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Even if this was my first full day back in town after seven years in a mental hospital.
Now that I was back home, it was more important than ever that I looked, talked, and acted normal in every possible way.
I turned away, but Ansel shifted into my path, the gleam in his eyes getting fiercer. I started to wish the crocodile was real so it could chomp his nose right off.
And that, according to some expert, was “normal.” Standing around mocking a former classmate about something he didn’t know anything about.
I had no idea what the “episode” that’d sent me to the hospital was. It’d short-circuited my brain, wiping all memory of what’d happened between walking up to my house one day and waking up in the ward the next.
“Class, it seems we have an exemplar of the subject of our course right here among us, and not just the delinquency of tardiness. In her juvenile years, this young lady was involved in an incident that required her to be removed from her home by the police followed by several years of rehabilitation.” Was he seriously going to make a production out of my past in front of all my peers? Well, yes—the answer was obviously yes.
There weren’t that many locals here, but anyone in the room who hadn’t already known the basics of my history did now.
How many other professors were going to look at me the same way? With both a professor and Mr. Popular harassing me, how long would it take before the murmurs spread across the whole campus?
I’d vowed to always name mine as men, because if I was going to ride anything, it’d be a dude.
How are we supposed to be sure that you’re really well now? They kept you in treatment for so long. I don’t think it’s worth the risk, Lily. They’d see. I’d show them. I hadn’t hurt anyone, hadn’t done anything wrong…
For a second, staring out at them, I could have sworn I heard my name. Something almost like a plea to listen. But that—that was really crazy.
No wonder I’d been able to imagine up four invisible protectors out of the marsh, though. All it took was a little moving air to make the place sound haunted.
When Wade would drive up, they’d make rude gestures in his direction, because obviously my imagination was more comfortable expressing how I felt about him than I was out loud.
Every time I’d come down here, I’d known I’d find them waiting. Watching over me. That certainty had made everything else bearable. But they weren’t really here. Of course they weren’t.
The sense of my name being called swept over me with the wind again, distant and wavering: Lily! I shook off the impression and the pang that followed it, and turned to face the cold reality I actually had to work with.
I’d say I shouted Lily’s name until my throat was hoarse, but I didn’t really have a throat. Or a neck or a mouth, come to think of it. Just one of the many ways that being dead was deeply fucked up.
Her gaze twitched a little, those pale blue-green eyes like the sky reflecting off the marsh water turning pensive, but I could tell she still hadn’t really heard anything. Not enough to realize that someone was actually speaking to her, let alone who.
It was still hard to wrap my head around the fact that she was right here in front of me. Even after all this time, I’d recognized her instantly. I wasn’t sure how exactly long it had been since she’d vanished from our afterlives, but even though she’d grown from a gawky barely-teenager to a fully-fledged woman, so much of her had stayed the same.
That was a fucking travesty right there. How could the idiots at that stupid college not see this was a girl—a woman—who needed to be held up and cherished, not ground into the dirt?
We’d see who got ground into what next… if I only had some real way of accomplishing that.
“What the hell is wrong?” I demanded to the landscape at large. “Why can’t she hear us anymore?”
Kai was probably pushing glasses that no longer existed up his nose that also no longer existed. “She’s grown up. Her mind has matured—it must have become too closed off to accept the possibility of people she can’t really see.”
Ruin chuckled. “She’s Lily. Of course all we need to do is make the connection.” The guy had the habit of not hearing so well—he tended to take whatever you said and spin it in the most upbeat way possible. Sometimes it was kind of cute. Frequently it was fucking annoying. It was a good thing I liked plenty of other things about him.
“How the hell are we supposed to do that when we’re all fucked up like this?” Jett burst out, with what was possibly the longest sentence he’d uttered in at least two decades.
but I couldn’t do more than mimic a bit of breeze.
“If I could raise my fucking skeleton out of the marsh for even five minutes, I’d gut them all with a rusty butcher knife,” I muttered. “Choke them with their own eyeballs,” Jett added. Ruin’s grin shone through in his voice. “Cut off their feet and shove them up their asses.”
