Page 42 of The Blood we Crave: Part Two

I wish I could say that I don’t believe in fate, but if it was real, I think I would’ve been made for her too.

“Do you know what thorns wish they could say to roses, darling phantom?” I glance over my shoulder, hurting myself more by looking at her.

The light from the kitchen downstairs twinkles onto the banister, dressing her in a dim orange glow. My sweater sleeves cover her tiny hands and drop just below her waist. She is all things chaotic and peculiar in a way that makes you want to believe in things like destiny.

Because no one is simply born this beautiful. This unbearably beautiful.

“That they deserve more,” I begin. “You deserve more than I can ever give you. I’m incapable of holding your heart, of taking care of it. Stop giving it to me. Stop before I kill it for good.”

This will be a night that lives in me till I take my very last breath. The look in her eyes will dwell in the depths of my mind as punishment for destroying her.

I step further into my room, grabbing the door and swinging it halfway closed.

“I don’t want to leave you empty, Scarlett. Don’t make me leave you empty.”

DELIVERY MAN

ELEVEN

Lyra

Hollow Heights is quiet, eerily so.

Usually, when students return from the Christmas break, it’s buzzing with life. Friends have come back together, sharing stories and laughing about the size of their yachts or where they went skiing for the holiday.

But as I walk through the marble halls, I can hear my footsteps. There’s a grim feeling cast across the grounds that has little to do with the snow. Fear had spread among the student body. Some hadn’t bothered to return, their parents demanding their children continue their studies online until girls stopped going missing and showing back up in parts.

The school is in chaos mode, trying to reassure donors and concerned parents everything is being handled and that the campus is still safe for attendance.

But is it? Has Hollow Heights ever been safe for attendance?

This school, no matter how prestigious, is haunted by peril. It survived the rumors of ghosts, but it can no longer hide the growing list of deaths.

There’s a meeting being held for each grade; the school wants to go over safety protocols moving forward until the killer is apprehended and taken into custody.

I tug my hood further up on my head, protecting myself from the freezing wind as I jog across the barren commons. My boots click against the ground as I make my way through the long sequence of columns, the space between them open and allowing snow to blow through.

The colonnades connecting the buildings of the Kennedy District are one of my favorite places to walk on campus. The sound of waves smashing against the coast roars just to my right, and if I had time, I would look out at the storming ocean. I love how it looks when winter comes. The sea is a raging obsidian color, and the jagged rocks below have a thin gleam of snow across the caps.

I’d told Briar when she’d first arrived about the ghost that haunts this hall, the one rumored to be the spirit of a girl who’d fallen in love with her English professor and jumped to her death with a broken heart.

During my freshman year, I used to walk through here around midnight just to see if I could hear her screams like they all say or if it was just one of those legends that upperclassmen use to freak out new students.

I’m busy thinking of ghosts, lost in my mind thinking about an obsession so deep you’d rather die than live without, when my body collides with another. The shock of the hit knocks the breath from my lungs in one big whoosh.

All of the items in my hands slam onto the floor, along with whatever the other person was carrying. Fallen pens rattle against the cold floor, and the last voice on planet Earth I want to hear snaps against my ears.

“Pay better fucking attention to where you’re walking, freak show.”

I roll my eyes, squatting down to grab my things so I can get away from this encounter as quickly as possible.

“You ran into me too, asshole,” I mutter. “You know, it’s common courtesy to say so—”

A square piece of starched white paper has popped up from the pages of their book. I wouldn’t have noticed it, would have overlooked it if it hadn’t been familiar to my eyes.

I snatch it up from the ground, my hands wobbling as I read the words across the paper repeatedly.

If they can’t have you.

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