Chapter 13 She's Not Dead
POV: Carly
She did not sleep well.
Which was not surprising considering she had spent half the night staring at her dorm room ceiling replaying a library scene that she had absolutely no business replaying.
By the time her alarm went off she had slept maybe three hours and had made a firm decision that today was going to be different. She was going to go to her classes and her practice and her committee meeting and she was going to be completely normal and focused and unbothered and Niko Monroeson was going to be a non factor.
She had the plan fully formed before she even got out of bed.
It lasted until Whitney knocked on the bathroom door.
"Care." Whitney's voice came through the wood carefully. The specific tone she used when she had information she wasn't sure how to deliver.
Carly rinsed her face and reached for a towel. "What."
"So." A pause. "You know Jake Fulton right. Junior wolf. Runs the four hundred."
Carly went still with the towel against her face.
"He and Danny Reyes were talking at breakfast this morning." Whitney continued. "And apparently they were talking to pretty much everyone at breakfast this morning."
Carly opened the bathroom door.
Whitney was leaning against the doorframe in her robe with her arms crossed and her lips pressed together in the expression that meant she was trying very hard to be neutral about something she had very strong feelings about.
"What did they say." Carly said it flat.
"They said they saw you in the hallway outside the lecture hall yesterday." Whitney chose each word carefully. "With Niko Monroeson."
"We were arguing about the partner assignment." Carly said immediately.
"Backed against a wall."
"He was being aggressive."
"With his hand around your wrist."
Carly put the towel back on the rack. "It was not what it looked like."
Whitney was quiet for a moment.
"Care." She said it gently. "What did it look like."
"It looked like an argument. Which is what it was." Carly moved past her into the room and reached for her uniform on the hook behind the door. "It was nothing. He cornered me and I handled it and they saw about four seconds of a ten second situation with no context."
Whitney sat down on the edge of her bed and watched her get dressed.
"The whole senior floor is talking about it." She said.
"Of course they are." Carly pulled her sweater over her head. "Because nobody in this school has anything better to do than manufacture drama out of nothing."
"Is it nothing?"
Carly looked at her.
Whitney looked back. Patient and steady and annoyingly perceptive in the way that only she was allowed to be.
"Yes." Carly said. "It is nothing. He is my project partner and a pain in my neck and that is the complete and total extent of what Niko Monroeson is to me. Okay?"
Whitney held her gaze for one more second.
"Okay." She said.
She didn't push. She never pushed.
Carly turned back to the mirror and pulled her hair up and told her own reflection the same thing.
Nothing.
Complete and total nothing.
Katy was cross legged on her bed eating cereal when Carly came out of the bathroom the first time and was still there now, watching the whole exchange with the expression of someone watching a show they were very invested in.
"Not a word." Carly pointed at her without looking.
Katy raised her spoon in surrender. "I didn't say anything."
"You were thinking very loudly."
"Vampire." Katy gestured to herself. "Heightened everything. Not my fault your feelings are basically shouting."
"I do not have feelings." Carly said. "I have a project partner and a rumor problem and a homecoming theme that still does not exist and I have to get to class."
She picked up her bag off the desk and walked out before either of them could say anything else.
The hallway outside the lecture hall looked exactly the same as it always did.
Carly walked through it with her chin up and her eyes forward and her pace completely normal. She did not look at the section of wall near the stairwell. She did not think about yesterday. She was a person walking down a hallway on a Wednesday morning and there was nothing significant about any of it.
Three separate people looked at her as she passed.
She smiled back pleasantly and kept moving.
By the time she reached her first class she had been looked at seven times by people who looked away too quickly and whispered to the person next to them and she was already exhausted and it was eight fifteen in the morning.
She sat down at her desk and opened her planner and stared at the week ahead.
Homecoming committee meeting Thursday. Cheer practice Tuesday and Thursday. Coven meeting Friday. Spellistry class Tuesday and Thursday with her project partner who she was going to be completely professional with because she was Carly McPherson and she did not let things derail her.
She wrote THEME IDEAS at the top of a fresh page.
Stared at it.
Wrote nothing.
Crossed it out.
Wrote it again.
Her pen tapped against the page three times before her phone buzzed on the desk.
Unknown number.
She stared at it. Picked it up.
Unknown: You left your grimoire in the library last night.
She sat up straight.
Unknown: It was under the table. I have it.
Her stomach dropped straight through the floor.
Her grimoire. Her mother's grimoire. Passed down through four generations of McPherson witches and sitting somewhere in Niko Monroeson's possession because she had grabbed everything off that table in four seconds flat and apparently not everything had made it into her bag.
Her hands were already typing before she finished processing it.
Carly: How did you get this number.
Unknown: I asked around. How did you think.
Carly: I want it back today.
Unknown: I know you do.
Carly: Niko.
Unknown: I'll bring it to class Thursday. It's perfectly safe.
Unknown: I'm not going to hex it. I don't actually do that.
Carly: I want it back TODAY.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Unknown: Library. 8pm. Don't be late.
She put the phone face down on the desk and pressed both hands flat on top of it and took a long slow breath through her nose.
The grimoire was fine. It was a book. It was sitting somewhere safe and she was going to get it back tonight and this was not a big deal.
