An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 8

Ellory left the bathroom in a daze, shrouded not in numbness but in triumph. Her fingers traced the lines of the tattoo—or where she guessed the lines were, as her skin felt smooth to the touch beneath her tangled hair. Part of her wanted to stay in that hallway, studying the impossible from every angle, but the rest of her was energized. Finally, she had more than feelings without facts. How could she have forgotten getting a tattoo , let alone one in her own handwriting? Something was wrong with her memories, and this was tangible proof. Tangible and terrific and terrifying.

“—if you can believe it!”

Ellory jumped as laughter echoed down the long corridor, reminding her that there were other people in the world. Sterling-silver utensils clinked against porcelain plates. Muffled conversation fused individual voices. She turned toward the foyer, freeing her coat from the hall closet before freeing herself from the house. Outside, an argent moon stared her down, half hidden by the smudged shadows of the surrounding trees.

The chill wind kept her grounded, focused. Without the autumn cold slicing bladed air into every gap between her coat collar and bare skin, her mind would have been stuck in that incredulous moment—a moment that already felt like it was slipping away the longer it took her Uber driver to arrive. She flipped between the photo and the app, the app and the photo, RemƎmber and Your driver is 5 minutes away . Neither felt real.

“Morgan, what the hell are you doing?” Hudson Graves stood in the doorway, one hand struggling into the sleeve of his peacoat and the other resting on the skull door knocker. “You’ve chosen a fine time to get some air.”

Ellory looked back at her phone. “I’m going to campus.”

“What? Why?”

For a moment, she considered telling him—about the tattoo and about the peculiarity of her school year, her expanding document of notes at the dorm, and her rising sense that something was not right with her head. But they were not friends just because he had finally buttoned up his coat and was now joining her on the gravel, his face tight with concern. They were not friends just because he had noticed her being missing from the salon within minutes. This night held them as close as a secret, but the sun would soon rise to illuminate the truth: She and Hudson Graves would never be friends.

“Tell Professor Colt I wasn’t feeling well,” she said. The Uber had missed the turn up the drive and was now looping around the massive block. “I’d love to come next month if he’ll have me.”

“Morgan, you can’t—” Ellory watched him visibly think better of telling her what she could and could not do. “Please come inside. I know this group is…a lot, but I promise you’re meant to be here.”

There was a gravity to the way he said it that made her pause. Darkness painted the fiery fall foliage in black and gray, making the trees appear like monsters circling their prey. Hudson, too, seemed monstrous by moonlight, the pewter rays making the angles of his face more severe. His eyes were in shadow, his lustrous mouth set in a familiar frown. The wind swirled around them, toying with the ends of her curls, the tops of her ears, the unprotected line of her chin. It was as if they existed in a world divorced from reality.

Meanwhile, her Uber circled and circled and circled the block, getting no closer to whisking her away. She would have to walk down the drive to meet the car, navigating the thick gloom of a yard that was, by now, as dark as a tomb. There would be nothing but the watery light of her phone, nothing but the slide of her shoes through the grass, nothing but the puffs of her breath and the hope that there was a driver waiting for her at the end of a too-long walk. She’d seen far too many horror movies with a scene like that.

Ellory canceled the car.

“Fine,” she said, putting her phone back into her pocket. “But only because these people waste so much food, it physically pains me.”

Hudson’s lips twitched into something resembling a smile. “Shall I get you a to-go box?”

“Shut up,” Ellory muttered, sliding past him. The salon waited, and the house would be a welcome haven from the crisp breeze.

His hand curled around her forearm, then slid down before she could take another step.

Ellory was so surprised by the contact that she allowed it. His fingers were soft when they settled at her wrist, loose enough for her to pull free if she wanted to. His thumb traced the fragile lines of her veins. She still wasn’t used to being this near to him or to the electric charge that his touch incited across her nerve endings, shocking and grounding all at once. Her mind told her to step away, but her body swayed closer to him, weak to his gravitational pull. In turn, he bent toward her like a flower to the sun, his dark eyes open and searching. Sometimes, they were compulsively intersecting lines, but other times, times like right now, they were a tangled knot whose interwoven threads were impossible to unravel.

“Thank you,” he said, “for coming.”

“Thank you,” she replied, “for inviting me.”

Behind Hudson, the front door opened. He dropped her hand as if her skin were suddenly slicked with acid. Professor Colt squinted at them in the halo of the porch light. He held a silver lighter in one hand and a cigarette between his lips. The look on his face made Ellory’s cheeks heat, even though there was nothing going on but a temporary ceasefire. “We’ll be having after-dinner drinks in the study soon. Will you be joining us?”

Hudson’s moon-kissed face was turned away, so it was Ellory who answered, “Yes.”

“In you go, then.”

Colt stepped out onto the gravel. The flame of his lighter glowed like a firefly against the night, there and gone. By the time Ellory dragged her eyes away, Hudson had disappeared into the house, leaving her with the sense that she’d lost something vital.

***

Stasie was awake when Ellory returned to the residence hall, and for the first time, that was a blessing. Tai hadn’t responded to repeated knocks or curses at her door; instead, her answering text was delayed by fifteen minutes and had apparently been sent from Cody’s bed. Ellory loved romance as much as the next single person, but her friends had chosen the worst possible time to get laid.

With no other options, she changed into her pajamas with her back to her roommate, trying to think of the best way to broach the subject of a mysterious tattoo without sounding like she needed to visit the Student Health Center. She had a complicated relationship with therapy, something her aunt believed in even less than she believed in community college. Those pills aren’t natural , Carol always said. If you’re feeling bad, you can always come home. That will set you right. Added to the fact that Ellory couldn’t afford it without the guaranteed health insurance of a full-time job—if even then—and it all meant that therapy was a stigmatized luxury she’d always gone without. No matter how badly she might have needed it.

