Dare Me: A Bully Romance (Legends of the Ashwood Institute Book 1) Read online

  Now… Now Christa was right. He might destroy me. Literally, if he could get away with it.

  It was an impossible choice, in some ways: become Sineater and gain access to the Vault so that I could make sure I’d tried literally everything to fix the past… Or give up on the past altogether, and try to have a future. Finally.

  I rubbed my temples, trying to make myself think of a way to get out of it… I was good at that. I’d survived our war in high school, after all; I’d gotten the faculty on my side by junior year, and he’d been stuck with a couple decisive losses in the long list of our conflicts. I’m no push-over, no wimp. Maybe it’s because my mom has been crowing about how we’re witches since the day I was born and almost everybody in Ashwood proper hates us, but adversity just doesn’t scare me. Sometimes, I think that made it worse between he and I—Jake is nothing if not up for a challenge. Neither of us ever backed down from a dare as kids… It was one of the many things that brought us together, before everything happened.

  But we both had our reasons for hating each other.

  Mine were actually reactive.

  But his…

  That was the worst part of it, I think; I didn’t blame Jake for hating me, when it came down to it.

  I felt like I deserved it.

  When I went back to what happened… I kind of hated myself.

  But there was nothing I could do to change any of that—nothing but get in the Vault, even if it was the longest long shot in history. And I would protect the people I needed to, myself included, and in my position I knew Jake would’ve done the same…

  Most of the time.

  Sometimes, late at night, I tried to imagine it was him instead—that he was the one with the secret, the one that lied. And I tried to reassure myself that he was just like me, would’ve done the same thing and ended up just as soiled, just as ruined, and that was fucking that.

  But I wasn’t sure.

  I could never be sure.

  “You don’t have to do this to yourself,” Christa softly said, drawing me back to the moment. She didn’t know what was between he and I, but she knew it was bad if I wouldn’t talk about it.

  She knew I felt guilty.

  “I know,” I said, and shrugged, although I didn’t feel indifferent. “I just… I don’t know. There’s no one else in my family that will ever have a chance at access to the Vault. I feel like I owe it to my mom. And my sisters.” Among others.

  “You don’t know that—Baby might be a brainiac like you,” Christa pointed out, sitting on the edge of my bed for a moment, forgetting to run around with her hands in the air. Her eyes gleamed, and it made my heart ache; she still hoped she could change my mind. “And just because—”

  “Baby is not going to the Institute, even if she’s fucking Isaac Newton reincarnated,” I said, and I knew my tone left no room for argument. Baby was my younger sister, and she was getting the hell out of Ashwood. She was very smart, if not in the mechanical text-book-memorizing way that I was; she was particularly good at geometry and writing goth-tinged poems, the way any sixteen year old girl should be. She could go to Brown or something—but not the Institute.

  “This isn’t your job,” Christa said, and she looked nervous; it was hard for her to say anything critical of my family, and this danced close to the line. My mother hadn’t gone to the Institute because she’d run off at eighteen, never told anyone where, and came back knocked up with a baby hanging off either arm. Just because one of them belonged to her twin sister didn’t change the fact that she disappeared one day and returned with a couple of kids, memories she refused to share and nothing that came close to a marketable skill with which to feed said children. But my mom was a hard worker. She learned how to take care of us, and how to run a business too, and because of the Institute and its rich kids, oddly enough, we had a decent living. But she wasn’t ever getting a look in the Vault, no matter how playfully she hinted that magic is what made her lattes so damn good.

  My older sister, who goes by Zelle—but is named Esmerelda, much to her chagrin, although I like to remind her of my extra special name when she gets too pouty about it--dropped out of high school her sophomore year and fulfilled the family tradition of fucking off to nowhere for a while before she came back last year. My cousin, Charlie, hated anything and everything that had to do with ‘witchery,’ as she called it; she worked in an orchard most of the autumn and helped Ma grow things in the big green house attached to the back of our home, selling soap online in the most suburban mom way possible (so as to avoid the taint of witchery, I guess): Facebook, Ebay, etsy. At any rate, if anyone in the Keller clan was going to make it into the Vault, it was going to be me.

