Lost in Thought (27 page)

He laughed. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

204 | C A R A B E R T R A N D

When the next slow song came on, Carter went to find Jill. I welcomed the chance to sit one out because, honestly, my head really needed it. Amy, Caleb, and most of the other couples at our table were taking a break too. I drank some more water while I watched Carter lead Jill onto the dance floor.

I’d expected Jill to be a somewhat stiff and awkward dancer, but together they looked surprisingly comfortable. As always, she seemed to relax around Carter. They made an amusing couple, tiny, petite Jill dwarfed by Carter’s broad frame. He was well over a foot taller than she was. I found myself smiling as he spun her expertly—really, she was probably a better dancer than I was—and she laughed in response.

My ridiculous fears from earlier rapidly evaporated. Until the song ended anyway.

As the music transitioned and couples started to leave the dance floor, Carter leaned down to give Jill a hug. She must have said something, but it looked like it was too quiet for him to hear. He frowned slightly as he leaned down closer. I saw his lips forming a question when, without warning, for the second time in less than an hour, a girl who was not me leaned in and boldly kissed my boyfriend on the mouth.

I froze. In fact, I’m pretty sure the whole room froze. I think we were all too stunned to move or react or do anything at all. This included Carter. I hadn’t been surprised Alexis would kiss him, but this was
Jill
. And it was in the middle of the Winter Ball, in front of practically the entire school. I’d known that she loved him as way more than a cousin, but never in even my craziest moments did I imagine she’d so publicly declare it.

I also couldn’t imagine what had given her the courage to do it.

Maybe it was their effortless dancing, or the magical atmosphere of the ball, or his gentle hug. Hell, maybe she’d had too much champagne too. Whatever it was, though, it had led to her mouth on his stunned,

L O S T I N T H O U G H T | 205

half open lips, and—I’m not even sure how I could see this, but I did—her small tongue tentatively slipping between them. Suddenly my joke from a few minutes ago was not funny but terribly prophetic.

Beside me, her jaw hanging open in utter disbelief, Amy said, “Ho-ly shit! Apparently it’s kiss-your-boyfriend night and we didn’t get the memo!” She looked around as if there might be other girls in line for the honor. I was almost afraid there were. I even noticed Alexis gaping.

Without thinking, I shot up from my chair, just as Carter regained his senses and stumbled backward from Jill. He looked completely dazed, both reaching toward her and touching his lips in total confusion. Jill turned and sprinted from the room, slipping out from under Carter’s hand on her shoulder.

Lightheaded and dazed myself, I too stumbled. And of course, in the most ridiculous of coincidences—though by that time, I probably shouldn’t have expected anything less—a helpful server happened to be on hand to catch me as I fell backwards. The moment he touched me, I saw that he was going to die, and soon. He had no idea he had cancer. His might not have been a very grisly death, but my champagne-and-shock-addled brain was already too overwhelmed to handle the surprise.

“I’m so sorry,” I cried, then promptly fainted in his arms.

MY FIRST WINTER Ball became the stuff of legend. I’d felt popular-by-proxy since I’d arrived at Northbrook, and had then gained further notoriety by my own antics—namely dating Carter, nearly “dying” at the bookstore, and causing Alexis Morrow to be banned from said bookstore—but because of the level of witnesses and the sensational nature of the events, I was instantly catapulted to a new stratosphere of recognition after the Ball.
Everyone
wanted to know how I was feeling, how I dealt with my “condition,” and, most importantly, how I

206 | C A R A B E R T R A N D

felt about seeing my boyfriend being French-kissed by his “ex-girlfriend.”

I didn’t bother correcting people that Jill wasn’t ever his girlfriend, and I couldn’t imagine the level of attention I’d have gotten if people knew I’d actually seen it twice; it was already ten times worse than the day after my first collapse or the day my relationship with Carter went public. I’d learned to enjoy gossip since coming to the Academy, but the negative side of that is learning to hate being the subject of it.

