Page 1 of Wicked Vile King
1
SAINT
Ibreathe in, slow and deep, savoring the taste of hell. Death whispers in the early morning air, twining with the incurable fog that shrouds the campus. It reeks of wet, rotting earth and decay, as though the abandoned graves at the northeast corner, long relinquished to the forest, have split from the earth to poison those of us still above.
Most students hate it here at Chryseum Reformatory Academy—the place we call the Asylum.
But not me.
I fucking love it.
I've known its distinct flavor of ruination for the past three years, since the day I was dumped at the tall, wrought iron gates and abandoned by those biologically designed to give a fuck about me. I craved this place long before I knew it existed, when I was still the odd child my parents were afraid of, the one that earned long stares from their affluent friends and hushed whispers from their even more affluent family members.
Hell, I might even miss this place when I graduate in the spring and leave it behind. On the heels of my nineteenth birthday, I'll be deposited back into neurotypical land.
I don't even remember what it was like, not really. Outside these walls is just one long, distant memory of someone else's life, but I still smell it in my nightmares. It's the place where everything is sugarcoated normalcy and chemically created, lab-perfected sweetness, where the world tastes like a burst of serotonin.
It doesn't smell like death outside the Academy's walls, and that's a shame. Because at least death doesn't hide what it is. There are no masks, no pretenses, no apologies, and here, at the Asylum, I don't have to pretend either. It's a relief too. I am goddamned tired of pretending.
Pretending to care.
Pretending to feel.
Pretending to benormal.
Dawn needles the horizon as I crouch on the stone parapet, the leather soles of my boots biting into the stubby wall beneath my feet. It's maybe ten inches wide, probably less, and below it, death waits for me. One slip, and I'd enter the great unknown in a nasty, bloody splat.
But I'm not afraid. I have been here a thousand times, maybe more. I won't slip. I never do. And even if I did, I don't think I'd care.
To my right sits one of the angels of the Academy, original to the building's construction in the early 1900s. It's one of four, each perched at a cornerstone of the building. Rumor is the angels were put here to protect the typhus patients and to heal them with the hand of God. Maybe that's true, but if it is, then God abandoned this place long ago and left his angels to crumble at the deathwatch.
The one across from me sits with its talons curled into the carved ledge beneath its feet. Its stone mouth is open, eroded to the elements with its lower mandible long gone. That thing doesn't resemble an angel anymore. It looks like the devil won.
The campus is quiet in the early morning. It always is, at the hour when the sun gilds the horizon. All of the bad boys and girls are locked away, sleeping safely in their dorm rooms. Well, except for me, at least. But if they aren't asleep, then they're wishing they were dead, living corpses with one foot already in the ground and scraping by on the remnants of their sanity as they rot in the hole.
The hole.
Isolation.
Solitary confinement.
We are all sent there at one time or another, when we fuck up or don't obey or see if an orderly's skull cracks like an egg or shatters like glass on impact. Minds break in there and students beg for their parents, but not me,neverme, because here, in this godforsaken place, I am king.
I survey my territory, and the brief respite that comes with the freedom of being outside evaporates as quickly as it came.
Fuck. I am bored.
So very,verybored.
I look down at the place where the toes of my boots inch over the parapet and further still to the splintered, moss-riddled stone.
A couple of inches, and I wouldn't be bored anymore.
How . . . tempting.
But what a boring way to leave the game.
I don't want to die. Or live either. I'm ambivalent about my existence because, in my world, there are only three knowns.
