I scanned the pool area. Joints, lines of crushed pills and powders, bongs, pills in bags, and more lay around everywhere. Anyone caught inside could very well kiss their college dreams goodbye.
“Get down here right now,” Vaughn barked at me. He sounded impatient, but not impersonal. I don’t think he realized that.
I shook my head. “I can’t. I’m locked upstairs. The key dropped into the pool,” I explained, just as the lights went out.
Poppy probably wanted to do some damage control on her way out, make it look like there hadn’t been a party.
Arabella sashayed toward a fire lamp standing on the wooden table by the loungers, making a show of running her finger around its edges, taking her time.
“Since you two are all secretive, and since this is getting on my nerves, I guess there’s only one way to find out if Vaughn really does like you, Drusilla. Oh, you thought changing your hair color was going to help cover your fugly face?” She looked up, scanning my recently restored hair. “So dead wrong.”
With a flick of her wrist, she knocked the lamp to the ground. The glass shattered, and the fire inside licked the table, spreading fast.
The alcohol.
Everything was soaked with alcohol. Arabella jogged toward Alice, tugging at her bikini string.
“Come on. Let fucked-up Romeo save his creepy Juliet. Oh, and Vaughn…” She looked back, smiling. “Thanks for all the help getting what I wanted. No hard feelings, right?” She winked.
I watched as the girls ran for safety as the fire spread across my backyard. The sound of the music died, replaced by wheels screeching to a stop as the police arrived. I closed my eyes and shook my head.
It was done. I knew it. There was no way for me to get out of here. Papa was still at work, off at the gallery. Everyone else had left.
“Jump,” Vaughn snarled.
I shook my head. I no longer cared about being caught inside a house full of drugs. I cared about surviving. Vaughn glanced at the pool, looked up again, and frowned. He was calculating something. Then it occurred to me.
He believed them.
He thought I’d told them his secret.
He wasn’t going to help me.
I swallowed hard.
Don’t beg.
Fear creeped in on me, coating every inch of my body with cold sweat, but I still couldn’t find it in me to plead with him to save me.
And he wasn’t going to. He was going to let me burn for what he thought I’d done to him.
I took a step from the window, turned around, and tried kicking the door open.
I clawed at the wood, feeling my nails chipping, and knew I had absolutely no shot at getting out of this room on my own. How had I been so stupid? Why did I fling my arm out, trying to talk to Vaughn, a guy who’d made it clear he wanted to hurt me? What the hell was wrong with me?
I grabbed the doorknob and pulled at it, propping one leg against the wall and using all of my strength. I was too shocked and full of adrenaline to cry. Then I heard something behind me. When I turned around, I saw the window was smashed, completely broken, and Vaughn was crawling inside. He’d climbed onto the roof, probably after calculating that it’d take him too much time to find the key underwater in the dark. Tiny pieces of glass clung to his shirt and flesh like fangirls. His left bicep had a tiny, open wound. I’d never met a god who bled so often.
Wordlessly, he turned around and started kicking out the remainder of the window glass so we wouldn’t get cut on our way down. The fire was gaining speed and body. I saw the tips of orange flames dancing at my eye level on the second floor.
More sirens—this time firefighters—rang in the air, deafening me. The sound of heavy wood splitting suggested the front door had been kicked in. The cops were downstairs.
“Won’t they see us?” I asked.
He didn’t turn around to look at me. Just nudged the last piece of glass aside to make the window a perfectly glassless hole.
“I’m going down first, and then you’ll jump into my arms.”
“You can’t catch me,” I told his back.
Vaughn was bigger than me, but he wasn’t the Hulk. Jumping into the pool made more sense, although I’d have to take a leap and hope not to hit the deck. Bloody hell, hoping to be saved at the last minute by a flying unicorn was more likely.
He turned around to me, seething. “You do it my way, or you burn to death. I really don’t care. This is a one-minute offer. I’m not fucking up my life to save yours, Good Girl.”
