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She could have let Noah walk with her. But she’d done this walk several times without incident and didn’t consider the need for extra precautions with how close the bus stop was. She could see it from here. Walking around this late near campus wasn’t abnormal for coeds.
Footsteps sounded behind her as she continued up the hill to the bus stop only a couple of streetlights down from the crosswalk. The hair lifted on the back of her neck. She didn’t want to stop, but if she didn’t, she would miss the last bus. She peered up the street and breathed easier seeing the familiar headlights of the approaching bus.
Stopping beneath the green sign, the bus hissed as the driver put on the brakes and opened the doors. Charlotte braved a glance back in the direction of the man.
Nothing.
Had he turned down Hickory Street? Did he turn back and go into the dorm apartments? She scanned her surroundings as the bus approached and came to a stop, but no one else stood on the streets.
Maybe her new medication had the unwelcome side effect of paranoia. She needed to Google that later. Getting jumpy over a pedestrian on the street, just because—
“You gettin’ on, hon?”
She spun to look up at the older woman sitting in the driver’s seat. “Yeah, sorry.” Climbing the steps onto the bus, she showed her UGA student ID card and took a seat near the front. She didn’t feel comfortable being alone, and with no one else on the bus, the driver would have to do for company.
Leaning on the window, she looked out at the street as the bus drove in the opposite direction of her apartment; it would eventually circle back and head toward her street.
As the bus chugged through the intersection, she saw the hooded man leaning on a lamppost watching the bus until the dorm apartment building hid it from view.
Okay. Maybe not paranoid.
She pulled out her cell phone to distract herself, opening her texts to find three missed messages. One from her mom regarding the full moon on the twenty-third of June—the Flower Moon, she called it. Normally, the peculiar messages wouldn’t be concerning, but her mom had been harping on how something big loomed, and that by the summer solstice her life would be forever changed. The words had her on edge with the recent strangeness.
She checked her phone calendar. June tenth.
Midterms fell on the same day as the solstice, but the professor scheduled the presentation earlier in the week. It made her wonder what, if anything, was going to happen next Friday.
When she was younger, her friends often thought her mom’s eccentric words and beliefs were related to her Native American heritage, but they were wrong. Stereotyping her mom that way felt offensive. She never forgot where she came from, but most of her insight came from elsewhere. Charlotte had felt something mystical about her growing up, but now the idea seemed silly.
She glanced back down the street through the window. Even knowing she was far from the man, she still couldn’t shake that feeling of being followed.
Turning her attention back to the phone screen, she swiped away her mom’s message and opened the one from her ma. The message brought a smile to her face. Her ma had found the owners of the Pittie Charlotte rescued before her big move to Athens.
If someone brought a stray to her ma’s veterinary clinic, they would take them to the local shelter instead of keeping them on board, but there was something special about the big-eyed pupper she couldn’t refuse, so she begged her ma to keep him. They posted flyers everywhere, hoping to locate the owner. He acted friendly, making it obvious the dog had owners and wasn’t a random stray, but he lacked a microchip and tags.
According to the text, the owner’s five-year-old opened the back gate, and that’s how the dog—Oliver—escaped. They didn’t keep a collar on Oliver at home to avoid a choking hazard, but with the scare of losing the furbaby, they purchased the chipping service from her ma’s clinic.
After sending a quick reply, she swiped away the message and opened the final unread text.
Aiden:
This game isn’t as fun with randoms.
Smiling, she tucked her phone away, not wanting to wake him with a response if he was asleep. Her ma kept her phone on silent, so she wouldn’t see the reply until morning.
Another reason leaving Rosebrook Valley weighed on her… Aiden Easton.
In the last year, they started getting to know one another through a series of strange circumstances.
Her best friend, Blaire, received a scholarship to join Blackthorn Academy, the mysterious and ultra-exclusive university in Rosebrook Valley. She wasn’t jealous Blaire got in and could stay in the area, because she had needed to escape a dangerous situation. Blaire’s stepbrother was a monster.
Charlotte leaned her head back on the seat and sighed. If only she could be so lucky to be offered a scholarship at random like that. She missed her best friend and wished she could visit and spend the night together like they so often used to.
That wouldn’t happen though. She didn’t know if it was an elitist thing or what, but she never entertained the weird rumors circulating the town about the Blackthorn Academy, even before getting to know some of the students in Blaire’s new friend circle.
Small town gossip in the South often swayed in the direction of religion; the misunderstood were marked as sinners or evil. A tale as old as time, religion thriving by feeding on the fears of the unknown.
It wasn’t a secret that a majority of the older denizens of Rosebrook Valley believed the school a front for a cult, and the students followers of Lucifer.
