Requiem: A Dark Academia Enemies-to-Lovers Standalone Novel Read online

  “You look like shit,” I tell her pleasantly.

  Her response is immediate. “Cheeky mare! You’re one to talk. You look like Casper the not-so-friendly ghost. Your face is the color of curdled milk. Your hair’s too black. You should get some highlights or something. Soften it up a bit. You look like you’ve gone full dark side. What color would your light saber be if you were a Jedi?”

  “What do you think?” I ask, laughing.

  “Red!” she replies. “It’d be red! Sith Lord in the making. Where the hell’s your tan, huh? You spent enough time at the beach this summer.”

  My smile fades at the mention of the beach.

  Life is an obstacle course these days. One minute I’m doing really well, navigating the challenges I’m presented with. I’ve jumped the gap. Grabbed the rope. Swung across the water. Scrambled up the vertical wall. And then someone says something small and inane that shouldn’t matter, and I’m falling flat on my face. The rope is ripping through my bare hands. I’m falling into deep and treacherous water.

  I spent the summer at the beach with Rachel.

  I will never spend a summer at the beach with her again.

  Gaynor notices me deflate and shrinks in on herself a little with me. “You’ve seen him, then, I take it,” she says.

  I know which him she’s referring to, naturally. I clear my throat. “Yeah.” My voice cracks. I clear my throat again. “Yes.” I say it more firmly this time. “I studied the file Ruth put together before we left. He looks like a real piece of shit.”

  Gaynor chuckles, hiding her face in her own coffee cup. She stops laughing pretty quickly, covering her mouth with her hand. “Ohhh. Ahh! Ow! Hot, hot, hot!”

  She’ll live. I squint at her a little. “What? What’s funny?”

  She grimaces, eyes watering. “Well, he’s not too bad to look at, is he? Very handsome. Rich. Plays the violin—”

  “Cello,” I say, correcting her.

  She rolls her eyes again. “He’s on the lacrosse team. He was voted most popular kid in the school or something—”

  “No, he wasn’t,” I scoff.

  Gaynor shoots me an annoyed sidelong look. “Whatever. He’s one of the popular ones. Privileged. People like Theo Merchant don’t take too kindly to strangers fucking with them and causing trouble—”

  I sip my coffee, not tasting it, my tongue far too scorched. “I’m not gonna cause trouble. I’m gonna be very, very nice—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you’re going to poison him in his sleep or something?”

  I shrug noncommittally. “Haven’t decided yet.”

  “Well, don’t expect me to come visit you in prison, sweetheart. Not up here anyway. Too cold,” she grumbles, hiding her chin inside the collar of her jacket. “If you do plan on murdering him, at least do it back in California. San Quentin’s no fun but at least it’ll be warmer—”

  “San Quentin’s a men’s prison,” I tell her. “And you’re forgetting something.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  I poke myself in the chest with my thumb. “Minor.”

  Gaynor laughs, shaking her head. She stares off into the trees that crowd the horizon, her gaze distant. “Know what I think? This is all some bad business. No amount of revenge is going to make you feel better. I think you know that already, don’t you? And…if you hurt this boy and get caught, your age won’t matter. You’re eighteen in a matter of months. And as soon as any detective does the smallest amount of work, they’re going to discover the connection here and realize that this was all very premeditated—”

  I don’t want to hear it.

  Gaynor can keep her logic and her worries to herself. She’s done nothing but try and dissuade me from this course of action since we left L.A. and I’ll be damned if I tolerate any more talk of ‘taking the higher road,’ and ‘letting the police figure it all out.’ I throw back the rest of my coffee, my anger mounting as Gaynor continues to ramble on.

  “…said the accidental death ruling could be overturned if we could provide any further evidence of—”

  “Gaynor?”

  “Yes?”

  “Stop.”

  “I’m just saying! What kind of guardian would I be if I didn’t try and play devil’s advocate?”

  “Enough. Theo Merchant is untouchable. You’ve already said so yourself. His parents are powerful and rich. He fucked up, drove recklessly, and killed Rachel. He killed her. The criminal justice system will not punish him, so I will. That’s all there is to it. Now let’s hit the road. It looks like it’s going to rain.”

