorporated us.”
“You Mortons are the worst,” Bianca said. “You used to cut out Roman hearts inside a ring of stones. Now you cut and paste in spreadsheets.”
“Again,” Sebastian said. “My grades beg to differ.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I said. “What doesanyof this have to do with Peter?”
“He arrived at Helshire already knowing what you can’t seem to grasp,” Bianca said. “That we are chaos.”
I remembered Peter at his first Primal Scream, happiest unleashed, with no rules to follow.
Xavier put an arm around his older sister, taking back the floor. “Here in Halcyon, we remind ourselves who we are. We kill with a personal motive.”
I stared at them both. “Like an ordinary? Like ananimal?”
Xavier beamed. “While still at Helshire. Anger, revenge, heat, before the math sets in.”
“Themathis how we’ve survived for thousands of years. We kill for our families, not ourselves.”
“No matter who the target is?” Bianca asked, dead still, sizing me up. The wind picked up outside, stirring the leaves on the floor, a sound like wings.
If she found out it was me…
“Wait,” I said. “Did one of you kill Peter?”
“Never,” she said. “We thoughtyoukilled him. Culled for not being a proper little Morton.”
“He fell.”
At last, the tension in her shoulders softened. She believed me.
I looked around the room again—the circle of candles, the layers of graffiti. Peter, gaudy and savage, must have loved it here.
“Didhekill someone?” I asked.
“He was still in the planning stages of his Hefnd,” Bianca said. “The word meansvengeance.”
“Have any of you actually done this?”
Xavier looked away. Sebastian raised his empty hands—a man incapable of making enemies.
“When I was a freshman,” Bianca said.
I stared at her.
“Jessica,” she said. “Has anyone ever cut in line, right in front you? Like you didn’t exist? Like you didn’tmatter?”
“Possibly.”
“And did you stand there, imagining all the ways you could hurt them? Thinking about how easy it would be to break their knees, snap their necks—so they’d never cut in line again?”
“I rarely fantasize,” I said. “And I avoid lines.”
