But that didn’t mean I didn’t, in fact, enjoy the view when he climbed. His ass looked quite nice in those jeans. From an artistic perspective, of course. He had good musculature.
Before I could start feeling like a perv, I grabbed the first rung and climbed up after him, making sure I didn’t look up until he was on the roof.
The view of the sky from up here was gorgeous, but it didn’t really give any perspective on the campus; the art building was only two stories tall, and the surrounding pines and dorms were much higher. The flat roof was relatively cleared of snow, thanks to the heating running through it that kept everything from accumulating.
Ethan and Chris were crouched low. There wasn’t much out here in terms of light pollution, and night was already closing in thick, but the last thing we needed was for security to notice shadows moving about on the rooftop.
“Tell me why we’re here again?” Ethan asked.
I hesitated. They were risking their educations to be up here with me, but I couldn’t tell them the full truth. If either of them knew about the drawing or the dream, they’d call me insane and cart me off to the school counselor.
“I just want to see it,” I said. “I want to know what happened.”
“The body will already be gone,” Chris said. He caught himself and swallowed hard. “Sorry. I mean Jane. She won’t be there.”
“I know,” I said. “But I still want to see. If there’s a reason they’re locking it up, I want to know.”
“This really is like Scooby Doo,” Ethan muttered.
“Can it, Scooby,” I said. Then I shuffled along the roof, tracing the hallways below in my mind until I reached the painting studio, Ethan muttering the entire time that he was clearly Shaggy in this equation.
Light streamed from the skylight, and I gave a quick thanks to whatever gods were listening that someone had left the lights on—I hadn’t even considered that before. Ethan and Chris were right behind me, silent as ghosts, save for the occasional kick of pebbles across the slabs.
I took a deep breath, then crouched only a few feet away from the edge of the skylight. For some reason, standing there, waiting to look at a scene I feared I’d already seen in my journal, I felt naked. Exposed. Like the whole cosmos was breathing down my neck, waiting for me to discover some dark secret. I tried to shake it off as nerves but couldn’t lose the feeling. What if there was blood, or if Jane was still in there for some reason, staring right up at me? This was the moment that would tell me if my fears were confirmed, or if this was all some big delusion. Was I ready for that truth?
Ethan put his hand on my shoulder. I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“You ready for this?” he asked. He didn’t ask if I wanted to leave, though I knew he was thinking it.
“Yeah,” I said. I’d have to face this some time. Class would go on. In a few days, I’d be back in that studio, painting and pretending a body hadn’t rested at the foot of my easel. The thought made my skin crawl.
I moved to the edge of the window and looked down.
A thick ring of black paint encircled the space within the easels. It stared up at me like an eye, like a portal to Hell itself, the void within blank and white and crawling with memory. No body. Of course there was no body. But there were notecards on the ground at strategic locations, no doubt pointing out evidence of some sort. Seeing it brought a sick feeling to my chest, a tightening of revulsion like the cogs of some terrible torture device. My vision tilted to the side and I stumbled back.
“Whoa,” Chris said, his arms catching me before I could fall on my ass. “Careful there.”
I glanced back at him, my heart thudding a thousand times a minute.
“Thanks,” I said. I pushed myself out of his arms. “Vertigo.” Which was a lie. I wasn’t scared of heights. I was just fucking terrified. I took a slow breath and went back to the skylight.
“Do you think she moved it?” Ethan muttered. “The still life. Do you think she moved it before she died?”
“Must have,” Chris answered. “Nothing else has been touched.”
For a while we just crouched there, staring down at where our classmate and friend had lost her life not a day before. My heart didn’t slow down. The circle burned into my mind, along with the words scrawled along the top.
The Tree Will Burn
It was one thing to worry that you’d had a premonition about something. It was another entirely to realize that premonition had been correct. My pulse was heavy and fast in my veins, my breath a beast I couldn’t control. I was linked to these deaths after all. And that circle . . .
Maybe I hadn’t run far enough away. The ghosts of my past were still here. And they weren’t just haunting me—they were striking out.
“It wasn’t her,” I said after a moment.
“What do you mean?” Chris asked. Ethan made a noise in his throat, like he was agreeing with me but wasn’t certain why.