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I need to get out of here. I need to find him.
I bolt for the door.
"Where do you think you're going?" she asks me as I run out of the room, my wrists still indented from the broken ties and the rest of me on fire, hot and dizzy after my confrontation with Headmistress. "You won't make it back to your dorm room before my staff catches you. You should have stayed gone, Ms. Bardot!"
Her cackles follow me as I leave.
As I stagger into the hallway, all I can think is that I don't think I'll make it if the Butcher is worse than that.
26
GABE
Ilean against the wall, watching as snow piles up outside, collecting on the stone windowsills and inching up the glass. It's probably up to a couple of feet on the ground by now, maybe even more. Baby girl brought an extra carry-on with her when she arrived, an early winter, but I'm not complaining.
I love the cold, and I love the snow.
Fire looks even brighter against a backdrop of white.
Kill walks past me, giving me a salute and a shit-eating grin as he does. I'm surprised he's not scratching at his forearms like he's desperate for a fix at this point. He gets all itchy when he's trapped inside the Academy for too long, and old man winter has been saying fuck you to his outdoor plans for the past month. Each time the snow rolls in, it gets progressively worse. I don't think Saint gives a fuck if a blizzard drops by, especially now that he has Willow, but Kill prefers the outskirts of campus.
Sure, Kill can still sneak out of the dorm as long as he's careful to not slip on the ice and fall off the roof as he does it, but he can't see shit or enjoy anything outside right now. Most of the gravestones he likes to visit at the low spot of the cemetery are buried. Hell, even the damn pool is closed until further notice because I guess the guards said fuck it to even walking us across the courtyard.
Speaking of . . . I look out the window, letting my breath fog the glass. Everything outside is white save for the speckled stone of the building and the naked bark of bare trees. You can't see the stone walkways that crisscross the courtyard. Hell, you can barely spot the shape of the evergreen hedges at this point. Yeah, there's no way any of the lazy bastards around here are getting out in this shit, even if it does mean a massive fight is coming, probably a damn riot if I'm lucky.
No exercise plus cooping us up like barnyard animals at a petting zoo always means a good brawl, but at least it gives me something to look forward to. I reach for the lighter in my pocket, roll the wheel, hit the button, and suffocate the fire nozzle with my finger. It nips at my skin for a moment before the flame extinguishes.
Roll on and off.
Roll on and off.
It's not enough.
The noise thunders in the distance, and when the halls fill as class lets out, it's going to take every bit of my self-control to keep me from setting some shit on fire.
I hate waiting, especially when I know bad news is on the horizon. It's certainly headed my way now. This is about to be the last time I see Avery for a while.
Whatever went down with her parents couldn't have been good.
Her mother cried as she scuttled like a bug down the hall and her father about broke a tooth, clenching his jaw and his fists like he wanted to kill someone, as Headmistress walked them out earlier. I guess that means Avery hit them where it hurts. If so, I'm going to shake her hand and congratulate her.
I haven't even been able to do that with my father yet, but then again, our parents are not the same. Hers think they can buy her redemption. Mine prefer to shove it down my throat and see if I'll choke. Her father uses money to get he wants, but mine uses violence. If I did whatever she did to get a rise out of her parents, my father would go full conservatorship on my ass and make sure I never saw the sunlight again just to prove a single point.
That he has power over me. That he controls me.
Granted, I'd try to kill him for it, but if I didn't win, well, that would suck for decades, literally, while he let me rot in a cage somewhere just to spite me.
My old man would shit himself if he understood how far I've come. I'm no longer the scared little boy sitting at the dinner table hoping to make Daddy happy. I'm a man with a firefly who burns bright and quiets all the nasty urges that roll around in my skull. With her, the noise dies, and I can focus. She kills off the thousand fires in my brain and takes them down to a controlled burn.
My father's spent well over a million at my various boarding schools, and he could never buy me what she offers.
Is our symbiotic relationship fucked up? Probably.
Is having a human coping mechanism agood choiceas the new, boring as fuck psychiatrist would say? Absolutely not.
Would I do it all over again? Fuck yes.
So, I stand in the hallway, watch the snow inch up the windowsill, and wait.