  Where Ruth is cold and emotionless, Gaynor is warm and sweet. She feels too much. I see her worry for me, plastered all over her kind face, and it cuts me to the quick. She looks stricken beyond belief, like there’s so much more she wants to say, but she knows how futile it would be to try. So she doesn’t.

  The moment I get back into the car, a wave of exhaustion hits me with the force of a wrecking ball. Pain lances through my head, strobing right behind my temples. I have to screw my eyes shut against the light that was dull and grey a moment ago, but is now blisteringly bright. I can barely think around the thrum, thrum, thrum of my pulse rushing in my ears.

  “You okay, sweetheart?” Gaynor asks softly.

  I nod. “Just tired. And I have a prodigious headache. Jesus.”

  I hear Gaynor rifling around in the center console: The rustle of paper; the crinkle of plastic; the rattle of a pill bottle. “Here.” She knocks the back of my hand with her own. “Take these.”

  Lord only knows how many Tylenol she passes me; she’s always been a little heavy handed with her meds. Grateful, I toss them back, swallowing the pills dry. I slump back into my seat. “Damn, this one came out of nowhere,” I say, wincing as the pounding inside my skull intensifies.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Gaynor’s voice sounds weirdly far away, but her tone is soothing. “The painkillers will kick in soon. Get some sleep. I’ll wake you up when we get there.”

  Toussaint.

  It’s a stupid French family name or something.

  I didn’t even know how to say it when Rachel first showed me the pamphlet and informed me that she was applying. She had a grand old time teaching me how to pronounce it, skipping around the training room, repeating ‘Too-SON, Too-SON,” in a ridiculous French accent, making the ‘N’ at the end sound nasal and preposterous. She’d screamed and tried to kick my ass when I told her that it just sounded like Tucson. As in Tucson, Arizona. Apparently, she hadn’t viewed the comparison as favorable.

  I dream, and my dreams are memories, swimming together, full of laughter and utterly brilliant.

  When Gaynor wakes me up, it’s late. The sky is a purple, dusky bruise. A long, rutted out, insane-looking swathe of buckled tarmac stretches out in front of us. It’s as if a huge earthquake has splintered the road apart, completely destroying it. This is, in fact, the only plausible explanation I can come up with to justify what I’m seeing as I clamber out of the passenger seat.

  Alongside the road, a large, lop-sided sign reads:

  * * *

  Toussaint Academy Pick Up Point

  EXTREME ROCKSLIDE DANGER!

  EXTREME FLASH FLOODING DANGER!

  EXTREME MUDSLIDE DANGER!

  EXTREME CLIFF FACE DANGER!

  Dial 55311 from call box for assistance.

  “What the hell?” I’m still super groggy. My legs feel a little spongy. Weak. Gaynor blows hard down her nose as she assesses the fucked-up road, visibly marveling at the chaos of it.

  “I could be wrong,” she says, “but I think there might be some extreme danger up ahead.”

  I snort at the quip, kicking a chunk of broken tarmac out of the road. It tumbles off into the undergrowth, bouncing along the thick carpet of dried pine needles. “I think you might be right. Can you see a call box anywhere?”

  “Over there.” She points off to the left, where a small call box does indeed stand in the center of a cl
eared patch of dirt. It’s painted red, but in the half-light, I didn’t notice it. Gaynor sets off toward it. I follow after her, still dizzy and a little unsteady on my feet. “There are tire tracks everywhere,” Gaynor observes. “No grass. Looks like this area is some kind of turning loop. Rachel never mentioned this to you?”

  I squint back up the destroyed road, trying to make sense of the situation. “No. She didn’t.” It’s cold, and the encroaching evening smells like smoke. The air feels too still, too full, too tense, and a strange prickling sensation climbs up the back of my neck. Somehow, I can tell that we’re the only people for miles and miles and miles. I can feel it. The last of the sunlight disappears quickly in places like this. It’ll be fully dark soon; fuck knows what kind of animals are lurking out there in the trees, waiting for the cover of night to commence stalking their prey.

