Page 152 of Endless Anger
“Don’t worry. If I leave you here long enough, Fury Hill legend sayssomethingwill crawl out and devour you. The same way it did my ancestor, who Cronus Anderson dragged here and left to fend for themselves in these caves. Do you think you could find your way out, Lucy?”
“You kidnapped four students to satisfy some weird vendetta from hundreds of years ago?”
Beckett makes a strange face, his eyebrows furrowing, and then he tips his head back and laughs. “Duponts don’t forget, you wild beast of a girl. Howcouldwe when we were nearly wiped out by Anderson interference?”
Foxe groans, his chin dropping. His neck is flushed, dripping still, and Willa doesn’t look good either. I don’t know how much longer we have before bad shit starts setting in here, but Beckett doesn’t seem terribly interested in shutting up.
“Not long after establishing Fury Hill and carving this town into the edge of the White Mountains with their bare hands, five of the six founding family patriarchs came down with these terrible coughing fits. From sunrise to sunset, they spent their hours hacking up pools of blood. They were drowning in it. Butonepatriarch remained completely healthy, leading everyone to the conclusion that Cronus had poisoned the others to gain access to their land and sell it off to outside investors.”
“Sounds like they had tuberculosis.”
“Sure, if you want to be modern about it. But that still doesn’t explain why Cronus, who was in constant contact with the other five, never caught it. It’s highly communicable, right? Meanwhile, a triage center was established as more and more of Fury Hill became infected. Guess where that triage center was located?”
Goose bumps scatter along my arms, trickling through my hair like liquid fear. I don’t have to answer; I canfeelit here, like the spirits of whomever died still linger hundreds of years later.
Maybe the Obeliskosishaunted.
“Avernia College, this amazing entity the six families had created, became a house of death that no amount of holy relics, priests, or praying seemed able to thwart. Until Cronus suggested an unorthodox method of healing: drinking healthy blood to replenish what had been lost and cancel out the tainted supply. But since nearly everyone in town was affected and no one wanted to volunteer, Cronus offered the livestock on his farm, arguing that meat and other parts were suitable for human consumption, so the blood would be fine as well.”
Spinning around, Beckett puts his hands on his hips, his voice echoing through the cave as he continues. One of the other hooded figures inches toward Willa, bending down to slide the sharp edge of a blade along her spine; she cries out, and I feel her anguish in my bones.
“That’s what hesaidanyway. But the creatures he brought and professed to be livestock were much larger than any animals the others had seen. Overfed, he told them, so their blood would taste better.”
A long, long pause. Beckett watches his companion terrorize my friend, and I clench my jaw against the urge to yell at them to stop. Her raw screams come from between gritted teeth, and she twists to try and escape, but the masked person follows.
“One night,” Beckett goes on, facing me again, “after the animals were drained, Jean Dupont felt well enough to venture down the narrow tunnels leading out of the caves, where they were housing the founding patriarchs. He stopped at a small entrance to an adjoining cavern. It was covered with a white sheet, and when he pulled it back, he found Cronus feasting on the corpse of a resident who had passed after drinking the livestock’s blood.”
“A vampire?” I reply, trying to hold back a laugh. “Really? You think that’s what Asher’s ancestor was?”
“What other explanationisthere?” he asks. “In that moment, Cronus seemed half human, half monster. Jean didn’t understand what was going on, but he knew he had to get out of there.”
“You should really leave the lecturing to your brother,” Foxe slurs.
Beckett ignores him. “Petrified, Jean took off running back to where the others were recovering, urging them to leave. He got a Blackwater on his back and a couple of others out of bed, but when they made it to the entrance, there stood Cronus, blood coating his entire body as if he’d bathed in it.”
My eyes flicker to Foxe and Willa.Are they trying to recreate that scene?
“There was no hesitation when it came to slaughtering the founders. Three of them were brutalized by Cronus’s bare hands, and only Jean and William Blackwater remained. Jean succumbed to his illness, which had ramped up as soon as Cronus came into play because, as it turned out, the blood did nothing to cure them.”
“Why suggest it in the first place?” I question.
“Some say it was just a theory. Others think it made the corpses tastebetter, and that was why he’d given them the overfed creatures.” Beckett shrugs. “In any case, Jean collapsed before Cronus could finish him off. William was never seen nor heard from again. Like he just disappeared in these caves, his body recovered by the earth.
“Cronus, in turn, would go on to rule Fury Hill under the guise of having been a courageous friend who’d tried helping the other families, because no one knew what had happened inside the caves. All the witnesses died, and Cronus painted the bloodbath as an animal attack.”
“Then how doyouknow any of this?” Foxe rasps.
“Cronus wasn’t subtle. He went on to marry the Dupont widow and would brag to her about what he’d done. She was too afraid to tell anyone until after he died, but she left journals detailing the events.Myancestor, although they never had any children together, thank fuck. I wouldn’t want any relation to Asher’s freaky nightwalker bloodline.”
You should be so lucky.“Is there a point to any of this?”
He cuts me a glare. “Thecursethat snaked its way down the line to your little boyfriend and his siblings is the goddamn point, Wolfe. You think evil energy like that just disappears when a man gets to finish his life peacefully?
“They exhumed Cronus’s body after his death and used his organs in a ritual that was supposed to keep his relatives and other evil away from Fury Hill, but one of the people who participated in the ritual sought chaos and sent a curse out instead. One that claimed three Andersons would eventually return to finish off the destruction Cronus had started. Since then, Avernia’s been prepared to rectify the curse by whatever means necessary. Their strategy has always been clear: end the three in the place this all began before they can annihilate what has been built.”
When Beckett finally finishes, I glance around the cave, raising my eyebrows. “Did you forget to bring Asher or something?”
He scoffs. My nails dig into my palms.
