Page 21 of House of Hearts
“You still followed me.”
“I was curious,” he admits, masking his emotions behind a careful shrug. “I wanted to see if you were scared away by the game.”
It’s my turn to flush, and I’m thankful for the darkness as I twist my head into the shadows. “You knew it was me this whole time?”
“You’re hard to miss, Violet,” he answers, surrendering my heels to the floor. “I’ll see you inside.”
He abandons me without another word, giving me space to finally do the one thing I’m dreading. Alone in the rain, I peer over the balcony, expecting to see Em’s body. I imagine a whole host of horrible things—blood blackening the grass, bones set at all the wrong angles, the milky whites of her eyes aimed lifelessly upward—but she isn’t there. And I have a horrible feeling that she never was in the first place.
8
I’m a little afraid of the dark.
I blame it on my ancestors. Something about cavemen and night predators and shared DNA. It’s hardwired in human nature to be afraid of what we can’t see, and right now the sky is pitch-black, the path to the hedge maze shrouded in darkness.
The last hour and a half is a blur, but I trace it from the beginning: the ballroom descending to chaos; the sight of Emoree drifting down the hallway—hard as it is to believe; the mass exodus of students scrambling over one another to leave the dance floor (“Where’s Amber?” “Her last words were ‘screw this haunted-house bullshit, I’m out’ ”); the Cards standing in the center of the room and telling the remaining club hopefuls that we might’ve passed their first test, but they have something much worse waiting for us outside in the hedge maze.
It hardly feels worth celebrating, but with the way Birdie keeps giving giddy grins to me in the dark, I can’t help the excited bubble in my chest. It’s currently fighting for dominance against the other overwhelming emotion of the night: fear. I throw a look to my right as we approach the hedge maze, if only to remind my Neanderthal brain that there aren’t any saber-toothed tigers or woolly mammoths waiting forme. No ghosts, either…though I doubt anything could be much worse than what I saw on the balcony.
The remaining pledges follow the Cards through the gentling storm. The rain has tapered to an on-again, off-again shower, and the wind has ceased screaming. It wails instead like a distant banshee, and I shiver as a gust racks against my damp shoulders. My dress remains plastered to my back, and my bun is slick against my scalp. The only thing that warms me up even remotely is the knowledge that Calvin is suffering, too.
He’s managed to find a new blazer, but his tie remains loose around his throat and his white button-up is wrinkled with the contours of his skin.
Everyone is deathly quiet around me—“everyone” being the non-Card members surrounding me. There’s Birdie and a couple of kids I recognize from my classes now that they’ve taken off their masks. The rest are starry-eyed strangers, everyone’s emotions a cocktail of excitement and nausea—but mostly nausea.
There are several Card members joining us, but I only recognize a handful of them. There’s Oliver, who has only just joined us for the evening. He doesn’t look at either of us, too absorbed by the blue screen light on his phone. Then there are the other familiar faces: the Lockwells, Tripp, and that British guy from the cafeteria this morning. Ash is sauntering forward with his arm slung across a girl’s shoulders. Her hair hangs in a honey-brown bob, and her lashes flutter above glittered cheeks.
“Isn’t it beautiful out here?” the girl croons—Mallory Hunt, presumably, if Birdie’s yearbook debacle is to be believed.
No one says a word.
“She asked you a question. Would it kill you guys to answer? And smile while you’re at it,” Tripp taunts, demonstrating what he wants us to do with a finger hooked on either corner of his lips. “The entire school would die to be in your shoes. Act like it.”
I force a grin on my lips, but I feel more like a feral animal flashing my fangs.
A guy beside me sticks his sweaty palms in his pockets. He gulps at the approaching gate. “If you enjoy mud and rain, sure,” he jokes weakly, as if he’s expecting a chuckle.
Mallory smiles back at him, her teeth as straight as a military cemetery and her eyes so Fiji Water blue you could sell them at Erewhon. “You’re out.”
“Wh-what?”
“You heard me,” she retorts as she swivels from her partner’s side. “We don’t need any smart-asses here.”
“I’m not…I didn’t mean—”
Tripp glares at him, the threat clear.
Meanwhile, Calvin examines the crescents of his nails in the moonlight. “Don’t take it personally. We’re already at capacity for smart-asses.”
The boy ducks his head and runs back to his dorm with his tail between his legs, and Sadie not-so-subtly smacks her brother in the arm.
“Mallory’s right. It’s just a spot of rain. Not the end of the world,” Ash insists as he herds us closer to the gate. “The game’s easy, besides. All you’ve got to do is go in, have a look about, find the heart we’ve hidden, then walk out. Quite simple. We’ve hidden two of them in the maze, which means most of you won’t get in. If you find it before sunrise, you’re in. If not…” He lingers, his gaze cutting to Sadie.
She stands there with a hip cocked and her cold eyes narrowed. Her lips are a devilish red, like the hourglass on a black widow. It makes sense for her to be a cunning spider. This whole school might as well be a web beneath her. “If not, I’m afraid this is private property. Trespassing the first week won’t earn you any points with my mother.” She directs her attention my way. “For some of you, it might mean expulsion.”
A key swings from Sadie’s throat, and she slips it off her neck and turns to the gate. It’s a wrought-iron vision in front of us, an enormous fence that surrounds the entire northern perimeter of the campus grounds. There’s a heart crafted around the keyhole, formed by a conjoined set of metal S-scrolls. Melded beside it is a tiny plaque:
The Final Resting Place of Anastasia Hart
