Page 52 of House of Hearts
Thankfully, Birdie must pick up on this strange tension, so she mercifully fills the silence. “How did Tripp smuggle fireworks on campus in the first place?”
Sadie trudges forward with a shrug of her shoulders and a swish of her cape. She’s a witch tonight, with a pointed black hat and gnarled black broom. “You can always count on Tripp to know a guy. And if he doesn’t know a guy, he knows a guy whoknows a guy.”
On cue, another firework crackles overhead and casts the hedge walls in neon blue. This sort of thing would be a major write-up for any other student on campus, but I already know Tripp will get let off with a slap on the wrist.
“You make him sound like a glorified mob boss,” I say as I realize we’ve finally made it to the center of the maze. The Lockwell twins know this place like the back of their hand. I almost have to wonder if the route is etched in the family DNA.
“No, he’s just well connected,” she retorts before gesturing at the four mausoleums in front of us. I stop to read the inscriptions as we pass each tomb. Calvin flashes a light on each one and briefly brings the words to life.Dearly Beloved, Departed Too Soon, Rest in Peace.A whole family alive and dead like sand sifted through your fingertips. “All right, here we are.”
The silence returns. The only noise comes from a bat chirping overhead and the buzz of a fly spun in a spider’s web. We’re alone and yet we’re surrounded, this maze teeming with all sorts of nocturnalhorrors. And I have the distinct, horrible feeling that more are yet to come.
“Hypothetically, would you say this counts as grave robbing?” Calvin asks finally.
“By definition of the word, it doesn’t count as grave robbing if we’re not robbing a grave,” I argue, breaking off the silent treatment.“We’re grave peeking, which is ethically questionable, but not as bad.”
“All right, grave peeking. That’s loads better,” he says, sucking his lips into an anxious, tight line before digging the key into the lock. “All right, then, who wants to call dibs on Anastasia’s grave?”
I grit my teeth. No turning back now. “I’ll do it.”
If this were a low-budget horror movie, this would have the whole audience groaning and pelting popcorn at the screen. It’s the kind of self-sacrifice that gets you killed first. “Dead Girl #1” in the credits.
“Violet, are you sure?” Birdie asks.
“Someone’s got to. Let’s split up and get this over with before anyone notices, okay?”
Birdie looks at me like I’m using a Disney FastPass to get to the front of the execution line, but she doesn’t argue, and just like that, I’m alone and staring down the entrance of Anastasia’s tomb.
My imagination has already painted the scene of what I might find inside: a macabre mix of the Parisian catacombs and the royal vault at Windsor Castle.
Surprisingly, the room inside is neither. The crypt might be cold and uninviting, but it’s not some eighteenth-century hovel constructed out of femur bones. Similarly, the alabaster chest tomb is beautifully embellished, but the surrounding room is so musty and dank, the royal family would roll over in their graves at the thought of being buried here.
I throw a queasy look at the casket and remind myself that there actuallyissomeone buried here.
She’s not one of the plastic skeletons on display at school, either. This is a real person, and perhaps that’s more terrifying than any ghost or zombie or make-believe monster. Someone who lived and died and was buried here to slowly decompose.
Horrifying mental image aside, there’s nothing all too damning about the tomb from an evidence standpoint. No satanic sigils on the ground orHELPwritten backward on the wall in blood. It’s a simple marble crypt with a stone floor and a sealed casket in the center and really not much else.
Maybe I misunderstood what Em was trying to tell me. “Down the rabbit hole” could mean literally anything. Or, if Tripp is to be believed, it could mean nothing whatsoever. Another dead lead in an unsolvable case.
I’m about to abort the mission when I feel the prickle of something brushing against my leg. I stumble back in a panic and land my ass on the cold hard ground before seeing it was a centipede.
It’s only as I’m struggling to sit my bruised self up that I feelit. A pale stone juts out strangely on the floor beneath me, not quite grouted like the rest of the tile. It wiggles in place beneath my fingers, and that’s all the incentive I need to shimmy the stone free. Tile by tile, the floor comes apart beneath me, the stones pushing back to reveal a wooden trapdoor.
I take it back.Nowwe’re in horror-movie territory. No sane individual would open a secret door in a haunted mausoleum, but here I am doing it anyway. I expect to find a lot of horrible things—a portal to the underworld or an Indiana Jones snake pit.
What I don’t expect to find is Percy.
16
Hart Academy might be storybook material after all—we have our very own Sleeping Beauty. Percy Lockwell is a slumbering Aurora inside Anastasia’s tomb, his expression waxen like a Tussaud model of himself.
Apparently if you let out a bloodcurdling scream from a tomb in the vicinity of other people, they all come barreling toward you. Which is flattering, if nothing else.
“Violet.” Calvin’s by my side in a second, his hands gripping my shoulders, his eyes more worried than they have any right to be. “Violet, what is it?”
But I don’t even have to answer him. Sadie is the first to follow my trembling finger downward, and she echoes my scream with a terrified “PERCY!”
That gets everyone’s attention, and soon we’re all gaping down at the third Lockwell sibling. Sadie shakily reaches a hand down to his wrist, her fingers pressing for a pulse. “H-he’s alive.”
