Page 14 of House of Hearts

I’m a little afraid of the dark.

I blame it on my ancestors. Something about cavemen and night predators and shared DNA. It’s hardwired in human nature to be afraid of what we can’t see, and right now the sky is pitch-black, the path to the hedge maze shrouded in darkness.

The last hour and a half is a blur, but I trace it from the beginning: the ballroom descending to chaos; the sight of Emoree drifting down the hallway—hard as it is to believe; the mass exodus of students scrambling over one another to leave the dance floor (“Where’s Amber?

” “Her last words were ‘screw this haunted-house bullshit, I’m out’?”); the Cards standing in the center of the room and telling the remaining club hopefuls that we might’ve passed their first test, but they have something much worse waiting for us outside in the hedge maze.

It hardly feels worth celebrating, but with the way Birdie keeps giving giddy grins to me in the dark, I can’t help the excited bubble in my chest. It’s currently fighting for dominance against the other overwhelming emotion of the night: fear.

I throw a look to my right as we approach the hedge maze, if only to remind my Neanderthal brain that there aren’t any saber-toothed tigers or woolly mammoths waiting for me.

No ghosts, either…though I doubt anything could be much worse than what I saw on the balcony.

The remaining pledges follow the Cards through the gentling storm.

The rain has tapered to an on-again, off-again shower, and the wind has ceased screaming.

It wails instead like a distant banshee, and I shiver as a gust racks against my damp shoulders.

My dress remains plastered to my back, and my bun is slick against my scalp.

The only thing that warms me up even remotely is the knowledge that Calvin is suffering, too.

He’s managed to find a new blazer, but his tie remains loose around his throat and his white button-up is wrinkled with the contours of his skin.

Everyone is deathly quiet around me—“everyone” being the non-Card members surrounding me.

There’s Birdie and a couple of kids I recognize from my classes now that they’ve taken off their masks.

The rest are starry-eyed strangers, everyone’s emotions a cocktail of excitement and nausea—but mostly nausea.

There are several Card members joining us, but I only recognize a handful of them.

There’s Oliver, who has only just joined us for the evening.

He doesn’t look at either of us, too absorbed by the blue screen light on his phone.

Then there are the other familiar faces: the Lockwells, Tripp, and that British guy from the cafeteria this morning.

Ash is sauntering forward with his arm slung across a girl’s shoulders.

Her hair hangs in a honey-brown bob, and her lashes flutter above glittered cheeks.

“Isn’t it beautiful out here?” the girl croons—Mallory Hunt, presumably, if Birdie’s yearbook debacle is to be believed.

No one says a word.

“She asked you a question. Would it kill you guys to answer? And smile while you’re at it,” Tripp taunts, demonstrating what he wants us to do with a finger hooked on either corner of his lips. “The entire school would die to be in your shoes. Act like it.”

I force a grin on my lips, but I feel more like a feral animal flashing my fangs.

A guy beside me sticks his sweaty palms in his pockets. He gulps at the approaching gate. “If you enjoy mud and rain, sure,” he jokes weakly, as if he’s expecting a chuckle.

Mallory smiles back at him, her teeth as straight as a military cemetery and her eyes so Fiji Water blue you could sell them at Erewhon. “You’re out.”

“Wh-what?”

“You heard me,” she retorts as she swivels from her partner’s side. “We don’t need any smart-asses here.”

“I’m not…I didn’t mean—”

Tripp glares at him, the threat clear.

Meanwhile, Calvin examines the crescents of his nails in the moonlight. “Don’t take it personally. We’re already at capacity for smart-asses.”

The boy ducks his head and runs back to his dorm with his tail between his legs, and Sadie not-so-subtly smacks her brother in the arm.

“Mallory’s right. It’s just a spot of rain.

Not the end of the world,” Ash insists as he herds us closer to the gate.

“The game’s easy, besides. All you’ve got to do is go in, have a look about, find the heart we’ve hidden, then walk out.

Quite simple. We’ve hidden two of them in the maze, which means most of you won’t get in.

If you find it before sunrise, you’re in.

If not…” He lingers, his gaze cutting to Sadie.

She stands there with a hip cocked and her cold eyes narrowed.

Her lips are a devilish red, like the hourglass on a black widow.

