Page 11 of The Villains of Winter

“Yeah, the philosophy department. Thank you.”

He gathered the necessary paperwork, smudging the edges with a patina of blood by accident, and he left for his morning lecture.

Maybe if he had forged the signature for the science department right then and there and if he begged Roslyn to never mention it to anyone, none of what happened that Samhain weekend would’ve ever happened. He would’ve been preoccupied with textbooks and midterm preparations.

It wouldn’t have been the beginning of the end of everything he knew.

The end of everyone he loved.

Allegory of Prudence by Titian

(c. 1550-1565)

​​ CHAPTER EIGHT

“TENTĪGŌ?” DIDN’T WE JUST HAVE sex?

A distinct, smoked voice startled Elliott from behind in the philosophy department labyrinths.

James smirked at him. Are you excited to see me?

Elliott translated the words in his head. ‘Erection. Impatient to have sex.’

Elliott’s cheeks burned with slight embarrassment as a few seniors laughed when they strode past, reveling in their last week of October lectures. James was only kidding, but Elliott hid the registration paperwork in his backpack before James could see it in the dim dark. Elliott blew out his match. “I wasn’t looking for you, James.”

James flickered his eyes over the philosophy department’s cavernous aragonite walls and damp subterranean dusk of the hibernaculum, then back at Elliott. “Sure you weren’t.”

His ears scorched. “Really, I wasn’t.”

“I believe you. I wander thirty meters below the earth to the philosophy registration desk all the time myself.”

The concealed campus was a Daedalean convolution of underground labyrinths. The passages were as tightly complex and concatenated as Gorgon knots and while the philosophy and political students had the privilege of lecture halls nearest to the ground, the students of the arts and music had to plunge deep into the sightless dark several dozen meters underneath the ground. The concealed campus was structured after the hibernacula of bats.

Far more important than that though–it was Samhain, which meant a multitude of activities–the churches were full to capacity with sudden believers; the myriad libraries were empty of scholastic readers; the lecture chambers were deserted of several drunk students; and the parties were raging all weekend.

“Dinner tonight?” Elliott asked as a distraction from his unzipped backpack. He removed the hood of his second-hand cape he’d purchased from the town bargain store.

“Don’t you have dinner with Hazel?”

“I think we broke up.” Elliott grimaced, his letters were unreturned, the bouquets burned.

“Was she pissed because she realized she’s a copy of Halle?”

Elliott ignored him. “Do you want to come to dinner with me?”

“Better than dinner, there’s a rager in the Common Room for juniors and seniors.” James was already heading to his early lectures, and Elliott fell in step beside him, relieved he left the matter alone. With James’s waxen torch, they traversed through the serpentine, tortuous trenches of the concealed campus. At the top of the grand staircase, Elliott left on his own down towards the art chambers. “See you later for the party.”

As the students of the arts peregrinated through the underground lecture chambers, the curls of slow-burning tobacco were overpowered by pungent ancient resin and waxen torches. The cavernous corridors were impossibly crepuscular, and Elliott always needed a few seconds to adjust his sight to the subterranean dark. Everyone wore expensive, knee-length, well-cut capes in the hibernacula, lest they earn themselves bat excrement on their scholar attire with the stench of urine. However, their basalt-black capes made it even harder for Elliott to see the undergraduates. Distantly, he could hear the screeches and rapid flight of northern long-eared bats preparing for hibernation in their colony.

As always, he’d forgotten his torch in the labyrinths, but as he flickered his small lighter from his pocket, someone blew it out. Hazel Scott snapped at him. “Which girl were you sleeping with last night?”

Elliott’s cheeks burned. I was in bed with James. Hazel never understood that Elliott and James fell in each other’s beds without thought, it simply happened. She couldn’t comprehend why James was important to him. “I’m really sorry, Hazel. I bought you flowers to apologize–”

“I’m done this time.” She glared over the flames of her own torch. “I’m not Halle, but you could at least pretend you’re not thinking of her when you’re on top of me. You disappeared.”

“It’s not about Halle,” Elliott insisted. Anxiously, Elliott scratched the back of his head. “I swear–”

I killed my own teacher. Elliott couldn’t bring himself to tell any of his past girlfriends about it. He couldn’t open up about the worst thing he’d done in his life. Only James knew.