If I felt bad for myself, I felt a million times worse for Jill. I wasn’t mad at her, not really, just sorry. I didn’t like pitying someone, but I couldn’t help it, even if she’d brought the attention upon herself. I couldn’t fathom why she’d done what she did at the Ball, but she certainly wasn’t talking to me about it. In fact, she wasn’t talking to anyone.

Carter had tried, repeatedly, but she was avoiding him as effectively as she’d previously been avoiding me. She hadn’t quit the bookstore, but she wouldn’t stay within five feet of Carter when she was there and she stopped attending Sunday dinners completely. If I’d thought she was isolated by nature before, now she was in a self-enforced soli-tary confinement. For my part, I left her alone—I didn’t think it would help if I tried to approach her—and I encouraged everyone else to do the same. With time, I prayed this would blow over, or that something more sensational would take stage.

The only other item remotely worth any attention was the new ‘It Couple’ on campus: Alexis and Garrett. Carter and I had held the title for a while, but we’d become relatively old news by this point. Apparently Alex hadn’t dated an Academy boy since her freshman year, and Garrett had never really dated anyone, so this was big news for the queen of campus. I was intrigued to discover that the last fellow student she
had
dated was the same senior Amy’d gotten tangled up with

L O S T I N T H O U G H T | 207

her freshman year; I had a feeling that’s where some of the their ani-mosity came from.

I wished I could be happy for the new couple, but it was difficult. I wasn’t sure that Alexis wanted more than someone to distract her from her failed attempt on
my
boyfriend, and I was afraid Garrett’s heart would end up broken. Speaking of, I was also bizarrely concerned about
Carter’s
heart. I couldn’t shake from my head what I’d overheard Alexis say to him the night of the Ball:
She’ll break your heart,
Carter. She will.
Would I? Why did she think that? And why the hell couldn’t
I
stop thinking about it?

I was sure she meant it, just as I believed her feelings for Carter were more than surface-deep. The worst part was that this time her Sententia ability had nothing to do with my shaken confidence. She’d been too far away from me that night for it to have had any effect. No, something about her words struck a nerve of doubt, all on their own merit.

But I kept these worries to myself, for now. I didn’t
think
I would break Carter’s heart or, at least, I had no intention of it. The depth of my feelings for him grew on a daily basis. What I felt for him was love, plain and simple, even if I wasn’t ready to say so out loud yet. In fact, the way in which I became absorbed with him was incredible. It should probably have been frightening, but I wasn’t scared to fall in love with Carter. Instead, I was fascinated, excited, and eager to see how much further I
could
fall.

I was also convinced he felt the same way, maybe even more so.

Where I was reserved by nature, Carter was not. He was passionate and intense about whatever he believed in. Luckily for me, he believed I was the one for him. And I believed it too, so I did my best to push away my nagging fears and, as Amy said, enjoy where I was right now.

s a distraction, I threw my attention into something else: discovering my heritage. It had been months since I’d thought A about it, there were so many other demands on my brain, but I decided that knowing where I’d come from would eliminate one question in my life. That could only be a good thing.

During one Wednesday session, I had a stroke of genius.

“What if my dad’s parents, whoever they were, went here?” I said to Carter as we were packing up to leave the library. “That’s possible, don’t you think?”

“One of them must have, at least,” he replied. “Otherwise why establish a Legacy? It would be an unlikely thing to do if they hadn’t been a student here first.”

I got up from our table and started to wander while I thought. I was walking between the stacks of Academy history when I saw them.

“Hey! Aren’t these all the old yearbooks?”

Carter joined me and surveyed the dusty spines in front of us.

“Looks like it to me.” I trailed my fingers over the yearly records of Academy students—every year since the school’s inception was lined up in neat row after row—and stopped on one from the year my fa-L O S T I N T H O U G H T | 209

ther was born. Carter tilted his head at me in curiosity. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know…just, what if I can look through these and see someone who looks like him? It could be a clue or something to go by.