It makes sense for her to be a cunning spider.

This whole school might as well be a web beneath her.

“If not, I’m afraid this is private property.

Trespassing the first week won’t earn you any points with my mother.

” She directs her attention my way. “For some of you, it might mean expulsion.”

A key swings from Sadie’s throat, and she slips it off her neck and turns to the gate.

It’s a wrought-iron vision in front of us, an enormous fence that surrounds the entire northern perimeter of the campus grounds.

There’s a heart crafted around the keyhole, formed by a conjoined set of metal S-scrolls. Melded beside it is a tiny plaque:

The Final Resting Place of Anastasia Hart

Loved Dearly by Her Sister

I brush a hand over the railing. Students have littered the gate with heart-shaped love locks. A miniature Parisian Pont des Arts with young lovers leaving behind their initials. Some names are engraved in Edwardian script, while others are simple silver and stamped in permanent marker.

I narrow my eyes at the one beside me. Fairly nondescript despite the two letters carved into the back: E+P . It hits me like a blow to the gut. Could be a coincidence, but…

Somehow I know it isn’t.

“A girl died here over a hundred years ago, you know,” Tripp says, clearing his throat as the rest of the Cards line up next to Sadie.

Oh good, we’re starting this shit already. We all stand next to one another in the maze’s first courtyard. If the earlier map is to be believed, there are dozens of these small clearings littered throughout the maze, the largest of which sits smack-dab in the center.

“She came into this world in…uh…in 1860…” says Tripp, treating this little ghost story like a failed book report.

“Anastasia Hart came into this world crying in 1860, and that’s how she left it,” Sadie interjects. “She was the baby of the family. Always in love. Always crying when her love wasn’t returned. Her heart was too big, and when she fell for someone, she fell entirely.”

“She fell super hard at sixteen,” Mallory continues, and her voice has that airy, whisper-tone quality that lends itself well to ghost stories. “And this time felt different. The guy’s name was Oleander Lockwell, and—not to be weird, Cal and Sadie, but he was hot.”

This has to be scripted, because Oliver suddenly lifts his head up like a marionette pulled to life.

He tugs at the collar of his vest and throws a disparaging look at the wet ground before addressing us.

“Their meetings were a clandestine affair. They’d hide out in the heart of her family’s maze on campus under the shadow of nightfall.

Anastasia was the only one who ever spent any time in the maze, so it felt like the one thing that belonged to her.

And now she thought Oleander would belong to her, too. ”

Birdie throws a weak smile his way, but he doesn’t return it. He struggles to even look at us and opts instead to stare at the ground.

Calvin picks up the ghost story next, digging his hands into his pockets. “But legend has it his sister was a bitch.”

Sadie twists from her spot in the circle to glare at him, and he amends with a groan, “My bad. Her sister.”

Ash swings an arm over Birdie’s shoulder, reeling her in like he might whisper a secret in her ear.

“Helen, Helen, Helen,” he tuts. “What a nightmare her older sister was. Couldn’t let Ana have a bloody thing.

Admittedly, Anastasia was pretty, but Helen was prettier.

Couldn’t even let her get laid, could she, now? Had to be a home-wrecker.”

Birdie wiggles out from under his arm with a grimace and shuffles instantly back to my side.

Tripp’s grin slashes through the dark. “Shit came to a head when Anastasia caught them together by the lake. Oleander was down on one knee, proposing, and she totally lost it. It absolutely broke her. So, next thing you know, she was running into the maze. But this time she’d never leave.”

Mallory takes over and mimics the breaking of a heart with her hands. “Her heart hurt. It burned in her chest. She could feel every crack in it, and she wanted it gone. So she took a knife and dug it right out.”

In true performance-art style, someone else has to carry on the last monologue. I bet it’s really killing them right now that this isn’t around a campfire, no bulky flashlight to point up at their chins.

Sadie finishes the story with a dark gleam in her eyes.

“She didn’t stay dead. Some say her grave site swelled with a bad storm, and her body was lifted out of the dirt.

Others claim that she practiced black magic and cast a curse before she died.

Either way, she’s lurking in that maze, waiting.

Looking for her missing heart, and believe us when we say any heart will do.

” She lets that last word hang in the air as she stares down each one of us.