Page 53 of Merciless Prince
“He tried to deceive us,” one of them said. “But we can tell when people are lying.”
“Oh.” My eyelids shuttered, and I leaned my head against the rough bark of the tree behind me.
“Wake up,” one of the red-cloaks said, gently tapping my cheek. “It’s your turn.”
I opened my eyes. “For what?”
“Your first trial.”
I swallowed thickly. “What do I have to do?”
“You need to answer some questions,” she said. “You must be honest with us. If you lie, you’ll face the same fate as that other boy.”
I bit my lip and nodded.
At first, the questions from the red-cloaks were simple enough—they wanted me to tell them my name, my interests, what I was studying at Bellingham, and what I hoped to achieve in the future. After that, the line of questioning grew a little deeper.
“If you had infinite power, what would you do with it first?” someone asked me.
I blinked slowly. “I would take away all the suffering in the world. Not just for humans. Animals, too. No one deserves to suffer.”
I knew they probably didn’t want to hear such a wishy-washy, feel-good answer, but I couldn’t concentrate hard enough to formulate a response that I thought they’d want to hear. All I could do was blurt out exactly what was on my mind.
“What is the darkest secret you’re willing to admit to us tonight?” another red-cloak asked.
I cast my eyes to one side as I considered the question. “I don’t know if this counts as a dark secret,” I murmured. “But it’s something I’ve never told anyone before, and it makes me feel horrible whenever I think about it.”
“Tell us.”
I took a deep breath. “When I was in my final year of high school, I found out a secret. My dad wasn’t my biological father. I figured there were a few different explanations for it, but my main theory was that my mom cheated and never told anyone.” I paused and bit the inside of my cheek as the memories flooded back in. “At first, I was furious at her, and I started having all these horrible intrusive thoughts about her. Like… for a few seconds I’d wish something would happen to her to punish her for what she’d done. I didn’t mean it, of course. I loved her, and I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her at all. They were just intrusive thoughts. I honestly couldn’t stop them.”
“So you wished something bad would happen to your mother.That’syour big shameful secret?” one of the red-cloaks asked, voice dripping with scorn.
I shook my head. “No. It’s not that. It’s…” I trailed off as my voice cracked slightly. “Just a few days after I found out, my parents died. They were run off the road by a drunk driver.” I stopped and blinked away the tears threatening to spill out of my eyes. “I know there’s absolutely no logic to this, but ever since it happened, I’ve had this horrible thought pop into my head every so often.”
“What is it?” one of the red-cloaks asked as I paused to gather my scattered thoughts into something vaguely coherent.
“I feel like I killed my parents,” I finally said, looking down at my lap. “Like I wished the accident into existence because I wanted my mom to be punished for what she did.” I stopped and sucked in another deep breath. “Like I said before, I know there’s no logic there, and I know it sounds completely ridiculous. I also know that it wasn’t my fault at all. It was the drunk guy’s fault. But I can’t stop feeling guilty anyway, because this irrational part of me still thinks that I somehow manifested the whole thing through sheer anger. So I keep feeling like I’m a killer even though I’ve never actually killed anyone.”
The red-cloaks were silent for a moment. Then one of them finally spoke again in a low voice. “What’s the closest you’ve ever come to actually killing someone, Shay?”
The jarring question shook something loose in my brain; something I hadn’t thought about in years. Suddenly the memories were as clear as day, and the words were bubbling out of my mouth before I could stop them.
“This is another thing from high school. But it was before the other thing. It happened in my sophomore year,” I said. “There was a boy in the same grade as me. His name was Rufus, and he had a developmental disorder. Some of the other boys bullied him because of it. They’d pretend to include him in stuff just so they could mock him. He was so innocent that he didn’t realize. He genuinely thought they would be friends with him if he tried hard enough, so he’d go along with whatever they said or did because he wanted to fit in so badly.”
I closed my eyes and swallowed thickly before going on.
“We had a school camp that year, and there was a bridge at the campgrounds. A very high bridge over a river. Two of the boys from the bully crew took Rufus there and convinced him to climb the fence along the edge and jump off. They lied and told him it was totally safe, and they said they were going to do it too, but they wanted him to go first because he was the coolest. He fell for it, like he always did, and he jumped. He broke both legs when he hit the water, and he almost drowned. The only reason he didn’t die was because one of the teachers managed to pull him out of the river and do CPR on him. I think he was clinically dead for a couple of minutes, though.
“The two bullies claimed that Rufus decided to jump on his own. The teacher who pulled him out of the water had seen them up on the bridge with him, but they said they were only there because they were trying to convince himnotto jump. They were lying, of course. They bragged to everyone else about it afterwards. They always knew they were going to get away with it, because they were from well-off families who lawyered up at the drop of a hat. Rufus wasn’t. So they got off scot-free and acted like what they’d done was just a hilarious joke.” I shook my head slightly. “Anyway… Rufus was different after that.”
“How so?” one of the red-cloaks asked, tilting his masked head to the side.
“He became really withdrawn and depressed. It was like he’d finally realized the truth—that all those horrible boys he desperately wanted to be friends with despised him and thought of him as some sort of inferior sub-human. They believed it so strongly that they were willing to let him die for a prank. And technically, hehaddied for two minutes.” I paused and pressed my lips into a thin line as I recalled the way the light in Rufus’s eyes had been permanently snuffed out after the incident. “Eventually his parents took him out of school. None of us ever heard from him again, but we all knew why he was gone. He didn’t die from that fall into the river. But something inside him did.”
“So… what does this have to do with our question? Did you want to kill this boy to put him out of his misery?” one of the red-cloaks asked in a tentative tone, as if I was a complete sociopath.
“No! Of course not!” I said indignantly. “I’m not finished yet.”
