Page 33 of Waysider
Cass didn’t make a sound as she spun, but her heart jolted in her chest. Michael stood in the same place as before, his hands shoved in his pockets, the soft ends of his hair awash in dying sunlight. “Have you been here the entire time?” Cass demanded.
Michael’s dark eyes revealed nothing, and his voice was soft as he answered, “No. I’ve been occupying one of the empty rooms. I felt you calling.”
“You felt it?” Cass echoed. She didn’t like the sound of that. Cass shook her head and let out a short puff of breath. “Never mind. I found something today. You were a student here.”
She held the picture out to him, her pulse rapid with anticipation. Michael stared at it with an inscrutable expression, his brown eyes thoughtful, full lips pursed. Seconds ticked past, thick with his silence and Cass’s urgency.
“Yes,” the revenant murmured finally. “Yes, that’s very strange.”
That was it? Dissatisfied, Cass jabbed the image with her finger. “Does seeing this spark anything? Any more memories?” she pressed.
He quirked a dark brow at her. “Trying to get rid of me, Miss Ryan? Is my company so unbearable?”
“I don’t even know you,” Cass countered. The sparks in her veins had dimmed now, her old impulsivity retreating to make way for the anxiety that constantly breathed down her neck these days. Had Cass royally fucked up by bringing this to Michael? She was supposed to ignore him, not try to figure out more about him.
Cass swore under her breath and tossed the picture onto the bed—she’d put it back later. Right now, she had to get out of here. Cass grabbed her backpack from the floor and dumped all the contents in a pile beside the picture. A crumpled piece of paper fell last, and Cass snatched it up, her eyes scanning the words again. She rushed around the room and started shoving things into the empty bag. Flashlight. Lockpicks. Keys.
Cass threw the backpack over her shoulder and turned, crossing the room in a silent rush.
“Where are you going?” Michael called after her. His voice should’ve bounced off the walls. The fact it didn’t was only a reminder to Cass that he was dead.
“On a scavenger hunt” was all she said.
The event didn’t actually start for another couple of hours, but Cass wanted to be in a ghost-free zone for a while. That left out the chapel, she concluded with a suppressed shudder. Where else could she go?
A moment after she had the thought, Cass got an idea. This was a school. Every school had a library, right? She didn’t remember seeing it on the map, but then, she hadn’t been looking. Cass didn’t have the attention span for reading and she found it incredibly dull. Cal said a good book could feel like watching a movie in your head; she thought it was like watching paint peel.
Luckily, there were helpful arrows and signs all over campus, and Cass found the library within minutes. This building looked older than the others, its walls made of brick, like House Wayside. Cass had come to learn that the older the place, the more likely there was to be something… lingering there. But she ignored the flutter in her stomach and went determinedly up the path. She pulled at one of the heavy doors. A rush of cool air greeted her, laden with the scent of old books.
To Cass’s relief, there was no one else here. Even the front desk was unmanned. She hurried past it and went toward the tall shelves on the other side of the room, instinctively seeking out a place where she wouldn’t be spotted if someone did come. Halfway down the aisle, a velvet rope hung across the space.
RESTRICTED, a sign read in capital letters. Cass paused in front of it, scanning the shadowed shelves beyond the rope. That feeling stirred inside her again—the restlessness. The burning need to throw her life into chaos and make dangerous choices.
Standing there, her hands clenched into fists, Cass asked herself the question she always asked when she was about to do something stupid. What would Cal do?
She didn’t need to think about it. Cal would do the right thing, as he always did. Because her brother was good, and normal, and everything she wasn’t.
Cass stepped over the velvet rope and walked past the rows of bookshelves. As she slipped into a pocket of darkness, she remembered what she’d said to Teddy. I swore things would be different here.
It would be, Cass insisted to herself, reading the spines of the books in front of her. She couldn’t just quit cold turkey, though. Real change happened gradually, didn’t it? A title caught her interest, and Cass pulled it out, opening the book to the middle. The letters against her fingertips read, Documentation No. 96. It was so vague that she knew it had to actually be hiding something interesting.
A picture had been folded and taped inside. The rings on Cass’s fingers glinted as she pulled it out. There was something written on the back, she noted, quickly scanning the words.
Artie Salmon, 1902.
Cass opened the yellowed piece of paper. She expected an image of a man, wearing a suit, maybe, staring into the camera with a solemn expression. When she registered what she was seeing, Cass almost dropped it. Her stomach rolled. She told herself to fold the picture, tuck it back into the book where she’d found it, but she couldn’t look away. Her breathing was faint and uneven.
Artie Salmon had been a boy when he died. He was slumped against a wall, his eyes wide and glassy, fixed on something in front of him. He was completely naked, revealing that he was little more than a skeleton—his cheeks were so gaunt that it looked like there were holes in his face. His starved, sharp-edged body was riddled with other dark spots, lines of liquid pouring out of them. Blood.
He’d been shot at least twenty times.
Cass wanted to know what had happened to him. She sat down in the middle of the aisle and read several chapters. With every page, her blood ran colder and colder. There was nothing further about Artie Salmon, but she read newspaper clippings about entire families that had been found dead, along with their autopsy reports. Tidy, typed sentences that described bodies ripped apart by teeth and claws. Matter-of-fact paragraphs that reviewed how each subject had been killed. Cass was numb with disbelief.
Demons had done this? These were the things Shadowrippers hunted?
Toward the end of the terrible book, there was another picture. As Cass unfurled it, her fingers were trembling. The image was just of a girl. She wore a white nightgown, and she was laying on her back. It would almost seem like she were just looking at the stars, were it not for one detail.
Her eyes were gone.
