In spite of those melancholy thoughts, Quan’s clumsy pirouettes spark laughter from all five of us. He leaps across the threshold and tosses me a box of Band-Aids.
I shake my head, still grinning. “Thanks.” Sitting down next to Audrey, I roll up my sleeves. She takes a few and together we stick them into place over my seeping wounds.
Sunny methodically sifts through my uniforms. “Rune, you never answered what happened to the clothes you were wearing earlier. Did you get caught in the rain?”
Quan crouches beside Jax who’s scooping up rose petals and dropping them back into the tub.
I bite my lip. Where did I get the Fire and Ice roses? Why are they torn up? And the same questions for my clothes and uniforms . . . It’s hard to decide what’s safe to answer. The one thing I’ve learned over the years while trying to hide my secrets: The most believable lie has remnants of the truth.
I preoccupy myself with one of the Band-Aids hanging off my elbow—only half stuck to my skin—pressing it into place as the four of them watch me expectantly, their faces lacquered with purplish light. “When I was gardening today, a storm hit. I went inside the chapel for cover. That’s where I found my uniforms and the roses.”
“Then why are they so wet?” Sunny asks, picking up a vest that drizzles water. “If they were in the chapel, they should still be dry, right?”
I grimace at her powers of observance. Where’s an e-cig when you need one? The things are like pacifiers to her. “The clothes were tied up in the plastic bag, floating around in the baptismal.”
Jax stops picking up the stems. “Wait, what? That baptismal has been bone dry since the school opened. I’ve never seen water in it.”
No. That can’t be. I almost drowned in those depths . . . I can’t even process the implications before Quan practically dives into the tub, his eyebrows almost reaching his unkempt hairline.
He yanks out the hospital wrist band and the IV tubing, holding them to the lamplight. “Were these in the chapel, too?”
Audrey almost topples the chaise as she scrambles over to see. Everyone gathers around the items now placed on my nightstand under the lava lamp. I step into the ring of bodies to study the tiny letters and numbers I didn’t notice earlier, neatly written on the plastic label:
Rune Germain
1986 boulevard du Pernelle
passage à la Bouche de L’enfer
10-29 / 18:30
Dread ices my veins and frosts my heart.
Even though this time my name’s not taking shape before my eyes, it’s a reminder of the bleeding roses, and just as intimate and unnerving as before, because it’s on a hospital wristband where the third line of the address translates to . . .
“Passage to the Mouth of Hell,” I whisper.
Audrey and Jax exchange a glance. Quan and Sunny do the same. Then everyone turns to me.
“What?” I ask. “Do you know the place? Is it a hospital?”
“Try a morgue,” Quan answers as Sunny pries the wristband from his hand. “An abandoned morgue.”
“Dios mío.” Audrey drags a rosary from inside her shirt, kisses it, and crosses her chest. Then she touches the crucifix to the bird tattoo on her face and shivers.
“Don’t think of it like that, Blackbird.” Jax wraps an arm around her, pulling her petite body against his tall, powerful one and hugging her tight. The room grows quiet, all of us sympathizing as Audrey is dragged back to that horrific day when her sister almost died. After Jax whispers something in her ear, she nods and swipes some tears from her cheeks, breaking out of his embrace but keeping her fingers laced through his.
He slants his blue eyes my way. “The Mouth of Hell. That morgue is rumored to be the entrance to a rave club, but none of us have ever been able to pinpoint exactly where it is. It’s just the name of it, floating around online. They say if you get tagged, you wait at the address on the instructions and a car will come for you. But the pickup locale is different every time. And you’re forced to wear a blindfold, so you can’t see the way to the final destination. It’s also rumored, since the morgue once housed the dead, that creatures of the underworld can emerge and mingle with mankind there. That’s why the parties are so wild. People lose consciousness . . . don’t wake up until days later and find themselves out on the street with puncture marks on their arms and ankles. It’s got to be some kind of drug or something, because along with the needle tracks, they all have amnesia and don’t know how they got there. No one can ever find the place again either, unless they get tagged a second time. It’s some crazy stuff.”