Academy of the Forsaken (Cursed Studies Book 2) Page 3

  “It wouldn’t really have saved me, though. If I’d gone through with leaving and let myself give up—” She stopped and shook her head. “If you’re so sure it was the right approach, why did you change your tune in the end?”

  Because it hadn’t been working. Because I’d realized that being a jerk was more about protecting myself than her.

  And maybe because I’d wanted her to look at me one more time like she had in the infirmary right before she’d kissed me. I couldn’t say I’d really stopped being selfish even in the end.

  “And how much did that approach help anything either?” I said rather than answering as I shoved down the prickling uneasiness. “Aren’t you still here? Do you have any idea what they’re going to do to you if they find out you gave them the slip?”

  “Do you really wish I was gone and you all were stuck with the same horrible situation?”

  Yes, I wanted to say. I wish I never saw your lovely face again except in my imagination, picturing you having a real life out there. But the fact that I could say that would only betray that it was a lie. I did wish that… while also wishing I never had to give her up at all.

  “Wouldn’t I be an even worse asshole if I wanted you stuck here with us?” I asked instead.

  “No,” she said quietly. “I think that would just make you human.”

  Something inside me clenched up at the sympathy in her words. She was trying to understand me, trying to know me in ways that wouldn’t benefit either of us—but she wanted to anyway.

  Maybe I’d perpetuated a greater con here than I’d let myself suspect.

  “Keep in mind that you don’t really know that much about me,” I said. “Save that concern for yourself.”

  A rough laugh spilled out of her. “And how much do you know about me?”

  Enough. More than enough to be sure she didn’t belong here. “Trix,” I said, not sure where to go from there. The strands of the conversation seemed to have twisted around on themselves into an even bigger mess than when we’d started.

  “Are you even going to help with all the stuff we talked about?” she asked with a jerky motion toward the space where we’d all stood talking ten minutes ago. “Or would that be too helpful for you to stomach? Should I expect that in another day or two you might change your mind again and go back to hassling me at every opportunity?”

  “What would be the point in that when you’d see right through it?”

  “So you would have started up again if I’d forgotten everything like you expected?”

  A thread I hadn’t even realized was fraying inside me snapped. “Yes. Of course! I’d have laid into you like there was no tomorrow because it’s so much fun trying to tear you down, and I definitely enjoyed every second of it the last time around, and I don’t give a shit what happens to you as long as I get my kicks in. That’s why I’m here right now, because I’ve got no interest at all in doing anything to support you.”

  I regretted the words the second they’d tumbled out. Trix was already wincing, but not for the reason she would have been if she hadn’t known enough about me to read between the lines. To know the fact that I’d said all that meant the opposite was true.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice tight. “I shouldn’t be making accusations or asking for more when you’ve already— I know you’ve been trying. It’s just been hard to wrap my head around all of this. I’m not good at believing people even when they can give me straight answers. You shouldn’t feel badgered into taking more risks for me out of guilt or whatever.”

  She turned with a whirl of that bright hair, and my heart lurched. Without thinking, I sprang forward and caught her wrist. “Trix,” I said as she turned back toward me. I stepped closer. “Don’t. Don’t.”

  What was I telling her not to do? I wasn’t even sure. Nothing I could say felt adequate. That was the only excuse I could give for why I found myself slipping my fingers along her jaw and bowing my head to capture her mouth.

  How could kissing her feel so much better than any other girl I’d ever been with, and yet so terrifying at the same time? The heat of her mouth sent an electric shock through me. My heart hammered at my ribs.

  I was going to lose her. I was going to lose her all over again. Every nerve in my body clanged with that warning, but for that moment, I couldn’t bring myself to listen. The heady rush of it was too wonderful to give up.

  When I eased back an inch, she was gripping my shirt. She gazed up at me with both a question and a hunger I had to draw on every ounce of discipline not to answer.

  “Did that feel like guilt to you?” I asked in a low voice.

  “No,” she said with a soft quirk of her lips. “Point taken.”

  At least she sounded convinced. I still couldn’t tell whether it’d been the best move I’d ever made—or the worst.

  Chapter Four

  Trix

  Roseborne’s art classes were taught by Professor Filch, a grayed, hulking man whose body appeared to be constructed entirely out of rectangles. His head might as well have been a cinderblock for all the expression he offered with it. His pale eyes somehow managed to look both watery and emotionless.

  After he answered my knock on the art room door, he considered me with those eyes for a long moment. I’d made my usual deal with the staff where they let me stick around and keep up my search for information about Cade as long as I acted as a full student, pretending I thought it was the first time I’d ever asked. I’d even picked an unused bed in a different bedroom from last time, partly to play into the ruse that I didn’t know there’d been a last time and partly because the thought of returning to the room where I’d watched Delta waste away made me queasy. But art wasn’t on my current class schedule until next week, so I was dropping in on Filch uninvited.

  “Yes, Miss…?” he said in a hollow voice that only emphasized the cinderblock impression. The earthy scent of clay drifted past him from the room beyond.

