The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (21 page)
My heart slammed into my ribcage. I whirled around and looked up at Billings. Heavy curtains were drawn over each and every window save for one. There, in the center pane, was Noelle gazing down at me. She smiled slowly and I felt an overwhelming chill of fear.
“If you want to know where your stuff is, you better get in here. Now.”
“
You
have my stuff?” I said.
But the line was already dead. I looked up at the window again and Noelle was still smiling. She lifted her hand and crooked her finger, beckoning me inside. And then, ever so slowly, the curtains fell closed.
The moment I stepped into Billings, my first instinct was to run. Fourteen girls stood in the foyer, forming a semicircle with Noelle right at the center. With the curtains drawn, the room was cast in shadow. Candles flickered on the mantle and every other available surface. Each of the girls held a black candle before her with both hands. I paused near the door, uncertain. Was this some kind of sacrificial ritual? Kill the new girl to expunge the shame she has brought upon them?
Noelle stepped forward. She handed me an unlit candle, took my arm in her iron grip, and led me to the center of the room. The girls closed into a tight circle around us, the flickering light contorting their faces.
Run. Get out now. Run and never look back.
Noelle took my hand that held the candle and forced me to hold it up. She tipped her candle toward mine and lit it. My fingers shook as I gripped the taper. My mouth was gummy and sour. Noelle stepped back and faced me. Her eyes were as flat as weathered stone. What were they going to do to me? Why was I here?
“The women of Billings House receive you, Reed Brennan, into our circle,” Noelle said.
My pulse raced ahead so fast I felt dizzy and faint. All the colors and faces in the room rushed together and I had to force myself to breathe.
Receive me into their circle? What did that mean? Did that mean . . . ?
I found Kiran in the dim light and her frank gaze solidified me. Next to her Taylor struggled to stifle a grin. That was when I knew for sure.
I was in. At Billings House. Somehow, someway, I had been chosen to live here. Yes, they had taken my things, but they had taken them and brought them here. I wasn’t expelled. I was, in fact, even more accepted than I had ever been.
I was now a Billings Girl.
It was happening. It was actually happening. Overcome with glee and relief, I searched the ring of faces for Ariana. My first friend. The one who had brought me in, who had started it all. I wanted to thank her with my eyes. Let her know how much this all meant. I owed it all to her.
But when I found her, she was staring right through me again, just like that first night when I had spotted her through the window at Bradwell. With the shadows from the candlelight dancing across her face, it was difficult to focus. With every moment her features morphed and changed. In her face, I recognized nothing, and my pulse pounded with uncertainty.
It’s just Ariana. What’s wrong with you?
Noelle stood next to me and faced the others. I stared at Ariana, transfixed, unable to look away. I was desperate for a glimpse of the girl I knew, but there was something wrong there. Something off.
“Ladies?” Noelle said.
“Welcome, Reed! To our circle!” they chorused.
Ariana’s flame finally held still and she came into sharp focus. My breath caught. As she looked through me, I saw through her. And all I saw was blackness.
Noelle leaned toward my ear. Her whisper so hushed, it was barely a breath.
“You’re one of us now.”
With that, the candles died as one and darkness consumed us all.
Chapter 2: Something to Impress
Chapter 14: Friends With Benefits
Chapter 19: The Perfect Weapon
Chapter 25: The Wrong Invitation
Chapter 27: The Password Is . . .
Chapter 44: Blackmail Boomerang
K.B. would like to thank the following members of the circle for their support . . .
At A.E.: L.W., J.B., L.M., B.S., M.F., R.D.
At S.P.(et al): E.M., A.B., S.W., J.Z., C.B.
And, as always: M.V.
It was a cold night. Cold and extremely dark, with no stars and no moon and a wind that ripped a deluge of leaves from the trees whenever it blew—leaves that were still wet from a morning drizzle. They felt slimy and foul when they happened to fall on exposed skin, so as another gust whipped through the hills, we all ducked and covered. I felt myself begin to shiver.
“Augh! There’s one on my neck!” Taylor Bell cried, doubling over with her shoulders to her ears. She clutched the bottle of vodka she’d been swigging from all night in one hand and slapped ineffectively at her back with the other. The large yellow maple leaf had sucked itself almost all the way around her neck, matting down the blond curls that had escaped from the back of her ponytail. “Get it off!”
Normally, Taylor was not the biggest drinker, but tonight she had been pounding straight alcohol like it was the nectar of the gods, perhaps because she, like many others, felt the need to expunge parents weekend—which had ended just hours ago with a
ceremony in the Easton Academy chapel—from her memory. Taylor’s parents had seemed like nice people, though, and she had appeared to be at least comfortable in their presence. I wondered if something else could be bothering her.
