Ariana smiled placidly at me as she dragged Missy’s body toward the stone wall and carelessly tossed her over the edge. A moment later I heard the thump of her body hitting the steps.
“Why,” I sobbed, falling to my knees. “Why are you doing this, Ariana? Why?”
She turned and glared down at me, her eyes hungry like a rabid animal’s. “You’re next,” she growled.
She pounced on me, her fingers curling around my shoulders as she let out a screech.
“No!”
I sat up in bed, gasping for breath, sweat pouring off my body. Noelle looked up from her pillow. “What is it? Reed? What’s wrong?”
“Missy,” I said with a gasp. “It was Missy.”
At the same time, both our cell phones rang. I lunged for mine, saw Josh’s smiling face on the screen, and picked up the call.
“Josh!”
“Reed! Are you all right?” he asked.
“What?” I blinked. “Yes, I’m fine. I just had another dream.”
There was a pause. I could hear his ragged breathing clear as day. “I know.”
A sinking feeling went through me as I realized what that meant. Then the bed shifted as Noelle got up. Eliza’s torn pages fluttered to the floor and I realized with a start that Noelle must have been reading them in bed, after I’d fallen asleep. Slowly I turned to look at her, still holding my cell to my ear. She stood at the side of the bed, one hand holding back her thick hair, the other clutching her phone. Over in the fireplace, the last of the embers glowed red, throbbing like a heartbeat.
“Reed?” Josh said, sounding panicked. “Reed, are you there?”
“Okay. Yes, of course. We will,” Noelle said grimly. “Thanks for calling me, Paige.”
She lowered the phone. I’d never seen her look so scared. “It’s Missy,” she said to me. “She’s gone.”
“I get it now,” Noelle said, pressing her fist into her hand as she paced back and forth in front of the fireplace. “I see the connection.”
Downstairs the house was full of commotion as Mr. Lange and his security team made phone calls, ordering up bigger and badder systems, probably tapping the phones or installing hidden security cameras or ordering up some vicious guard dogs. I sat on the bench at the end of the bed, my phone in my hands, waiting for it to ring again as it had been doing nonstop since the news had gotten out. Josh was on his way over, and I felt like I was sitting on a bed of pins and needles, waiting for him to walk through the door. Outside the huge windows the sun was just starting to make itself known, lighting the sky with pinkish-purple hues. It looked like it was going to be a beautiful day.
“What connection?” I asked Noelle, intimidated by her frenetic restlessness. “What are you talking about?”
“I know why they’ve taken Astrid, Lorna, and Missy,” Noelle said, her eyes wide, as if she’d been mainlining espresso all night. She grabbed Eliza’s pages from the floor, wrinkling the edges in her grasp. She flipped through them, reorganizing them, searching them frantically for something.
“Why who have taken them?” I asked standing.
Noelle groaned in frustration as her eyes scanned a page. “Look!” she said finally, holding one out to me. “Look what it says right there. Caroline Westwick’s final words.”
I didn’t have to look at the page. I’d practically memorized it. “I don’t belong.”
“Right!” Noelle said. “Eliza says that Helen had a theory that everything went bad because a girl who hadn’t been properly chosen and initiated had been let into the group.”
“The coven,” I corrected.
Noelle rolled her eyes, letting her arms and the other pages flop to her sides. “Fine, the coven. So if what Grandmother said about these alumnae factions is true, if there are really some crazy old bats out there who think that all this stuff is real, maybe they’re trying to get rid of the people who weren’t properly chosen to be in Billings.”
A whoosh of realization nearly blew me off my feet. Astrid, Lorna, and Missy hadn’t been vetted by the other Billings Girls and invited into the house like tradition dictated. They had been handpicked last fall by then-headmaster Cromwell when he’d been trying to do away with all the elitism he felt Billings House engendered.
“Noelle,” I said, feeling a rush of excitement. “You’re brilliant.”
“I know,” she replied, looking more like herself than she had since Paige’s phone call.
Then the triumphant rush fizzled and died. Because if she was right, this wasn’t over.