Page 98 of An Academy for Liars

This, at least, came with some measure of relief. “You could’ve told me—”

“I did,” said Dante. “I told you many times that we shouldn’t proceed. You didn’t listen.”

“This isn’t about me,” said Lennon. “This is about you and the secrets you’ve kept. How you weren’t honest with me, or, I suspect, anyone. Not even yourself. You’re acting like this was a relationship between two people who could actually consent to one. But Dante, you were a child with a grown woman who had no right to…” Lennon cut herself short. She couldn’t get the words out.

“Don’t pretend this is about that,” said Dante, and he brought the car around a tight bend. “If you have something you want to accuse me of, then say it.”

“I don’t have anything to accuse you of. But I do have questions.”

“Like what?”

“Like why is it that I bare so much of myself to you while you always keep me at arm’s length? You never let me close enough to understand you. When you’re at your weakest, you shut me out. Is it that you don’t trust me—”

“That’s not it.”

Lennon felt close to tears now. “What, then?”

“I can’t care for you in the way you want to be cared for,” said Dante. “I warned you in the beginning, and you wouldn’t hear it. Youdidn’t want to believe me, and frankly, neither did I. I wanted things to work because I wanted you. I still do. But that isn’t enough to blind me to the truth.”

“And what is the truth, Dante?”

“This needs to end. It needs to end because it should’ve never started in the first place.”

Lennon received these words like a backhanded slap. It all came to her so clearly then, as if she’d woken up from a dream. She had been naïve and stupid in falling for Dante. And Dante had used her, the way men are apt to do. It had been the same with Wyatt and all the others Lennon had loved and slept with. She had given them everything, and they’d taken and taken and taken. And when she had nothing left to give, or when they just grew bored of her offerings, they discarded her like she was nothing at all.

“I defended you,” said Lennon. “When Claude accused you of killing Benedict, when people began to believe him, I stuck up for you. Always. I’ve been on your side this entire time, and now I see that I was a fucking fool for that because clearly I don’t even know you.” She was crying now—hot, angry tears that cut tracks down her cheeks. “Maybe Claude was right about you—”

A boy appeared in the middle of the road. Eyes wide, refracting the light of the headlights. He had a long pale neck slashed open just above the collar.

Dante wrenched the steering wheel a split moment before he would’ve struck him.

The car careened off the side of the road, toward the gully that ran along its shoulder. Dante slammed the brakes so hard that Lennon snapped forward, gagging as the seat belt cut deep into her throat. A beat passed. The boy in the road lunged across the left lane and disappeared into the dark of the tree line. Lennon unclipped her seatbelt even as Dante caught her by the arm and begged her to stay in the car.

Lennon wriggled out of his grasp, kicked open the car door, stepped out into ankle-deep mud, and dragged her way up the side of the ditch to the road where she’d seen the boy just moments before. He couldn’t have gotten far, not in the condition that he was in. But when Lennon staggered across the road and peered down into the gulley, then past it through the trees, there was no sign of him anywhere.

He’d just…disappeared, like he’d never been there at all.

And then, with a sinking feeling as though the ground had opened beneath her feet, Lennon remembered. She had seen this boy before, back in Amsterdam. She recalled the way he’d moved and glitched like a thing not human. The way that even when Lennon tried to bring his blurred and twisted body into focus, she couldn’t, no matter how much she strained her eyes. She’d blamed the strobe lights and darkness in the club, but what if it was something else? Something inhuman?

“That boy back there,” said Lennon, turning to Dante, who now stood in the street. “He’s the one from Amsterdam, isn’t he? The friend on bad terms.”

Dante gave no answer, which was confirmation enough. “Lennon, I need you to get back in the car. It’s not safe out here.”

“Who was that boy, Dante?” Her voice was rising now, shaky and hysterical. She didn’t sound like herself. She couldn’t get the image of the boy’s open throat out of her mind. The fear in his eyes.

“His name is August. He was a student of Benedict’s and a friend of mine, or at least he was. A friend of mine, I mean.”

So this was August, who Claude had referred to. The name of the boy tattooed along Dante’s ribs. The apparition from Amsterdam. “What happened to him? What happened to his throat?”

Dante didn’t answer. But his expression said what he wouldn’t.

“Did you hurt him? Is that what Alec was referring to?”

“We can talk about this later,” said Dante.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Well, it’s the only one I can give you tonight,” he said, and he looked tired then. So tired that if his knees had buckled right out from under him, if he’d fallen there in the middle of the street, Lennon wouldn’t have been remotely surprised. “Get in the car. We can talk in the morning.”

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