Page 18 of The Villains of Winter

​​ CHAPTER TEN

“SNEAKING IN THE PRIVATE STUDY?” Someone asked behind Elliott the next afternoon of Samhain weekend. The voice echoed on the aragonite walls of the hibernaculum, disturbing the colony of bats that fluttered over Elliott’s head. Ear-splitting screeches jolted his spine.

Elliott nearly jumped out of his skeleton and dissolved into the floor in the philosophy department. It was James Wilde. Again. It was the second time he’d caught Elliott attempting to turn in the exit paperwork into the department mailboxes. James delivered a conspiratorial smile. “New interest in philosophy, Elliott?”

Before Elliott could speak, James blew out his small match.

As the professor assistant, James’s private study resided beside Professor Wulfram’s end of the pedagogic cave. James sipped from his monogrammed JVW IV mug. Elliott pretended to read his name in order to give himself time to think of an excuse. James Vallen Wilde IV.

The Stygian depths of Samhain night darkened the sky, fine mist submerging the visible campus in translucent fog, wading over the manicured grass like ferrymen of the underworld. However, thirty meters below ground, James exuded the playboy charisma of Bruce Wayne. He was dressed in a sharp tuxedo of Gotham refinement.

Elliott fixed his swirl of dark hair over his polished, square-framed Clark Kent glasses. The Superman emblem of Elliott’s shirt burned beneath his skin. It was the second night of Hallowe’en parties for the weekend.

Elliott felt kinship with Superman, who lost his parents, raised by someone else, suddenly far from home, and surrounded by folks different from him. He wished he could fly out of there faster than the speed of light. However, he was trapped.

James illuminated his face with the flame of a primitive torch. For their inside joke, Elliott was supposed to respond, Arrēctus? You want to have sex with me seven times a day now? He’d seen James six separate times that afternoon alone to hang out before dinner, this was their seventh. Except, Elliott hid the forged transfer papers in his backpack. He’d hoped to insert it into the metal mailbox to be sent as if it already had approval from Wulfram. Wasn’t James supposed to be in the Kierkegaard lecture on Monday? Didn’t he always prepare for them in the Exeter Athenaeum on Sundays?

“Arrēctus?” Elliott remarked at last, as though he had nothing to hide. As though nothing was wrong. “We should make the seventh count.”

“Per os?” James smirked in response. By mouth?

“If you buy me dinner first.” Elliott replicated his smirk. “The dirt and sweat and stamina will be a pain.”

James remarked with a wink, “A little dirt never killed anyone, Elliott. I promise to be gentle with you.” He lowered the timber of his voice as Bruce Wayne. “Dulcius ex asperis[5].”

Sweeter after difficulty.

Elliott grinned, but he grimaced at the last second. Torrid heat blazed over his cheeks from the torch’s thermal fire. Damn it. He couldn’t keep it together. He needed to turn in the paperwork. “What do these words mean?” Elliott asked to distract himself instead, pointing at the mammoth philosophy tome under James’s arm. His scribbled notes were esoteric–ἐπιστήμη–μυστική, ἱɛρά.

Without warning, James’s face darkened, and he set the tome aside. He covered the burgundy-stained edge of a few cryptic words: Elixir vitae. Panaceum. “Nothing.”

“Is that blood?–” Elliott swallowed, staring at the stain on the aged parchment.

“Paint. It’s for Plato’s Protagoras.” James checked his wristwatch, he quoted something Elliott couldn’t grasp. “‘Creation begets creation.’”

That wasn’t from Protagoras. Elliott knew very little of Plato’s dialogues, but he knew that. Why was James lying to him?

As Elliott inhaled James’s aftershave, he thought of Socrates in Protagoras. ‘What of his beard? Are you not of Homer’s opinion, who says youth is most charming when the beard first appears?[6]’ Protagoras believed virtue could be taught, something James declined to believe. Why was he reading Protagoras now?

“Who’s in there?” A second voice filled the deep abyss of the mineral cave. Elliott nearly flatlined.

Thankfully, it wasn’t Professor Wulfram.

“Oh, James, it’s you.” A teenage girl with bright blue eyeshadow and massive blow-out hair with amber-dyed strands dumped her book bag onto the ground. She was Elliott’s little foster sister. “Quick, I need your help with my Spice Girls costume.”

“Are you Spooky Spice?” James locked his recondite tomes in the cabinet when he thought Elliott wasn’t looking. “Rich Girl Spice?”

“It’s Scary Spice and Posh Spice, Grandpa.” She hopped up on the chamber desk so he could fix her mini skirt and boots for the music video costume. She lowered her hooded cape she borrowed from James. “I’m Scary Spice.”

“You’re the least scariest girl on the planet.” James hung his torch above her on the receptacle.

“I’ll bite you.” She grinned at him. “You’ll change your mind then.”

James was glad to see her smile. Kitty Evers was an unauthorized high schooler on the college grounds, but they snuck her in every year for Samhain. As he sutured the skirt, he hoped that her academy friends hadn’t abandon her that time. Kitty had sleepovers at their dormitory, and they stayed up late watching illegal MTV tapes on the Common Room television. For years, Kitty struggled to keep friends because of them.

Everyone knew about the car crash of Arthur Newton.

As minors at the time, their names were redacted by law from the press. No one knew who’d been driving that night, who’d been involved, what led to the gruesome death. But Banebury was unbearably small and close knit, the news spread and the gossip couldn’t be contained for long. Did your brother hit him with a truck in a prank gone wrong? Did he run over him twice?