  Behind me, Gaynor starts talking and I nearly jump out of my skin. “Yes, yes, oh, good evening. Yes, I’m sorry. I know, we got here a little later than I was hoping.” She titters politely. “Yes, that’s right. Sorrell Voss. Well, no, ahh, actually I’m Gaynor Pettigrew, her guardian, but—yes. Yes. Oh! Oh right. Okay. Yes, I’m sure we can manage. See you soon.”

  She hangs up the phone, setting it back in its cradle inside the call box, and I raise my eyebrows, waiting on her to tell me what the hell’s going on. She looks a little flustered when she turns and faces me. “She sounded nice. Ford. Principal Ford. She said we have to take the track that leads west from the call box, down the slope to the jetty. They’re going to send someone to meet us.”

  “There’s a jetty?”

  Gaynor nods. “There’s a lake down there, that way.” She points. “You didn’t see it. You were sleeping.”

  “Okaaay.” This is all very unusual, but whatever. We’ve come this far. Gaynor helps me with my two bags, heaving them out of the trunk.

  “Christ, child, what have you got in here, bricks?

  “—got in here, bricks?” I finish the sentence along with her, knowing perfectly well what she’s going to say. Gaynor sticks her tongue out at me—very childish. “It’s books, actually,” I tell her.

  “Ahhh. You brought your Shakespeare collection. The tragedies.”

  “Nope. It’s fifteen copies of The Anarchist Cookbook.”

  “Sorrell!”

  “What? They’re all different editions. Some have updated information in them. Oh, and I also brought a book on poisonous plants and how to use them.”

  Poor Gaynor. She’s white as a sheet. “You’re going to put me in an early grave, child,” she declares. “What’s that going to look like, when the police show up to investigate a dead boy on campus—”

  “Relax, relax. It’s the Brontës I swear. It’s just the Brontës.”

  She growls intelligibly—something about me not being funny at all—as she ambles off down the narrow single track that she found directly behind the call box.

  Sure enough, after stumbling down the slope and tripping over tree roots in the twilight, the trail spits us out on the pebbly shore of a massive lake. The water is clear as glass and flat as a mirror, not a ripple in sight. It really is quite breathtaking. On the other side of the lake, the tree line is now a dark black silhouette against the fading sky. A single star flickers to the east, bright enough to be seen through the wispy clouds that whip astonishingly fast across the horizon.

  “Would you look at that.” Gaynor looks wistful as ever. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I suppose it is.” I no longer possess the part of my soul that used to recognize and appreciate beauty. It died a month ago. It makes sense to agree with Gaynor, when her words are laced with such awe, though. It’ll go some way to convincing her that I’m not completely dead inside.

  The jetty is little more than a small, wooden dock, painted white. It looks new. A large black crest has been painted on the sturdy slats, inside which a T and an A has been etched, presumably for Toussaint Academy. I expect a boat to come tearing across the lake or something, but after a solid forty minutes of waiting, growing colder, the night closing from all sides, something far more unexpected happens.

  We hear it first—a high-pitched mechanical whine that is initially just a faint suggestion of sound, but as it gets closer…

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I stare up into the sky, shaking my head in disbelief. It’s a fucking sea plane.

  Gaynor’s like a kid on Christmas morning. She whoops, clapping her hands together, bubbling over with excitement as the sleek little white aircraft touches down onto the water, buoyed by its skis, and casually parks at the jetty.

  A dark-haired guy in his early thirties jumps out, his facial features blank, but…yep, the way he’s holding his shoulders, so tense, his nostrils flaring a little—he is not stoked right now. “You kids were all supposed to be here by four at the latest,” he grouses. “It’s not safe to be taking off and landing out here in the dark.”

  “Sorry!” Gaynor grins from ear-to-ear, staring at the plane; the very last thing she looks is sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her this excited. “We had no idea about the road, and having to come down here, and—wow, I just—is that a Piper PA 18 Super Cub?”

  The pilot gives her a dumbfounded look. He’s nowhere near as surprised as me, though. “I didn’t know you liked planes?”

