Hadrian's Wall (53 page)

For a split second, I hoped
that the freshmen would rebel, that everybody would turn away
around and leave that asshole standing there. It was certainly what
I wanted to do; however, some guys got excited about the bid to
jump and their enthusiasm was infecting the other guys. I started
hearing words of encouragement, “C’mon, before we lose our
nerve!”... “The last to jump is a fool!”... “I’ll bet you a hundred
bucks that I jump before you!”... “Let’s show those arrogant
veterans what we’re made of!” Soon, I was hearing screams...and
thus began a festival of bodies crashing into the water
below.

The group of pale guys made
no comment in favor of or against Verano’s orders. As if they had
been born to do it, they ran and jumped without hesitation...with
elegance. Surely, they would incite envy in Olympic champions with
their elegant style. Even Joe Verano fell silent, as fascinated as
we were watching those beautiful, pale bodies flying off the
rock.

I took a deep breath and stepped back a few
steps, almost tripping over Delilah. She looked as if she wanted to
say something. I wanted to tell her something very important
related to my irrevocable decision to run back down the trail;
however, we both kept silent when David passed us heading toward
the rock ledge. Apparently, he wanted to jump too.

“Dwayne, Nik! Normally I’m
the coward,” he said, turning back and smiling. “But today, I think
you two are the ones with cold feet.”

“No way, dude!” Nik replied, passing us like
a tornado as he ran to catch up. David made the sign of the cross
on his chest and quickly followed.

Upon hearing the sound of
bodies in the water, I closed my eyes, but curiosity made me look.
I glanced at the edge of the cliff just in time to see Abby and
Dwayne jump hand-in-hand.
How
romantic!
I grimaced, feeling my stomach
doing pirouettes. I thought I was going to throw up any minute
now.

Delilah came to me again and I grabbed her
arm to avoid falling.

“It’s hot, right?” she
said, attributing my nervousness to the high temperature. I
realized that she was preparing to jump.

“I will not go!” I shouted, retreating a few
more steps.

“What do you mean you won’t
go? You can’t let me do this alone!”

“I can and I will.
Did you forgot that I just got out of the
hospital?
”

She gave me a disappointed
look.
This was a worse insult than if she
actually had forgotten.

“Oh, really... Sorry, I completely forgot.”
She also forgot that I was in jeans and a T-shirt.

“That’s okay,” I replied in
a faint voice. Of course, everything was not okay, but I did not
intend to discuss it now!

I made a vague gesture with my hand and
started walking back toward the trail. She had to run to catch
me.

“If I’d known that this was
the way it would be, I wouldn’t have let you talk me into coming,”
I blurted loudly as I walked away. My ribs protested a bit and I
was breathless, but my anger drove me to ignore the
signs.

“Believe me, I didn’t
know,” Delilah tried to argue. “Verano’s parties always have
rituals, but he’s never done something...so radical.”

“Or full of suspense,” said
Sally, joining us. “I’m afraid of heights. I won’t even jump from a
trampoline half a meter high, much less from a cliff.”

Suddenly, two of the fraternity guys blocked
our access to the trail. Joe Verano immediately approached us.

“Sorry, girls, there’s no
going back. You already received your passes, so you’ve got to take
it all the way.” We three stared at each other, shocked.

I peeked around, looking for help, but then
I remembered that our guys had already jumped.

“C’mon,” Verano insisted.
“I guarantee you won’t get hurt.”

I winced when he tried to hold onto my arm.
I felt an instantaneous repulsion for this man.

Noticing my gesture, his
smile faded and then he turned nasty. “You’re the girl who got lost
on the mountain, aren’t you? The Cahills’ baby girl. I suppose you
think you’re better than the others?”

It was his manner that was scaring me, but
he really scared me when he grabbed my wrist tightly and started
pulling me toward the rock ledge.

“Let go of me!”

“Fear goes away fast, baby!” He affected a
sympathetic tone that sounded as insulting as it was fake. “If you
can face the mountain, certainly a jump in the lake will be easy.”
He kept looking around as if searching for something among the
trees.