I know it’s a long shot, but…”

“Let’s give it a try anyway,” he suggested. “Why not? It might be a long shot, but we don’t have anything to lose but a few hours of time together. I can afford that.”

It amazed me that he seemed excited to spend time looking through dusty old yearbooks, just because it would be with me, but I think he liked the challenge of the mystery too. He wanted to figure it out as much as I did. We went back to the table and began flipping pages. Not knowing where else to start, I picked the book under my fingers, from the year of my father’s birth.

It was actually fun, looking at all the unfamiliar faces and imagining who they were today, or which of my classmates they were like, seeing how styles had changed or not changed. We finished the first book without any luck, but it wasn’t late and we were having a good time, so we picked up the one next to it.

Turned out my silly idea was a good one. Except that our search shouldn’t have been for my
father’s
face.

We were nearing the end of the second book, in the middle of the senior class portraits, when I stopped in surprise. There, smiling back at us from the second row from the bottom, was an almost exact like-ness of…me. I pointed at her and stared for a minute. She really looked just like me, except for a subtle difference in the shape of the eyes. Otherwise, it could have been a picture of me taken yesterday; her long, dark hair was even styled the same. We both leaned over to read the corresponding name printed on the side of the page. The small text read: Virginia Lillian Marwood.

210 | C A R A B E R T R A N D

Carter inhaled sharply. “Is it possible?” he said aloud, but I was sure he was talking to himself.

I tapped his arm. “You know who she is?”

“Yes, though obviously I’d never seen her before, or I might have known who you are too…” he trailed off and recommenced staring at the page.

“Um, so who is she?”

He turned back to me and said, “She is—was—the last Hangman.

Now…maybe that’s you.”

Hangman?!
I was not encouraged by that. “Wh…what do you mean?”

But he was back to muttering to himself. He stood up and started pacing. “It could be…half the gift makes sense anyway…but there has to be another.”

I stood too and moved into the small path he was wearing in the carpet next to the table. He nearly bumped into me. “Hello? I’m still here, and kind of freaked out. What do you mean, Hangman? Who is she?”

“Sorry! I…just can’t believe it.” He put his hands on my shoulders and guided us back to our chairs.

“Well…maybe it’s nothing.”

Carter gave me his measured look. Okay, it probably wasn’t nothing. “The resemblance is way too strong to be a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“I do. But you’ve scared me, so I’m pretending maybe there’s nothing to worry about.”

He shook his head. “No, you don’t have to worry. It’s just, well, you’re special. Even more than we already thought.”

“What does that mean?”

“The Marwoods were the last documented Hangmen. Virginia Marwood was, we thought, the last of the last and she disappeared the

L O S T I N T H O U G H T | 211

year after she graduated. I don’t know anything else about her, but I’d heard that much at least. We’re always on the lookout for evidence of another.”

I felt like I was missing something. “So they could do what I do?

Predict deaths?”

He shook his head again. “Not exactly, no. If that were the case, I’d have known immediately who you were. You must get that, well,
part
of that, from whoever is your grandfather. It has to be. No Lainey, they didn’t predict anything, but they did deal in death. The Marwoods are exactly what I said. They’re hangmen…executioners.
Carnifex
is the Latin.”

Okay, this was
not
good at all. He said I didn’t have to worry, but honestly, this was about the freakiest thing I’d heard since this whole crazy thing started. And that was quite a distinction, considering. “Can you spell this out for me, please? What, exactly, is it that they could do?”

He ran his hands through his hair, the international sign, as far as Carter’s signs went, that I was right; I
should
be worried. He reached over and grabbed my hands. “You can do it too,” he said. “At least I’m guessing you can. With Thought, Lainey, they—you—can cause death. That’s what they could do. All of them.”

It was my turn to gasp. If Carter hadn’t been holding onto me, I would have fallen off my chair.
“WHAT?!
That…that’s impossible.”