screwed.
I strain to try to hear something but there’s nothing there, only the distant sounds of students fighting and yelling at each other, so I slowly creep forward to peek around the stone wall.
There’s a garden there.
An entire freaking room carved out of the basement with plants everywhere. It’s… well, it’s kind of stunning, vines growing over the walls and bright blooms of flowers breaking through the deep and gorgeous greenery. It’s like something out of Wonderland, like this entire basement is some twisted and sick version of all my favorite tales.
Only the more I look, the more I see that this isn’t a paradise.
The vines are moving for one, slowly reaching out towards me like they’re about to wrap around my body and take me out. The flowers are all weeping, the liquid coming out of them is eating away at the ground as it drops, and then there’s the small matter of the thorns.
They’re popping up everywhere.
I look down at myself and curse the shorts and tee I’m wearing because they’re not going to protect me from shit but once again, time is working against me here and the longer I stand around indecisively, the bigger and more dangerous the horrors in the room are becoming.
Okay.
Okay, this is fine. I can walk through thorns and acid while dodging creeping vines. Totally reasonable. My gift wouldn’t help me with this anyway, so no use feeling shitty about not having it, just zip through this, Oleander.
Self talk doesn’t really help but imagining everything I’m going to do to this entire freaking school the second I’m no longer powerless sure does. When the first thorn imbeds itself into my thigh, I think about bringing North Draven to his goddamn knees. When the acid starts to eat it’s way through the soles of my shoes, I imagine the look on Nox’s face when I show him exactly how I could break him open. I think about proving myself to Gryphon, showing him that I’m not some useless fucking brat.
And Gabe.
Ho boy, the thoughts of exactly what I’d say to Gabe blocks out the tearing pain of the vines wrapping around my wrist and yanking at my injured arm perfectly. The more of the pain I can ignore and work past, the more aggressive the garden gets about trying to stop me, trying to hurt me so badly that I stop trying to get through.
When I finally get to the small opening, the soles of my shoes are completely gone and my shirt is in tatters, blood running down my stomach from the wounds on my entire torso. There’s vines wrapped around both of my arms and my thighs, twisting and tightening painfully, and I have to slam myself into the wall and then wrench myself around the corner to pry them off, stumbling to my knees as they finally snap and break away from the main plant. I panic, assuming they’ll still be able to wrap around me or that they’ll suddenly become snakes, because that’s the horror show bullshit I’m expecting here, but they instantly fall away from me as though they really were just vines all along.
I stay on my knees for a second longer, panting and rolling my shoulders back painfully, trying to test the muscles out, and the screaming around me reaches a fever pitch.
Does Vivian have some weird fucking S&M kink I didn’t ever want to know about? Does he get off on torturing students and listening to their terror?
I’m definitely going to ask him about it later because I have zero freaking shame about calling him out. This is supposed to be a college class, for fuck’s sake. Who in their right mind does this to their students?
The shuffling catches my attention first.
I startle and scramble back before my brain catches on to what I’m actually seeing. In the doorway of the killer garden is what I thought was a tree trunk, but is actually a student wrapped entirely in vines. She’s alive, I can see her breathing, but she’s out cold. There are cuts all over her body from the thorns and her feet are bare, but she looks almost peaceful now that she’s unconscious.
What exactly is the protocol here?
I feel very strongly about not getting myself killed or injured for another student who hates my freaking guts, but if there’s a chance this thing is going to kill her— am I really the type to just abandon her?
“Vivian, a little guidance here would’ve been