With some difficulty, I managed to turn my
body and saw Sally and Delilah following the two yellow-shirt guys.
They seemed annoyed, but not as scared as I was.

“You don’t understand...” I
tried to explain, but he cut me off.

“Explanations are a waste of time,” he said,
continuing to pull me toward the rock.

When I realized we were right on the edge of
the rock, I grabbed his shirt, clinging to him as vertigo washed
over me in waves. Though the height was comparable to a three-story
building, to me it seemed like twenty! In the water below, the
heads of those who had just jumped moved slowly away toward the
other shore. Some were floating, others were playing, splashing
water on each other. Again, the music and the laughter came to us
on gusts of wind, which seemed to be growing stronger. People were
having a great time, totally unaware of the drama I was living up
here.

“A small step forward and everything will
end quickly,” he whispered in my ear.

“Listen to me...”

“I advise you to let go of the girl.” A
familiar deep voice echoed across the rock. “Step away from her
slowly.”

Verano didn’t seem
concerned. It was like he’d been waiting for him. He turned back
and said, “So it’s really true. You wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t
important to him.”

Dazed, I looked back and
saw Stephen Cahill casually leaning against the trunk of a tree.
However, his attitude didn’t seem casual. He took off his
sunglasses and glanced at me.

“She has broken ribs,
Verano. She can’t participate in the antics that you organize for
your silly parties.”

Verano feigned
astonishment. “I didn’t know! You should have told me.” He scolded
me as he slowly moved away from me.

“I tried, remember?” I
didn’t hide my anger.

As soon as he let me go, I quickly walked
over to Stephen. Automatically, he put his gloved hand on my back
in a protective way.

“Come,” he commanded, without taking his
eyes off of Verano.

Indeed, his yellow eyes looked like two
yellow drills and he made no effort to disguise them.

The discomfort among the
Empiric Fraternity’s guys became almost palpable. Although Verano
pretended to remain calm, I could see his nervousness. The signs
were evident. He couldn’t hide his trembling hands or the
tightening of his jaw.

Only then did I notice the
shocked looks on Sally’s and Delilah’s faces—Delilah being the most
shocked! Stephen glanced briefly at the two girls. They needed no
more incentive to follow him.

“Do you want to go to this party?” he asked
me quietly.

I couldn’t say why, but his
scowl no longer seemed as threatening as before. I was learning to
trust him and feel safe at his side.

What an irony!
Verano’s affable manner scared me far more than
the angry expression on Stephan’s face.

“No,” I hastened to reply.

“And you two?”

“No way!” said Sally.

“Not
anymore,” Delilah replied, staring at Stephen as if
mesmerized.

Unlike Delilah, Sally felt intimidated by
his nearness. When Stephen turned, she took a step back. Of course
he noticed, because nothing escaped those strange, penetrating
eyes. His expression softened a little in an obvious effort to not
seem so threatening. He straightened his back, put on his
sunglasses, and gave us a half smile.

Hmmm... I appreciated his attitude.

Stephen was starting to
rise in my esteem—not that he would care about what I did or didn’t
think about him. I doubted that my opinion would bother him at all,
but the fact was that I was seeing him differently now. I’d already
grown accustomed to being around “the palefaces.” That meant that I
was able to be in the same room with them while their eyes were
changing color. Is that not a big breakthrough?

Voices behind us
interrupted my reverie. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that
there were still some undecided freshmen on the edge of the rock
and the yellow shirt guys were laughing at their fear, but Verano
was not among them. It didn’t take me long to locate him. He and
his two partners were walking toward us.

I recognized one of the guys. He was the guy
that Dwayne talked to in the clearing. Suddenly I realized that
they were following us. To me, it seemed ironic that he intended to
abandon the party so readily now that Stephen was there.

“Don’t be a party-pooper,
Cahill.” Verano walked a little faster to catch up to us. “They’re
just scared. They’re outsiders and don’t know our
traditions.”

