I blew air through my cheeks. “That still doesn’t explain the time period. I haven’t seen any hundred-and-fifty-year-old men wandering around Dover recently.”
“But what if they don’t look old? What if that’s the point? Think about it: If you needed a constant stream of young people to sacrifice for your own eternal youth, and you couldn’t run your asylum scam anymore, what better plan could you have than building your own elite university and inviting those young people to pay you for the privilege of coming here?”
I was speechless. This wasn’t just drunken rambling. This poor guy really believed what he was saying, that those same thirteen men still lived up here, still walked among the students, in some youthful form or another.
He kept going. “It’s the equinox. That’s the key. I thought it was ghosts at first; you know, some sort of specter. But that was wrong. The celestial event is definitely part of the ritual, which means there’s a good chance someone here on campus is going to die tonight. Before sunrise. Although you don’t have to worry about being targeted.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“You’re too old. Everyone who’s been killed so far has been nineteen.”
“Nineteen?”
“The same number as those who died in the fire.”
“Ah.” Then it hit me. “Wait. How old are you, Hollis?”
The smile he gave was a grim one. “I’ll be twenty next week.”
*
There was no talking sense to him after that. Hollis really and truly believed what he was saying, and nothing I said changed his mind. Apparently, a coven of witches was running the school and sacrificing its own students on the nights of the equinox in some black magic blood rite so that they could live forever. It was a terrifying thought, sure. But not one I could bring myself to believe.
At all.
“So what’re you going to do?” I asked after we’d gone back and forth for a bit. It was clear our opinions on the matter were deadlocked. It was also clear he resented my skepticism.
Hollis paced the room. “I told you. Tonight’s the best shot I’ll ever have, so I’m going to find the Phantom and I’m going to stop him.”
“Him?”
“Them!”
“How?”
“I don’t know!”
I went for the opening. “See! That’s just it. You don’t even know what you’re looking for, which means you won’t find it and you won’t disprove it, and that means you’ll just keep—”
“Shut up!” Hollis stopped to seethe in my direction. “I already know you don’t fucking believe me. You’ve made that pretty goddamn clear.”
“It’s not that. . . .”
He walked toward me then. His hands were curled into fists. “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want your opinion. I never wanted it, C. J. It’s worthless to me because you don’t know shit about anything. So just shut your mouth. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
Hollis sneered. “You’re pathetic.”
I didn’t argue with him on that point. Instead, I shut my mouth and stood there, staring at the floor, waiting until Hollis had grabbed his coat and his whiskey bottle and stormed from the room.
Slammed the door behind him.
*
I stayed like that for a while, unsure of what to do or how to do it or if I should even do anything at all. But in the end I couldn’t do nothing. So after a few minutes, I left Hollis’s room, winding my way back through heaven and down the staircase into hell, where I found the party had grown more crowded, more out of control. Iron Butterfly’s seventeen-minute psychedelic dirge droned on while someone lined up shots of Fireball on the dining room table. I couldn’t see Hollis anywhere, but I did spot Zoe, the girl from the truck who’d given me my halo. She was leaning against the wall, still in her Giants cap and devil horns, and I couldn’t help myself. I went to her.
“Hey,” I said.
She smiled. “It’s the safety escort.”
“My name’s C. J.”
“How ’bout a drink, C. J.?”
“No, thanks.”
“You know, I still think it’s weird,” she said.
“What’s weird?”
“That I’ve never seen you before. You don’t look familiar at all.”
“It’s a big campus,” I said.
“It’s really not.”
My cheeks warmed. “Yeah, well, it’s pretty easy to be invisible when everyone wants to pretend you don’t exist.”
Her brow furrowed. “Why would anyone want to pretend that?”
I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything else, the music cut off. The overhead lights came on, too.
“Oh shit,” Zoe whispered, and pointed behind me.
I turned and groaned. Hollis English was standing on a coffee table in the middle of the living room. He looked more disheveled than ever: his hair a greasy mess, his eyes wild and bloodshot, his oxfords somehow missing. In one hand he still held on to that damn whiskey bottle, but in the other he gripped what appeared to be a large hunting knife, the kind with a long jagged-edge blade. He definitely hadn’t had that before. I held my breath, watching in horror as Hollis staggered, almost fell, then raised the knife high above his head with a roar of fury.
“One of you here,” he screeched, “is a killer! You’re worse than that, even. You’re a monster. I know what you’re planning, so you can quit hiding behind whatever mask you’re wearing. Show yourself! Come after me this time and stop being such a goddamn coward!”
In response, the crowd around him began hooting and laughing, as if this were a performance they’d seen before.
“Maybe it’s me tonight!” someone called out.
“Or me!” yelled another.
“Maybe we all want you dead!”
“Or undead!”
“No . . . definitely dead!”
“Should I do something?” I whispered to Zoe. “This is bad.”
She shook her head. “The best thing to do is ignore him. He won’t remember any of this tomorrow.”
That seemed a reasonable tactic, except a guy who I recognized from earlier as the driver of the silver pickup, elbowed his way through the crowd right then and swaggered up to Hollis. The expression on his face was one of pure disgust.
“Let’s do this, English,” he said. “I’m sick of your paranoid shit. If it weren’t for your dad, I would’ve kicked your ass out of this house by now. So yeah, tonight, I’m all for doing whatever the hell it is you want. If one of us is looking to kill you, let’s just be done with it. Okay?”
Hollis shrugged. “Okay.”
The guy snapped his fingers.
And the lights went out.
For the first ten seconds there was silence. Zoe reached for my hand, and I held hers. Then I heard a thud, like bodies colliding. Followed by what sounded like a piece of furniture tipping over. Someone screamed and glass shattered, and that was when panic set in because everyone was shouting and moving, and someone shoved me from behind. I wrapped my arms around Zoe, to keep her from being run into, and more screaming started and— The lights came back on.
Hollis was nowhere to be found.
“Hey, where is he?” a voice shouted.
“What the hell?” The truck driver guy lay on the floor, rubbing his cheek. “That asshole sucker punched me.”
“Look!” A girl with feathery angel wings pointed at the carpet next to the now-tipped-over coffee table. A dark stain covered the gray shag. It hadn’t been there before.