Page 23 of Soulless Saint

An image of Brianna comes to mind. She ran Briar Hall, my old high school, until my girl, Ava Jade, put her in her place. She’d burned off half Bianca’s hair, forcing the self-titled queen bee to shave it bald.

I smiled, remembering the first day I saw her with a shaved head in class. One of the best moments of my life. She deserved everything Aves threw at her. It was her fault I lost the only real friend I had at Briar Hall. It was her fault Jenny Taylor was dead.

“Becca?” Toby stopped suddenly. “You good?”

I swallowed, refocusing on the present. Brianna Matthews was firmly in my past with every other horrible thing I left behind when I boarded the bus to SoCal. This, right now, was my present, and I intended to live in it.

“Fucking amazing,” I replied. “Come on, let’s go inside. I need a drink.”

Toby hauled me across the lush green lawn, through groups of students smoking pot and drinking. Past a couple that was only one thin garment away from straight up fucking in the grass.

I found myself laughing, that familiar buzz in my blood awakening as we climbed the three steps to the front door and passed the threshold.

Toby led me by the hand through the student clogged front entryway, snaking a path through the house toward the kitchen.

My nose filled with the scents of hoppy beer and sweet liqueur. I could feel the bass from the music rattling in my chest .

We stopped next to a center island littered with empty plastic red cups, several bottles of different sodas and at least half a dozen bottles of booze in varying states of fullness. The refrigerator hung open across from us, two guys with red hair that looked like twins pulled fistfuls of deli ham and turkey from a crisper drawer, stuffing their faces.

“What the fuck?” I laughed, my voice swallowed up by all the noise just as the song changed to one I knew. Primal Ethos’ newest hit single, Dark Duet, ft. my girl Ava Jade came blasting on through the speakers and a few students hollered, their bodies swaying to the opening beat.

I smiled, feeling a sense of pride as Ava Jade’s haunting voice started at a breathy whisper and grew into a skin tingling siren call, Corvus’ voice entangling with hers as they hit the chorus.

“I have you pegged as a whiskey girl,” Toby shouted over the music, and I turned in time to grab the plastic cup he pushed into my hand. He raised a brow in question, and I nodded.

“You guessed right!”

He knocked his cup into mine before taking a long drink from his own. I stared down into the amber liquid, a shiver of unease scattering through my body.

“Don’t worry!” Toby shouted, tipping his head in the direction of my cup. “This is the safest place to drink in all of Santa Clarita. Scouts honor.”

I licked my lips, nodding once before knocking back the whiskey, moaning quietly to myself as the burn seared a path down to my belly. My tensed shoulders relaxed, and I held my empty cup back out to Toby, giving it a little shake. “One more?”

He grinned widely, pouring us two more shots. I guessed we were not driving back to the apartment tonight. I hoped Uber was decent all the way out here.

With the first day of classes tomorrow, I’d allow myself a reprieve from all the stress of the last week, but I wasn’t staying for the long haul. I needed sleep. Real sleep. Not the one-eye-open bullshit I’d been enduring at the motel.

“So, which one is the lucky guy?” I whisper shouted in Toby’s ear as we leaned back against the kitchen counter to people watch and nurse our fresh cups of whiskey.

Even at over six feet tall, Toby went up on his tiptoes to see over the crowd, peering into the massive living room beyond the kitchen. The open floor plan allowed for you to see almost the entirety of the main floor.

The front door, still ajar as students passed in and out, was to our right, smack dab between the kitchen and living room.

All the way across the house, another door leading to what I assumed was a side garden was also open to the night.

To the right were two hallways that I guessed led to bathrooms and bedrooms. Oddly, no one went down those hallways, almost as if there were an invisible barrier keeping everyone penned in this front area of the home.

Toby tugged the sleeve of my sheer shirt, excitedly bouncing on the balls of his feet as he gestured across the room. “There, you see him?”

I set my drink down, branching my palms against the tall kitchen countertop to lift myself higher.

“There,” Toby said again. “The guy with the light brown hair. In the dark gray long sleeve.”

I scanned the bodies in the wide space, my gaze narrowing on the guy Toby called Kaleb. I felt my lips part as I drank him in. He threw his head back in a laugh at something someone was telling him, the line of his jaw somehow even sharper at that angle.

His eyes glimmered with mischief.

And that gray long sleeve? He wore it like a fucking model. The sleeves rolled up to the crooks of his elbows to reveal muscled, tattooed forearms. The tuck of the sleeves only serving to accentuate the fullness of his biceps above.

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