  I smiled at him with a concentrated effort not to grit my teeth. He knew exactly what my name was, but I wasn’t supposed to know that.

  “Corbyn,” I said as politely as I could manage. “This is the art room, right? I had a question about, well, art.”

  The man’s eyebrows managed to stay straight across even as he lifted them. “I suppose you’ve come to the right place, then.” He didn’t move to let me into the room.

  I gestured vaguely toward the stairs to the first floor. “Those painted portraits that are hanging in the hall downstairs—someone told me they were done by students here. I was just wondering who the people in them are. No one around here seems to wear uniforms like that.”

  Professor Filch smiled thinly. “They’re students from decades past who contributed a great deal to making this college what it is today. We honor them with an art contest every year in which the best renditions are hung as you’ve seen them.”

  “Contributed” to making the college, huh? That didn’t sound ominous at all. I willed my face to look awed rather than unsettled. “That’s pretty cool. When’s the contest going to happen again?” If Cade had been himself enough to participate, it couldn’t have been very long into his stay here. After seven past cycles of arriving and searching for him, it had to be coming up on a year since he’d started here.

  “Oh, not for a few months yet,” Filch said without any hint of concern. “If you’re still with us then, I suppose you’ll get to try your hand at it as well.”

  “No chance of getting some early practice in?” I kept my tone light as if it were a joke, but Elias had said the professor gave photo references for the portraits. I’d like to get my hands on those photographs.

  Filch chuckled, an equally hollow sound. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be patient like the others.”

  Well, that hadn’t gotten me very far. I meandered a little down the hall as he shut the door, and turned to eye it. I should be able to get in there the same way I’d made my way through other doors with regular locks around
this place. A card placed at the right angle could pop the old-fashioned latch no problem. But the staff always seemed to sense whenever anyone was poking very far into places they weren’t meant to be. The dean had caught me within a matter of minutes the one time I’d broken into his office. It’d be risky showing I was willing to go that far this soon.

  Violet, one of my former roommates, walked past without a glance my way, her cloud of curls billowing around her face. I balked against the impulse to call after her. She hadn’t exactly chummed up to me during my last time, but she had offered a couple of tips that had pointed me in the right direction… and confessed the horrible incident that had brought her here and left her with vicious burn scars down one side of her body from forehead to calf.

  Did I really want to make friends with a girl who’d been willing to set off a bomb in her high school cafeteria over some of her classmates making fun of her clothes and hair?

  Was I any better than her when I’d destroyed someone who’d never purposefully hurt me even on that small scale?

  It didn’t matter anyway. Now that we weren’t sharing a bedroom in the dorms, she appeared to have decided there was no point in re-establishing whatever small connection we’d formed. I didn’t think, from the impressions I had of my times here, that we’d really talked in the more distant past either.

  A few other girls wandered by with muttered remarks when they noticed me. Other than my three guys, none of the students had bothered to talk to me since I’d shown up, but that much was business as usual. Why care about the perpetually new girl and her annoying questions? I was only trying to save all of them from years of torment.

  I swallowed that annoyance and headed down for my shift on laundry duty. At least I wouldn’t have Jenson heckling me through my work this time.

  The staff kept a close watch over the school building, but they hadn’t shown signs of being as sensitive to what went on beyond its walls. That was why I’d called the guys over to the carriage house to speak, and why I let out my breath in relief the second I slipped out the front door at midnight to make my way into the woods that sprawled across the south end of campus.

  As I hurried across the lawn under the hazy light of the moon, half covered by the clouds that never totally left the sky over the college, a knot of tension returned to my stomach. I might have escaped notice by the staff, but I had a different sort of reckoning ahead of me.

  It’d taken nearly two weeks of my last cycle at Roseborne, but Ryo and Elias had finally told me enough that I’d discovered my foster brother’s fate. Cade was still on campus, but not really at the school. For months, he’d been living in these woods, trapped in the shape of a horrifying monster nearly all of the time.

  Ryo had said that at first he’d only transformed for short periods, and he’d been able to attend classes then. These days… Elias had indicated that I’d be able to find Cade in human form at half-past midnight. It couldn’t have been much later than that when I’d managed to meet him after I’d gone searching for him, and I didn’t think we’d been together more than fifteen minutes before the change had come over him again.

  In those fifteen minutes, I’d admitted to him that it’d been my careless plan to scare his girlfriend that had gotten her killed. A crime only compounded by the fact that I’d let my own fears keep me silent while he’d blamed a guy who’d hassled her before and beat him into a coma in retaliation. That show of rage had to be why the beings that ran Roseborne had decided he deserved to be here—and it never would have happened if I hadn’t lost my mind to petty jealousy.

  I hadn’t gotten a chance to see how Cade would respond to that revelation. He’d started to shift into his monstrous form somewhere in the middle of my confession. Tonight, I’d have to face the music.

