Even through the darkening veil of monstrosity, I knew I had to move Salem’s body. If she was found in that state, I would be . . . I’m not sure what I’d be. Expelled? Criminally charged? Either way, the thought of anyone knowing what I’d done filled me with obsidian shame; as though the blood in my veins ran pure black. It made me want to tear the skin from my flesh.
I returned to the chapel in the small hours of the morning, praying she hadn’t yet been discovered. Mercifully, the place was deserted, and I found her sweet black body where I’d kicked it hours earlier. The awkward angle of her neck wasn’t too stark. If I left her in the woods at the bottom of a tree, it might just look like she’d fallen badly.
Tears sliding down my cheeks and into her fur, I picked her up in a plastic carrier bag and stuffed her into my briefcase. The feel of her stiffening limbs made me gag.
I went as deep into the woods as I could bear, near the glade where I’d found the tincture ingredients. The moon lit the way until it didn’t, then I had to feel my way over gnarled roots and low-hanging branches with my breath hitching in my throat.
Eventually I emptied her out of her plastic bag at the base of a beautiful old oak.
Rest easy, little one, I thought, but the wordmurdererbeat in the back of my head like a pulse.
As the days crunched on, my body sank into deeper withdrawal from the tincture. In the fragments of respite between the psychotic urges, all I could think about was the ritual. It was a craving unlike anything I’d ever experienced; like I was dying of thirst and the tincture was the only thing that would slake it.
I knew in my bones that I needed to perform the ritual again in order to gain ground against the darkest side of myself. If I didn’t . . . what if Salem was just the beginning? What if a human being was next?
While I still had the elderflower mixture in my briefcase, I was missing blood. Specifically, the blood of someone I had wronged. Yet how could I trust myself to gather more when there was a very real chance I wouldn’t be able to stop? The thought of Harris bleeding out on the cobbles filled me with a rich sense of pleasure, and I had never been so afraid.
Before long, the tenuous dam I’d built against the darkness burst.
On bonfire night, the campus was rich with the after-scent of gunpowder, whorls of smoke curling up into the charcoal sky. The fireworks had ended, but students still gathered in knots on the front lawn, drinking hot cider and toasting marshmallows over miniature campfires. The distant sound of them made me sick with envy.
It was almost midnight, the half moon’s pearlescent gleam slicing through the crack in our curtains, and exhaustion had me trembling in my bed.
My thoughts were bleached by pain. I felt something deep within me shudder and then break, and I knew it was over.
Using the last vestiges of light to guide me, I stumbled from my bunk and crossed over to Lottie’s, where she was snoring merrily next to a hardcover copy ofMy Dark Places.
I shook her awake, monstrous thoughts churning in me like nausea.
Strangle her strangle her strangle her look she looks so innocent she’s defenseless strangle herrrrrr, she deserves it she hates you it would feel so goodMy hands reached to her throat.
‘What? What is it?’ she mumbled through the shroud of sleep, pushing my outstretched fingers away.
With every ounce of strength I had left, I withdrew my hands.
Then, with a final, gasping pause. ‘I need your blood.’