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Prologue
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Ten years ago, St. John the Apostle’s Academy, Upstate New York.
Never get drunk on altar wine, because the hangover will probably kill you.
Zelda Madison gritted her teeth to accommodate the thundering pain radiating out from her temples and met the emerald glare of the man sitting opposite her.
Tyrone ‘High and Mighty’ Sullivan had been staring at her as if she was a bug under his shoe ever since Dawn had been ushered into the Mother Superior’s Office five minutes ago. Her friend Faith’s eldest brother obviously had something against Zelda. She had no idea what, as she had never met the guy before today.
Squinting her eyes to reduce the blaze of sunlight coming through the stained glass window of Christ on the Cross that bore down on them from the vaulted hallway, Zel attempted to glare back at him.
The glare wasn’t one of her best. Probably because her retinas felt as if they’d been lasered off, and there was a huge bottomless chasm opening up in her belly at the thought of what might be waiting for her once the Mother Superior had finished giving Dawn the gestapo treatment.
She broke her glare-off with Sullivan and stared at her sensible shoes. He could bugger off. Right now, his disapproval was the least of her worries.
Getting stoned on unconsecrated communion wine hadn’t been the smartest thing the four of them had ever done. But it had felt good at the time. Hiding in their dorm room with her three best friends—Faith, Dawn and Mercy—the giggly buzz of the alcohol had raced through her bloodstream, blurring all the jagged edges and making her feel euphoric. Until Sister Ignatius had marched in, thrown a complete hissy fit, and ruined everything.
The buzz was long gone now, but at least the killer hangover that she’d woken up to this morning had stopped her from having to contemplate the possible consequences of their actions. Until now.
She glanced at Sebastian, her older brother and guardian, who sat stoically beside her in his creased travel clothes and had arrived an hour ago. He looked remote and broody and indifferent, the way he always did.
While Faith’s brother had given his sister a hug and told her ‘not to worry, we’ll figure this out,’ Seb had shot Zelda his what-the-hell-have-you-done-this-time look, and then blanked her. He sat next to her now, as they waited their turn with Mercy and her parents and Faith and Mr. High and Mighty to get a roasting from the Mother Superior, still ignoring her. His booted foot tapped on the polished wood floor, the patient thud, thud, thud echoing in Zel’s skull like a death knell in time with the loud ticks of the grandfather clock.
With his hair shorn off in a brutal buzz cut, his skin darkly tanned from his latest tour in the French Foreign Legion, the blank expression on his face neither angry nor consoling, Seb seemed like even more of a stranger than the last time she’d seen him. Four months ago, when he’d dropped her at St. J’s after she and Mercy had spent the Christmas break at the Madison townhouse in Manhattan. Before Seb had headed off to his latest posting with the Legion. Or rather, before he’d run away from her. Again.
“It was only a few glasses,” Zel whispered, attempting to get him to at least acknowledge her existence. “Iggy totally overreacted,” she added, using the nickname she and her friends had coined for their least favorite sister.
Seb turned and blinked, as if surprised to see her there. Then shrugged. “Whatever, Zelda.”
She slumped back against the uncomfortable bench seat, her panic increasing. He was wearing that weary scowl again, the one he’d worn when he’d sent her off to boarding school three years ago, despite all her pleas and protests and angry tears, and the two times she’d been expelled since and she’d been sent off somewhere new.
But this time was different she wanted to yell at him. This time she didn’t want to leave. And she didn’t want to return to the Madison Mausoleum. There was nothing left for her in their huge family home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side anymore, the shadowy hallways and empty rooms as moody and miserable as her brother, and she’d finally figured it out.
She glanced across at Mercy, whose cheeks glowed pink under her olive toned skin before her friend’s gaze darted away. Mercy’s mother whispered something in hissed Spanish while her father sat on her other side, stony faced.
I wish Mum and Dad were here to be mad at me.
Zelda swallowed down the choking feeling in her throat. The cramping pain in her stomach a cruel echo of the agony she’d been in three years ago.
; It can’t be happening again. I can’t lose my friends now, too.
