Page 78 of Serpentine Valentine

I sat back in the chair, breathing heavily even though it didn’t seem to bring any air into my lungs.

I hadn’t given much thought to the Man Eater Crew. I had enoughgoing on in my life, but now that I’d turned my mind to it, an anchor of fear sank deep in my gut.

What kind of people would think it was okay to take the law and justice into their own hands this way?

Who was brave and angry enough to take on grown men and bring them to their knees?

I swallowed the bile on the back of my tongue and closed my eyes.

There was only one answer I could think of and she had the school motto painted above her bed in looping script, “Veritatis et acquitatis tenax.” Persevering in truth and justice.

I sat there numbly for a very long time. Long enough to puzzle things together until I got a sense of the whole picture.

And that picture didn’t look good for Lex.

Or for us.

It was two in the morning by the time the front door opened and the clatter of shoes announced the Gorgon sisters’ arrival home.

Juno found me first, startling when she came through the doorway to find me sitting in her chair in the dark.

“Hey, Lunar Eclipse,” she said slowly, sensing the heaviness of my mood. “What’re you doing in here?”

“Have you heard of the Man Eater Crew?” I asked woodenly.

She blinked.

I noticed she was wearing all black, and something was protruding over her shoulder where it was obviously strapped to her back. It looked like the handle of a baseball bat.

That anchor of dread in my gut dragged my heart down along with it.

“Where is Lex, Juno?” I asked quietly.

As if summoned, she appeared behind Juno. If she was surprised I was awake or that I’d taken up vigil in Juno’s office, she didn’t look it.Instead, she merely pulled her sister back by the shoulder into the hall and then stepped around her into the office and shut the door. It was dark, the only light spilling over me from the computer monitor and lighting the room with a dull, neon glow.

“What is it, Luna?” she asked softly, but it wasn’t a gentle tone. More like a dangerous lure goading me into a trap.

“Are you and your sisters the Man Eater Crew?”

She didn’t say a word or move a single inch. I wasn’t even sure she breathed.

It took me a couple of minutes to realize she wasn’t going to answer, and something in my sunken heart began to quake.

“I don’t know why I didn’t think about it until now.” I laughed at myself, the sound hollow, almost coughed out of my throat. “Maybe I was too much under your spell to really notice. How can you do this, Lex? You’re…you’re terrorizing people.”

“Terrorizing?” she said in that same quiet, frightening tone. “You mean like Morgan terrorized me? Like Jerrod terrorized Rhea and your friend Taya? Like the Delta Alpha boys terrorized five different girls over the past few years and fuckingtapedit?”

“You could have turned them in,” I said, my stomach churning so hard I thought I’d be sick all over Juno’s computer. “You don’t have to be a monster to take down monsters!”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know enough,” I argued. “I sleep beside you every night. You think I’m not awake when you cry out and wake up screaming? You think just because I haven’t been violated, I can’t imagine the horror of it and the way it must haunt a person? Ican seethe way it haunts you, Lex.”

“Yes, well, now I’m haunting them.” Her smile was a wide, dim white wedge in the darkness like the Cheshire cat’s floating, menacing grin.

“Why did you come back?” I asked even though I knew the answerlike it was written in blood on the walls.

“I refused to be buried at the scene of the crime. I had to come back.”