Page 17 of Serpentine Valentine
“Is that right? Because you don’t seem happy, Lex,” Grace said.
I was saved from responding by Effie, who was dangling with her head off my bed beside where I leaned against it. Her soft Afro brushed my shoulders, tickling me. “It’s only been ten months. We’ve barely started yet. You can’t expect her to be happy.”
The silence that followed her words was tacit agreement with what she’d said.
It was too soon.
I still couldn’t sleep, plagued every night by black and white images of the incident playing out in the shadows of my room, in the reflectionof lamp light on the windowpanes. If I managed to battle the shades of the past and actually fall asleep, I dreamt of the forest. The setting of my childhood, the only place that used to bring me solace in those lonely days, had been corrupted. Most mornings, I woke up with a scream lodged in my throat. Our neighbors complained until they realized who I was.
Thatgirl.
It was one of the things that surprised me after the incident. If they knew what happened to me, women were frightened of me. As if being faced with a woman who had lived through their worst nightmares was a bad omen. I’d become a black cat, an umbrella opened indoors, the number thirteen.
Now, my neighbors didn’t bother me even when I shrieked like a banshee.
“Still, Luna Pallas is pretty,” Grace muttered petulantly. “That’s something to be happy about.”
“Why? I don’t give a damn what she looks like,” I countered mildly because if I protested too much, they’d read into it. “She’s a means to an end.”
“A pleasurable one, hopefully,” she pointed out, waving the nailbrush in one hand so black speckles of varnish sprayed the stack of books beside her.
“Not the point,” I gritted out between my teeth.
“So you haven’t noticed?”
“Strawberry-blond, green eyes, dresses like the jock-focused collegiate girl she is.”
“Perky breasts, round ass, and thighs like marble,” Grace sing-songed.
“Not my type.”
My three pseudo sisters gasped in tandem. Gracie pressed a hand to her heart, the drama-loving theater geek that she was. “You have atype? This is news to us. Please elaborate.”
I leveled them with a glare and returned my gaze to the blinking cursor on my screen. Unwittingly, sometime in the past distraction-filled few minutes, I’d only typed two words.
Luna Pallas.
Fuck.
I slammed my laptop closed with too much force and shoved it off my lap as I rose to my feet. Cracking my knuckles, I checked my watch.
“You ladies ready to hunt?”
“Yippee,” Grace crowed, jumping to her feet, dislodging the still-opened bottle of varnish so it spilled across the edge of my bargain-basement rug. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Juno stood up to test the barbed wire-bound bat against her leather-gloved palm. “Ready.”
Effie swung off the bed, grabbed the black suede roll of knives off my bedside table, and handed it to me. “I heard in the commons today that Jerrod and his lot would be by the lake for an evening row.”
The anger that lay coiled around my soul, dormant during the day like any nocturnal creature, reared its head and gave a mighty, ominous rattle. The smile that claimed my face was the first true one I’d had in days. In the wake of the violence against me, the only thing that brought me any peace was seeking out violence myself.
So it was time to go hunting.
Acheron University was builtin the 1700s by two men, Johnathon Wilcox Hammond and Demetrius Drakos. They were an unlikely pairing, one a scholar and youngest son of an earl from Britain and the other the fabulously wealthy son of a shipping magnate. They met, not unusually, through their wives, Hermione Wellington and Hyacinth Forbes. The twowere best friends who, rumor has it, made a pact to stay that way forever. So when Hermione moved to America with her husband, Hyacinth convinced her husband to follow. The foursome was appalled by the lack of higher education in the New World and immediately set out to build something to rival the place where they met, Oxford University.
As a result, Acheron was born, a college to rival Harvard, one that focused particularly on the humanities because they were of specific interest to Hermione and Hyacinth. Many of the oldest buildings on campus were named in honor of Demetrius’s heritage after places, people, or myths of ancient Greece, and the ones that weren’t were called for Johnathon’s and Hermione’s favorite philosophers.
Hermione and Hyacinth even had statues in the small quad beside the lake. The duo was cast in bronze, two women sitting on a stone bench leaning together just a little too closely for propriety. One was reading a thick book, and the other balanced a set of scales on one petticoat-skirted knee.
