Sanctuary Bay (11 page)

None of my business,
she thought. She hurried to the bathroom, grimacing as her bare feet found one of the floor's icy cold spots, then returned to her room. Her empty room.

Seriously, where were they? They told her everything else. Why would they sneak out without her? Sarah's mind buzzed with possibilities, but nothing made sense. The whole school had thrown her off balance lately, from the unexplained dining hall changes to the student-teacher sex. Not to mention Nate's on-and-off flirting, and Ethan's annoying hotness.

But Izzy and Karina were the worst part. She liked them. She wanted to trust them. But how could she when they didn't tell her the truth? Sarah hated uncertainty. She needed to know where she stood with people; it's how she survived.

“Screw it,” she muttered. She yanked on a pair of jeans and one of her old sweatshirts. The pale gray sweater that used to be Izzy's would be too easy to see in the dark. As soon as she jammed on her sneakers, she left, her eyes glued to the dots moving across the screen of her cell. Karina and Izzy were at the edge of the woods.

Sarah trotted down the two sets of stairs and out the back exit. The teachers took turns as dorm monitors, but they were all pretty lax about it. Maybe they figured there wasn't much trouble to get into on an island.

Frost had covered the grass and moisture soaked through the thin canvas of her shoes in seconds. She shivered. She was crazy to be out here at this hour. She should go climb back under her warm covers and leave her roommates alone to do … whatever it was they were doing.

But she kept going. Even when she entered the woods and realized the trees were so thick in places she didn't have a glimmer of moonlight to guide her, she continued. Finally, when she'd walked the forest equivalent of a couple of blocks, the dots on her cell stopped.

Sarah slowed her pace as she closed in on them. Each time a pine bough slapped at her or her foot landed on a stick, she was sure they were going to hear. And what then? How would she explain being out here? Why
was
she out here?

Because it's too fucking weird for the two of them to be in the woods in the middle of the night, that's why,
Sarah thought. She had to know what they were doing.

She crept forward. A yellow light glowed from between the tree branches, and she heard a soft scraping sound followed by a muffled thump. Sarah inched closer—scrape thump, scrape thump—and saw that she'd almost reached a clearing. She pressed her body tightly behind the rough trunk of one of the pines.

Torches. The first thing she saw was actual torches with flames. Three of them were stuck into the ground, casting a flickering light over a clearing around an enormous pine tree, one that towered over the others. Izzy and Karina stood beneath it with Nate. The scrape and thump she'd heard was someone—a guy Sarah didn't know—digging a deep hole, long and narrow.

Sarah's heart lurched against her ribs. A grave.

Maybe the cat she'd seen hanging around the Admin building had died and they were burying it, she thought wildly, desperate for some sort of normal explanation. The hole was too big for a cat though. Way too big.

Suddenly another sound came from the forest. Footsteps.

Sarah pressed herself closer to the tree trunk, the coarse wood biting into her flesh even through her sweatshirt. Four boys appeared from the shadows at the far end of the clearing. On their shoulders, they carried a coffin.

As they moved across the clearing past Sarah's hiding spot, she heard a scratching, scrabbling sound, followed by a muted scream. Someone was in there! Sarah's eyes darted back to Izzy, Karina, and Nate. They just stood there. No horror on their faces. No cries of protest.

They only watched, calm and silent, as the coffin was lowered into the grave, the screams from inside growing louder, and as the boy with the shovel began covering the coffin with earth. Burying someone alive.

Sarah stumbled away from the tree, horrified. She had to get out of here. But her feet crunched on a broken branch on the ground, and Nate's head jerked in her direction. Terrified, Sarah froze. Nate's caramel eyes met hers, no trace of warmth in them. He signaled to two of the boys who'd carried the coffin, and they started toward her.

Sarah whipped around and ran, but they were on her in seconds. One of them yanked her hands behind her back and tied them together. “Get off me!” Sarah screamed. Something was tossed over her head, then a wad of cloth was jammed into her mouth. A pair of hands grabbed each of her shoulders, and she was half pushed, half dragged through the woods. She fought, twisting, trying to dig her heels into the ground, but her sneakers just slid on the slippery pine needles, and the boys were too strong.

It wasn't until the ground smoothed out that she was even sure they were taking her in the direction of the school. They had to be moving across the back lawn now. But even if she could scream, there was no one to hear her. It was too late for anyone to be out. Except the people who'd snatched her.

