I couldn’t take my eyes off the black circle.
“Look at the paint,” I said. “The circle is hers—the flourishes at the edges are exactly like she’d do. But that’s not her handwriting.” I’ve seen those words before, hidden in the pages of my notebook. But this wasn’t my doing, just as it wasn’t my handwriting.
“She was going to kill herself, Kaira. I don’t think she was worried about perfect cursive.”
“No, Elisa was right. She didn’t kill herself.”
“So who killed her?” Ethan asked.
Chris sat back. I was still transfixed by the circle and the words above it. I could see the ghost of Jane, almost, splayed out against the white, her hair a fan around her head and her eyes open in confusion.
Who killed you? I whispered inside.
She didn’t answer, of course, but the sudden gust of wind sent chills down my spine.
“I don’t know,” I finally replied. “But there’s no blood. It doesn’t look like there was a struggle. But there’s no way she killed herself.”
“That doesn’t sound possible,” Chris said. “If she didn’t kill herself and it wasn’t a murder, why would she draw a circle and just drop down dead inside it? And who would write that and then not report the body?”
I didn’t say anything. Helen was the one who found her, but she was innocent. Helen wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Someone or something else had been in that room. But whether they’d forced Jane to draw the circle or done it themselves, I had no idea. All I knew was it wasn’t a suicide. And it wasn’t a simple murder. This was something beyond mortal doing. I knew this. I’d seen it before.
Only this time, I wasn’t the one who’d accidentally called down the gods.
We parted ways after coming down from the roof. The ceramics studio was empty and the whole of the arts building felt like a tomb. I think we were all reeling from the weight of our discovery; we needed to process. And we artsy types often processed best on our own.
Ethan left us outside the building to go wait for Oliver’s practice to finish, and Chris walked me back to my dorm before giving me an awkward hug and returning to his. There was something so distanced about that parting, yet also heavy with closeness. We’d shared something big, and that both bound the three of us together and forced walls between the spaces. I knew, as I watched Chris walk down the road to Rembrandt, that things between us would never be the same again. And seeing as things with Chris had only just begun, I had no clue what that would spell for the rest of our . . . friendship.
But I knew one thing: These suicides weren’t natural. They weren’t human. And I knew precisely who to talk to to figure it out. It was time to talk to Munin.
“How was dinner?” Maria asked from behind the desk.
I had to intentionally keep myself from getting defensive or wondering if she somehow knew what I’d been up to.
“Pretty good,” I said. “Cookies for dessert.”
“As always,” she said. Then another girl came in from one of the halls and asked something about the Internet, so I took the opportunity to bail.
I wandered up to my room where Elisa was hard at work on calculus and, feeling guilty for not actually getting any work done, pulled out my own academic homework. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but getting wrapped up in essays meant I didn’t have room to think about Jane or the circle or the strange correlation to Brad’s death. Or what I was going to do about all of it.
I knew the risk. I knew what toying with the gods would do.
But if someone was meddling in things they shouldn’t, I needed to figure out how to stop them. Before they made a few deaths look like mercy.
? ? ?
Elisa left around nine to go sleep over with Cassie. She kissed me on top of the head when she went and handed me the last cookie from our old package.
“For luck,” she said with a grin, then walked out, already in her panda pajamas.
I did work for a little while longer. A part of me considered calling Ethan, but I figured he’d be busy with Oliver. Then I considered calling Chris, which was stupid because I barely knew the guy. Still, the fact that I even considered it made me feel strange. I knew I couldn’t fall for him, not without spelling disaster. But a part of me—the part of me that remembered how his hand felt brushing mine, or how his eyes looked past all my walls—wanted to. It wanted to very, very badly.
I pulled out my notebook and a pencil that wasn’t charcoal and left it on the shelf. Just in case my dreaming mind decided to divulge any more information. My brain was a cesspool as I lay there in the dark, staring at the shadows stretching along the walls. Jane and Mandy were both dead, and there was no way any of this was a coincidence. But how it was related to me . . .
The gods require blood.