“I’m going to need another shower,” I mutter, looking away from him. I don’t want to talk about what just happened.
I don’t ever want to stop fucking you.
Please don’t ever fucking stop.
For us, fucked up as we are, it’s practically an admission of love.
It’s definitely an admission of feelings that I don’t need. That will only make things more complicated than they already are.
I slip out of bed without looking at him, grab the towel, and head for the door. I pretend not to hear him call after me—if he wants to punish me for it later, fine. Right now, I need to be anywhere other than in that room.
I half expect him to follow me into my own bathroom, but he doesn’t. I step into the shower alone, and there are no sounds of footsteps outside. Part of me is almost sad that there isn’t.
Getting into Cayde’s bed was supposed to bemygame. But I’m slowly getting sucked in against my own better judgment.
And I have a feeling the same thing is happening to him.
* * *
I’m supposedto meet Mia in the library today, and I’m only a few minutes late. She’s already at one of the long tables, surrounded by books, her glasses sliding down her nose and her curly hair escaping from the bun atop her head, secured with a velvet scrunchie.
“You look like a nerd,” I tell her affectionately as I slide onto the bench across from her, setting down a coffee and pushing it towards her.
“You’re late,” she says, wrinkling her nose, and I point at the coffee.
“I’m late because I brought you coffee.” I don’t mention that I’m also partially late because Cayde fucked me again this morning, and I had to shower twice. Or that I slept in late because heandDean were fucking me in every possible orifice late into the night.
Those seem like details I could leave out.
“A lot of the history of Blackmoor is—weirdly sanitized,” Mia says, pushing some newer titles towards me. “The more recently published stuff, at least. There’s no mention of a game or a system where a “virgin sacrifice” chooses the heir or any of that archaic shit. There’s a lot of talk about the founding families’ charitable contributions, especially Philip St. Vincent.”
“My family was certainly one of his charity cases,” I mumble irritably.Apparently, the price of that charity was that he thought he could just give me to his son.
“There’s really no mention of how it’s decided who inherits the town in any of the books going back a few decades. Reading these, you’d assume they just—traded off or something. Blackmoor is painted as just a charming little New England town, with very little poverty, virtually no crime rate, just a nice little Stepford community. There’s pointedly no mention of the Devil’s Sons, and definitely no mention of games or weird cult-y rituals.”
Mia pushes another history book towards me. “This one is older, though. It focuses more on the early days of Blackmoor, like—colonial era. And it’s fuckingdark.” She flips open the book to an old drawing of a girl in a white robe manacled to an altar, her throat slit by a jeweled dagger with the point still pressed against it. Her blood is pouring out into a pitcher set below, like a slaughtered hog in the drawing.
“There’s more,” Mia says, seeing my horrified face. She flips the page to another drawing, this time of what appears to be the village elders gathered in the town square, sprinkling the blood into the dirt. The next page features them pouring drops of it into the well that’s marked in the description as the town’s water source, and then another of them sprinkling the blood over a field of corn.
“Oh my god,” I whisper. I flip the pages back to the drawing of the girl chained to the altar. I reach out, tracing the lines of her face. “That could have been me.”
“It could have,” Mia says darkly. “If not for the fact that the town had to, um—update their image in the early 20s. It looks like they were pulling this virgin sacrifice bullshit all the way through the Industrial Age, quite possibly. But then—”
She pulls out a stack of newspapers and a book with scans of early newspaper clippings. “Really, I have to commend the librarians here. How has all of this stuff stayed here? They’ve got to want to get rid of it.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” I flip open the book to a page she’s tagged with a sticky note. “I don’t think they’re embarrassed by any of it. They’re not really trying to hide it, so far as I know. Not from anyone here. Maybe from the outside world.”
There’s an article from the early 20s about exactly that—the outside world. Richard Blackmoor, then the leader of the town, was arrested in connection with the murder of Alice Plymouth, a girl who had gone missing and whose parents—obviously not on board with the rituals of the town—had called the policeoutsideBlackmoor.
“He got off, of course,” Mia says, pointing out another article. “There’s no way they were going to make it stick. But then—” she flips a page. “Look at this.”
Plymouth family found dead in an apparent murder-suicide on daughter’s grave.
“There’s no way that was really a murder-suicide.” I look up at her, feeling a cold chill as realization dawns. “He had them killed for going outside the town.”
“Of course. But after that, it looks like the ritual changed. That must have been when they started making the virginity the sacrifice rather than the virgins. That black and white photo in the bunch you found was from the 20s, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I run my fingers over the photo of Alice Plymouth in one of the articles. She looks pretty, her hair short in a flapper style, her mouth traced with lipstick in the bow shape that was popular then. “That must have been the girl who came after her.”