Page 127 of The Villains of Winter

Elliott passed him a thermos of beef bone broth.

“What?” James asked beside him, he ran his eyes over the Harvest Moon.

“You mentioned the theater department.” Elliott cleared the flecks of dirt from his long sleeved, buttoned denim shirt. He knotted the dark bandana around his neck. “That if I knew the truth about it I would never forgive you. What did you mean to tell me?”

James thought about it. “Nothing, never mind.”

Séverine Ilaria was gone. However, instead of a cyclopean weight lifted from his shoulders, he felt the gaze of a cellist behind them. Of course, the Nixon Forest was available to all students year round, with the exception of extreme weather conditions, it rarely closed.

Surreptitiously, however, the stage actors had gathered in a clandestine congregation a few tents over from their sleeping bags. Actors that preferred the Amalfi coastlines of Italy and the pampering luxuries of the wineries of Toulouse, France were outside in the dried soil with them. He’d never heard not even one of the lead actors ever mention the dense timber forestation of the Nixon Forest before.

They were a hundred meters behind them, traversing through the immense, vast elms and timber, the mountainous terrain of the camp grounds encumbered with stately trees and tiresome roots. The thick, sweaty summer air of the overheated woodlands flooded them with tiny flies.

If James believed in coincidences, he wouldn’t have been concerned.

“I can handle anything you need to tell me, James. I already promised to forgive you for anything.”

Everything was finally right again, and James couldn’t ruin it. Besides, there was a meteor shower aligned that night. He’d wanted to use the extraordinarily brilliant meteor storm to formally ask Elliott to be his boyfriend. He lit the end of his Marlboro cigarette.

He paused when he saw Lucy Swann enter through the wooded gates of the entrance. Lucy Swann wore a black Dolce and Gabbana evening dress in the mud of the forest despite the illogicality of it. Strapped across her back was a golden crossbow and arrow.

Last weekend, she increased Perseus’s life insurance, and the pay out was expected to be massive one day, James heard, considering that she now stood to inherit his part of the Swann fortune.

Should anything happen to him.

By the dyspathy in her glower towards him, she wasn’t amused that James decided to endanger her husband’s life the same week she decided to increase his life insurance. The insurance had been neatly done, convincingly a formality in their post-nuptial paperwork.

She was methodical. She understood the purpose of stealth in financial matters.

While Perseus had forgiven James for inducting him into yet another murder plot without permission, Lucy granted him far less clemency. He nearly interfered with her money.

She’d killed men for less.

Her pupils were the tone of cold ash. The same ash of the letter Callum left for Elliott to not leave for Montana, which James had burned with the edge of his lighter before they left. James’s enemies were rising in number before his political career began. However, he never perceived it as the omen it was for him.

He never intended to retreat when he could have.

He never intended to surrender to any of them.

James asked Elliott instead, with the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, “Where will Callum take you in the winter?”

“Callum?” Elliott repeated.

“When you were on top of me…” James reminded him under his breath. It might’ve been their fourth round or the fifth. “There was a passport I saw hidden behind your Jimi Hendrix poster. The cover of it had the Hán 韓 insignia, I imagine Callum gifted it to you.”

“Oh, I booked a flight to Mount Kilimanjaro with Callum, I’ve never been out of the country. I bought the ticket myself, he just had an extra passport cover. I really hate the thought of not seeing him for a while after we return, though.” Elliott frowned, wincing at the bright, remarkable stars as though their luminescence in his eyes was the matter with him. Why was his brain acting weird and confused at itself? At times, Elliott turned over in bed to whisper a joke to Callum, and it was James asleep there instead. His mind couldn’t keep it together. There were moments where he mentioned an inside joke with James, expecting him to laugh, then he remembered only he and Callum knew it instead.

Elliott had wanted to leave Connecticut since the winter, only he couldn’t stop thinking of Callum. The way he laughed at Elliott’s jokes even when they didn’t make sense to him. The way he read Mandarin-translated literature and Cantonese-translated ancient poems beside him in the afternoons with complete concentration. The way he practiced the drums with him before bed every night.

Even when Callum read comic books beside Elliott, it was with his full attention. His brows wrinkled.

James didn’t care for foreign literature. He didn’t have time for comic books anymore.

He liked to watch Elliott drum with the set in his room, but that was the extent of his interest. On the first Sunday of the month, Elliott made a point to be early to chapel, but Callum didn’t attend anymore.

Elliott grimaced from the noise of dozens of chatter–crushed potato chip bags, crackles of the outdoor campfire, the sound of seniors that drank beer and belched as they crunched the cans. Elliott missed him and he hadn’t even left yet. Every time Elliott thought he could leave without Callum, he was messed up inside about it.

James reminded him, “We’ll leave Connecticut behind, it’s what we’ve wanted.”