“Get it off!” she whimpered again. “Guys!”
“Don’t look at me,” Kiran Hayes said, taking a ladylike swig from her silver flask. She pulled her long cashmere coat around her knees and held it there. “I just had a paraffin wrap.”
Kiran, the first actual model I had ever known and one of the more gorgeous girls I had ever seen in real life, had always just had
something
done. Highlights, lowlights, dermabrasion, seaweed thigh wrap, eyebrow threading. Most of it sounded like torture, but apparently it all worked.
Noelle Lange rolled her eyes and plucked the large wet leaf from Taylor’s skin. “Prima donnas,” she said derisively. She whipped the leaf at the ground, and it landed right in front of the long, flat rock on which Ariana Osgood sat. Ariana looked down at the leaf for a moment, studying it as if it held the meaning of life. A lighter breeze lifted her long, almost white-blond hair from her shoulders and she looked up into it, then closed her eyes in pleasure.
I pulled my third beer from the cooler across the clearing and watched this tableau unfold like I was an anthropologist studying some previously unclassified subset of human. I had been fascinated with the Billings Girls from the moment I had first seen them a month ago through the window of my sophomore dorm at
Easton Academy—fascinated from afar, that is, with seemingly no hope of ever gaining up-close access. But that hadn’t been the case for long. The Billings Girls were now my friends. My dorm mates. The people with whom I partied illegally in the woods on the outskirts of campus on a regular basis.
If you could call “twice” a regular basis.
I was one of them now. I had ascended to greatness at Easton. Though if someone asked me to sit down and tell them how I had done it, I would be rendered speechless. Last I checked, I had pissed them all off by continuing to talk to my boyfriend, Thomas Pearson, of whom none of them approved. I thought I had lost them forever by going behind their backs and offering to stick with him and help him through his issues. Instead, I had apparently impressed them.
Somehow. And thank God I had, because with their help I might actually have a shot of leaving my past behind. Of not being one of the many Croton, PA, progeny who return to the hometown after two years of community college to take assistant management positions at Costco. With the Billings Girls behind me, I actually had a shot at a life. A future. A shot at being part of a world I had only ever dreamed of—a world of success. Of privilege. Of freedom.
“Are you all right over there, Reed?” Noelle asked, lifting her long, dark hair over her shoulder. “If you don’t want another beer I’m sure Kiran would be happy to mix up a Hayes Special for you.”
Her eyes danced with mischief and I knew she had noticed my
state of contemplation. I didn’t want to appear ungrateful for having been invited here, for everything they had done for me. For the fact that I was getting a beer for myself, rather than running errands for them, as I had been doing pretty much nonstop since the first week of school. So I waved her off.
“That’s okay. I’m good with this,” I said, lifting the bottle.
I used the rusted bottle opener to pop the cap off and took a long drink, knowing she was still watching me. Earlier tonight I had my first beer ever. Now I was on my third one, which was going down more smoothly. The key, it seemed, was to take long drinks and not let it stay in my mouth long enough to touch my tongue. Yeah. Refreshing. I took a deep breath and let it out into another cold breeze, pulling my sweater closer to my goose-bumped skin. I was about to rejoin the girls, when a sudden conversation shift near the fire stopped me.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Dash McCafferty said. “This is going to go down as one of the great disappearing acts of all time.”
“Maybe he’s at his grandmother’s in Boston,” Josh Hollis suggested.
Dash shrugged. “Eh, I’m sure they already raided the old bat’s place.”
Thomas. They were talking about Thomas. I couldn’t believe that the last time I was here, he was here as well. It had been approximately forty-eight hours since anyone had seen Thomas Pearson. He had disappeared from Easton without leaving so much as a note behind. And, according to his roommate Josh
Hollis—who stood near the fire with the other guys just then, staring into the flames—Thomas had gone without packing one stitch of clothing, not even his favorite black T-shirt. On Friday morning Thomas had told me he loved me, had made me promise I would be there for him no matter what, and had then proceeded to vanish.
I wondered how much Josh knew—about me, about what Thomas and I had done together. Had Thomas
told
Josh what we had done in their dorm room? I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t known him long enough to find out. But now, every time I saw Josh, I wondered if he knew what I’d done and the thought made me squirm. I didn’t need half the school knowing I had lost my virginity to a guy who maybe meant well but was clearly too troubled to be in a healthy relationship. Lost my virginity to a guy who I now knew (even before he vanished) I probably should not be with, but who I still felt irresistably attached to anyway. Lost my virginity to Thomas Pearson, the most popular guy at Easton and also, as I’d recently discovered, the campus’s foremost drug supplier. I still couldn’t believe it.