Wildalone (34 page)

Then there was a name—innocuous, mentioned in passing. A name that had meant nothing to me back in Bulgaria, when I hadn't arrived at Princeton yet:

Numerous students and faculty members paid their respects on Thursday afternoon. According to the funeral home's records, the last one to see the body was Vincent A. Giles, professor of the deceased, who signed in with the receptionist at six o'clock and exited the main lobby at six twenty-five, concluding the long list of visits. For the time being, no suspects have been identified. University officials urge the entire campus community to observe an early curfew until the authorities have concluded the case.

I sat back and stared at the page.
Giles.
All this scholarly chase of cat and mouse over my sister's paper, and not a word to me about his visit to the funeral home. Were there other things he had chosen to keep to himself?

My father stroked my arm. “Don't look so preoccupied. I just want you to be careful, that's all.”

“Careful about what, Dad? Of course Giles would go to the funeral home; Elza was his student. That doesn't make him a criminal.”

“I'm not saying he is a criminal.”

“Then what exactly are you saying?”

“A lot of things were left unexplained, Thea. Including at that funeral home. The day your sister was brought there, someone sent dozens of flowers, in a single delivery.”

“What do you mean
someone
? The police didn't track down who it was?”

“They tried. The order had been placed earlier that day, at a local flower shop, by a middle-aged man who asked that the delivery remain anonymous. He paid in cash, so there was no way to trace him.”

“And you think it was Giles? Sorry, but I don't see him obsessing over a student that way. Or sending loads of flowers.”

“Well, luckily for your dear professor, the man from the flower shop was described as shorter and more formally dressed.”

“Then why are you telling me this? And why now, all of a sudden?”

“Your mother and I . . . we've gone back and forth on whether and how much to tell you. At first we thought the less you knew, the better. Maybe it was wishful thinking, to imagine you could come to this school and not have brushes with the past. But seeing Giles at your concert was a reality check. Which is not to say that by now Princeton hasn't become a safe place, it's just . . . I don't think fifteen years is all that long, Thea. Many of the same people are probably still around. So all I'm saying is . . . don't trust anyone, okay?”

AFTER MY PARENTS WENT TO
bed, I should have done the same. But this was the post-Thanksgiving party night; I didn't want to be the only person missing.

Tiger Inn was the eating club next to Colonial and clashed with it completely: a white façade crisscrossed with dark brown beams, to evoke the holiday cookie effect of German houses. Rita had texted me earlier that my name would be on a guest list at the door. Luckily, it was.

“Tesh, finally! Are you all right? I haven't heard from you all day.”

I said something about showing my parents around, and how I would probably fail at least half my classes.

“You mean Giles isn't cutting you slack after Carnegie? I bet you rock in his class. The man couldn't stop raving about you at the reception.”

“He's had better students.”

“Really? Some mad archaeologist rubbing genies out of those ancient pots?”

As always, she was spot-on. It gave me a shudder. “The genie would be
A Thousand and One Nights
, not the Greek legends.”

“Whatever, that's why I'm a science major. But enough about school. When did you and Rhys break up?”

“What makes you think we did?” She had probably assumed it, after seeing me at Carnegie with someone else. “The guy last night was his brother.”

“I figured as much. But if the two of you are still together, how come he wasn't at the concert?”

Or better yet: Why was he there and no one knew about it?

“He's out of town this weekend.”

“Did he tell you this himself?”

“Yes, why?”

The answer took a second, but it was enough for the first signs of pity to show on my friend's face.

“He
is
in town, Tesh.”

“He is?”

“Dev saw him last night. That's why he had to be back by eleven, remember? The swimmers were having that thing I was telling you about, their monthly . . . well, anyway. But first they partied at Ivy.”

“And?”

“Rhys was there with two women, in front of everyone. Apparently, it got pretty bad.”

The floor began to slip from under me. She tried to take my hand.

“Tesh, I'm so sorry. Dev didn't want me to tell you but I thought you should know.”

I could see Dev across the room, looking at us and then away. “Is he certain it was Rhys?”

“Yes. And also . . .” She decided not to finish. I had never seen Rita change her mind when she spoke.

“Please, just say it.”

“Rhys is on the Street right now. At Ivy, with the others.”

The rest was noise—noise and heat—as I tried to figure out what to do, how not to break down in front of everyone. Part of me refused to believe it. Although why would my friend be lying to me?

“Rita, I need a favor. Can you ask Dev to take me to Ivy?”

She said something about going back to Forbes, but I wasn't listening.

“Please ask him, if you really are my friend. I have to see with my own eyes, and it will be much easier to get into Ivy if Dev is with me.”

None of us said anything as we left Tiger Inn. Ivy was literally across the street: a massive rectangle of sooted brick, thudding with music. Dev knocked. The heavy door opened an inch. Then his face must have been recognized
because the door gave in a bit more, just enough to let us slide past a security guard dressed in black.

A few steps was all it took. The room was crowded—mostly men, mostly drunk, and a few strikingly beautiful women—but it wasn't crowded enough to block him from my eyes. He was in the center, bent over a woman, face buried in her neck, the rest of him weighing down on her until her long hair almost swept the floor. He lifted her back up, slipped his hand behind her knee—the same hand holding a beer bottle—and pulled her bare leg up, rubbing his hipbone against the inside of her thigh. She opened his shirt. Traced her nails all over him. He didn't stop her, poured the beer into his throat, spilling the rest of it down his chin—his chest—his stomach—until the empty bottle flew at the wall and shattered against it. Finally free, his fingers snatched her hair and pulled it back, just long enough for him to take one last look at her face before he pushed it forward, forcing her mouth into his wet skin—

EVERYTHING IN MY ROOM WAS
distinctly visible, strangely alive under the full moon that had invaded my world through the window. I didn't want to stay in. I needed to walk. On grass. Among trees. To walk endlessly and disappear.

