Page 48 of Salem’s Rise

After Lucien leaves, Mr. Jottingsworth returns carrying a tray with two grilled cheese sandwiches and a basket of delicious-smelling fries. He places them before us, takes one look at Silas’s expression, and withdraws without comment.

“What was that about?” I ask Silas. “You looked… scared of your uncle.”

Silas’s eyes lift sharply.

“I was not scared.”

“You were something.”

“You have no idea what you saw.” His expression turns glacial. “Eat your sandwich.”

The temporary warmth we shared earlier has vanished, every wall back in place. I hate how much the change disappoints me.

After a few more tense minutes, he pushes back from the table. “I need to speak with my uncle,” he says. “I’ll send Rowan over to take you home.”

“You’re leaving?”

“I’ve done all I can to help you,” he says. “You’re on your own now.” He disappears into the corridor, leaving me to finish my sandwich alone.

A moment later, a little ping sounds beside me. I glance over and realize with a shock that Silas left his phone on the table.

A reasonable person would ignore it. Going through someone’s phone is a major invasion of privacy, and something tells me Silas is not the kind of guy to take that lightly. But I’m neither reasonable where Josh is concerned nor particularly concerned about Silas’s privacy. I reach across the table and grab the phone.

Somehow, it’s already unlocked. Either Silas is so confident no one would ever dare touch something of his that he failed to passcode-protect it, or I just got there quick enough the time lock hadn’t kicked in. Either way, I’m in.

The photo app is already open on the screen, a picture in the album library catching my attention. It’s me, crossing the quad with Wren, laughing at something she said. The photo was taken from a distance, but the focus is intimate, almost careful.

I swipe and another photograph of me appears taken outside Hallowell Hall my very first week of school. Then another of me walking around campus, my hair blown across my face. Then another and another. Far too many photos of me to be accidental.

The discovery leaves me strangely off-balance. Has Silas had someone following me? Keeping tabs on where I am and what I’m doing?

Except—the pictures don’t seem like that. They don’t feel investigative, and they certainly aren’t crude or invasive. If anything, they’re strangely beautiful, as though whoever took them wanted to preserve something special about those moments. As if the person was taking photographs of someone they cared about.

But I don’t have time to dwell on what these pictures of me mean because any moment Silas will realize he left his phone and come back. I swipe through the photo app, all the way to fall of last year.

Just as I suspected, there’s Josh.

There’s a picture of Silas standing beside my brother outside the SFU quad, both of them smiling at the camera. Josh and Silas inside the Witch’s Brew, drinking beers. Josh and Silas sailing on the harbor at night. Josh and Silas sitting together in this very kitchen.

A cold knot tightens in my chest. He can deny it to my face as many times as he wants, but these pictures are finally proof of what I’ve known all along. Silas knew my brother. He knew him well.

So why has he been lying to me about it?

October 10 (21 Days Until Halloween)

Salem’s Fall University transforms as Halloween quickly approaches.

Pumpkins appear on every stairwell and windowsill, their carved faces glowing after dark. Students drape paper ghosts from dormitory ceilings, weave orange and purple lights through the common rooms, and inflate enormous monsters that loom over the courtyards. Hay bales and cornstalks line the brick walkways, while the scent of cinnamon, bonfires, and apple cider is all over campus. Every evening, another student organization hosts a haunted house, pumpkin-carving contest, or horror movie marathon.

I spend my days in class and most of my nights poring over the books I took from Ashcroft Library and Blackthorn Manor, trying to make sense of them. The problem is they don’t read like any books I’ve ever encountered. The passages are dense and frustratingly vague, some written in ancient ciphers and codes I can’t crack. It also doesn’t help that some volumes have pages torn out or entire paragraphs slashed through with thick black marker.

The Book of Eternal Rites is the worst of them all—a labyrinth of nonsense that defeats me every time I open it. I’ve started it three separate times, only to give up in frustration, but I know I’ll have to come back to it. Somewhere within these pages lies the truth about what happened to my brother. Of that, I’m certain.

Every time the books threaten to swallow me whole, Rowan or Wren appears and drags me back into the world. Rowan and Wren have fallen into an inelegant friendship where they both appear to tolerate each other so the three of us can hang out together, along with Micah, Lena, and Jonah.

One Friday night, we all take the midnight ghost tour at the Old Town Cemetery, where our guide whispers about witchy women buried beneath hidden underground tunnels. Then we spend Saturday watching old scary movies like Halloween and The Silence of the Lambs projected against a stone wall near the harbor, bundled beneath cozy blankets, while Micah complains about the quality of the popcorn. The next weekend, we stumble through a corn maze after dark, drink cider around a harvest bonfire, and spend a Sunday afternoon at a pumpkin patch where Rowan insists the pumpkin I picked out looks deformed and I tell him his looks pretentious.

My crooked pumpkin now sits on my dorm room windowsill. I’ve carved it into a jack-o’-lantern with an uneven grin to match its lopsided shape. Every now and then, I catch myself smiling back at it.