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Merritt’s chin tips up as she turns angry gold eyes to me. “I tried to tell her about what we are. To explain why you all are such fucking assholes, why she should stay.”
My gaze narrows on her, and I know she has three other sets of eyes narrowing on her in the same way. She doesn’t quake under our scowls though, doesn’t bend or break, not like she used to. Being friends with Rosalind Sweeney gave Merritt a backbone, and now she just glares at us.
“You have a gag on you though,” Ezra says, almost hesitantly. “Right?”
“I found a way around it.” Panic grips my chest. She can’t have. Rosalind can’t know. If she knows, she’s in more danger. His cousin’s face falls and tears fill her eyes as she shakes her head. “She didn’t believe me.”
My breath puffs out of me, relieved. So fucking relieved.
Turning my attention back to my phone and the message from my father, I ignore the demand of a call and type out my reply.
Me:
Its done.
She’s gone.
Now if only those four words didn’t make me feel like I’m drowning.
One
I leave the university with hardly a backward glance.
No, not really. I watch it and Cohen Faulkner fade through the back window of the van I’m in, staring back down the road until it’s disappeared from sight and for far longer after. The girl sitting next to me keeps throwing curious glances in my direction, her jaw working on a piece of gum.
Cohen just wanted to verify that I was okay. Curious about why I was leaving after fighting so hard to stay. It’s not like I could tell him that Fielder Harris discovered my secret and told Morgan Bettencourt. It’s not like I could tell him that the person I’d thought I could trust turned against me at the very last moment and practically shattered my faith in humans.
Are you saying they’re witches?
I close my eyes against the question and turn back to face the front.
No looking back, Rosalind Juliet. Only forward.
I’d kicked Merritt out shortly after I’d incredulously asked if she claimed the Effers are witches and she’d nodded enthusiastically at me.
Witches don’t exist. Not in our world. And her insistence on playing such a stupid fucking prank on me hurts. So. Bad. I thought she was my friend. Stupid of me. Obviously, she’s been lying for six months, collecting information to feed back to the Consequences. Stupid fucking name.
Merritt’s betrayal hurts.A lot.
But it’s obvious to me she had been working with the four kings of the university and only pretending to be my friend. That hurt a hell of a lot more than the boys bullying me. They’d at least been honest about their intentions from the beginning. She’d lied to me.
The next few hours are a blur of travel. Shuttle, ferry, another shuttle to SeaTac airport. I can’t describe how relieved I am that I am not heading straight home to Olympia. Instead, I’m flying to London to spend the next week with Desi. And I won’t have to see my mother until I show up on her doorstep and explain that I dropped out of school.
Telling her I’d left the Academy won’t go well, and I am hoping to put off that conversation for as long as I can. No, I will enjoy my brief reprieve, enjoy seeing my sister, and then I will deal with my mother and figuring out my real life when I come back.
The trip to SeaTac is long, punctuated by whispers from my classmates, but no one dares to say anything to my face. Not since the Consequences made such a big deal of punishing anyone who said anything disparaging to me for the last month.
The hustle of the airport keeps my thoughts at bay mostly, the actions of checking in, going through security gives me something to focus on, to occupy my mind when really what it wants to do is go over everything from the last six months to prove that what Merritt said is not true.
I scoff at the idea as I pay way too much for a coffee and a muffin from a Starbucks.Witches.Of course, that isn’t true. Witches aren’t real.
I laugh at the idea as I take footage of the airport for a travel vlog, shaking my head at the ridiculousness of it.
Supernatural abilities aren’t real. Silly Merritt thinking she’d be able to convince me that witches are real.
But even as I think that, something deep in my body tells me I’m wrong. I’m fighting this so hard because some portion of me thinks it might be true.
When I’m settled in my seat, wedged between a woman who smells like mothballs and a large, sweaty man, I have no choice but to think about it. Even when I try to force my thoughts elsewhere, I keep returning to Merritt’s claims of witches and magic.
