Chapter 114 Packing
Chapter 114 Packing
POV: Carly
Spring Break arrived the way the end of things always did at Black River Academy: suddenly and all at once, like the semester had been running at one speed and then someone changed it without warning. The last week of classes before break carried that specific chaotic energy of a school winding down, everyone simultaneously behind on their work and already mentally somewhere else. The corridors grew louder than usual, the library emptier than usual, and the dining hall inexplicably ran out of granola bars every single morning, as though the universe itself had decided to mirror the general sense of unraveling.
She had packed on Thursday night.
She had told herself it was just a bag for a week. It did not need to be an event. She had packed for Spring Break before - had gone on trips with her mother, coven retreat weekends, and once a whole five days at the coast with Whitney junior year - and none of those had required more than forty-five minutes and a medium bag.
She had been staring at her open wardrobe for an hour.
She was going to the Monroeson estate.
She was going to meet the rest of Niko's family.
She was going to spend a week inside a house that he had left four years ago, had not gone back to since, and had specifically said he never wanted her near.
She had asked to come.
She had not, technically, asked to come. What she had said, in the library on Sunday when he explained that he had decided to go to the wedding and asked if she would come with him, was yes. Immediately and completely and without requiring time to think about it. The word had left her before she had even finished processing the question, some instinct in her moving faster than caution ever could.
She had meant it at the time and she still meant it now, sitting here surrounded by the evidence of her own indecision.
She also currently had both her going-out black dresses laid on the bed alongside three different cardigans and two pairs of boots, and had no idea what the dress code was for a vampire wedding at a mansion she had never seen, hosted by a family with a four-hundred-year history that included at least one person she already had very complicated feelings about.
"You're going to need a formal," Katy said from her own bed without looking up from her phone.
Carly looked at the pile on her bed, chewing the inside of her cheek. "I know."
"The navy one," Katy said.
"It might be too much."
"It's a vampire wedding at an estate," Katy said, finally glancing over. "Too much is not a concept that applies."
Carly pulled the navy dress from the back of the wardrobe and held it up, studying it as if it might reveal some hidden flaw only visible under sufficient scrutiny.
She looked at it in the mirror.
"Fine," she said.
"Also the black heels, not the boots," Katy said, still not looking up.
"How are you even - "
"I have good peripheral vision," Katy said. "Pack the black heels."
Carly folded the navy dress carefully and placed it in the bag, smoothing the fabric with more care than the gesture strictly required.
She looked at the rest of the pile.
She thought about the estate, about what Niko had told her over the past week, incrementally, in the way he was sharing things now that they had agreed she would be the first to know when it was actually serious. Not everything at once. Just pieces, offered when they were relevant, when the conversation arrived there naturally, as though he were testing the weight of each detail before setting it down in front of her.
The house was large. He had described it as the largest in Black River Falls by a significant margin, which in a town that already had its share of old money was saying something considerable. Four floors. Multiple wings. The Monroeson family had owned the land since before the town was officially settled, and something in the way he spoke about that fact - flat, almost rehearsed - told her it was a weight he had carried longer than he let on.
His father had an office on the fourth floor that Niko had not entered since he was twelve years old.
His mother preferred the garden wing, where the light suited her magic practice.
Freida's room sat on the second floor, south side, overlooking the rose garden.
He had told her this as though he were handing her a map. Not of the building exactly, but of what had mattered to him inside it, once, before whatever happened that made him leave and never return.
She folded a cardigan and put it in the bag.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Mm," Katy said.
"What do you do when you're about to walk into something you know is going to be hard, and you want to be ready for it, but there's no way to actually be ready for it?"
Katy put her phone down. She looked at Carly properly, the way she did when she meant to actually answer instead of deflect. "You go anyway."
"That's the whole answer?" Carly said.
"That's the whole answer," Katy said. "Being ready is mostly a story we tell ourselves to feel better before hard things. Most of the time you can't be ready. You just go, and you deal with whatever happens because you're there and it's happening."
Carly looked at the bag, feeling something in her chest loosen slightly, just enough to breathe around.
"You're not going alone," Katy said. "He's going to be there the whole time."
"He is," Carly said, and something about saying it aloud made it feel more solid.
