Chapter 9

9

MINA

I had just watched Sylas kill someone, and I really thought I should be more frightened.

Was this shock?

I didn't know.

I'd had to deal with a lot of shit in my short life, and there was always the possibility that I was already dead inside.

In fact, that seemed highly likely.

Because if I didn't know that Sylas was still watching me, I would've been staring up at the ceiling until dawn, replaying scenes from my past, letting my memories burn me from the inside out like coals until they charred all of me to a crisp.

The worst part was remembering the good times. With me and Ella and Trent. Back when my life—well, it hadn't made sense, except in retrospect, when I realized Trent was setting the both of us up—but back when I thought that I was lucky.

Lucky enough to be the somewhat weird goth girl, who bleached her hair and then dyed it two different colors, who painted her nails red and black, and that Trent Donovan, Treasurer of Rho Rho Phi and son of the well-known businessman Jack Donovan Senior, wanted.

He was smart, athletic, pre-law, and somehow we had the same taste in music, a thing which I could not believe, but I swear to god Sleep Token was on his playlists before he even met me—and he was into me.

My high school boyfriend had almost been scared off by my high sex drive, but Trent took it like a challenge, and there practically wasn't any place on campus that we hadn't fucked.

Ella and I joked that I was doing all of her sex for her, too, since she was ace and aro and totally uninterested in having relationships except for friendship and sheer fun. We were both getting biology degrees—me in microbiology, so I could go on to become the doctor of my dead parents' dreams, and her in ecology, so she could go study elephants in Africa someday—and while things between me and Trent didn't make sense on paper, on a day to day basis they were good, for six months. His frat friends tolerated me, and he made it so I hardly ever had to deal with them...up until that night in May when he'd wanted me to come to an end-of-the-year party at the Rho Rho Phi cabin.

I knew it was going to be rowdy nonsense, but I figured when he told me to bring Ella he was acknowledging how bullshit it was, and wanted me to have a friend to hang out with while he got wasted with his buddies because it was periodically expected of him.

I thought I knew him differently.

But it turns out I didn't know anything at all, and there was no way I could've known, unless—unless—unless ? —

I'd spent the intervening months living in my memories like Theseus in the Labyrinth, only without the help of thread. Experiencing one dread moment after another, walking through the hallways of my mind, lost and feeling blind, looking for hints that would've made everything make sense, all the while knowing that nothing I figured out would ever really matter.

I'd be punishing myself for missing something, or punishing myself for finding something if I ever did, every breath I took until the end of my life.

And it was that realization that'd driven me into the library, and into giving Brad Kirk regular blowjobs for access to his grad student keycard that got me into the vaults.

Because once I'd seen the elaborate set up in the RRP's cellar, I knew Ella couldn't have been the only girl things had happened to. And after I combed through crumbling newspapers with gloves on, and then went into the microfiche they'd used to scan the older ones, I'd figured out what was happening.

Every couple of years, a girl around campus would go missing. There'd be a few headlines in the papers, and it would be very sad and there would be candlelight vigils, but nothing ever changed. In fact, my campus probably had below the normal death-attrition rate for college aged girls—I looked at some of the larger statistics just to see where we were at. But I was now certain each of those disappearances could be traced back to Rho Rho Phi somehow. And sure enough, each of the girls was dating a Rho Rho Phi, or last seen at a Rho Rho Phi party, or a friend of a friend of a Rho—I could see the lines drawing everything together, but I knew from trying to report what'd happened to Ella and me that asking the police for help was futile. And I knew, from trying to tell everyone else what'd happened, that no one would ever believe me .

So I'd spent practically the whole summer in the depths of the library looking for clues, losing whatever tan I'd possessed and getting crippling neck pain. And that was when I started learning about the Hourglass Killer—a serial killer that haunted the streets of our city, one who, unlike the RRP guys, at least had an ominous name.

After that everything had flowed in that direction. I'd taken up listening to true crime podcasts, in the hopes that someone somewhere else would eventually give a shit about what'd happened to us, and that was when I learned about the coroner's reports, all of which I could find online if I was willing to give the dark web a whirl.

And I slowly put enough stuff together about him to figure out his attachment to the bigger murders—because I wasn't hung up on the people he killed personally at the end, with the brands, like he would me—no, I was able to go back further and realize that something really pants-shittingly bad happened every time he came around, a few days before he killed the branded party.

But everything started with Mr. Bannerman's great grandfather, the Hourglass Killer's first kill, and that was why I'd gone to the Monster Security Agency tonight—to talk to his great-grandson and try to understand. Maybe there was some connection between the Hourglass Killer and whatever the fuck the RRPs did—because one murderer might recognize another one?

I didn't know—I was desperate—and now I had a Nightmare.

Watching me sleep.

Assuming I ever fell asleep again.

I shook my head and opened my eyes—and found Sylas standing right-the-fuck beside my bed, like a jump-scare from a horror movie.

"Good-fucking-lord!" I shouted, violently scooting back in my sleeping bag .

"There was a bedbug," he said dryly, and that was even worse.

I started thrashing from side to side. "Where? Where?" I asked, panicking until he began to laugh. It echoed around the small hotel room, while I looked at him like he'd betrayed me. "It's not funny."

His laughter stopped, although I could still read the amusement in the creases on his smokey face. "I'm sorry. I only came over to note that you are not very good at sleeping."

"Yeah. That shit's been hard lately," I said, wiping my face with a hand.

"Would you like help?"

I blinked and stared up at him. When was the last time I'd stayed asleep for more than an hour or two? I was tired. My body was tired. My brain was tired.

It was one of the many reasons I was willing to give myself over to him—because I had a sneaky feeling that being dead would be better than always being exhausted.

I pouted, not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. "This isn't some sort of cheating thing where you make me sleep for six days, go do whatever you want to, and then come back and kill me, right?"

He squatted on his heels beside the bed, bringing his face closer to mine. "What kind of fairy tales are they teaching children nowadays?"

"They don't. Or if they do, they involve true crime."

"Ah." He pondered that for a moment, then held his hand in front of him, drawing from one palm with the fingers of the other. "Well, in that case, dearest Mina, I, Sylas Veil, Mister Smoke and creature of night and darkness, have a wish for you. "

His tone was sonorous. Soothing. And if I'd had my eyes closed, I would've found it kind of hot.

Perhaps even trustworthy.

"What's that?" I asked him in a small voice.

"Sleep and dream for me," he said, before blowing a trail of the smoke he'd pulled from his palm my way. I gasped in surprise, inhaling some in, and?—