I furrowed my brow. Okay, wait a second. Was Phist being nice to me? Because that never happened.

  “If you’re having to… do things with Ryan and you wanted to, uh, to…”

  “What?” I said. “Talk? You offering to be my therapist?”

  “If you ever didn’t want to do anything,” he said. “If you needed an excuse, you could always come find me. I could pull some macho thing, get really possessive, tell them all to back off.”

  I took a deep breath. I felt bad, suddenly, keeping him in the dark about what was going on with Ryan. He thought that I was actually getting physical with the guy, and I wasn’t. But Ryan’s sexual preference, it wasn’t my secret to tell. If I told Phist about it, I’d be betraying him.

  Of course, Ryan was a total dick. There was no good reason for him to be in the closet, only his own homophobia.

  So, I lifted my chin. “Listen, about Ryan?”

  “You don’t have to go into gory details with it, Suther.”

  “He’s gay,” I said.

  Phist knitted his brows together. “What?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know because he and my friend Lev hook up in secret all the time, and so, I decided that since he wanted to hide his sexuality, and I needed—”

  “I’ve seen Legion punch a guy in the nose for looking at him the wrong way. He kicked the kid in the stomach over and over and called him a faggot and a pillow biter.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He’s a peach of a guy, isn’t he? All your friends in the Circle, they’re aces.”

  Phist scratched his jaw. “So, you’re pretending to sleep with him.”

  “Mutually beneficial,” I said.

  Phist looked up at the night sky, exposing his neck, which was thick and strong and yet somehow graceful. “Why does that make me feel so much better?”

  I didn’t answer that.

  He sighed, shaking his head, and then he started for his motorcycle. He picked up one of the helmets and handed it to me.

  I took it from him. “You can’t tell anyone. You have to pretend like you don’t know.”

  “I can keep secrets, Suther. Come on.”

  “Well, if it does come out,” I said, “you didn’t hear it from me.”

  * * *

  Later, when Phist and I got back to the dorm, it was late enough that some people were in bed, but not so late that everyone was. Girl time sometimes went on into the wee hours, after all.

  Phist used his considerable demonborn magic to zap us up into his room. He could teleport, apparently, and it barely made him winded.

  Well, he did seem a little affected by it. He sat down on his bed once we were there and bent his head over, sinking his fingers into his hair.

  I looked at him there, and he was beautiful and male and I wanted to touch him. My clothes felt tight.

  He lifted his head to look at me. “It’s better if you come out of my room, like we were here the whole time. People might ask questions if they saw us walk in together.”

  “No, I got it,” I said. “It’s smart.”

  “Do you, um, want to stay here for a little bit?”

  My lips parted.

  He patted a space next to him on the bed.

  My body lurched forward and then I forced myself to stop. “Why?” My voice came out raw and strange.

  “You know, to keep up appearances.” He gazed at me from beneath his dark, dark lashes.

  My heart stopped for a moment and when it beat again, it went too fast. “Right, appearances.”

  “Yeah.” His voice was scratchy.

  I swallowed. I looked at the door and then back at him.

  He got off the bed and came for me, his hooded gaze intense and almost predatory.

  I knew I should back away from him, but I just stood there, a deer caught in the headlights, and I let him come.

  He stopped inches from me. He reached up with one hand and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear.

  I made a funny noise in the back of my throat.

  “I think about you sometimes,” he murmured.

  I made another funny noise. I was currently incapable of actual human speech, apparently.

  “I don’t want to think about you, not the way I do.” He brushed knuckles over my cheekbone.

  I felt his touch all the way through me, like the ringing of silver bells.

  “I think it’s only because of… of proximity.” His touch went lower, feathering over my jaw.

  I leaned into the brush of his fingers, and my eyes closed. It was instinctual. I couldn’t help it. I hated myself for doing it.

  Now his mouth was on my cheekbone. “Because we’re here, and we’re pretending,” he continued in a harsh whisper. “It’s only natural we’d…”

  I waited for him to finish the sentence, but he didn’t. I opened my eyes and found him looking at me with this look that was almost ravenous. It made me quiver. “We’d what?” I breathed.

  He kissed me.

  I wrapped my arms around his neck and opened my mouth to him. Oh, these kisses. All I wanted were these kisses. I was beginning to crave them.

  He groaned, low in his throat, and broke the kiss, but I could see it took effort.

  I made a little mew of protest. My arms were still around his neck.

  He rested his forehead against mine. “Shit, Suther, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Do about what?”

  “You’re… distracting.”

  “So are you,” I gasped.

  “I can’t think about the things I need to think because I keep thinking about you. About what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with. About the things I want to do to you. And I don’t know what to do about that. But I need to do something, because the mission… The mission is what matters, you know?”

  I brought my lips to his, something I’d never done before. We’d kissed lots, but he’d always initiated, and I had never done it. I didn’t mean to do it now, but my head was spinning and he was so close, and I was swimming in the good sensations of everything that was Phist.

