Prologue
Obligation makes a person do stupid things.
Like walk into a party with dozens of people who hate my guts.
Like lowering myself to walking through puddles of beer and wafts of smoke, wading through kids whose tongues are shoved down one another’s throats, and worst of all, forcing myself to talk to the Devil.
Or one of the Devils. I’ve only been in this house—smaller and less opulent than the usual Devil fare—for mere minutes, and I can already feel the familiar tension at the base of my spine building. It makes my stride choppy, mechanical, driven by purpose and little else.
I find Xavier first, with his swoopy hair and cute but infuriatingly smug expression. His red and black letterman jacket shines with a whole array of varsity letter pins. There’s a patch with an interlocked PP on the left side, Preston Prep, the bottom of the second P extended into a devil’s pitchfork; the mark of the beasts. Their identities. Xavier should know where Skylar is, though. He’s the one who brought her.
He eyes me with surprise. “Oh look, Morticia’s here. Didn’t know they let the freaks out at night.”
An Addams Family joke. Wow. How incredibly original. Perfectly elementary school. About the place Xavier’s maturity stopped. I have no idea what Sky sees in him. “Where is she?”
“Where’s who?” He takes a sip of beer, the foam lingering on his upper lip.
“I know she came with you, Xavier.” I skim the crowded room. There’s a line of people going down the hall. Headed to the bathroom, I presume. “She thinks you like her.”
The guy next to him, another Devil, Ansel Davenport, elbows him and makes kissy faces. He’s wearing the same jacket. Xavier’s cheeks heat—embarrassed to be associated with Sky—with me.
“You’re useless,” I sneer, turning on my heel. Before I get far, a hand grabs my upper arm and stops me. I turn. Xavier followed me.
He clucks his tongue, rolls his eyes. “She disappeared, okay? Bailed on me. Once she saw there were a bunch of Northridge kids here, she started drinking with them and took off.”
“Sky wouldn’t ditch you for a Northridge kid,” I reply. She’d been ecstatic about this date. New outfit. Hours on her shiny blonde hair. She even convinced me to help her with her makeup. It was literally hours sitting in our shared bathroom, me trying to talk her out of this while Sky just preened and gushed, “I feel like a princess!”
There’s no way.
His face goes shuttered. “Well, she did, and I’m done with her,” he says, walking off.
As if he ever wanted her. I’d been suspicious from day one. These guys don’t slum. They don’t have to. And that’s what it would be considered, going out with one of the Adams girls: slumming.
“Party must be over, guys, someone let the trash in.”
The voice makes my skin crawl. I’d misrepresented before. Xavier, Ansel, Emory, Heston…they aren’t the real Devil—they’re simply his minions. Hamilton Bates, the asshole currently standing before me, he’s the real Devil. The leader of the pack. You’d know him anywhere. Face of an angel, body of a Greek god, personality of a root canal.
“Of course,” he continues in a rich southern drawl, ignoring the fact a girl, some junior, is sucking on his earlobe as he speaks, “someone had already let the trash in. It’s an epidemic. These Northridge kids will let anyone come to their parties. Zero standards, if I’m being honest.”
“I’m not here to party.”
His steel gray eyes sweep over me. “In that outfit, you’re not fit to do anything but scrub floors.”
I’m well aware that the oversized cardigan, ratty jeans, and scuffed boots aren’t up to Preston standards. Of course, nothing about me ever has been. I push my glasses up my nose. I’d already taken out my contacts when I’d tried to contact my younger sister Skylar, who’d promised to keep in touch if she came here tonight. Six texts. No response. Yeah, I’d jumped in the car without looking in the mirror.
“Although,” he gives me a sidelong glance, “the sexy secretary thing can be hot—you know, on the right kind of girl.”
Right kind = pedigree.
Which, I think, no matter how wealthy and educated and successful my parents are, I’ll never be, because it’s about one thing. Blood. Mine isn’t the right shade.
I roll my eyes, long ago accustomed to not letting it get to me. “I get it. You think I’m repulsive. Where the hell is she?”
He drinks from his cup. “Who?”
“My sister.”
His mouth curves into a prickish smirk. “You mean one of the rejects your parents raised you with?”
“Hamilton, I swear to god.”
His eyes dart over my shoulder to where Xavier and Ansel are standing. “I saw her—earlier—but not in a while. I think she left with some Northridge kid.”
“You know how much she likes Xavier,” I argue through gritted teeth. “There’s no way she left with someone else.”
When people look at Sky, they see someone who’s beautiful. Fun. A chameleon who can adapt to any crowd. The cheerleaders, the drama kids, the dance squad, the preps. They see a girl who’s bubbly and kind.
But me? I see the little girl who, at age five, was asked to clean her plate and ended up vomiting an entire serving of green beans back up ten minutes later. I see the girl who, at age six, witnessed me getting an inkling of praise for learning to swim so quickly and nearly drowning in an attempt trying to get the same. I see the girl who, at age eight, accidentally got a marker stain on the bathroom tile and scrubbed at it for five hours, until her nailbeds began to bleed. I see the girl who’d do anything to belong, to be appreciated, accepted, praised, wanted.
No one in this room really wants her, and it makes me anxious in some frenzied, abstract way, as if something is terribly wrong but hasn’t happened quite yet.
“I may be the prince of this school,” Hamilton says without a trace of irony, “but you and your sister aren’t my concern. You’re not one of us. You never will be. Xavier shouldn’t have even asked her to this party, really. Completely out of line. Naturally, he ditched her.” He jerks his thumb toward the row of kids in the hall. “The last time I saw her, she was down that way.”
If Xavier rejected her, Sky would take it hard. Really hard. I swallow back my anger. “If anything happens to her, I’m going to—"
“Do what, Gwendolyn?”
My name makes his face pinch, like just saying it tastes bitter on his tongue. His deme
anor changes, going from lazy to terrifying in a blink. He towers over me, his swimmer shoulders broad enough to cast a shadow. His glare is ice cold, void of compassion or empathy. I search them futilely for a touch of the boy I knew a long time ago, but long gone is the carefree childhood laughter shared between two imaginary pirates on a picturesque playground. Now it’s just this: Hamilton’s stony face and my clenched fists. I don’t even know why I’ve wasted time talking to him.
I go in the direction he gestured, more worried about Sky than a discarded childhood friendship. The line to the bathroom is still a long, serpentine thing, and as I get closer, I realize it’s also noticeably male. I see another Devil, Emory Hall, a junior, pinning in his girlfriend, the Queen of Hell herself, Campbell Clarke, just outside a closed door. A guy in a Northridge shirt suddenly exits the room, but another guy enters just as quickly, door closing behind him with a resounding ‘snick’. Emory turns from Campbell to smirk at the exiting Northridge boy, their palms meeting in a congratulatory high-five.
An eerie chill falls over me.
You don’t get a high five for taking a piss.
I stop by one of the Northridge kids standing in line. “Is this for the bathroom?”
“Nah,” the kid says, looking nervously at his friend. They’re holding forties and one takes a drag from a vape pen.
I’m about to turn away when the vaper adds, “There’s a chick in there sucking dick. One after the other.”
My stomach bottoms out, because I know.
I wish I didn’t. For that split second between ignorance and acceptance, I hope everything would just end right here, right now, because it’d be better than knowing. But I do.
I know. I know. I know.
I lurch past them, vaguely noting they’re all unfamiliar faces—all from the public school. But that red devil jacket is only a few feet away. When Emory sees me, he jerks up, grabbing Campbell’s hand and bolting the other way. I glance back down the hall and all the Preston Devils are suddenly missing, including their prince.