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I didn’t know the last name, but… “They’ve gone missing?” My breath came faint, my head starting to pound again.
“All three of them,” my neighbour agreed, pushing his glasses up his nose in an obviously stressed move.
“Three at once,” I breathed, panic closing off my chest.
“And you know why,” Fashion Magazine said emphatically. “This is Duncan Ford’s cult bullshit.”
I blinked. “Aren’t you friends with Duncan?” I asked, trying to ignore the hammering inside my skull, the anvil crushing my chest. The room was starting to go dark around the edges.
Three were missing. Darya was dead. People were asking after her. But she was never coming back, because I killed her.
“I was,” Fashion Magazine said, his mouth twisted and arms crossing over his fashionable jacket. “Until Halloween.”
So he thought Duncan was behind Nightmare’s resurgence to power. Duncan was one of the few I knew wasn’t—I saw the look on his face that night, and it was honest and terrified—but I could understand how everyone would jump to conclusions.
“You got an invitation,” my neighbour said, watching me with tense understanding. “Did you go that night?”
I nodded tightly.
“Me, too,” he offered. Neither of us was talking about simply attending a party. What costume did he wear that night? What was he now cursed as?
“They’re picking us off one by one,” Fashion Magazine spat, the whites of his eyes showing. He angrily stuffed his hands in the pockets of his khaki slacks.
“They?” I asked. My blood pounded too loudly in my ears.
“Those robed fuckers. The cult.”
Was he right? Had her cult killed the other two? Oh god, was I one of them now? Was I her follower, controlled by her whim, powerless against each command? I shuddered hard, cold all over.
“I can’t do this,” I gasped, and fled back into my room, locking it firmly behind me. I stumbled over the rug to my bed and collapsed face down onto the covers, shaking all over. Cold all the way down to my bones.
People knew Darya was missing. How long before they realised she was dead?
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CAT
Aweek passed, but I only got out of bed to use the bathroom attached to my room. I wasn’t sure this room was supposed to be ensuite but my gods had made it so. Magic, I presumed. They tried to coax me into eating, but beyond a few sips of soup every day, I couldn’t keep anything in my stomach.
One morning I woke up with Miz squashed into the single bed with me, his arms and legs wrapped around me like a clingy octopus and his whole body shaking. I didn’t ask what had freaked him out, and he didn’t ask why I couldn’t leave my room. I knew the answer would be the same: Nightmare.
My phone buzzed on the fourth day, and I reached for it, thinking it was Virgil finally, but instead five words stared back at me from an unknown number.
I know what you did
I threw it across the room so hard it shattered the mirror on the wardrobe—Tor picked up the shards hours later so I wouldn’t stand on them, and stared at the text I’d received with his nostrils flaring like an angry bull.
I hadn’t checked my phone in the days since. Sometimes Tor scanned my messages and passed on any from my family and friends.
Honey and Byron had hammered my door down, and only relented when I finally let them in to see I was miserably sick. They didn’t know why, but I couldn’t bring myself to explain what Nightmare made me do, what my own hands had done.
Darya hadn’t been found yet. She was officially missing. But Professor Lancashire had been found in Rosalind Woods, his throat cut, and the other girl had been found hanging from a tall tree’s heavy limbs. Dead, all three of them.
On the fifth day, Honey forced her way into my room and curled up with me in bed, holding me so tightly the impression of her arms must have been imprinted on my ribs.
“It’s awful out there,” she whispered. “Everyone’s talking about the murders, and Darya being missing. I can’t stand it much longer.”
“I’m sorry,” I’d whispered, my body hollowed out, soul decaying in my body.
