Page 44 of Priest and his Anarchist

His eyes narrow, and the vein in his forehead pulses. “You trust him?”

“Corbin?” a girl calls out from behind me. It’s the beautiful girl from earlier who was laughing with her friends. Ah. No surprise there.

“I should let you go.” Thankfully, he doesn’t stop me as I hurry toward the exit, careful to smile at the girl in passing. I don’t want her to think Corbin and I are anything serious.

“Luna?” I stop, sucking in the brush of wind from outside. “You’ve always had control, Luna. Find the anchor again.”

I push through the doors without an answer, desperate to get away. I’ll never come back here again—big mistake this was. Our lives are so different now. Corbin was supposed to be the person I ended up with.

It’s easy to picture how my life would have turned out had I taken a different path.

It bores me.

I wish I paid closer attention to Dad when he tried to tell me about the Elite King's curse that ran through their blood. All I remember is that it would start from the ritual. I guess love wasn’t an emotion that the Kings were to feel, especially after creating so much chaos when they formed the club. Not a big fan of the witchy-woo-woo stuff, but maybe it’s true. Perhaps it was an old Hayes witch who did it and she sniffed me out the second I walked in here, hexing me too for constantly agitating her great-great-great-something grandson.

The air becomes thick around me. How are we expected to sit here for—however long it will take—without a decent amount of oxygen. I need a distraction. Moss grows on ageless concrete walls that smell of death, and although buried beneath Riversidecemetery, the space is large enough for a stadium of people—and the lost souls they left behind.

“There has to be hundreds of people here tonight.”

Dad catches my hand from beside him, placing a kiss on the back of my palm. “Five hundred to be exact, Baby Night.”

My mouth falls open. “Five hundred?”

Father’s eyes find mine when he leans in front of Dad. “Don’t. Act nonchalant. They want you to be impressed. Pull your shit together.”

Rolling my eyes, Mom wraps her arm around me and pulls me into her chest.

“Have you seen any of them since leaving?”

Her question fades into white noise as I follow the detailed carvings of images that mark the concrete floor. I’m sure each one means something important, but it's all riddles and tricks like everything else in the Elite Kings world.

“No.” I rest my head on Mom’s shoulder.

She doesn’t need to know about Priest. Since arriving home, she’s managed to keep her pestering at a minimum when questioning my time away. She knows nothing of what I went through, or what happened, and I’ll keep it that way until I’m allowed to do otherwise.

My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I fish it out as we all take our seats. Bishop Hayes, a.k.a. the God of the Elite Kings, starts speaking in Latin tongue to begin the ritual. I’ve lost interest.

You could have been up here with them you know.

Nate stares at me from his chair on stage, his phone in his grasp and a half grin spread over his face.

My reply is instant.

No thank you.

I push my phone away and relax in my seat as the ritual goes on. Minutes become an hour, and I can’t stop the yawn that escapes when people start shuffling near the front, which is only a few rows in front of us. Thankfully, we’re arched upward, so I don’t have to move a lot to see.

I lean into Dad. “What’s happening?”

“You learned about the curse…”

All night, I’ve made it my mission to not look anywhere near his general direction. I’ve seen him twice too many since being back, and it’s been two times too often. After he left me to die that night, I vowed in my most vulnerable moment that I’d never allow his evil to come near me again.

Dad continues, and I rack my brain to remember what we were talking about. The curse. The Kings lying asleep on the ground. Right. “Well, the last one to wake is usually the one who is infected. We don’t know what they see or what they’re told, but all we know is when they do wake, little by little they’ll become something much worse than what they currently are. It eats away at their soul like rot. This skipped our generation, because we weren’t in Riverside, but?—”

“Why?” I turn to Dad, tracing the lines of wrinkles around his eyes. Although age has been good to him, I’ve seen how much older he is now that I’m home. How much older they all are. My stomach twists into knots if I think about it too much, the guilt almost unbearable. I spent so many years away from them.

“I can’t imagine any of them being worse than they are now.” My eyes roll on their way back to the stage, where Halen is stirring awake.

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