  He grunted. He deepened the kiss and then he propelled us backward, into the wall of his bedroom. We kissed hungrily, devouring each other.

  He lifted me, wrapping my legs around his waist, and he braced me against the wall and we were touching everywhere, the heat of his body against my thighs and the… the juncture between my thighs and…

  I was making noises again, embarrassing noises, noises because it felt good, and because it was a release to all the tension that was building up in me every single day.

  Not just the tension with Phist, but the other real tensions—fear of breaking my cover, fear of being asked to do something I’d never come back from, fear of being discovered, fear of being killed.

  I channeled all of that into our kisses, and they were violent and bright, like the surface of the sun.

  I tangled my hands in his hair and I held his face in place, and I wanted all of him.

  He had one hand on my outer thigh, holding me there, and he squeezed me occasionally, a squeezing that went through me in pleasant jolts. His other hand was inside my shirt, brushing against the sensitive dip of my waist, sending thrills through me, making my body pucker and tighten.

  I writhed against him.

  He met my undulating body with thrusts.

  And it went on for a very, very long time, until I was reduced to jelly, until I was warm and a little sweaty, and I was yearning for more. A wide cavern of desire opened up in me and it wanted… filled.

  I’d never really felt this before. I wasn’t a virgin, but neither was I experienced, and I’d never been this kind of physical with a boy—

  But Phist didn’t seem like a boy. He seemed like a man. So huge and powerful and foreign and a little frightening. Maybe the fear was delicious, but it was there.

  And these sensations I was feeling, they were overwhelming. As the yearning swelled, so did the fear, and they were warring in my body, too much. I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted more. I wanted everything. But I also wanted it all to stop.

  I wasn’t sure if I wanted this with him. He didn’t like me. He was awful to me. If it was to keep up the cover, that was one thing, but no one was watching right now, and I was confused.

  “Stop,” I whispered. My whole body shuddered.

  He grunted again. His fingers were traveling higher, brushing my rib cage, the band of my bra.

  “Stop,” I said again, and my voice was stronger.

  His eyes opened. His hand froze.

  “I just… I don’t know… I need a minute,” I said.

  He nodded. Carefully, he set my legs back down on the floor and he extracted himself from me.

  I couldn’t stand upright, so I held onto the wall, and I felt cold and small and empty. Why had I stopped it?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I did that. Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Really just very perfect and good and totally…” I couldn’t look at him. I turned and ran out of the room.

  “Suther!” he called after me.

  I shut the door to his room, drowning out his voice.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tess was in the hallway upstairs carrying a glass of water. She had obviously gone down for it and was heading back to her room. She was wearing her pajamas, an oversized t-shirt over pair of pants with cupcakes printed on them.

  “Did he kick you out of his bed?” she said.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Phist,” she said, laughing. “Or were you with Ryan?”

  “No, um, not Ryan,” I said. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but I felt really stupid for having run away from Phist.

  I didn’t know why I had. I sometimes got this feeling out of nowhere, like I was in deep water all the way up to my neck and that the tide was coming in, and soon I wouldn’t be able to touch the ground with my toes. I was afraid that I had gotten myself into something that I couldn’t handle.

  This same situation had taken my sister’s life. I’d come here to get revenge. I still planned to do that. But… what if I couldn’t?

  To my horror, tears were springing to my eyes. I choked on the lump in my throat and tried to scurry away from Tess.

  But she saw. “Hey!” Her voice was full of sympathy. She wound an arm around me and gave me a hug. “I totally know how that goes.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I mean, I think it’s fall allergies or something, and—”

  “Come into my room and we’ll talk,” she said, tugging me with her.

  “No, really, I just want—”

  “Shh, you need a listening ear.” She guided me into her room and shut the door. She let go of me and went to her bedside table, where she set down her glass of water. Then she looked up at me.

  I was still just inside the door. “Tess, really, I don’t need to talk.”

  “You know, they treat us like we don’t matter,” she said, and her eyes looked shiny too. “They take whatever it is they want from us, and then they act like we shouldn’t be affected by it at all. They don’t want women, they want objects. They want sex robots.”

  I looked down at my feet.

  “I saw a movie like that once,” she said, wrinkling her brow. “It was about this town where all the women were perfect.”

  “The Stepford Wives?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Did you see that movie?”

  “Both of them,” I said. “One of the crappy sequels too.”

  “Huh?” she said.

  “Never mind.”

  “Anyway, it’s true. That’s what men are like.” She shrugged. “The only thing you can do is figure out how to, like…” She cocked her head to one side. “Okay, promise me this stays between us, Suther. If I say this to you, you aren’t going to repeat it to Banks or Gina and make me look stupid?”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  She gave me a hesitant smile. “I know you wouldn’t, Suther. I feel like we could really be friends. You’re honest, you know. You don’t lie to me.”

  Well, that was ironic, because I was lying to her. About everything.

  “Anyway,” she continued. “With guys, you have to figure out how to guard your heart. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I… maybe?”

