His smell lingered there too, like a ghost—present but so distant I couldn’t quite grasp hold of it. Of him. A lump rose in my throat as I tipped my head to the side, soaking in that minor remnant of his existence.
How long ago had he last slept out here? The dust suggested it’d been at least a couple of months, but would a body’s scent have clung on much longer than that? Had I missed finding him by a matter of weeks?
Why had he been sleeping out here instead of in the dorms?
My fingers curled into the rough sheet that covered the mattress. The impulse ran through my body to collect the linens and carry them back to my third-floor bed, to make some kind of a nest out of them, as if surrounding myself in these minor remnants of him would bring me closer to him in some concrete way.
I forced myself to let go and to climb off the cot. Then I searched through the rest of the shed, lifting every object that wasn’t fixed in place, scouring the building from floor to ceiling, looking for any other sign Cade might have left behind.
There was nothing else that showed he’d ever been in here. Not even initials carved into the wood. And nothing to indicate where he might have gone next.
He hadn’t slept here in months… so where was he sleeping now?
I ventured back outside into a brisk wind. The branches on the trees across the lawn rattled, their leaves whipping around. Layers of cloud scudded across the sky like currents in a broad river.
Cade? I thought, but his name stayed locked inside me. If he was close enough to hear me, wouldn’t he be here? I’d come out onto the grounds in plain view often enough.
I circled the school building just to be sure there weren’t any other structures nearby that I might not have given due attention to. The carriage house a short distance away on the other side of the building hadn’t offered anything interesting when I’d looked through there before. Otherwise there was only the abandoned pool, the badminton court, and lots of grass and trees.
When I reached the shed again, I peered across the lawn with growing trepidation. There could be a cabin or something similar hidden away in the woods. Who knew what other secrets those trees might conceal?
I squared my shoulders and strode across the grass to the deeper shadows. My skin crawled as I passed between the first few trees. The leaves warbled with the wind, and I couldn’t see much of anything except the vague silhouettes of the trunks. I doubted my phone’s light would extend far enough to give me much comfort—it’d only turn the darkness beyond its range even more impenetrable.
Still, I might have kept going out of sheer stubbornness if the shadows hadn’t stirred other shapes from my memories. Not quite as fast as in the library yesterday but just as doggedly, scraps of the past washed through my mind. The form of one of my foster parents looming with a belt clutched in one hand. A figure standing beside my bed with his head bowed. The stuttering of light and darkness as car tires skidded out of control. The lumpy shapes in the high school janitor’s closet vanishing into total blackness with the closing of the door.
The spray of shattered glass in a moonlit courtyard as a body fell.
My breath lurched ragged from my lungs, and in the back of my mind a gurgled exhalation echoed. I spun around, fumbling back toward the lawn. As soon as the last haze of sunlight fell across my face, the shadows inside me retreated too. I swiped my hands across my face as if I could shove the lingering traces of the past away that easily.
It was okay. I was fine. I’d come back tomorrow in the middle of the day when I could conduct a proper search, which made more sense anyway.
The queasiness that remained in my stomach only fueled my conviction. Everything in this place was toxic. The college or the staff who ran it or both had done something to my foster brother just like they were breaking down every other student here. Just like they were trying to break me.
I’d been through way too much before now to break because of anything these pricks threw at me. I’d claw the truth out of them, I’d make my way to Cade, and until I had him by my side or knew how to put him there, I wasn’t setting one foot outside those gates.
Maybe I didn’t belong here, but they were stuck with me now.
Chapter Thirteen
Trix
“I… don’t think you’re going to like this class very much,” Delta said in her offhand way as we headed to my very first encounter with Archery.
“Great. Now I’m really looking forward to it.” I double-checked my timetable for the room number, even though the other girl should know where we were going. I’d have expected this subject to be an extension of gym class, but it wasn’t being held in the fitness room. I guessed that small space was a little too cramped for shooting projectiles at targets across much of any range. Instead, we were assigned to one of the second-floor classrooms. “What am I in for now?”
“Just give it your best shot, and it’ll probably be okay.”
The note of uncertainty in her voice made my skin prickle, but the room we entered looked about as I would have pictured it. It was the biggest of the classrooms I’d encountered at Roseborne College so far, maybe twenty-five feet across and almost as wide, with a rack of bows against the wall near the door and five stations spread out across the floor in a row, each marked by a bin of arrows. Across from every station, a target that looked about as tall as I was stood at the far end of the room.
That all seemed pretty straightforward, but no doubt I’d discover there was some twist to this set-up.
Like so much of the furnishings and equipment at the school, the bows had an old-fashioned vibe: polished wood that was worn around the grip from decades of use, metal fixtures with a faint tarnish. I picked one up and found it substantial but not quite as heavy as I’d been prepared for. When I rested one of the ends on the ground, the other came up to my chin. The middle of the bow had a notch where it appeared the arrow rested to help one’s aim.
Delta had already grabbed her bow and walked off to the farthest arrow station. I picked the station in the middle of the row at random. The arrows in the bin were wooden too, with feathered fletching at the back and a nock to fit the base against the string. The metal tip appeared to be a heck of a lot deadlier than anything you’d find on your average piece of sporting equipment. I tested the point warily with a finger and jerked my hand back at the pinch of pain.
Other than a dinky plastic set one of my early foster families had owned, which had barely moved its arrows more than a few feet and in seemingly random directions, I’d never operated a bow before. Hopefully the professors didn’t expect newcomers to be experts right off the bat.
The man I assumed was the Professor Roth listed on my timetable strode in a moment later. He had a houndish look that fit his class’s subject matter, his jowls grayed with a hint of beard, his steel-gray hair hanging limp and floppy at either side of his dour face. He considered the few of us who’d already arrived with a slight nod toward me but no hint of friendliness. His round, dark eyes held a chill that touched me even at a distance.
More students were trickling in from behind him. He swept an arm toward them. “Come along, people, you know the drill. Pair up. Let’s see…” He snapped his fingers toward a tall, slender figure who’d just ambled in. “Mr. Wynter, since you like to spend as much of your class time chatting as working on your skills, why don’t you take our new arrival through the basics?”