The four of them couldn’t get chucked out of St. J’s. She couldn’t bear it. Faith, Dawn, and Mercedes were her only friends. They were all she had now. The other school misfits. Ever since she’d arrived at St. J’s a year ago and been assigned to their dorm room, she’d bonded with them. Maybe not at first, because she’d been so hurt and angry and still determined to cause as much trouble as possible so Seb would notice her and let her come home. But gradually she’d come around, and figured out that all the things that made her friends strange to everyone else, made them fascinating and fun and perfect to her.
Mercedes’ thick Argentinian accent, which they had all dedicated themselves to helping her lose. Her stalwart loyalty and passionate temperament, so unlike the demure expression she wore now for her parents’ benefit. Faith’s quiet grief, and dogged determination, the incredible pictures she drew and the funny stories, which Zelda would beg her to tell them all late at night, about growing up over her family’s Irish pub in Brooklyn. Dawn, the scholarship girl, who the other girls teased because she was tall and gawky and who Sister Bridget had said they should all respect with a sneery tone in her voice that really meant the opposite. But who Zelda and Mercy and Faith knew was really super smart and super witty. All those things made them the closest thing Zel had now to family. Zel, the bad girl, who spoke with a British accent the rest of the school accused her of faking because she’d been born in New York, who’d been expelled from two boarding schools in the UK already and who had only got to go back to her family’s townhouse in Manhattan for Christmas with Mercy in tow after begging her brother for months.
Of course, this wasn’t the first time she’d lost herself in that special buzz that only alcohol could offer. That had been the afternoon of her parents’ funeral. Age thirteen. When she’d discovered the drinks cabinet at her aunt’s house in London and gotten hammered while Seb, only recently returned from the hospital, had been locked in his bedroom upstairs, brooding and ignoring her.
That had been a bad hangover, but not as catastrophic as this one. Who knew that two hundred year old brandy was a lot less hard on the head than the wine the sisters at St J’s used for communion. Then again, Mercy—whose family were celebrated vintners in Argentina—had warned them, declaring it was not a good vintage before they’d all chugged their first glass.
Zelda had had her sixteenth birthday two weeks ago, but she suddenly felt a million years old as the door to the Mother Superior’s office opened, and Dawn appeared, her shoulders bowed, her face a sickly shade of grey and her eyes shiny with unshed tears. Dawn must have a killer hangover, too, because she looked really crappy. Then again, Zelda had a vague recollection of her looking pale and shaky last night, after locking herself in the bathroom, even before they’d started drinking.
“Go to your dorm and collect your belongings,” Sister Ignatius announced.
Dawn’s being expelled? No, no, no.
Panic hammered at the pain in Zel’s temples. But as Dawn nodded, the nun added. “When you come back from your suspension, you will bunk with the year fours. To show you the meaning of humility and sobriety.”
Relief gushed through Zel. Dawn was okay. Suspension wasn’t the worst that could happen. If they didn’t expel Dawn, they couldn’t expel the rest of them, because they’d all made a pact not to tell who had stolen the wine. And Zel knew none of her friends would rat, no matter what the Mother Superior threatened them with.
Screw her.
Because they’d made a pact, they were one for all, and all for one, just like the Musketeers.
Dawn sent Zel a weary smile, that seemed to want to say everything would be all right but wasn’t too sure. Zel smiled back, even though it made her head hurt.
Zel heard Mercy’s mother whisper something else across the hall, but she didn’t look round as Sister Ignatius approached her and Seb.
“Mr. Madison, thank you for coming. The Mother Superior will see you both now.”
Seb nodded as the Sister headed back towards the office at the end of the hall. His once warm, brown eyes were empty though when he turned to her. Black holes of nothingness in his darkly tanned face. As empty as they’d been three years ago, when he’d been eighteen and broken, in body and soul, and she’d sat by his hospital bedside and bawled like a baby, praying that her brother would be okay—only to discover the brother she’d once known was never coming back when he finally regained consciousness.
The thin scar that cut into Seb’s lip twitched as he stood up. “Let’s get this over with.”
She stood, brushed her uniform kilt with trembling hands, and prayed it wouldn’t be the last time she wore it. Her belly bottomed out as Seb strode off ahead of her, the heavy boots thumping against the polished wood like the toll of the doomsday clock. She caught Faith’s eye. Faith smiled, but like Dawn, her smile looked worried. And forced.