  And that was it.

  I knew it, and I had to decide: go to the Institute, sign up as Sineater, try not to die at the hands of Jacob Warfield, and see the Vault… Or go to Harvard. Live a real life, a life away from everything Ashwood symbolized: guilt and shame and grief. Family and love and hate.

  I shook my head at my best friend as she stared at me from the edge of my bed.

  “Well, come walk me down, then,” she said softly. “I want a little more time with you.”

  Before I took my chances with my dignity and my life.

  I understood, standing up and holding her hand as we walked downstairs together. We’d spent four years together, and for most of it she’d been watching my six. I adored her, I really did—deep down, Christa was closer to me in many ways than Zelle, Baby, mom and Charlie. She knew all of the little things about me: which songs got me revved up before a really difficult exam, which hallways I couldn’t walk down because they reminded me of incidents in the past too traumatic to relive, which teachers gave me recommendations and told me things would get better. My family knew a lot about me—too much, honestly. We were very close. But Christa was my tether to what looked like a normalcy, that beautiful, unattainable thing that always somehow escaped the Kellers. I would miss her terribly, every day, all day. But I also hoped… Maybe without me, Christa would get to enjoy the fact that she was normal. She could live that real life, the one I thought might be waiting for me if I could ever break away from my ghosts.

  But I couldn’t, yet. I had unfinished business.

  We hugged for a long time before she sat down in her car and gave me one last look. “Are you sure?”

  I couldn’t speak. I was going to cry as soon as she couldn’t see me, so hard and so bitterly I could feel it sitting in my throat like a knot. I nodded, and saw that she was going to do the same thing, just as soon as her car was out of sight.

  I closed her door, stepped back, and waved.

  And that was that. I’d chosen, and my fate lay at the end of Rose Avenue in the Ashwood Institute.

  With Jake Warfield.

  Chapter Two

  Raven

  I woke up on Orientation Day in a cold sweat.

  My room is on the second story of our house, which is a giant, horror-movie style Victorian that stands at the crossroads of the only major thoroughfares in Ashwood. My family ran a dry goods store out of the first floor for three generations, but nowadays my mom keeps us in bacon and Target clearance rack goodies with the Witch’s Brew, a coffee shop. And witch… Thing… Shop. Tarot cards, dried sage, that whole deal. But the other merchandise she always keeps well stocked is books—used books, in any subject, which any ole so-and-so can trade in for credit, thus supplying them with a bottomless book stash. That’s what saved us from losing the house and our dinners; it also convinced me that under her New Age goth world view my mom is a cold, hard capitalist. In spite of drowning in actual text books, college kids read a lot of pulp fiction, and it turns out having a warm, comfy, cozy, paperback packed coffee house for them to lounge around in will bring in some decent duckets.

  We live in the top two stories. There’s towers and even a secret tunnel, of a kind, that winds along the back of the house and lets out in the alley. I love my house, and I understand why my mom has foug
ht so hard to keep it. A fight is what was required, too, because Ashwood is a very small town, and like all small American towns… It’s dying.

  The only things keeping us incorporated are sheer stubbornness and The Ashwood Institute, although in the last ten years or so a couple new businesses have started to pop up, if not thrive. My mother claims that some of our foremothers—and fathers, not that she spends much time thinking about them—must have helped to found the Institute, even if our last name only shows up on that plaque out by the highway on the brief list of witches who lived here first, in the 1780s. There’s no mention of us as founders of the Institute. We don’t know much more than that, and the gravestones on the edge of town don’t talk much.

  Thorn and Rose are the names of the cross streets where our house sits; Rose Avenue is the main drag, and it runs parallel to the railroad tracks—we still get arrivals five times a day, most often people coming to the Institute for one reason or another, and we get history buffs and vacationers too. Thorn heads off into the country, passing by an old church, The Orchard, the plantation, and our remaining farms in one direction, and in the other it merges with the highway. Rose is only two miles long; on one end is the cemetery, and on the other is the Institute.