"And if something happens you can't handle, you leave," Katy said. "It's a week. Not a life sentence."
"That's actually helpful," Carly said, surprised to find she meant it.
"I have my moments," Katy said, picking her phone back up, though something softer flickered behind her eyes before she looked away.
Carly folded the last cardigan and tucked it into the bag, then stood back and looked at it, as though the sight of it fully packed might finally make the trip feel real.
She thought about Niko's face when she had said yes in the library - the specific expression that had moved through it in the half second before he managed it back into something more neutral. She had seen it clearly. She was always going to see it clearly. It had looked, for just that instant, like relief so raw it bordered on disbelief, like he had expected her to say no and hadn't known what to do with the alternative.
Whatever waited at the other end of that drive, whatever the Monroeson estate held, she was going because he had asked, because she had meant yes, and because Katy was right.
You just go.
She zipped the bag.
She put it by the door.
She picked up her phone.
Carly: I'm packed. What time are we leaving tomorrow?
The response came in under thirty seconds.
Niko: Eight. I'll come to you.
She put the phone down, something warm settling in her chest at the simplicity of it.
She looked at the bag by the door.
She went to wash her face and get ready for her last night in Degrassi Hall before a week away, and told herself she was as ready as she was going to get.
Which, as Katy had pointed out, was the only kind of ready that ever actually existed.
POV: Katy
She waited until Carly's light was off and her breathing had gone slow and even before she sat up.
She did it quietly, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and sitting in the dark with her hands in her lap, the room around her doing what rooms did at midnight when everyone in them was supposed to be asleep - holding its breath, waiting to see what she would do with the silence.
She looked at Carly's bag by the door.
She thought about the Monroeson estate.
She thought about Isabel Monroeson arriving at a school event at the same time as Leona McPherson.
She thought about the faction review notice that had sat on the headmistress's board for two weeks before it disappeared without explanation.
She thought about Whitney Salem feeling a witch's call differently than she should have, the wrongness of it lodged somewhere Katy couldn't quite name.
She thought about Zdravei Katerina in a corridor, and the look on Niko's face when he said it - something between recognition and dread.
She had been sitting on all of it for months.
She had a reason for sitting on it. Not cowardice, exactly. More like the specific calculation of someone who knew that saying things out loud changed the shape of them, and once changed, the shape could not be unchanged. She had been waiting until she was certain enough of the picture to risk saying any of it to anyone, afraid that speaking too soon might set something in motion she couldn't take back.
She was getting closer to certain.
She thought about Carly going to the Monroeson estate for a week, walking into a house full of history and blood and old grievances without knowing the half of what any of it meant.
She thought about what might be in that house. Who might be there beyond Niko's immediate family. What a week inside the founding bloodline's home might stir up for the girl who had been unknowingly carrying the weight of the covenant since she was fourteen, oblivious to the size of what rested on her shoulders.
She thought about whether she should say something before Carly left, turning the question over and over until it wore smooth.
She pressed her lips together in the dark.
She did not have enough yet. She could feel the shape of the thing she was building, but she did not have the whole picture, and saying half a picture to someone about to walk into a complicated situation was worse than saying nothing. It would only make Carly doubt herself at a moment when she needed to be clear, and Katy refused to be the reason for that particular kind of unraveling.
She would wait.
She would keep watching.
She would have the whole picture before she said anything.
She lay back down.
She looked at the ceiling.
She thought about one more thing she had been thinking about for weeks and had not said to anyone, one she was not ready to say yet even to herself.
She thought about the moment in the Hole, standing at the bar, watching Niko cross the room to Carly. The specific quality of watching someone who mattered to her move toward someone who mattered to them both. The warmth of it and the ache of it arrived simultaneously, tangled together so thoroughly she couldn't separate one from the other, couldn't decide which she was allowed to feel.
She pressed her lips together harder.
She was not going to examine that tonight.
She closed her eyes.
She let the dark do what it did.
Tomorrow Carly would be gone for a week, and Katy would have the room to herself for the first time since October. She was going to use the time to think clearly about all of it, without someone whose wellbeing she had somehow, against her better judgment, started to care about deeply sharing the same air, the same walls, the same quiet hours.
She needed the space to think.
She was going to use it.