Page 13 of The Library at Hellebore

It took everything I could to avoid making a face. “Were you following me or were you not? Answer the damn question.”

“I didn’t set out to follow you. But as it happened, I ended up in the same place. So, I suppose that’s following you,” he said very nonchalantly. “I think we’re both looking for the same thing.”

“Please don’t say it’s answers. I’ve had enough of that from Eoan and Gracelynn.”

For as long as I’d known him, Rowan had been—except once, just once, as we stood over Johanna’s sad, folded-up corpse—pathologically incapable of treating anything with even an iota of seriousness. He was an indefatigable peanut gallery, the kind of person who’d make his last words a wisecrack. But there was none of his usual irreverence at that moment. Rowan stared at me with a pensive, thin-lipped expression. Black was beginning to bleed from the confines of his pupils, tendrilling into those hoarfrost irises.

“You don’t have to tell me why you did it. It’d be nice if you did but you’re not obliged. And just in case you needed someone to say it, you don’t need absolution from me.”

“I wasn’t looking for that, but thanks for telling me.”

“Sure.” His eyes were black from pupil to sclera. I tensed, not knowing what to expect. But I could sense his rabbiting pulse, feel the structures of his muscles, his bones, the yards of nerves stitched under his skin. One tug and I’d have him unspooled on the floor like so much yarn. Nonetheless, I still took a wary step backward. “I’m just saying that if you find yourself seeking forgiveness, you probably want to do something more productive with your time. Everyone knows these are weird days.”

“Okay. Can we move on?”

“And you were wrong, by the way.” A muscle in his right jaw seemed to flinch from the words queued up in his mouth. “When we were in the dorms? When you were yelling at me about how I didn’t know she loved me? I did, actually. She deserved better than we gave her.”

“Excuse me. What the hell do you meanwe? I—”

“Johanna was a lot of things and she had a hell of a savior complex, but all of it was coming from a good place. She wanted to make the world better. She was kind—”

No,I thought, remembering what Johanna had said in those strange minutes before I unbuttoned her vertebrae.She’d been angry.

“—and she really liked you. We talked a lot about how sorry she was that you were stuck at Hellebore. She tried to come up with ways to get you out. She knew how much that mattered to you. And how much you mattered to me.”

With reverential tenderness, Rowan took one of my hands in his own gloved ones, stunning me into a nerveless silence. I was at a loss for an appropriate reaction, couldn’t do more than stare as he raised my knuckles to his mouth, almost—almost!—grazing them with his lips. I couldn’t think of a quip, a retort, could just gawk like an idiot.

“I wish it’d been different. That we could have all met in a different life,” said Rowan gently. The nearness of his lips, his breath, it all stung like salt water dripped on a raw lesion.

“So you could have a harem?” I managed, my voice huskier than I’d have liked.

“No? So we could have had the option of being normal. Haven’t you ever wondered what that’d be like? To be without all this baggage? To have the freedom to fuck up and not worry if it’d destroy the world or turn a person into sludge? When I was a kid, I used to dream about meeting someone who could tell me what that’d be like: being normal. It’s why I enrolled, you know? I couldn’t figure out a way to talk to Hellebore’s graduates, so I thought—”

I would think about his face and his words every night to come, rotating the memory in my mind, studying it like a wasp preserved in amber, how his eyes had looked, the earnestness in his expression, and wonder what would have followed and what I might have said if a deep, amused voice hadn’t intoned: “Am I interrupting something?”

Rowan and I leapt apart. I turned to see Adam leaning against the doorframe, half in light, eerily lovely as he always was: less a man than an idea, a fantasy loosely distilled into meat and sinew, bone and bored disdain.

“What do you want?” I asked.

Rowan slipped his smirk back on and for once, I was glad to see it in its usual place. “He’s had a crush on me since he saw me. Sorry, Adam. You’re very pretty, but I just don’t see you that way.”

I would have paid with my soul to have Adam’s ensuing look of disgust bottled up and preserved for my future pleasure. He let out a matching noise, a sound like a man offered piss when he had asked for wine.

“I should have let you die.”

Rowan cocked his head. “But that’d have required you being good enough to keep me alive, which I don’t think you are.”

We were united then, he and I, all previous awkwardness and resentments shed in the company of a mutual foe. I didn’t like Adam. Never did. Long before everything imploded, he had already established himself as a fucker. He had made no secret of the fact he was septic with envy for the respect Sullivan commanded. As far as he was concerned, he was better than Sullivan: more handsome, more facile with his abilities, more in command of his identity. Our dearly deceased valedictorian had struggled with nightmares. Adam had none, dreamt of nothing but ownership of the world. Whyindeeddid his peers look to his rival instead of him? Such was his narcissism that it never occurred to him that even here in Hellebore, no one liked a killer who made off with their smiles, their mannerisms, the little idiosyncrasies that made them individuals. Every beautiful thing about Adam was stolen; he was a mimic, empty of actual personality. The only thing he had of his own was his sense of envy.

“What do you want?” I repeated.

“What doyouwant? Whatareyou two doing here?” said Adam with a dazzling smile, all glint and no warmth at all. “Are you perhaps looking to see if there is a way to survive? Let me tell you there isn’t. Not unless I decide it.”

“What we’re doing is still none of your business,” I said.

“Actually, I think it’s very much my business,” he said, taking several purposeful steps forward so he wasn’t just encroaching on my personal space but dominating it. We were practically chest to chest. I could feel the heat radiate from him, the inferno of his parentage barely held back by his skin.Adam grinned down at me, eyes half-lidded, pretty despite his brazenness or maybe because of it. It irritated me to no end that I noticed the fact.

“Back the fuck up.”

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