Page 51 of An Academy for Liars

When Lennon surfaced again, she’d ventured farther than she’d realized, and the crowds had thickened considerably. In the distance—and only because Dante was one of the tallest people in the club—Lennon could just barely make out the sharp cut of his profile.

She didn’t know how the stampede began, exactly. But she was aware of something triggering within her—a sharp surge of adrenaline, not unlike a sense of doom, as if the entire world was collapsing beneath her feet. She wasn’t the only one who felt it; all around her people froze, screamed, and began to run. The urge to flee felt forced upon her. It was a crushing and terrible pressure, but also a familiar one. This was the way she’d felt when under the force of Benedict’s will, and Lennon realized then that she and all of the people around her were being persuaded to stampede.

A crush of bodies surged between her and Dante, and Lennon, stumbling over her own loafers, was swept away from him. Someone stepped on her foot. She caught an elbow to the nose and cried out in pain. Another man—tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in a fishnet tank top—moved as if to help her, reaching out a hand, but he too was swept away in the chaos. The music kept playing, but the shouts and yelling, the screams for air, very nearly drowned it out. Someone shoved her forward, but there was no space to fall, her ribs crushed inward, as if tamped down under a boot. She stumbled over something soft, a person, a body on the floor. Time slowed and the air, heavy with the scent of sweat, warmed and thinned. She couldn’tbreathe it. A black shade came down over her eyes, lit with so many silver stars.

Lennon squeezed her eyes shut. Sucked in a breath of sour air, trying to steal what little oxygen there was left to breathe. She was surprised to discover the room within herself, her bedroom safehold. Its furnishings were all the same. There was rain beating outside the window. The ceiling fan cycled slowly above her bed. She could hear, from downstairs, the clattering of pots and pans. Perhaps her mother was making dinner.

Standing in front of her closet was a boy she recognized. He was the boy with the moth. He looked older now, and less forgiving. “Force them back.”

It was the first time Lennon had ever heard him speak.

“I can’t. There’s too many of them.”

“Force them back,” said the boy again, and his words—while uttered in the voice of a child—had all the weight and gravitas of a man. There was something, Lennon realized now, that was familiar about him. Though she could not place it. “Get them out of here. Now.”

The light in her ceiling fan flickered. Its blades began to whir faster. The pull chains clattering together. Outside the window, rain turned to hail. It cracked the windowpanes.

“Do it,” said the boy. “Now. Before you can’t.”

The windows of the bedroom blew out. Lennon ducked, closing her eyes against the flying glass, and when she opened them again, she felt the force of her will expanding outward, until she occupied all of the people in her vicinity. The ravers and the DJ, the security guards dispersed throughout the crowd. She tasted their emotions and scented their pain. She was present in their minds and organs. She felt her will extend and animate their limbs. She was the air in their lungs and the adrenaline spiking through their veins. She was the voice of their mother, telling them to slow down and look both ways beforecrossing the street. She was in the quiet between heartbeats and the underground river of their unconscious thoughts. She was, in those sacred moments, everything to all of them.

She felt like a god.

Led by the guiding hand of Lennon’s will, the crowds cleared, streaming toward the nearest exits like water swirling down the drain, until the only people that remained were Lennon and Dante. Her knees buckled with relief at the sight of him, and she began to break toward him, when something seized her.

It was an abomination. There was no other word with which to describe it. It was less than human—or maybe more—or perhaps it was something entirely unto itself. A thing that had abandoned its humanness and become…what? Lennon didn’t know. The thing was almost ineffable. A thin and wretched mouth, lips just apart, a dark razor slit between them. The arms and legs were…long and heavy and jointed where they shouldn’t have been, as if they were drawn from memory by someone who’d only seen a human being once in passing. But all of these components were…wrong. Scrambled somehow. When she met its eyes, her ears filled with the sound of static. She felt the need to vomit, but nothing came up.

Under the flashing strobes the creature moved like something not of this world. The only thing that Lennon could liken it to was the speed and sharp precision of a spider racing up a wall.

“Get back,” said Dante, and Lennon saw, with horror, that he was bleeding badly from the mouth. His teeth were slick red, more blood running through the cracks between them when he spoke.

The last of the crowd fled the club. None of them registered the abomination standing in their midst but the crowds parted cleanly around it nonetheless, dragged aside by the force of the thing’s will. It cast its gaze on Lennon.

Her heart seized in her chest. It wasn’t fear. It was worse. Something anatomical, somethingwrong, like her brain had forgotten how to make her heart pump blood. Like something vital had been severed within her—an artery or a nerve. Her heart skipped one beat. Two. She keeled over, her knees soft beneath her, grappling for her chest. The third beat was a painful palpitation. The next was normal. Then her heart skipped another.

The thing wearing her face grinned. Its expression melted. Its face became someone else’s. A boy she didn’t know.

Dante yelled from across the club. “Call an elevator,now!”

Lennon tried, but her efforts were useless in the face of such power. From inside her head, a horrible voice, at once strange and familiar, leering:Dante.

Her heart strained painfully in her chest. She grasped at the hard bone of her own sternum, helpless. Her legs remained weak and soft beneath her.

Dante cried out again, she could hear his voice above the thing that was chanting his name. “Don’t let him into your head. Raise your walls. Fight it.”

Lennon felt a pull, a sharp kick within herself, as though someone had caught her soul by the hand and dragged her roughly forward, out of the cage of her body.

All at once she found herself in a room, concrete floors, concrete walls, a burnished aluminum toilet burbling in the corner, a small sink set into its top. Some type of prison cell. Overhead, the fluorescents flickered, and a light bulb blew out with a spray of sparks. A brown moth fluttered at the slit of the window of the cell door, throwing itself senselessly against the cloudy glass.

“Stay here.” The voice, familiar, seemed to come from everywhere. Dante’s.

“Where am I?” she called out into the empty cell. She staggered to the door, stood up on her tiptoes so she could catch a glimpse through the slit window, but the glass was so smudged and dirty she couldn’t make out anything more than the flickering light of fluorescents.

“You’re safe. I have to go. Stay here.”

The concrete floor of the room shuddered. A fissure raced up the wall, but it held fast. Lennon edged toward the hard metal cot bolted to the far wall and sat down, curled fetal, her knees tucked tight to her chest, and stuck her fingers in her ears against the sound of a rising scream.

And then, all at once, Dante was back, coming in through the door of the cell. He extended a hand, and when their fingers met, the walls of the cell dropped around her, falling backward as weightless as playing cards, and Lennon found herself back in the club, Dante’s hand tight around her wrist, dragging her along behind him down a dark and empty hall. They cut left, then right, through a doorway and into an empty bathroom.

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