Page 19 of The Villains of Winter

It was on purpose, wasn’t it?

“I’m the designated driver since I’m the youngest. I can’t drink.”

James propped her oversized boots on the table so he could fix the string laces. He balanced her socked feet on his lap. “Don’t feel pressured to drive.” He felt his throat close around his words. “Hallowe’en is capitalistic and consumerist, if you don’t want to, you don’t need to participate. Remember, that ‘the revolution won’t be televised’–”

James always quoted Gil Scott-Heron.

“I know–‘the first revolution happens in the mind.’” She tossed a candy corn at him. James caught it in his mouth. She said softly, “I don’t mind driving. Not everyone who gets behind the wheel has an accident. You need to forgive yourself for what happened to you. You’ve never forgiven yourself.”

That last comment made James’s mouth flatten in a hard line. Even though she was a high school student, that was the best skill set of Kitty Evers–she was rarely wrong about him.

James remembered when she was a precocious child with stuffed kittens she slept with at night, reading Freud and Maslow before bed. Mrs. Ledgerman didn’t tolerate coloring books and children’s stories. However, Kitty preferred to read the Bowen family systems theory to understand the family she might’ve had. The foster experience she lived through.

Kitty seemed to view right into his soul. James hated it. He was relieved when she changed the subject.

“Are you the receptionist today?” She asked, fastening his silken tuxedo bow tie. Typically Cormac Smythe handed out stale peppermints, if you left him alone. He took two hour smoke breaks.

“Elliott forgot his art badge,” James lied for Elliott as Elliott emerged from the metal mail slots, successfully submitting the forgery. Kitty’s face brightened at the sight of Elliott.

She knew Elliott like she knew the freckles on the back of her dark brown hands. She twisted her lip in confusion. “You left your badge in the…philosophy department? What were you doing all the way out here?”

Elliott stammered. “Thought I might look everywhere.”

“Let me help.” Kitty hopped down and retrieved the badge for him in his back pocket without even needing to break eye contact. She always knew where he kept everything. “The philosophy department is weirdly dark, but there are easier places to take a nap–”

“Thanks, Kitty-Kat.” Elliott flushed hard enough he felt his collar warm.

However, Kitty frowned at the blood stuck to his bandages.

“Are you having the nightmares again? Is that why you’re forgetting your badge?” She hugged him afterwards, in case he needed it. Elliott went silent. James rolled the highly processed candy corn over his tongue. Neither of them made eye contact. Neither of them exposed their minds in the hypogean department.

Kitty tilted her head, trying to decipher what might be wrong with the two of them that day. They were eerily quiet. Avoidant. Furtive.

Kitty gasped suddenly. “Wait. You heard the rumor, didn’t you?”

Kitty walked in stride with the young men to the refectory. She remembered why she even stopped by. “Rumors about the honorarium are everywhere. I should’ve told you.”

Elliott knew already. “There were seven runaways that were caught.” A circuit of chill coiled Elliott’s spine. The honorarium was a fate far worse than the provost’s symbol.

The honorarium was the yearly victim chosen for death.

James carefully shut the miarolitic granite doors to the liquor-speckled professorial doors, as if it might have ears. “Who are the seniors sending to their watery death this year? Do either of you know?”

“No one mentioned your name, thankfully.” Kitty held his hand as they departed. Beneath their feet, the sinuous underground passage staircase was scorched from the great fire of 1881. In the hibernacula, the humid cavern passageways were formed with sedimentary limestone, partially replaced with imported aragonite. Around them, the bats went dormant in its caliginous crevices. “It’s alright to be scared, if you’re worried–”

“Death would be a mercy for what I deserve. I’m not worried.” James was solemn for once. The entrance of the hibernaculum was blanketed in remarkable stars above the night air as though Jean-François Millet painted the pinpricks by hand himself. However, James could not appreciate its beauty, he frowned. “Who is it this year, Kitty-Kat?”

Dread arrested Elliott’s attention, waiting for the hammer to fall. Kitty whispered, glancing behind her at the concealed campus’s clandestine entryway to ensure no one was near enough to overhear her. “Finch.”

“Finch Hudskin?” James looked as if his heart stopped functioning. He let go of her hand. The ill were chosen this year.

Elliott felt his intestines plunge, seconds before the bile burned up his throat, and he vomited in the professors’ lavatory. Elliott grew up with various lung infections, needing pneumonia treatments for most of his young life, due to the weak lungs he’d been born with. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of neighbors to share donations, homeopathic remedies, and antibiotic medications with him, he might not have gained the strength to live on. He had been lucky to be taken in by the caretaker of an orphanage who didn’t send him to work in the welder fumes.

Finch was not.

Their peers knew Finch was ill, rapidly deteriorating with lung disease–and therefore, they would send him early to death.

​​ PART THREE: THE KNIFE POINT