  Ever since I’d come to stay with my second foster family when I was seven and Cade eight, he’d stood up for me, comforted me, been there for me in every possible way. He’d managed to keep us together across two more transfers to new families, and we’d planned to get an apartment together once we’d saved up enough to leave the last of those. I’d never been able to count on anyone in my life other than him. And now he might want me out of his life forever.

  More knots twisted my gut as I picked my way between the trees, switching on the light of my phone to make it easier to see. He’d have a right to cut me out, I reminded myself. How could he count on me after what I’d done? How could he still care about me?

  It didn’t matter. I owed it to him to save him from this place. Even if I never left here, even if I ended up wasting away like the others, I had to get him out.

  The forest grew denser around me. My heart thumped faster as I reached the area where I’d encountered Cade before—first as a hulking, coarse-furred beast with a row of fangs that jutted around his wolfish jaw, then as his real self. My phone’s clock said it was exactly twelve-thirty. I stopped beneath the rustling leaves and sucked in a lungful of the cool night air.

  “Cade?” I called into the stillness of the forest. My pulse counted out several seconds, and then footsteps crackled through the brush toward me.

  My worries couldn’t dampen the joy that rushed through me at the sight of the well-built figure with his mussed blond hair that emerged into the light. A few twigs and bits of leaf clung to Cade’s thin sweater; a smudge of dirt marked his cheek. Here was an older version of the boy who’d liked to play rough and tumble in the ravine a couple of blocks from our first home together. Absolutely, completely himself—down to the crooked grin he gave me.

  “You came back,” he said. “I wasn’t totally sure, after seeing what they’ve done to me…”

  He hadn’t been sure that I’d want to be around him? I’d already seen him transformed when Ryo had first brought me out here to show me my brother’s fate. Cade didn’t seem surprised that I’d known to come out here again at all, but Elias had said that the power the staff used to send me back to my arrival echoed through the school building. The impact might not carry all the way out into the woods.

  “Of course I came,” I said. “None of this is your fault.”

  He shrugged. “They seem to think it’s suitable payback.”

  “But they don’t know—they have it all wrong—” The words caught in the back of my mouth. Neither the words he’d said nor the way he was looking at me offered any indication that he remembered what I’d told him. I peered into his light gray eyes. “I tried to explain everything last time we talked.”

  Cade cocked his head. “What’s there to explain, Baby Bea? I let my temper get the better of me, and the psychos who run this place decided to lay down their crazy judgment. You couldn’t have stopped them.”

  I could have stopped it from happening in the first place by not setting the whole chain of events in motion. Sure, Cade’s temper had always been unpredictable. How many jobs had he lost in the years before he’d come here because he’d blown up at some customer or coworker or even his boss? But that was just because he felt things so deeply. He’d never hurt anyone like he had Richie before.

  Could he really have missed my whole confession, or was his refusal to acknowledge it his way of telling me it didn’t matter to him? I couldn’t tell. But my throat constricted against the thought of spilling my guts all over again. If he did remember, he obviously wanted to brush it aside. And if he didn’t…

  I’d tell him again. I’d make sure he understood exactly how horribly I’d fucked up. Just not right now. I’d have a better chance of getting him out if we could actually talk, if he wasn’t stewing with rage over my actions.

  The decision brought a pang of guilt into my chest, but I ignored it. I’d spent months shoving down that guilt before I’d confessed. I could live with it a little longer if it meant I could help Cade now.

  “I’m going to break the hold they have over you,” I said instead. “I’ve already—they tried to wipe my memories again, but I held onto them this time. We can fight this. I’ll fight however I can for
you.”

  “Oh, Trix.” He crossed the last short distance between us and tugged me into a gentle embrace. My head bowed to his shoulder automatically, taking in his tart, coppery scent. He rumpled my hair in an affectionate gesture that took me back ten years in an instant. “Why am I not surprised? You’re too good for them to keep you down. Too good for me, really.”

  The guilt jabbed right through my heart. Back home, no one other than Cade would have used the word “good” to describe me, not after years of me mouthing off at teachers and giving back crap at anyone who threw it at me. Even he shouldn’t have thought that now.

  “Not possible,” I mumbled into his sweater. “And no way in hell are you a bad person. No one who isn’t a psycho could blame you for getting that angry after everything with Sylvie.”

  “And the fact that you can say that shows just how much I don’t deserve you,” Cade teased. He pulled back just far enough to brush a quick peck to my forehead and then gazed down at me. Something shifted in his expression with a momentary narrowing of his eyes. “How did you know when to find me anyway? Elias told you? He’s the only one who’s talked to me at all since the… situation got this bad.”

  Out of all the other students, why only Elias? I’d have to ask the other guy that. “Well, it was Ryo who brought me out here the first time, when you were still… not yourself. He thought I deserved to know, after so long when no one had been willing to tell me anything. I don’t think he realized you’re still yourself any of the time. Elias told me what time to come out.”

  Cade nodded, but his gaze stayed intent. “They’re looking out for you now, are they?”

  My body resisted that representation, especially with my brother’s arms still around me. “I wouldn’t exactly say that. They’ve helped a little. It’s not like I’d expect them to have my back the way you always have.”