  That’s it. A post office, a couple little ground floor shops with apartments for college kids above them, three frat houses directly next to the Institute, the train station, one neighborhood with eight houses, and us.

  That’s Ashwood, my hometown.

  The Warfield Plantation is back by the Orchard. It has ‘historical significance,’ according to the long-winded marker that sits in the dirt by Thorn, at the end of the driveway. The Warfields don’t like to call it a ‘plantation.’ The call it ‘the house,’ as if anyone in their right mind could mistake an English country-style mansion with a house.

  That’s where Jake grew up; Jake and his older brother, Tristan, Zelle, Charlie and I. Morgan and Baby too, although she was younger when things changed, so I don’t know if she remembers much about running over the trails, playing hide-and-seek in the woods, having picnics in the gardens…

  I remember, though. I remember everything.

  That’s why I wake up soaked in cold sweat, night after night after night.

  On this particular morning, I had the additional terror of dealing with today’s events: I publicly declared myself available for the Sineater position in the Society, leaving a cryptic note to a non-existent friend on a Facebook page that DMs every incoming Freshman at the Academy with the following nonsense: ‘Do you know Mary?’ No one knows what this means, but it’s been the ‘invite’ for the past… However long. At least as long as Facebook has existed. Before then, it must have been hand-written notes left in weird places or something. But now? Online. If you look for anything else about the page it’s all just reposted click-bait, absolutely nothing note-worthy, and examining the code is less than meaningless; it just exists to let people like me—idiots like me, probably—announce their allegiance to the unknown.

  Except, in my case, I have a pretty good idea who I’m pledging my allegiance to.

  Jacob Warfield is an excellent choice for Games Master, even if he is a freshman. He’s been building his resume in mayhem for four years… Probably more, although I would’ve forgiven him anything when we were friends. In all the studying I’ve done about the Society, freshman are unusual picks, but not unheard of. Besides, he’s rich, he’s evil, he knows a thing or two about the kind of ‘games’ the Society seems to enjoy. And he knows how much seeing the Vault would mean to me—and that’s what really runs a shiver down my spine. I told myself he didn’t remember enough about me to do this, but in his position… Well, I think he’s going for it. As much as someone can campaign for a position in a secret society that denies it exists, I’m sure he has. Complete control over the person he hates most in the world? That’s the kind of thing that would give him wet dreams, while I get cold sweats. That’s the kind of thing Jacob lives for.

  So I pulled my covers back, forced myself out of bed, and found the outfit I chose yesterday. It was reasonably bland, hopefully something that wouldn’t grab anybody’s attention—anybody who wasn’t looking for me already, anyway. Black leggings, long sleeved, thin grey tunic, black boots with a thick heel. I pulled my hair into a high ponytail and skipped the make-up except for mascara; my hair is black, my eyes dark blue, and my skin is pale. I’m not necessarily pretty, but some have called me striking… If by ‘some’ you count my mom. At any rate, at the moment I was hoping to be blandly uninteresting to anyone and everyone, and my looks seemed to accomplish that. I grabbed the books I bought online and finished reading two weeks ago, stuffed them into the new backpack Zelle and Baby gave me yesterday as a present, and slung it over my shoulder. I took one more look at myself in the mirror and my image spoke very clearly to me: you are anonymous, wan, and overwhelmed. In other words: a perfect, every day new arrival at the Ashwood Institute. Could be anybody at all.

  Not a witch history hunting nutjob.

  Not Jacob Warfield’s greatest enemy.

  No one worth noticing, no one worth remembering.

  I grabbed a coffee on the first floor from Zella, kissed her and Charlie on the cheek, and walked out the door. The air was still chilly; I knew the day would heat up fast, but because Ashwood is so near the mountains, autumn arrived on time every September, and lately it’d been cool even for us. The nights in August were downright cold sometimes. I knew the air conditioning would be on high in the vast room where my first class was meeting, so I quickly made my way down the street and headed towards the campus I both dreaded and looked forward to so much, grateful to arrive before I started to sweat.