  “Good eye,” the pilot says. “Yeah, it’s a Super Cub. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to hang around and chat about it. If you’re going to Toussaint, you need to give me your bags and get in right now,” he says to me. “I’m turning this thing around and heading back in the next fifteen seconds, with or without you. You getting in or what?”

  2

  SORRELL

  Gaynor is a shadowy dot, and then she is a blur, and then she’s gone.

  I wanted to walk her back up to the car, but Jeremy (which is apparently the sea plane’s pilot’s name) told me to get situated while he hurried her back up the slope toward the Subaru. He was back in no time at all, the plane was running, then speeding across the lake, and then we were climbing into the air in what felt like seconds.

  “I am not a personal fucking taxi,” he grumbles, as the plane banks heavily to the left. He skirts along the perimeter of the lake, the water a reflective black mirror below us. I say nothing. Jeremy is pissed, and Jeremy will stay pissed no matter what I tell him. A carpet of trees rolls onward into the night. In every direction, all I can see are trees and the dark, looming shapes of mountains in the distance.

  We’re in the air for all of ten minutes before Jeremy tells me to sit tight, and then he straightens out the plane, and we descend. We land on another lake—wait, the same lake? Surely it can’t be?—and Jeremy pulls up alongside a much larger, more impressive looking dock, making the whole affair look easy.

  “You tell Ford that I’m charging double for this one, you hear?” he tells me, as he grabs my bags and dumps them onto the dock.

  “Uhhh. Should I…?” I point over my shoulder, into the darkness. It’s amazing just how dark it is when you head out of the city and there are no ambient lights to throw off some shadows. I have no idea which direction I’m supposed to head in if I want to find the school.

  “No, no,” Jeremy snaps. “Don’t go wandering off. You’ll only break your fucking neck. Just wait.”

  His attitude is shitty as hell, but kind of amusing. I like his generous usage of the word ‘fuck.’

  “He’s also pretty hot, don’t you think?” a voice in the back of my head comments. Rachel’s voice. I laugh softly under my breath, a flood of sadness rising in me; that is exactly what she’d have whispered in my ear if she was here. And yeah, grumpy Jeremy is kind of hot. He ties off the plane like it’s a boat and grabs my bags again, hurrying along the jetty toward solid ground. At the end of the dock, a golf cart is waiting for us. I consider asking Jeremy if I can drive, but I don’t think his wicked temper could take the joke right now.

  He fumes, muttering under his breath a
s he speeds up a hill and across a massive field. We turn a corner, the golf cart tipping precariously, and then—

  Whoa.

  The place looked impressive in Rachel’s photos. Stately. But even in the dark, it is so much more than that. Toussaint Academy is huge. There is only one light on inside the building—a light in what looks like the entrance way, beneath a grand portico. The rest of the building, with its carved stone lintels, gables and parapets, is a Victorian masterpiece. Ivy chokes the eastern wing of the building, its tendrils clinging tightly to the stonework. The western wing is formed out of a colonnade, monolithic columns dotting a kind of porchway, seven, eight, nine…no ten monstrous cylinders of stone, rising seven floors, reaching all the way up to an elaborate iron cresting that runs the length of a fifty-foot-long parapet. A giant domed cupola sits in pride of place atop it all, it’s beaten gold panels somehow bright and glorious even without any sunlight to bounce off of them.

  “Oh my…god,” I breathe.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s great. Come on. I have to get you signed in so I can go home.” Jeremy has my bags again. He’s halfway up the worn stone steps that lead to the entranceway before I’ve even gotten out of the golf cart.

  Somehow, I have a clipboard in my hands a moment later. I’m signing my name into a registry. Gripping a flashlight between his teeth, carrying a bag in either hand, Jeremy guides me down a long, winding, darkened hallway, warning me not to touch anything, and then he’s leading me up a flight of stairs. Another flight, and then another. I can’t see much within the narrow beam of light thrown off by the flashlight, but I can feel how plush the carpet is underfoot. I can smell the beeswax, and the faintest hint of something floral and clean. The silence nearly crushes me.

  Jeremy takes a right, hurrying along a wide hallway, gesturing for me to hurry up and follow. “Where is everyone?” I hiss.

  “Where the hell do you think they are? They’re sleeping.”