Vaughn slipped out the window without glancing back at me. I realized it was still more than I could have hoped for. Everybody else had run away. Poppy probably forgot I was even in the house.
I ran to the window and watched Vaughn climbing down the roof, then taking a leap to the patio. He walked backward, watching me with his calm, dead eyes, and waited for me to jump. I held the window frame, shaking all over. There was not even one bone in my body that wanted to do this. I tried to tell myself he was going to catch me, that he wasn’t just saying that to let me die. He wouldn’t go through the effort of climbing up just to watch me plunge to my death.
“I didn’t tell them your secret.” My fingers dug into the wood of the window frame, the splinters cutting through my skin like little blades. The police officers were raiding the second floor, I could tell. I could hear them. They were going to find the attic, and then me. “Tell me you believe me, and I’ll jump.”
“What difference does it make?” He bared his fangs, staring at me with forced boredom.
The fire spread, licking at the grass and approaching us with surprising speed, though he didn’t seem to mind at all. We were already dangerously close to getting caught.
“Because it’s the truth,” I screamed.
Our eyes met in the dark and held for a moment.
“I don’t believe you, but I’ll still catch you,” he said. “I will always catch you, the fucking dumbass that I am.”
“What do you mean?”
“You soften me.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to fucking kill you! You’re too fun to fuck with. Now Get. The. Hell. Down.”
I jumped with my eyes shut, not expecting it to work, but Vaughn defied gravity and somehow caught me honeymoon-style, while still managing not to fall back. It was like my bum knew exactly how to land in his palm, my back braced against his other hand. In one smooth, continuous movement, he ran to the back of my house, ignoring the fire at his feet, keeping me closely pressed to his chest.
He shoved me behind the bushes, then joined me, taking shelter and hiding. The cold, moist earth was a welcome relief from the dancing flames, and I shuddered with pleasure as I took a clean breath—just in time for the firefighters to start yelling among themselves and turning on their hoses.
We watched them from behind the grand bushes.
We’re safe,I thought. He saved me.
Yet I couldn’t thank him. Not after what he did with Arabella. Not after he called me a liar. Not after he’d humiliated me so many times in front of the people I hated.
I’d dreamed of piercing his heart with a spiked sword, and this act of kindness, of heroism, only made things worse somehow.
“Why did you even care? You said your father owns the police.”
“I’d walk away unscathed. You, on the other hand…” he trailed off, watching the firemen roam my backyard.
“And you care because…?”
He turned around to look at me. “I’m not done fucking with you.”
I wish you wouldn’t come to England.
For a moment I didn’t realize I’d said it out loud, that it had slipped past my lips, bitter and full of menace. I had a violent need to hurt him back. To get even. Then to save him, too. To be his equal. A god and a mortal, defying all odds.
“Wait till I get there, GG. You’ll wish I were dead.”
LENORA
No one mentioned the party after what happened.
Not the next day, when Papa, Poppy, and I boarded the plane to Heathrow, or the days that followed, when everyone settled back in England—Dad and I at Carlisle Castle, which was empty due to summer break (summer session hadn’t started yet), and Poppy at our Hampstead Heath house.
Poppy naturally presumed I’d escaped the attic on my own—she didn’t know I dropped the key—and I didn’t correct her assumption. When Papa questioned us about what happened that night, we were both adamant that a lit cigarette had caught the bushes on fire, and we’d called the firefighters.
Naturally, the Todos Santos police came to investigate, too. And when they’d concluded, they backed this version of events. All they needed was one tilt of the head from Vaughn Spencer. He wasn’t joking—his family really did rule the bloody town.
I wasn’t mad at Poppy. She had no way of knowing I was trapped. I didn’t have my phone with me, and when I dropped my key, there was so much commotion and noise in the backyard, she surely missed it. But there was one persistent part of me that wondered why she hadn’t looked for me—at least checked.
