Page 55 of An Academy for Liars

Dante kicked off his shoe, which was filled with blood, his sock soaked through. “Oh my god, your foot—”

“It’s my leg,” said Dante, and he made his way to the bathroom, trailing a dark smear of blood behind him. “And I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I noticed. Thanks.”

“I think you should go to the hospital.”

“Not going to happen,” he said, and he stripped out of his jacket, tossing it out of the bathroom and onto the bed. Lennon watched by the door as he peeled up the hem of his blood-damp shirt, muttering to himself as he assessed a second wound, the one on his side. She had never seen an injury quite like it. The skin at his waist had been somehow torn, gashed apart, and deep bruises surrounded the slashes. To her eye it almost looked like something had attempted to claw its way out of him, which was, of course, impossible. She knew he must’ve been somehow injured during the stampede, shoved along something sharp, perhaps? Or maybe that entity had attacked him with a knife? His injuries didn’t look like knife wounds, though.

“This is fucking ridiculous. You need medical attention.”

Dante ignored that. “You sit tight. If anyone knocks on the door, don’t answer. I don’t care who they say they are.”

“What if you bleed out?”

“Then I want to be cremated, not buried,” he said and shut the bathroom door in her face. She half expected to hear the thump of Dante hitting the floor, but the only sound was a running faucet.

Pissed—but knowing she’d lost this battle—Lennon lay down on the bed beside Dante’s discarded jacket. That’s when she saw the money, sticking out from an inner pocket. Lennon glanced at the bathroom door and listened carefully to the hissing of the showerhead. When she was certain Dante wasn’t about to emerge, she reached carefully for the money and withdrew a thick stack of crisp hundred-dollar bills, folded in half and held fast with a money clip. A quick count confirmed that it was an easy ten thousand dollars, and upon further inspection of the jacket she saw that there was another folded stack of bills in the same pocket, this one in euros, and two more stacks in another, bringing the total sum of money to a cool forty thousand.

“Holy shit,” she whispered, shoving the money back into the pockets where it belonged.

Dante finally emerged from the bathroom with the first aid kit in hand, freshly bandaged and looking less pale. Lennon was making coffee in the instant machine and, without asking, she poured Dante a cup too, then they both sat down on the couch and watched reruns of a dog show that was playing on ESPN for a while in silence.

Lennon wanted to ask him about the money but knew she couldn’t without revealing that she’d snooped through the contents of his jacket. “So, are you going to tell me what happened back in Amsterdam?”

“Already told you. Ambush.”

“But who were we ambushed by? You said it was an old friend of yours?”

He nodded. “A former classmate. From Drayton. We parted on…bad terms.”

“Why was he like that?”

Dante finished the dregs of his coffee in a single swallow, stared down at the empty mug, which looked small in his large hands, like something from a child’s tea set. Lennon could tell her question was one he didn’t want to answer. “The power we wield has its costs. If you push yourself past a certain threshold, you can break your mind and lose yourself.”

“Will I turn into something like that, if I keep practicing persuasion?”

For a long time, he didn’t answer. “Not if you’re careful. Drayton will teach you how to kill it. But the catch is that it doesn’t stay dead. Every day for the rest of your life you will wake up and wrap your hands around that thing’s throat and strangle it. Or it will strangle you.” Dante delivered this indictment with his eyes locked on the TV in a dead-eyed, thousand-yard stare. “But this is true both of those who use persuasion and those who don’t. Every one of us harbors a facet of ourselves that wants, desperately, to destroy us. A part of us that longs for our own annihilation. It tells you to jump when you stand beside a tall drop-off. It makes you want to put a knife through your own hand when you’re chopping vegetables for dinner. It is hungry and it is corrosive, and it will come for your soul and your sanity. Which is why all of us must work actively against it, or else it will succeed.” The toll of saying this sapped what little strength he had left. He hung his head.

“You really do need to see a doctor.”

“I’ll be all right. I rinsed out the wound with alcohol.” He nodded to the first aid kit on the nightstand.

“May I have a look?”

Dante sighed. “If you must.”

Gingerly, she peeled up the side of his bloody shirt, wishing he had something clean to wear. He’d done a shitty job with the bandaging, though, so Lennon cut it away and started again. The wound below wasn’t as deep as it had looked at first. Dante had flushed it thoroughly with alcohol, and while it was slightly swollen it showed no signs of infection. Lennon rifled through the contents of the first aid kit, cut several thick squares of gauze and pressed them carefully to the wound, and held it fast with wrap and strips of tape.

“Where’d you learn to do this?” Dante asked, watching her work. His voice had the husky quality of someone who’d only just woken up.

“My mom was a nurse,” said Lennon, carefully wrapping the bandages around his waist. “But more importantly, I was a Girl Scout.A Cadette, actually.”

“High achiever.”

Lennon shrugged. “I mean, I don’t like to brag, but…I do what I can.”

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