She picked up her pen.
Wrote nothing.
Picked up her phone.
Saved the number under a contact name she was not going to examine too closely and put it back in her bag.
Her pen tapped the page three more times.
She wrote ENCHANTED EVENING at the top of the theme page.
Crossed it out immediately.
Stared at the wall.
Eight pm was a long time away.
The library at eight pm looked different than it did at closing time.
The overhead lights were fully on and the librarian was still at the front desk and two freshman witches were sharing a textbook at the table nearest the door. It was completely normal and populated and Carly walked in with her bag on her shoulder and her expression set to a temperature that communicated she was here for a book and nothing else.
Niko was already there.
He was in the back corner, not the couch from last night, but one of the reading chairs near the window that looked out onto the Black River Falls tree line. The fog was thick against the glass tonight, the forest completely swallowed up in it. He had his sketchbook open and his legs stretched out and he looked exactly like someone who had been there for a while and was in no particular hurry.
The grimoire was on the small table beside him.
Carly walked over and reached for it.
He put two fingers on top of it without looking up from his sketchbook.
She stopped.
"Good evening." He said pleasantly.
"Thank you for letting me know." She kept her voice even. "I'll take it now."
"You're welcome." He turned a page in his sketchbook. "Sit down."
"I'm not sitting down."
"The freshman witches by the door are already looking over here." He said mildly. "You can stand and make it more interesting for them or you can sit down and we can have a normal conversation for five minutes and then you can take your book and leave."
Carly looked over her shoulder.
Both freshman witches looked down at their textbook at the exact same moment.
She pulled the chair out from the other side of the small table and sat down without taking her coat off.
"Five minutes." She said.
Niko finally looked up from his sketchbook. He looked more settled than he had yesterday. Less of that coiled tension she had felt in the hallway. His eyes were fully blue tonight, the regular version, and the sketchbook in his lap was open to something she couldn't see from her angle.
"Are you going to ask how I got your number?" He said.
"No." She said. "I'm going to ask you not to use it again after tonight."
"Fair." He said simply.
She blinked. She had been prepared for an argument on that.
He reached over and pushed the grimoire across the table toward her without the two finger move this time. Just slid it across and let go.
She pulled it into her lap immediately and felt the specific relief of having it back that she was not going to let show on her face.
"I didn't read it." He said.
She looked at him.
"The spells and the annotations. I didn't read them." He held her gaze. "The quotes in the back I already knew. But the rest of it I didn't touch."
She didn't know why she believed him.
She believed him.
"The Brontë section in the back." She said before she could stop herself. "How do you know it."
He looked at her for a moment. Like he was deciding how much of a real answer to give.
"My aunt." He said finally. "She had a copy of Wuthering Heights with half the pages falling out that she'd had since she was seventeen. She used to read it out loud when I was staying with her." He paused. "Some things stick."
Carly sat with that for a second.
She had a version of Niko Monroeson in her head that she had been building since she was fifteen years old. It was a specific version. It had very defined edges and no soft spots and it made complete sense within the framework of everything she had been taught about what he was and what his family was and what vampires were in general.
The version sitting across from her right now was doing things that didn't fit the edges.
She didn't like it.
She put the grimoire in her bag and stood up.
"Thank you for returning it." She said.
He nodded once.
She pulled her bag strap onto her shoulder. "I'll see you Thursday."
"Thursday." He agreed and looked back down at his sketchbook.
She was three steps away when she stopped.
She didn't fully understand why she stopped.
"The girl from last night." She turned back slightly. "She really won't remember."
It wasn't quite a question.
Niko looked up. "She woke up this morning thinking she fell asleep studying." He said it simply. "She's fine."
"How." Carly said. "How does that work."
He looked at her for a moment. Like he was surprised she had asked a genuine question instead of a pointed one.
"It's something we can do." He said carefully. "Get into someone's head. Redirect what they hold onto." He paused. "It doesn't hurt them."
Carly turned that over slowly. She had a word forming at the back of her mind, something she had read once in an old text her mother had, but she couldn't quite pull it forward.
"Does it work on everyone." She said.
"Most." He said. "Not witches."
Their eyes held for a second longer than necessary.
"Okay." She said.
She turned and walked toward the exit.
The two freshman witches watched her leave.
She pushed through the library door into the corridor and stood in the quiet hallway and breathed.
She had a grimoire. She had a Thursday class. She had a project partner who knew Wuthering Heights by memory because his aunt read it out loud when he was a kid and apparently that was the kind of information she was collecting now.
She started walking toward the dormitory.
The fog of Black River Falls pressed against every window she passed, thick and grey and settled in the way it always was this time of night. Like the town itself was keeping something in.
She pulled her bag strap higher on her shoulder.
Thursday.
She could handle Thursday.
Author's Note:
He kept her grimoire safe. He didn't read it. He knows Wuthering Heights because of his aunt. I need everyone to take a second because Niko Monroeson is not who Carly McPherson built him up to be in her head and she is starting to figure that out and it is going to be a PROBLEM. Drop a like and tell me in the comments, are you feeling the slow burn or do you want things to move faster? Add us to your library because the project officially starts Thursday and these two have to actually work together now!