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CAT
Ididn’t sleep, which turned out to be good luck because it took me three hours to work up the courage to grab the door handle, let alone step out of my room. I didn’t take my thumb off the crown ring on my finger, spinning it over and over and over, my chest so tight I couldn’t choke down a single scrap of air.
But I made it out. I made it to class, with Honey silent beside me and Byron… absent. I didn’t know where he was, but we were in a different class today so maybe he wasn’t avoiding me. Maybe he didn’t hate me. Or maybe he did hate me, he’d realised there were a thousand better friends in the universe, and he’d decided he needed nothing to do with an anxiety-ridden burden like me.
My makeup never washed off, even when I showered with the water at igneous temperatures, but no one commented about it. I asked Honey about it but she shrugged and said she couldn’t see anything; I performed the same check when she asked if her cat nose and whiskers were still there. Everyone else was distracted and jumpy too, like something was off with them, like they couldn’t forget what had happened in Ford House last night, either.
By the time the lecture ended, I’d taken in nothing of the information, made no notes on my laptop, and I was ready to explode. I kept trying to find the positive in the situation and coming up blank. What was the positive about witnessing murder? Worse—unexplainable murder that had no rational explanation.
Honey yawned so wide her jaw cracked, her eyes hazy. “God, I’m exhausted,” she said as we left the ancient lecture theatre, an air of history and gravity hanging over Milton Hall, the spire-topped building where most classes were held. The grey skies made it bleary and miserable outside; it threatened to rain again. It always threatened to rain on Ford’s End. “I need a twelve-hour nap.”
I needed the opposite. I was drained and my body desperately begged for rest, but I dreaded it. My whole waking day had been a nightmare, but if I slept? We’d been tormented by a woman literally called Nightmare. What would she do while we slept?
I briefly leaned my head on her shoulder. “I need coffee. I’m gonna drive down to the village. You coming?”
“Pass,” Honey groaned, pulling her black beret further over her head like it could block out the dull light as we crossed campus. Her azure eyes narrowed balefully at the sky. “Do you see rain, Cat? I see rain. I hate rain.”
I gave her a strange look, pulling my bag higher on my shoulder and wincing at its book-induced weight. I shouldn’t have carried two romance books with me today but I needed the reassurance of having them, like I needed my crown ring.
“You didn’t hate rain when we made the crossing,” I reminded her as we reached a fork in the path, where one way led to Lawrence Hall and our rooms and the other veered past the laboratory to the garage where Bugattis, Aston Martins, and Maseratis now sat beside my beloved lime-green Lamborghini Urus, delivered this morning to the island by a one-time ferry.
Honey gave me a horrified look. “Shit. I remember standing out in the storm. What was I thinking? My fur must have been soaked.” She shook her head and laughed at her past self, coaxing a weak smile from me. “I’ll see you when you get back. If you want to earn my eternal love, you could pick me up an iced latte.”
“Consider your eternal love earned,” I replied with a slightly stronger smile. Because of everything that had happened, and how fucking terrified I was just to exist, to breathe, to walk, to be outside, I grabbed my friend into a hug and squeezed tight. “Go straight to your room, okay? Be careful.”
“I will if you will,” she agreed, squeezing me just as hard.
It pained me to release her, but comfort coffee and comfort books didn’t come without risk and effort.1 At the very least, they didn’t come without driving down to the village that sold them. So I forced my arms to drop and took a step away from Honey, dragging my stare away from her when we parted.
I couldn’t fight the feeling I’d never see her again, like Nightmare would swoop in and take her from me like she took Mason Lindgren and Milani Hussain.
But nightmares only happened after dark, and it was barely four p.m. I twisted the ring around my finger, my thumb worrying the spikes, and followed the path, giving Ford House a very wide berth but unable to stop staring at it. It looked completely normal. No blood, no glowing windows, no cult ritual. I shuddered and kept walking.
Byron’s words from last night followed me all the way to the low-slung garage building on the edge of campus, where the forest hugged the edge of the cliff. The sea’s choppy wind was stronger here, lifting hair off my shoulders and throwing pink-tinged strands into my face.
That was another thing I did not want to think about, along with the people Nightmare murdered, the makeup that wouldn’t wash off my face, and Byron snapping—my hair wasn’t dark brown anymore. It was the same white as the wig I wore last night, complete with pink where Honey used hair chalk to colour the nylon. Only this wasn’t nylon—it was real hair, as if I’d always been this colour.
Honey’s was permanently smeared black, too. No magic hid those marks; the changes were there for all to see. We didn’t talk about it.
I batted the hair away and walked on, my stomach clenching. I was lucky the dress had allowed me to remove it, or it’d end up yellowed like Miss Havisham’s wedding gown. There—I’d found it, the single silver lining. I wasn’t forced to wear a piss-stained dress.
I got out my keys and the remote fob dangling from it, relieved when the huge metal door slid into the wall and the garage proved to be empty. I couldn’t handle socialising right now; even asking for my coffee order was skirting impossibility. I was dangling over the edge of a breakdown, clinging to the tiniest scrap of composure, the handhold narrow while my body dangled over a perilous drop.
Hopefully an iced caramel latte with oat milk and an iced latte, please didn’t send me over the edge.
It took me two minutes to locate my car’s bay, another two to find where my keys had fallen to the bottom of my heavy bag, and then I was sliding into the soft leather seat. Enclosing myself in the familiar scent and a sense of safety nothing else had given me on the island.
I exhaled a sigh, a weight falling off my shoulders when the car purred to life. It was only when I peeled out of the garage, closed the big metal door with the fob, and was driving down the hill away from Ford that I realised what Honey had said.
I remember standing out in it. What was I thinking? My fur must have been soaked.
Fur?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CAT
Isurvived asking for coffee, thanking the barista when she handed them to me, and even got through checking for stock on the book I needed more than air in a tiny, hole-in-the-wall bookshop I found tucked between a tea room and florist. I emerged half an hour later with two lattes, three slices of Victoria sponge in a white cardboard box, and a book about a vampire who marries her werewolf enemy.
