What happened in that hideous castle? What happened to all those girls, each one disappeared from under our noses? I’d wondered before, but now I was obsessed. Never had someone so close to me been taken.
Was she trapped in there, still alive? Were there other girls? What did the vampires do in there? The need to know—to have some image, however morbid, to hold on to in my mind—consumed me.
I tugged off a glove and jammed my hand deep into my coat pocket. Found the handkerchief.
Emma’s handkerchief.
I’d snagged it from her room before they’d cleared out her stuff. It was a simple square of white fabric, one we’d all gotten in our standard-issue kit bags. Not many of us used them—I mean, ew, right?—except for Emma. It’d been just like Prairie Girl to use her hanky all the time. While mine was still folded crisply in my drawer, hers was stained, bearing a rusty brown patch of blood that’d never washed out completely. Blood where she’d wiped her hands after skinning a rabbit on that night we’d been left stranded in the dark to face punishment. We’d faced it together and had been friends ever since.
I took it out and folded it as I walked. Folded and smoothed and refolded. I’d stolen the handkerchief as a memento, but as I put it back in my pocket, it became something else. It was my pact. Pinky swear, Em. If you’re alive, I’ll find you.
Frost was ahead of me on the path, and I watched as she squared her shoulders and slung her small gym duffel over her shoulder. She was headed back to the dorm, and if I wanted to shower before lunch, I’d need to follow her. But I couldn’t bear going straight back to the room, especially not with her. Did she know the secrets of the keep? Did she know the fates of all those girls and yet chose to side with vampires instead?
Our new Initiate housing only made things worse. The dorm was smaller, with a warren of oddly sized rooms that had more the feel of a giant converted house than the first-year Acari dorm had. And how I missed that old dorm now. These new irregular rooms lent a false impression of intimacy to our roommate situation—like we were all sisters sharing rooms in a house instead of strangers forced together by circumstance.
I couldn’t bear to face it. Not just yet.
I stopped abruptly and turned, taking a detour to the boys’ housing. To the castle. I had to see it. If Emma truly were alive, that was where she was probably being held.
Could it really be true? That she might’ve been enduring the vampires’ keep, all this time…My God, Em…It was too much to consider. If she were alive, it meant I’d failed her even more than when I’d let Alcántara slash her down her belly. Because, truly, I couldn’t decide which was the greater horror: to be killed by vampires, or to be imprisoned and kept alive by them.
I walked briskly, picking along the edge of the path, tromping through what remained of last night’s snow. A thin rime had crystallized along its surface, making a satisfying crunch with every step. The January light was weak and gray, and it struck me that my one-year anniversary on the island had come and gone.
So many others had disappeared, and yet here I was, still alive. Cheers to me.
A heaviness beyond grief weighed on my shoulders, and I glanced up. Sure enough, the ancient keep had appeared, looming in the distance. It was a grim scene, several thousand pounds of gray-black stone. What secrets were hidden within? I peered hard, studying every line, every crag and crevice in the facade, like I might’ve perceived answers through the force of my will alone.
A familiar voice startled me from my thoughts. “You’ve got guts, showing up here like this.”
I spun. It was Yasuo.
I knew that happy, relieved feeling of seeing a friend, but the sensation was instantly cut short by the look of him. So crushed. So pale and bleak.
“Yasuo.” I realized I’d hoped to run into him. He’d forgive me. We were friends. We needed each other. We’d work through this together. I put on a brave, gentle face, hoping to convince myself—and him—that there was forgiveness to be had. “How are you doing?” I hoped he heard how the words had come from my heart.
“How am I doing?” A smirk contorted his face, and his words came sharp and cold. “How am I doing? Please tell me you didn’t come here to ask how’m I doin’? Because I’ll tell you, Drew. Here’s how I’m doing: I suck. You killed my girlfriend, remember? Or wait. Maybe you don’t, because you’re…too…freaking…self-involved to care about anyone but yourself.” Hatred glimmered in his eyes. Emma was gone, and he blamed me.
“No, wait,” I blurted. “It’s not like that. I have news. I think—”
“Screw what you think.” He spun away from me, shutting me out, striding in the direction of the dining hall.