“Traditions?” Stephen laughed wryly.
“Traditions that you just invented.”

Verano’s expression
suddenly became serious. His eyes were troubled.

“He’ll have to meet me
someday. You know that.”

Stephen’s smile widened and
an evil glare shone through the shadowed lenses.

“Oh, don’t worry about it.
He will...now that you’ve gotten his full attention. I hope you
will enjoy the realization of your greatest wish.”

Verano squinted, trying to understand the
meaning of those words.

Stephen’s face grew
serious. “This time you went too far. If I were in your shoes, I’d
leave town right now.”

Stephen turned his back to them and kept
walking down the trail without looking back. The girls and I
followed clumsily behind him. When we got to the end of the trail,
he stopped abruptly, turned to Delilah, and held out his cell phone
to her.

“Call Preston and tell him
that you’re not staying for the party,” he ordered in an impatient
voice.

“He left his phone in the car,” she
argued.

“Then find someone who will give him the
message.”

She nodded, taking the
phone from him as if he had just handed her a rare jewel.
While she made the call, Stephen gently pulled me
by the arm, leaving behind us a dumbfounded Sally; so he led me
down to the shade of the trees.

“Thank you!” I took the
opportunity to say that, hoping it would quell his temper.
“I didn’t even want to go to
that party!”

“Then why were you up there?” he asked,
obviously still angry.

His voice made me angry
too, but I swallowed an “It’s none of your business,” since he’d
just saved me from a very difficult situation. I didn’t want to
seem ungrateful. With some effort, I began to explain. “Because
it’s my first day...I didn’t...”
How do I
say this without sounding like a jerk? Like,
‘everyone-does-what-they-want-to-me...’

Stephen took off his
glasses. His eyes were as disturbing as Adrian’s jade colored eyes,
but then his face softened unexpectedly.

“You didn’t want to
disappoint your new friends.” He sighed to keep from becoming
angry. “Don’t make concessions for them. No one should make a rule
that causes you to feel afraid or to make you risk your own life in
order to be accepted. If someone asks you to do something like
that, he or she will never be your true friend.”

Suddenly, his gaze became alert, as if a
thought had just occurred to him, something deeply disturbing.

“Was Delilah the one who convinced you to
come?”

“Yes...I mean, no!”

His face was strangely anxious.
Instinctively I knew that Delilah was in trouble.

“She didn’t know that the
party would be
like this,”
I added nervously. “When we realized it was when
Verano grabbed me by the arm...and you know the rest.” I
deliberately skipped the part where Delilah tried to convince me to
jump with her. I also didn’t mention that she made no effort to
help me with Verano.

He took a deep breath. His
nostrils flared a little, but to my astonishment, his face remained
neutral. Mmmm... Like his “brother,” Stephen had remarkable control
over his emotions, which he kept carefully hidden behind an
inscrutable mask.

At that moment, I hoped
I’d given the right answer for Delilah’s sake. Stephan’s stony face
didn’t give me any clues about what he was thinking. A wicked
thought occurred to me.
Delilah will owe
me for this...and I’ll charge it!
Especially because it was the only opportunity I’d have to
unravel the strange connection between her and Stephen Cahill. That
there was a connection, I had no doubt! Meanwhile, Delilah was
talking on the phone, but looking at us.

“Again, thank you.” I
placed my hand on his arm, anticipating the electricity that would
make my fingertips tingle...and indeed, I wasn’t
disappointed.

He tilted his head slightly, as one might
bow. “At your service, madam.” The enigmatic face didn’t show if
he’d noticed that I was testing him.

After Adrian, Dr.
Barringer, and now Stephen, I came to the conclusion that each of
them "vibrated" in a different way. As if the “shock” of them, or
whatever it was...was equivalent to the fingerprints of normal
humans, (i.e., there is a pattern for each pale individual), a
subject I was researching on the Internet.
Okay girl, your hallucination is science thing now!
Maybe...CSI show!