  I’d already registered online; I knew where everything was. I was a little bit early but I hoped that would give me a chance to check out the rest of the fresh meat wandering around Ashwood. Sure enough, there were a few late arrivals jumping off at the train station and running with break-neck speed towards the campus book store. Good luck guys, I thought, and strode through the gigantic brick entryway. They were going to need it.

  The residential halls fanned out from the main open area in the center of the campus, called the Commons. It was a broad, green field with three fountains in the center, ringed by ancient, gnarled trees, and a brick sidewalk guiding pedestrians through them, passing right by the spraying water. Cars could drive around the Commons on a wide circular drive and find parking back by the dorms on either side, but the Commons itself was for pedestrians only. The actual school faced downtown Ashwood, such as it is, standing as orderly as a castle across from me as I entered the imposing gate. I walked under the tall trees, most of them probably at least as old as the rest of the Institute, and watched the other students milling around.

  So many boring ass rich kids. Jesus.

  I didn’t hate rich people—Christa was a bonified rich kid, actually, and I tried really hard not to make any snarky remarks around her. I hated Jake, and his cadre. But I didn’t want to think about him, so I’d slowly developed a tick where I just mouthed off about ‘rich kids,’ as if I were speaking in code. It was stupid, but it was also a way I protected myself from thinking about him. All. The fucking. Time.

  I walked through the main hall, up the stairs into the giant gothic archway that marked the entrance to the school proper, and entered the Institute. There was a second open area here; the original building really was designed like a castle, a walled citadel with an open interior and forbidding stone walls that stretched into the sky. The Commons was kind of like a front lawn for the actual Institute. There were four towers, one in each corner; I needed to go to Rose Tower, to the south. I walked down the gigantic, empty hall, and found my room number. Although still large, lecture halls here were smaller compared to modern universities, and I found a seat in the center towards the back—inconspicuous. Neither too far away nor too close to the empty podium at the front of the dry, spartan room, the air conditioning doing its job already.
I was the first one there, so I pulled my laptop out of my bag, connected to the wifi, and finished my coffee.

  I was alone for three minutes, then the door opened and shut with a bang, the sound of giggling girls and heavier bodies thumping on the floor. I faced forward and down, intent on my laptop screen; when the giggles disappeared my stomach instantly sank. As someone who’s been targeted by a bully for four years, I have a sixth sense when it comes to that kind of silence. I shut my laptop and put it in my bag, instinctively protecting what couldn’t withstand a water balloon, spit, or a dumped drink. I made sure I didn’t look up, instead finding a composition book and placidly opening it to the first page. Then I waited.

  “Sineater, huh,” a familiar deep voice murmured from right behind me. He’d walked over silently; the rest of them must be clustered in the back row, closer to the door.

  I hadn’t heard that voice in months. Maybe even a year.

  Jake. He was the kind of person that only had to glare for people to do what he wanted—that was true even before he became a legendary dick. I kept facing forward, my entire body clenching in anticipation.

  What would he do? Would he kick my chair? ‘Accidentally’ dump hot coffee all over me? His minions were usually the ones who did the actual dirty work; he was more of a puppet master.

  A Game Master.

  “They gave me an office. My very own. Isn’t that fan-fucking-tastic?” He was leaning forward so that his face was right by my shoulder; I could feel the tickle of his breath on my ear. “So much privacy. Crazy, right?” I could see his long, tan fingers wrapping around the edge of the seat next to mine in my peripheral vision—no, one hand. He was directly behind me, leaning into my space, enfolding me in his broad grasp. Sure enough, his other hand appeared on the other side, and the heat of his skin warmed my neck.

  I held perfectly still.

  “Why do you think they did that, Bird?” A perversion of the nick-name he gave me when we were kids. Little bird, he used to call me, when it was just us, sitting too close together in a hiding space meant for one as Zelle and Tristan yelled our names. If he turned his head to the left, he would kiss me in the soft spot just below my ear, the juncture where the mandible meets the skull. I felt the warmth of his breath in the hollow there, his skin so close to mine. “Do you think they already know what kinds of things I’m going to do to you?”