But if the tattoo was a sign that she was losing her mind, Ellory was sure Stasie would tell her.

It helped to have other things to distract her. At Professor Colt’s house, the cloud of conversation—increasingly inappropriate the more wine was consumed—had faded into background noise as Ellory had studied Hudson Graves. After stopping her from disappearing into the night, he went out of his way to avoid being near her, even if it meant talking to Greer while his entire body stayed tight with the obvious desire to tell her to shut up. Ellory drank and spoke little, trying to pierce his head with her gaze and read his confounding thoughts. She had spent more time with him tonight than in the last three months, and she had never felt less like she understood him.

“Did you forget how to get dressed,” Stasie asked, “or is this you coming on to me?”

Ellory realized she was standing in front of her bed, still wearing nothing but a pair of pajama bottoms. She’d gotten her head through her threadbare band T-shirt, but then she’d stopped there, lost in her own thoughts, her lower back and stomach bared to the room. Over her shoulder, Stasie was reclining with her phone in hand, a smirk on her face that suggested she wanted to laugh at her own joke but couldn’t allow herself to be that uncool.

“Can I ask you something?” Ellory asked once she was fully dressed. Stasie didn’t look at her, but she also didn’t say no. That would have to be good enough. “Have you ever noticed that I have a tattoo?”

“No, but I’m not surprised. Aren’t you from Queens?”

Stasie said Queens the way some people might say maximum security prison .

“What does that—anyway, it’s on the back of my neck. You’ve never seen it?”

At this, Stasie finally looked up. Her threaded honey-brown eyebrows drew together. “You don’t have a tattoo on the back of your neck.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you really don’t.” Stasie wrinkled her pert nose. “Or are you trying to tell me that you got one tonight?”

“No, I—no.” Ellory bit back the story of her night, well aware that it would only make Stasie’s nose wrinkle deeper until it concaved back into her skull. “It’s right here. Come and look.”

Instead of providing an argument or a snide remark, Stasie came to her side. They were the same height, so Ellory stooped a little to make it easier for Stasie to examine her neck. Her hands clenched and unclenched, brimming with restless energy. But Stasie was silent as one second turned into ten and ten into twenty.

Finally, Stasie said, “There’s nothing there. Like I said .”

Ellory turned to see that her roommate had brought her phone with her, and she was already texting—likely telling her friends about the latest weird thing Ellory had done. She frowned, wondering if Stasie had even looked or had simply stood there long enough to seem like she had.

She nodded toward Stasie’s phone. “Show me.”

“Okaaaaaay.”

Ellory’s heart dropped as she stared at the subsequent photo, and then it began to beat at a dangerous speed. Because Stasie was right. There was no longer a tattoo on the back of her neck. Unblemished skin stared back at her, slightly lighter than the brown of the rest of her body, framed by curls barely held out of the shot by her fingers. Stasie had taken four bright pictures, and not a single one of them showed the tattoo.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Ellory said, digging around for her own phone. “I just saw —”

Nothing. The photos she had taken were still on her phone, different angles and lighting as she contorted herself in that mirror-lined hallway, but, where they had once shown a tattoo Ellory didn’t recall getting, they now proved…nothing. Because her skin was blank in them, too, and Stasie was staring at her like she might call the Student Health Center herself, and Ellory’s heart was thumping in her chest like a drum.

Her fingers touched the back of her neck where the tattoo was. Where the tattoo had been. Where the tattoo was no longer.

RemƎmber.

Remember what?

“If you’re done being weird,” said Stasie, retreating to her bed, “can you find somewhere else to be? My friends are coming over.”

“It’s one in the morning.”

“Please don’t make it my problem that you don’t have friends.”

“It’s one in the morning .”

Stasie rolled her eyes and returned to texting. Ellory realized her hand was shaking around her phone and tossed it back on the mattress. She had seen the tattoo. She was sure she had. First in the mirror and then in the photos she’d studied in Professor Colt’s front yard. She was sure of it. She was sure .

Yet her instinct was to doubt herself. What if it had been stress? What if it had been a strange angle? What if it had been a defect in the lens?

But, a stubborn voice roared from within her, how many things could she write off as the product of an overactive imagination? She had a document full of the unexplained, a month’s worth of haunting inconsistencies, and still she doubted herself. She had worked since the moment she’d gotten her driver’s license, sometimes three jobs at a time. She had crafted a well-researched nutritional guide for Aunt Carol after her first stroke, learned to cook heart-healthy meals, memorized medication times and dosages, filled out hospital forms, and done her homework by her aunt’s bedside. She had been an honors student, an AP student, a fucking valedictorian with near-perfect SAT scores.

One month in this place had hollowed her out until she no longer trusted her own screaming instincts.

She imagined trying on the moneyed confidence of her classmates, the aggressive hubris of Stasie O’Connor and Hudson Graves, the passive sangfroid of Taiwo Daniels and Liam Blackwood. If she could wear that self-assurance like a costume, maybe she would finally feel like she belonged here—and maybe she could actually figure out what was wrong with her.

“Hey,” Stasie snapped as there was a knock on the door. “Are you leaving or what? My friends are here.”

“No,” Ellory said decisively, climbing into her bed and putting her back to her sputtering roommate. Her exultant smile followed her down into the darkness of her dreams. A little confidence felt good.