Page 69 of Gothikana

His eyes came to her. ‘Yes. Ninety years ago.’

Holy shit.

‘Holy shit.’

‘Yes, those were different times.’ He tapped his fingers at his side, his gaze far away. ‘Full moons were nights people were wary of anyway. That’s when they went down to the village and brought someone back to the woods. Played whatever power games they had to play and killed them after. It was a high for them, he told me. Especially for him knowing he was the master of it all.’

Corvina rubbed her arms, trying to calm her heartbeats when something occurred to her. ‘Wait, how is that possible? The Slayers were all killed, weren’t they? How was he alive?’

Vad worked his jaw, looking out the window again. ‘When the school discovered what had been happening, a group of students found the Slayers in the woods and lynched them.’

Corvina nodded, knowing that part of the legend.

‘He was leading the group.’

The silence after his statement was heavy. Corvina took a second to wrap her head around the fact that his grandfather hadn’t onlymurdered people with his friends, but he’d turned on his friends and murdered them, too. That was… she didn’t even have the words for what it was.

After a long pause to let that sink in, he continued, ‘He told me his girlfriend cursed them with her dying breath.’ His voice stayed steady. ‘Told him the Slayers would hunt all their killers down from beyond the grave.’

Fuck, this was spooky, especially in the waning daylight.

‘What happened then?’ Corvina wrapped her arms around herself as the horror of the story slowly started to penetrate her mind.

He shrugged. ‘He never knew. They say the hunters disappeared, too, but my grandfather was too scared of that curse to return to this place again, even though he wanted to keep it.’

‘And the disappearances during Black Balls?’ she asked.

‘He believed it was the curse.’ Vad gazed at her again. ‘He was an old man close to his death when he told me the story. He wanted to prepare me for when I got here.’

‘And how did he die?’ Corvina asked, remembering Ajax’s words about his suspicious death.

‘That I can’t tell you, little crow.’ Vad tsked, his eyes gleaming. ‘I will say I have no regrets about it.’

That could or could not mean he had killed him. After hearing the story, after everything his grandfather had done, she couldn’t say she felt any regret either. He must have destroyed so many lives for his own power play.

Corvina processed everything he’d laid on her, taking her time to sift through all the history, chewing on her thumbnail. ‘Does anyone know about what he did?’ she asked after a long time.

‘Not that I’m aware of.’ He began to fold the sleeves of his shirt up his forearms. ‘He told me I was the first person he was confessing to because he wanted to keep it in the family. The Board never had any idea he was one of them.’

‘Then why doesn’t anyone here know who you are?’ She was confounded. ‘If there’s no shame with the family name, then why?’

‘Why should they?’ He leaned forward, his eyes hard. ‘If there’s someone doing something suspicious here, do you think they would let their guard down around Vad Deverell, owner of Verenmore, member of the Board, if he was on campus all the time?’

He had a point. As a student and a teacher, he had better chances of simply existing on campus and observing everything without raising any red flags.

He kept speaking.

‘When I came to Verenmore, it was immediately after being told all of this. I had wanted this place but that taint was something I didn’t want. So I just got myself admitted as a regular student, wanting to know everything about this place from the ground up, especially about the disappearances.’

‘And it worked,’ Corvina mused. ‘That’s why you continued the facade of being just another person.’

‘Very good.’ His voice carried his approval at her inference. ‘The Black Ball was approaching when I enlisted the help of one girl in my class.’

‘Zoe,’ Corvina remembered. ‘Ajax’s girlfriend.’

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘She had grown up in town and knew the local area better than I had at the time. She’d found a shack in the woods one day, and told me about it. I had gone to investigate, to find someone had been living there but had left in a hurry.’

The memory of a long silhouette in the shack she had stumbled upon with Troy and her friends popped up in her head. ‘I think I know the place.’

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