Friends were rare on this rock. I needed Yasuo and I thought he probably needed me, too. Undaunted, I did a quick jog to catch up. “I think there’s a chance she’s still alive,” I said at his back. The words spilled from me in a rush. I needed to get his attention, to convince him there was hope. That I was still a worthy friend before he shut me out forever. “Emma. She was alive, Yas. After the fight. What if she’s still alive?”
He froze utterly, but it wasn’t an I’m-listening kind of pose that he’d assumed; rather, it was more like rage had finally frozen him, crackling him to ice. “She’s not.”
I refused to believe it. I was desperate. I had sunk my teeth into this new hope and wouldn’t give it up so easily now. “Just hear me out,” I begged. “Audra said something weird. She said they had to tie her—”
“She’s gone.”
“Wait. What do you mean? Do you know what happened?” Yasuo lived inside the castle. He was privy to many of its secrets. He got to peek behind that thick granite curtain every day. “What do you mean gone? Do you know what they—”
“I just know, all right?” He speared his fingers through his hair in what looked like a gesture of desperation, and I saw how his hands trembled.
“But how do you know?”
“I know,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Did you actually see her?”
“Let it go.”
He stormed away, and I followed at his heels. Until I knew exactly what’d happened, until I saw it with my own eyes or talked to someone who had, I wouldn’t believe it.
“I just need to understand. Did you see her…after?” I shuddered. It was unthinkable.
“Leave it.”
His long legs were striding down the path again, and I had to do a skip-hop to catch up. “What if I can’t leave it? She might’ve been your girlfriend, but she was my best friend. And that’s something.”
It’d once been everything.
He stopped and met my gaze full-on, throwing me in the path of hundreds of tiny razor blades. He peeled his lips back, revealing shimmering fangs. They were longer than I’d realized.
“When’d your fangs grow?” I wished he’d look away again. A nervous laugh fizzed out of me. “The better to bite me with, right?”
“Listen…to…me,” he said, enunciating slowly and with ice-cold fury. “She’s gone. Forever. Gone.”
“No,” I whispered in a voice like a child’s. His words finally registered. I saw the truth in his expression. It’d cracked—he’d cracked. I clutched my head in my hands, experiencing her death all over again. Grief embraced me—so familiar, it felt like my natural state. It would never go away. I’d carry it forever. “No. No, no.”
“Yes, Drew. She was ripped up the fucking middle, and it was your fault.” He looked manic, anguish flowing from him like a torrent of acid. “She loved you,” he said, his words like a slap. “Emma loved, but it always was all about you.” He stepped forward, stabbing a finger in my chest. “You, you, you. And Em was too good—she was too goddamned nice—to do anything but humor you. And you turned around and let her…let that happen to her.”
“Not a minute passes where I don’t wish that’d been me.” It took everything I had not to take a step back. I would not be afraid of Yasuo—he was once my close friend. He’d be my friend again. I refused to accept that he was done with me forever. “If I could’ve traded places with her, I would have. We need to stick together now, more than ever. Emma would want us to be there for each other. There’s no reason we need to be grieving alone through this.”
He gaped at me, aghast. “If you think you can show up here and say some shit and be all nice and I’m-so-sad and that it’ll make it all better, think again, D. You just want yourself to feel better. This is you making it about you, all over again, as always.”
“You’re not the only one who gets to be sad,” I snapped. I was the one who was angry now. “Don’t think for one second that there’s anything pretend about how totally and completely heartbroken I am. You’re not the only one who gets to grieve. You’re pissed, sure, but guess what? I’m pissed, too. I should’ve been the one Al sliced up the middle—I get that. But I wasn’t, okay? And now we have a chance for revenge. Don’t you want to know what happened to her?” It was knowledge that’d surely torment me for the rest of my life, but I had to know her exact fate. Had Alcántara tortured her? What happened to all those girls? “We can take them down, Yas. We can fight them together. Get our revenge.”
“None of your stupid little games or plans is going to bring Emma back. I wish you were dead instead.”
“Fine. Maybe you should just kill me right now. How about that?” I took a turn stabbing my finger into his chest. “You can have your revenge on me, and we can all slaughter one another until there’s nobody left on this stupid island.”
I let the dramatic pronouncement hang, then continued more calmly. “Or we can team up, Yas. We can be allies. We can fight this system. Approach it logically, systematically. We take our time, and we can have payback. For Emma. You’re on the inside. Maybe we can’t save her, but maybe we can save the next girl. She’d have wanted that. We could do it for her.”