  “You make things separate,” she said. “What happens to your body is just physical. You don’t let it mean anything.”

  I bobbed my head. “Yeah, I get that.” Because when I’d had sex with Billy Rickshaw, I had felt something really similar to that. Like I had detached from myself and I was hovering away from the whole thing, just watching it happen.

  I didn’t think sex was supposed to be like that, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe sex was a thing that was mostly good for guys and that girls just had to put up with.

  But that didn’t seem right. It couldn’t be that way. Women liked sex, I knew they did.

  “If you get to that point,” she said, “you can start to enjoy it for what it is. You have to make sure they please you. And you have to get yours—take advantage of them. It’s not easy at first, but it gets easier.”

  “Okay,” I said quietly.

  She laughed. “What the hell am I saying? You already have this down. You’re with both of them, Ryan and Phist, like it’s no big deal. Maybe you are more like them than me, after all.”

  “Them?”

  “Banks and Gina,” she said.

  “I’m not like them,” I said.

  “But you’re not like your sister, either,” said Tess. “Enid couldn’t handle it. You can.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that.

  “Come over here,” said Tess. She sat down on her bed and patted the space next to her, and I thought of Phist, and a wave of confusion washed over me again, and I couldn’t fight the tears.

  I ran over to Tess, and she wrapped her arms around me, and I cried into her shoulder.

  For two seconds. Only two seconds. And then I stopped, and I got myself under control, and I pulled back.

  Tess rubbed my back. “You know, when I was a little girl, I caught my mother cheating on my dad once. She apologized a lot and she made me swear never to tell my dad or he’d get angry and leave us.”

  “Oh, that’s…” I turned to her, horrified. “That’s a terrible thing for your mother to put on you.”

  “Well, I never said anything,” said Tess. “But he left us anyway. He was cheating on her, too, apparently.” She laughed softly, looking down at her fingernails. “When they split up, it was like they both left me. They were all caught up in their own drama. They didn’t even pay attention to me.”

  “Tess… I’m sorry.”

  She laughed, tossing her head. “I don’t know why I just told you that. I mean, that didn’t even have anything to do with anything.”

  I hugged her.

  She clung to me.

  When we pulled away, she wiped at tears in her own eyes.

  We were quiet.

  “I know something,” Tess said.

  “What do you know?”

  “About your parents,” said Tess.

  I sat up straight. “Tell me.”

  “Enid found it out somehow,” said Tess. “She told me what she knew. Your parents, they weren’t killed by demonborn.”

  “Then who killed them?”

  “I think it was other occultists,” said Tess. “But Enid didn’t know. Whatever happened was covered up and made to look like a demonborn attack.”

  My lips parted.

  “I just… I thought you should know,” said Tess. “I wanted you to know. You’re honest. You don’t keep things from me. I don’t want to keep anything from you.”

  * * *

  I banged on the door of Lev’s dorm. It was Monday morning around 10:00, probably too early for Lev to be awake, but I didn’t care. I needed to talk to him. He was the only person that I really and truly trusted on campus.

  He didn’t know everything about me anymore, but he was still my friend, and he would help me with this.

  “Lev!” I called. “I’m coming in.” I knew he never locked his door. I tried the knob and it turned. I let myself into his dorm.

  His kitchen and living room area was messy, the sink full of dirty dishes, the couch strewn with dirty laundry.

  “Lev?” I said again.

  He appeared in the doorway to the bedroom area, shirtless in a pair of KISS pajama pants. His hair was standing up straight on the back of his head. “Suther, you have a lot of nerve.”

  “I need your help.”

  “My help? Are you kidding? You come to my place at dawn and ask for my help when all you’ve done is make out with Ryan for weeks?”

  “Um, there hasn’t been a lot of kissing, actually,” I said. Both Ryan and I found it icky, so we’d stopped that. It was too weird. “And it’s not dawn.”

  “Get out.” He folded his arms over his chest.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do mean that,” he said.

  “Listen, I just found something out about my parents. Tess told me that Enid knew—”

  “Enid? Oh, yeah, right. I keep forgetting she was your sister. You guys are nothing alike, you know that?”

  It was still weird to me how he didn’t know anything about what we’d done together at the beginning of the school year.

  “Yeah, I guess I do,” I said. “You know how I’ve always thought my parents were killed by demonborn?”

  “How are we changing the subject from Ryan?” said Lev. “I’m not done with that subject yet.”

  “I guess you don’t remember,” I sighed. “Because I told you that before your memory got wiped.”

  “You’re always throwing that in my face,” said Lev. “It’s not my fault the memory wipe happened. And you’re still changing the subject. I want you to stop doing whatever it is you’re doing with Ryan.”

  “I know it’s not your fault. I’m not blaming you for not remembering,” I said. “Just let me explain it to you so that we can try to figure it out together. You can be the Sharona to my Monk again, okay?”

  “When were we ever detectives?”

  “Okay, Lev, look, when I first got to the school, I came here to find out who killed Enid.”

 

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