Twenty

It's late. Again. I know I need to go to bed. I know my body needs rest, especially after I poisoned it with alcohol at the cemetery party. But I can't stand to fall asleep and lose control, not any longer. Not now that I know a total stranger is waiting in the wings to possess me. A stranger with a dark mind and questionable morals.

So I go walking. It's very cold—a sharp, insistent bite of air against my skin. The sky is clear and scattered with stars. The campus is quiet. The cicadas have finally finished for the season, the newly hatched nymphs crawling back underground for another thirteen years.

As I walk toward the cemetery, I wonder if the ghosts can hear the cicadas moving in the earth, or if the cicadas sleep quietly the way the dead are supposed to. The thought makes me shiver worse than the cold night air.

Because some of the dead don't sleep. They don't rest. They rise up from their graves to steal hours from the living.

A graveyard at night is the last place I ought to want to be, but I'm already haunted, so what harm can it do? I stand at the cemetery gate, my hands clenched around the cold iron bars. I hold still for a moment, thinking of my initiation night, when I was so hopeful, so excited to join Magni Viri, to give up my solitude in exchange for their strange belonging.

The latch gives, and the gate creaks open.

As I walk down the path, that night rushes back to me. My friends giddy on the stairs, running across the lawn with Azar. The circle of candles, the eerie music. The feeling of leaving my own body and joining up with something greater than myself.

I abandon the path and wander among the gravestones. It's dark beneath the trees. Near the middle of the cemetery, Walter Weymouth George's mausoleum glows a little in the moonlight. The cold air breathes against the back of my neck, stirring my hair. I shiver and keep walking.

Here's where I lay on a blanket with Penny, gazing up at the stars. I walk on. Here's where I leaned against a tombstone, kissing her. Isn't this close to where I stood when I made my vows too? I run my fingers over the damp, mossy stone.

Tears burn my eyes. I turn too quickly and trip, landing hard on my knees, scraping my palm against rough stone. The smell of the earth surrounds me, damp and cold, just like in my dream of being in my ghost's coffin. But then, rising above it, sharp and sweet, is lily of the valley.

I let out a horrified moan and scramble for my phone. I don't want to be alone in the dark with her. I flick on the flashlight, and its cold white beam illuminates the grass and the fallen leaves, the gravestone shaped like an open book that I must have scraped my hand on.

I kneel in front of it and brush the damp, clotted leaves off the tombstone. A cicada exoskeleton rolls off with them.

I shiver, and then I freeze.

The name on the tombstone is Isabella Rebecca Snow. Born 1931, died 1967.

Isabella. Why is that name familiar?

I squeeze my eyes tight, suddenly dizzy. I remember voices calling in Latin, desperate cries echoing through the woods.

That's right. The night that Meredith died, I went walking in a haze and ended up here at the cemetery... and I heard the Magni Viri students yelling for someone named Isabella. I'd thought I was wrong, that they were yelling something in Latin. But what if they really were calling for Isabella?

This Isabella? Not a lost dog or a person... but a ghost.

I scramble back from her gravestone, my mind racing.

This is where I stood when I made my vows and gave a drop of my blood. This is where it all started. My new life. My initiation into Magni Viri. What did the words on that paper Laini gave me say? What words did I speak into the darkness?

I promise to be a vessel for genius, for the profundity of the human mind, for the sacred act of creation.That's the only part I remember.

I open my eyes and blink into the bright light from my phone. A vessel.

I promised to be a vessel.

I thought it was some silly metaphorical crap, a testament to Magni Viri's collectively massive ego. But what if it was more than that? What if it was a literal vow? What if when I spilled my blood on this grave, I actually promised my body to... to what? To a ghost? To Isabella Snow?

I remember the words I—she—wrote on the bathroom mirror the other day. You promised. That's what it said.

I promised.

I did this to myself, I realize, a hollow desolate darkness opening up inside me. She didn't snatch my body; I let her in freely. I gave myself over to her power.

All for Magni Viri.

"I didn't know," I say to Isabella's grave, my voice nearly breaking. "No one told me. I thought it was a silly ritual. I didn't know it was serious. How could I have?"

Isabella doesn't answer. The tallest treetops sigh in the wind. It's the only sound for a hundred miles. There's nothing else. The world is wrapped in cold and silence.

"I didn't know," I say again. "This isn't fair."

But I'm old enough to know it doesn't matter.

And so does Isabella. She was only thirty-six when she died—that's hardly even half a lifetime. I wonder how it happened, whether accident or sickness or violence. A part of me hopes that she suffered, the way I'm suffering now.

This is where I woke up in her grave, the sound of cicadas in my ears. This is where I scratched at the lid of her coffin. This is where I screamed.

All while she sat at my desk, writing Cicada.

Tears roll down my cheeks. I wipe them off with my sleeve before they can fall onto her grave. I don't want to give her even one more drop of myself.

In a shaky voice, I read aloud the inscription beside her name and the dates of her birth and death. "Magni animi numquam moriuntur." More fucking Latin. I reach for my phone and type the phrase into Google Translate.

Great minds never die.

My jaw tightens. Anger surges through me, enough to drown out my ever-present fear. I didn't do this for Magni Viri; I did it because of Magni Viri.

I thought I was pledging myself to the other students and the program. I thought I was promising to work hard and do my best. Instead, I was binding myself to a ghost, making myself into a vessel. Not for Magni Viri. But for her. For her genius, not mine. For what she could create, not what I could.

I stalk back up to the house, which rises like a sinister beast on the hillside, black and austere. The moon shines across the lawn, casting shadows everywhere. I remember how I felt looking up at Denfeld for the first time, like Jane Eyre at the gate of Thornfield. I couldn't have known how right I was then, what lies and deceit I would find here, what dangers.

And love too, a stubborn part of me whispers. Friendship, belonging. Penny. Jordan and Wren. All the rest of them.

I shake my head and continue on. It wasn't friendship. It wasn't love. It was a charade. It was a game that Magni Viri was playing with me. They lured me in and trapped me. I thought I was Jane Eyre, but maybe I'm truly Bertha Rochester, the mad wife in the attic. Locked up and hidden away—inside my own body. I was never anything more to these people than an empty shell, waiting to be inhabited.