The day she’d crashed into the marsh, she’d stirred our water-logged spirits back to some kind of life. Being with her had kept us going for years after that. But without her presence, we must have drifted back off into a muddled, monotonous limbo.
I felt the attention of all three of my men shift to me. They were my men—I’d been the leader of the Skullbreakers, and they’d been my closest colleagues as we built the gang together.
I’m looking forward to it. Just to be clear, we can’t create forms out of nothing or grow flesh back on our old bones. For the final plan, we’re going to need to commit a few murders so we have bodies to take over.”
Word about my psycho status had spread faster than the speed of light.
Oh, what a tough guy, Zach—hurling projectiles at unarmed women, my inner voice said. Tom Brady would be so proud of you.
For a second—just a second—I wished I really was a murderous psychopath who wouldn’t hesitate to carve them up. We’d see how long they kept laughing then.
Clearly he hadn’t volunteered for the peer advisor role out of any desire to be welcoming, only for extra credit or to look good for his favorite professors.
I had exactly zero interest in finding out what kind of “assistance” Vincent Barnes could offer.
A surge of hopelessness washed over me. I’d been here almost a week, I hadn’t lifted a finger against anyone, and still people were taking their emotional issues out on me. I had to get to my job—this was going to make me late for my shift. If I lost the job, I’d lose my apartment…
I might be a psycho, but I was a psycho who knew her way around a tire.
The grains had spilled in a very precise pattern. Into wavery lines that I’d swear spelled out words. It looked like they said… We re coming. We’re coming?
I definitely wasn’t hallucinating or anything. Because then I really would be crazy.
And I’d told the guys my strategy would work—I didn’t plan on getting heckled by them for the rest of our eternal afterlives for getting their hopes up.
“We’re going to have so much energy and everything else,” Ruin pipped up in typical chipper fashion. “We’re going to have bodies again! All the pricks in this town had better watch out.” He whirled around us so fast I had the impression of my hair rippling.
Ruin bounded right at me, throwing his almost-as-brawny arms around me. Right. I’d forgotten that when he had arms, he was a hugger.
Ansel Hunter was jostling past his peers to reach me. His eyes had lit up with an almost manically delighted gleam, and he was beaming from ear to ear. Not his typical broad but polished grin. This expression was so wildly gleeful I’d have believed he was genuinely ecstatic to see me… if he hadn’t been him.
Ansel blinked at me, still smiling away, no hint of animosity in his expression. Without his usual perpetual haughtiness and the cruel glint in his hazel eyes, which were shining now like autumn sunlight, he almost looked like a different person. I found myself studying him to confirm that it really was my former classmate and not just his evil twin… or, well, I guessed his good twin in this particular case.
“What the fuck did you call her?” Ansel snarled, switching from exuberant puppy to rabid pitbull in an instant. He slammed his hand into the guy’s throat and somehow lifted him right off his feet so the guy’s sneakers dangled inches off the ground. The guy gurgled and flailed, unable to answer the question, not that I expected he wanted to admit to what he’d said right now.
“No one’s ever going to talk to you like that again while we’re around,” he promised. Again with this “we.” Again with the acting like he had some kind of commitment to me instead of being a stuck-up bully. I couldn’t wrap my head around any of this. It took all the effort I had in me just to collect my jaw again.
“Fuck, it’s good to be able to actually see you like this,” he said in a cocky voice that didn’t sound like the professor at all. “Properly, I mean—with eyes.” Who with the what now?
Now they were planning out my life, even offering to buy me a car if I was understanding properly?
I wouldn’t have thought anything could get me down now that Lily was back with us. I hadn’t counted on how awful it’d be to have her more than ever before but not really have her at all. “She was right here,” I said, making a grabby motion in the space where she’d been standing in the parking lot. “Right in front of us. But she still didn’t know us.”
I felt as if I’d have known her anywhere, no matter what face she’d had on. But I guessed she’d never seen us wearing any face at all.
Oh, I’d missed this. Stretching my muscles—and other people’s—to their limits. Destroying anyone who fucked around where they shouldn’t have fucking tried it.