Even though I was in Berkshire and she was in London, Poppy still sent me a fresh basket of something sweet every day. Sometimes a courier knocked on my dorm door. Sometimes Papa left it on the threshold of my room. Sometimes it simply showed up on my nightstand in the morning. It was her silent way of saying she’d cocked up, she knew it, and it wasn’t going to happen again.
Apology accepted, sis.
My abbreviated summer came and went in a colorful, sticky blur. Pope was yachting in the Seychelles with his parents and two older sisters. I very much doubted he spent the time preparing for his internship. I didn’t know what Vaughn was up to, but I was sure it involved some sort of satanic ritual, knife play, and torturing babies.
Me, I was holed up in my new room in Carlisle Castle on the staff and interns’ floor, devouring book after book, greeting Papa in the hallways occasionally, and planning for my next assemblage. The new room had been furnished and decorated with the things Papa had found in my old room, the things I had purchased with Mum when I was twelve: the Nightmare Before Christmas sheets and pillows from our visit to Stratford, The Cure posters we got in Camden Town, photos of my portfolio—yellowed and dated, curling at the edges—stapled to the walls. Even Mum’s flowery quilt was still there, and when I inhaled into it really deeply, squeezing my eyes shut, I swore the faint scent of her clean perfume and sweet self wafted into my nostrils.
My things in my room hadn’t changed one bit from the last time I was here, yet it didn’t feel like mine anymore.
The year in Todos Santos had changed me. Everything looked silly and juvenile through the same eyes that had watched a house burning, an angry boy being pleasured in front of the entire school, and my sister’s heart shattering on the hallway floor of All Saints High in front of the “It” crowd. I couldn’t help but look at my room through Vaughn’s icicle eyes, and what I saw embarrassed me.
I didn’t even know why, but still couldn’t bear to make any changes.
It wasn’t like it mattered. It wasn’t like I was planning on inviting him over. In fact, I’d filed a request to change the lock on my room, because most locks were too easy to pick, and I didn’t want to take any chances where it came to Vaughn Spencer.
Two weeks after my return to Carlisle Prep, I sat in my room, working on my next assemblage. I’d started from the prop—the crown—because I figured it would take me the longest. The pinnacle of thorns was almost done, elaborate and heavy, coiling up like a gigantic crest. Thorns, like Vaughn, were difficult to work with—spiky, yet delicate. They broke so easily, but made me bleed so often. I’d never worked with such an evasive material before.
A spike pricked my thumb just as a knock came on my door. I sucked the blood from my flesh, spinning around in my chair and bracing my elbows over the drafting table behind me.
“Come in,” I said.
I thought it’d be Papa. School didn’t start until next week, and the interns weren’t supposed to be here before the following Saturday.
When the door opened, the pliers in my hand dropped.
Rafferty Pope stood in the hallway, his golden mane a mass of curls, highlighted by the sun, his piercing green eyes shining all the way across the room. He was taller and broader than I remembered, with a youthful, deep brown tan and dimples that kissed his cheekbones. He looked…
Handsome? Stunning? Glorious?
All those titles couldn’t do him justice, and still, Pope stirred nothing in me—except an ecstatic rush of platonic love. He took a step into my room, his balled hands shoved into white polo pants that only further highlighted his tan.
“Lenora Astalis, misery treats you well. You look fit.” He stopped a foot from me, quirking his head sideways with a smile.
“Rafferty Pope, happiness treats you well. You look brilliant yourself.” I moved to stand toe-to-toe with him.
The boy who’d gone ghost hunting with me when we were kids in the castle. Who’d explored hidden paths and unearthed secret doors with me. We shared history, entwined interests, and a deep respect for each other.
Our arms found one another, and we hugged long and hard. He still smelled of the ocean, the sun, and foreign spices that made my mouth water. Pope ruffled my hair in an older-brother gesture.
“Sorry you didn’t get the internship. You bloody deserved it, Lenny.”