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29
“Do you know what happens when people lie?”
I almost drop my books on the floor.
There’s no one in the hall.
And then a figure approaches me, drawing itself away from the shadows of the hallway walls. Candlelight flickers across her face.
Li.
She looks utterly demonic.
“What do you want?” I hate that my voice sounds nervous, but there’s something about Li’s cool focus that makes me feel like I’m on uneven ground.
I’d been heading to the library to revise my Finlay-approved politics presentation after my final test of the month. I don’t have time for her, but it looks as though Li doesn’t have time for anything else.
One foot slowly placed in front of the other, she strolls over to me. There’s something too casual about her manner that raises my hackles. Her eyes never leave my face, like she’s trying to read into the depths of my soul.
“The ritual was aboutFreya’s dad?”
A stone — no, a brick — plummets into my stomach.
I pretend innocence. “What?”
“Freya’sdadwas the subject of the ritual?”
I blink at her, possibly too much. “Was he?”
All of a sudden, Li reaches a hand out to my head. My books scatter across the floor. She grips my hair tightly between merciless fingers until I’m moaning in agony, trying to wrench my head out from her clenching grasp.
I’m gasping in shock. “Let me go!”
Calmly, she places me into a headlock. I feel my face turning red, turning purple, turningblue. I don’t know how much time passes. I just know instinctively that Li could kill me with her bare hands.
My head floats on air. It zooms in and out of hyper-alertness and a dreaminess I’m not even sure is real. Li’s sharp voice comes in and out of focus like a radio on the wrong frequency. “—so I asked Arabella, who said you told her nothing. And then — do you want to know who Arabella asked?Moncrieff. And he was as happy as a damn canary to tell Arabella what you told him.” Her grip tightens around my neck. I can’t breathe. My tongue pokes over my teeth as I try to draw in air from my mouth, panting like a sick dog. “It’s funny,” Li continues in an even tone, not sounding at all amused, “how his story didn’t match Freya’s story, and how both their stories didn’t matchmine—”
She releases me with a shove, and I stumble, coughing, against the wall. I slide down to the floor. I’m struggling to breathe. I frantically undo the knot of my tie and the top button of my school blouse as Li continues regardless.
“—which I guess means Freya left her position at a top political academy based on false pretenses. Quite something.”
Li doesn’t even look at me.
“So then I askedBecca. Becca, who’s apparently supposed to be theactualsubject of the ritual, and she didn’t have a clue. Not a fucking scooby.” Li stops pacing, the black patent leather of her designer heels glimmering up at me. For some reason, I’m surprised when she crouches down before me.
I’m not surprised when she slaps me.
The sting feels like fire and lightning combined. My skin is achingly raw, and it sounds as though the slap rings out down the hall for long minutes.
“You little bitch,” she hisses down at me. Blackness crawls at the edge of my vision and my head slumps onto my shoulder. Every part of my body hurts. “I trusted you. I thought a stupid little idiot like you would actually tell thetruthabout something as important as this. You’d have to be a real fucking eejit to lie about the Lochkelvin ritual.”
She resumes pacing, but not before swinging a kick at me. I protect my side with my hands, but her foot collides with my arm instead. “I even lowered myself to asking thechiefs. Luke knew nothing. Rory knew nothing. Finlay knew nothing.”
Li’s words manage to break through the pain, and I cling to them, knowing there’s something important buried there, something she can’t see.
Finlay knew nothing.
I repeat it in my head until it makes sense, until its implications are revealed, and I marvel at those three words joined together.