In the distance, disfigured like a badly lit stage prop, Cleveland Tower dominated the entire sky. I took the gravel path in the opposite direction—past a toolshed, through hills where I had never gone before.

The golf course was drenched in moonlight. Ravenous streams of silver poured over it, flooding the grass, the trees, and any creature that had moved until then on its surface. Now everything lay frozen. Wounded. Ready for a shriek. The night had burst, ruptured like a black pomegranate, and it bled silence. The same astonishing, delirious silence as the one from another night, two months ago—

The night in whose dawn I had met Rhys.

It was then that the lies had started. His open shirt in the fog that morning. The messy hair. The flush of those cheeks. His hand, probably still warm from another girl's skin when he had first touched me.

Not exactly a one-woman guy . . .

I lay down on the grass. The gravel path had ended and I stayed there, letting the moonlight curve around my body and take its shape—a last blueprint from which to re-create me and bring me back, on some future night like this, if I decided to pay those hills another visit. I would be a different creature then. Untamed. Ethereal. Affected by nothing except the moon.

Now I was just a human girl. I felt lost. Scattered. Poisoned by Rhys and everything I had seen at Ivy. Here, far from the crowd, I could sense his breath carried to my skin by the wind, his hand brushing my cheek, as it had done that first morning . . . then the silence of the hills again. And with it—his absence.

By the time I headed back to Forbes, it must have been past midnight. Most of the lights had gone out in the distance, yet a few still glimmered through the trees and I kept my eyes on them as I walked. The outline of something angular startled me. Then I recognized it and kept walking: just the toolshed, clashing with the round shapes of hills and trees. Until a sound nailed my feet to the ground. A voice. Coming from an old pine tree next to me—

Rhys!

It spilled under the branches, too low for any words to come through. Hushed briefly. Spilled out again. Then another voice followed—a laugh—and cut into me. Clear, unmistakable: the voice of a woman.

I turned. Took a few steps toward that tree—

The ragged branches hid nothing, but I saw her first. Her bare back moved slowly, without a single blemish, curving its arc under cascades of golden hair, the shoulders white, ablaze with moon. He was sitting on the ground. Naked. Abandoned to her. Spine pressed against the tree, rubbing hard into the ridges of the bark. His arms were reaching back, gripping the trunk for balance, flexing their muscles each time he pushed inside her . . .

I didn't dare move. But his eyes opened and crashed directly into mine.

A disbelief.

Then fear.

Dread.

Yet he wouldn't stop. His body kept moving, caught in the rhythm of the one above it.

Her porcelain fingers took his chin. Lifted his face. Opened his lips for her impatient mouth. And his eyes—the eyes that had held my world for so long—simply closed, having said their farewell to me.

I ran away.

Back to what? Where?

The grass stifled each sound, but I knew that mine were the only steps on it—he hadn't bothered to come after me.

Then I stopped, terrified. Something else was already happening on that golf course. It was coming from the pond, and I was afraid to look at it, at what my eyes had detected there briefly, in passing:

Ripples. Ripe at first, then slowly thinning. Expanding their dark circles along the surface as the fountain splashed its incessant rhythm out into the night—

But not a sound came from it. Or from anything else.

Like concentric rings on the water . . .

I knew this stillness, and the wild creature about to appear in it.

“Anyone born with the blood of the
samodivi
can summon them,” a man who was himself related to me by blood had once warned me. “Just think of these witches at night, and here they come!”

Back by that church in Bulgaria, I had thought of Elza. And she had come—a frail girl in white, ready to dance under the moon. This time I wasn't going to run in fear. I wanted to talk to her, tell her everything. How Rhys had broken my heart, twice in one night. And how all I wanted now was to become like her—a witch, a wildalone—and never be hurt by a man again.

But the hills were empty. Of course they were. Elza was gone, had been for years, and all I would ever have from her were a few faded pages about an old legend and a ritual.

Then I realized I no longer had even this much. To satisfy one of Rhys's many whims, I had grabbed her paper by mistake, with my music scores, and left the whole stack on his piano. The scores were easy to replace. But I
needed to get that paper back. And unless I wanted another encounter with him, I had to do it quickly, while I still knew for sure that he wasn't home.

Without wasting more time, I turned my back on Forbes and headed out—toward Cleveland Tower and everything that lay beyond it, waiting for me in the night.

T
HE MOON POURED
in through the French doors and illuminated everything—every place in the room where he had spoken to me, sat with me, held me.

I knew as soon as I walked in: there was nothing on either of the pianos. But I walked up to the one on the left—his—and glided my fingers over the keys without pressing them.

“Miss Thea?”

The voice nearly gave me a heart attack, until I realized who it was. Elegantly clad, as always, the butler stood at the hallway entrance. Solemn face. Unreadable expression. Just like the first time I had shown up on a whim.

“Good evening, Ferry. I let myself in through the lawn. One of the French doors was unlocked.”

He had probably figured as much, but was too discreet to ask about the reason for my untimely drop-in.