Page 172 of Endless Anger
“Hey, wait,” he says as I open the door, taking in the snow flurries drifting from the gray sky. “What’s that on your neck? New tattoo?”
Pausing, I bring my hand to the still-tender spot where neck meets shoulder and smirk to myself.
“Yeah,” I reply, recalling how my toes had curled when Lucy’s teeth indented my skin with their print. So much so that I got the impressions inked on my skin earlier, eager to be permanently marked by her. “It is.”
By the timeI make it back to Avernia, Quincy’s closing Lucy’s dorm room, and the sky is pitch-black. Not even the stars have come out to play tonight.
I meet my sisters in Quincy’s office, where Noelle sits on the corner of the desk, swinging her legs back and forth. Her dark brown hair is tucked inside a black hood, her skin glowing with a light sheen of sweat, like she’s nervous, though I can’t imagine why.
Neither Quincy nor I have been informed as to why she deferred starting school this past semester, but I suppose it doesn’t entirely matter now that she’s enrolled in the theater program for the spring semester.
For a few months, all three Anderson kids will be in the exact same place, and I try to ignore the unease that crops up in my stomach at that notion, remembering the names in that cave.
Our names. Two unmarked, one crossed out.
It feels as if trouble is only just beginning.
And in a way, I guess it is.
“Do we have everything?” Quincy asks, shutting the office door behind her.
She’s wearing a black hoodie, pulled all the way to her chin, and a black knit cap pulled over her forehead. She walks to a filing cabinet against the far wall, tossing Noelle and I each a pair of black gloves.
“Blowtorch, lock-picking shit, kerosene…check.” Noelle rummages around in her canvas knapsack, nodding. “But I must remind you two that there is in fact time to back out.”
Quincy and I just look at her.
Noelle holds up her hands. “Okay, sorry, I just thought maybe you’d want to send a more…theatrical message, but I forgot I’m dealing with the silent twins.”
“Destruction is much more impactful when it happens while you’re sleeping,” Quincy says, wrenching open the door.
“Not my cup of tea, but I’m happy to be invited.” Noelle slings the bag over her shoulder, following our older sister out of the room.
I stare after them both for a few quiet seconds, wondering if this is something I should be dragging them into. Then again, neither of them is innocent.
The blood on an Anderson’s hands is there at birth. There’s no scrubbing it clean.
Embracing our cursed heritage is the only way to survive.
We wind up outside Dean Bauer’s campus home and get to quick work making the first floor of the Victorian building inaccessible, inside and out.
The double-paned windows are already made of bulletproof, reinforced glass according to the blueprints we dug up in the Obeliskos, so breaking one of them won’t be possible.
He’ll have to climb out of the second story if he wants to survive.
I pour the kerosene in a nice, neat little trail on the wraparound porch, inhaling the pungent odor as I come back to where Quincy and Noelle stand just off the steps. I take a match from the book in my pants pocket, strike one against the strip, and drop it on the porch.
Flames burst from that site and spread instantly, singeing a piece of my hair as I calmly descend the stairs and stand next to my sisters. We look up at the house as a light flips on upstairs, and then several more of the windows illuminate, likely as Bauer discovers the imminent danger he’s in.
I’m certain he’ll get out, even if it means making a fucking fool of himself. There’s no way that bastard is going down without a real fight.
We watch the fire rise, orange and bright yellows mixing with the night sky. Off in the distance, the Obeliskos’s clock tower chimes, signaling midnight. One of the windows upstairs opens, and Dean Bauer leans out to scream expletives at the three of us.
“Oof,” Noelle says, cringing. “Maybe doing this before I started classes wasn’t a good idea.”
“He would’ve hated you either way,” Quincy says with finality, spinning on her heels.
Noelle and I follow suit, ignoring the dean’s cries the way he ignored everything else going on this semester. I couldn’t give less of a fuck if he makes it out or not, frankly.
