6. Chapter Six

Chapter Six

The Devil

It’s a relief to find Daisy in the room.

She leans over her desk, her nimble fingers manipulating wires and gears, her blonde brows furrowed in concentration. The soft hum of a soldering iron is a soothing background noise, a counterpoint to the silence of the dorm room.

“Hey,” I ask, breathless from the brisk wind. And from anticipation. “You know Professor Cormac Stratford, right?”

A little piece of wire snips off, flying onto the carpet. “I guess.”

Her reaction strikes me as strange, her blue eyes wide as if she’s nervous or something. But I don’t have time to decipher it right now. “Do you know where he is?”

“Umm, maybe.”

“Can you tell me where?”

“You couldn’t get in even if I told you. It’s the engineering lab. Your ID doesn’t have access.”

“Then come with me.”

She finally puts down what she’s holding, her expression clearing, as if she’s bracing for something. “What do you want with him?”

“I need to know where William is buried. He’s his brother. He has to know.”

Sympathy floods her blue eyes. “Anne.”

“Please.”

“You don’t need a slab of concrete to tell him how you feel. He’s listening wherever you are on earth.”

“I don’t have faith like you. I don’t know if he exists in any other realm. The only thing that ties me to him is his body, but that’s not even why I need to find it.”

“Then why?”

“Because someone wants me to stop looking.”

I show her the warning from the Society.

She reads it, her eyes darkening. When she looks at me, there’s nothing soft and glowy about her. Instead she’s a fierce warrior. “You can’t be seriously thinking of ignoring this. They’ve already shown what they’re capable of. Now you’re going to deliberately defy them. Do you have a death wish?”

Since she’s the second person to ask me that today, it makes me wonder if it’s true. Maybe some part of me does want to exit, does want to follow William into whatever place he’s found himself—whether that’s some afterlife or simply the ground. Maybe that’s why I’m so obsessed with finding his grave.

“Everyone is so afraid of them,” I say, almost bitter. “They hurt us, so we decide to never fight them. What happens when they keep hurting us? Isn’t there some point at which we fight back?”

“Fighting back looks like getting enough power to get rid of them. It does not look like sneaking around trying to find a grave that doesn’t even matter.”

Hurt squeezes my heart. “Fine. Never mind. I’ll find him myself.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“I love you, Daisy, but you don’t get to control me any more than the Shakespeare Society does. I thought that you, of all people, would understand that.”

Her expression softens. She does understand it, because it’s what she’s been fighting against her whole life. “Anne.”

“I shouldn’t have involved you. Of course you’ve been hurt by them. You shouldn’t have to help me fight them.”

“I’m already involved. I was involved from the moment they dragged me into the van. You already know they drugged me. They thought it made me out of my mind, and it did. I saw some scary shit on whatever pill they forced down my throat. The Devil visited me.”

“The Devil?”

“But even as He sat there, pilfering my secrets, stroking my inner wounds, I heard what they were saying.”

She’s never spoken about this. “You don’t have to talk about this.”

“I want to. They were taking orders from someone, clearly an adult. I’m assuming now that it was Andini or someone who works for him. One of them wanted to fuck me. Someone our age, but the man said no.”

My throat tightens. “God.”

“I don’t think he was trying to protect me. He knew it would be seen as more than a prank if that happened. It would get more attention in the news. It wasn’t part of his plan. He’s calculating. Manipulative. And completely insane.”

The memory comes to me of the tattered copy of Macbeth that’s part of the Port Lavaca Library. I returned it, of course, before I left for the summer. Macbeth was also calculating. Manipulative. And completely insane.

How are you supposed to live in a department run by such a man?

He’ll never be satisfied with only running the department, of course.

It will be the university as a whole. Maybe even the city.

Does he have enough power for that? Enough ruthlessness?

Maybe.

So I can cower in fear for the rest of the school year. It won’t stop him. Won’t even slow him down, of course. That’s what he wants from me.

I take Daisy’s hands in mine and squeeze gently. “Please believe me when I tell you that I know. I know he’s really, really, really bad. You think that if I’d defy him, then I must not understand that, not fully, but I do. It’s a choice to be afraid. And I don’t want to live that way.”

Her eyes glisten with unshed tears. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I’m already hurt, and it’s only going to get worse. Fear doesn’t prevent it. It doesn’t protect me.” I remember the young girl in the library with the pretend cape and the foam sword, her chin held high, ready to fight the world. A little bean sprout of a girl. It won’t keep her safe, not really. I know, because I used to be her. “Being afraid is just…being afraid. That’s it. There’s no upside.”

“You’re really wise. You know that?”

That’s the lie of trauma and anxiety. It tells us that if we worry enough, if we dedicate our entire lives to stress, that we’ll somehow be safer. It’s lying. “I’m not wise. I’m well read.”

“What’s the difference?”

I grin at her. “You know the way to my heart.”

“Good,” she says. “Because I love you, too. And I’m not going to try to control you. But I am going with you.”

“Because I need your ID to get in?”

“No, because he’s more likely to tell you what you want to know if I’m with you. I know what he wants.”

I don’t know much about Cormac Stratford besides the fact that he’s William’s brother. And a professor of engineering. “Money?”

“No,” she says. “Me.”