What were they going to do to her? She'd seen them bury someone alive! Would they kill her too?

The guys slowed, and Sarah heard a door open. Were they taking her back into the school? Maybe they would just throw her in her room and tell her to keep her mouth shut if she didn't want to end up in a hole in the woods too.

But instead of pulling her over to the stairs and up, she was yanked through another door not too far from the first one. “Stairs,” one of them grunted. Soon she was being roughly steered down a set of steps, then across a wide room. Their footsteps echoed.

They stopped, and Sarah heard a key jiggling in a lock, then a squeak of hinges. “Stairs,” he said again. The hands on her shifted. It felt like only one person was behind her now, with one hand digging into each shoulder.

“I'll go first,” one of them said. They started down again, the air growing colder and colder, chilling her through.

These steps were bumpy and uneven under her feet, unlike the first set. While the room had felt cavernous, the stairway felt narrow and claustrophobic. Her arms brushed against the walls. They were wet, and there was the smell of decay. Where the fuck were they?

The steps ended and she was taken down a hallway. She heard a metallic clang, and then she was shoved, hard, sending her sprawling to her knees. “Wait here until we figure out what to do with you.” There was another clang, and the sound of footsteps moving away.

Sarah used her tongue to work the wad of cloth out of her mouth, choking and coughing. She jerked her head back and forth until her head covering fell off. It was somebody's jacket.

Sarah struggled to her feet. It was hard without being able to use her hands for support. She stood in a ragged stone cell with a door made of rusty bars. A large, tarnished lock held it closed.

Panic started to overwhelm her, but she forced it down.
Hands first,
she told herself. She tried to get control over her ragged breathing as she gently twisted her wrists back and forth. Slowly, steadily, the binding was loosening. A few more twists and it fell to the floor, also stone. The whole cell had been hacked out of a massive hunk of rock.

That first day Karina had mentioned something like this. Sarah took a deep breath, and each of Karina's exact words came back to her. “The school is built over the remains of a POW camp from World War Two. At one point it got blasted to bits by a bomb, and the whole operation was moved into the bomb shelter underneath. They made it bigger, carved rooms right out of the stone. Nazi soldiers were kept here during the war. Actual Nazis. Their cells are still down there.”

So that's where she was, trapped under the school. She circled the small room. Damp, phosphorescent patches of mold gave the walls a faint, sickly yellow glow and a tiny sliver of moonlight beamed in from a slit high above her.
The room must go straight through to one of the cliffs over the ocean,
she thought. Not that it was of any help to Sarah, but it was something.

Avoiding the mold, she sat down in the middle of the cell. She needed a plan. Nobody would hear her scream, not with the ocean pounding against the rocks. But eventually someone would come for her, unless they decided to let her starve down here. Which maybe they would, since they'd already buried somebody else alive.

She shivered. No, she couldn't think that way. Someone would come for her. And they'd have to come into the cell to get her. The door wasn't that wide. Maybe two of them could get through at the same time. She needed some kind of weapon. Her eyes darted around. All this stone, but not a loose rock anywhere.

Maybe she could convince them she wouldn't say anything, that she wasn't a threat. She could tell them the truth. That the school was her one shot at a decent life, that all she wanted was to graduate and she wouldn't do anything to screw that up, including running to the dean with a story she probably wouldn't believe.

Nate was class president. Karina was the daughter of a Hollywood power couple. Izzy was the daughter of high-level Boston society types. Who would believe Sarah's word over theirs?

Nobody.

And maybe, for once in her life, that was a good thing. She was powerless. If she could make them see that there was no way she could hurt them, they'd let her go. They could move the body. There'd be no evidence that she could point to. Except that there'd be a person missing, but that wasn't any kind of proof. It could've been some guy who worked in the kitchen that nobody even knew. Or a janitor. Someone unimportant. Someone no one would care about. Someone like her.

No one will come looking for me,
Sarah thought. Izzy and Karina can say I fell off Suicide Cliff, and that will be that.

She pushed the thought away. She had to focus on staying positive.

So that was the plan. She'd start talking as soon as she heard someone coming toward the cell. She forced herself to believe—even though they had thoroughly conned her—that Karina and Izzy wouldn't hurt her, not if they didn't have to. Nate either.

She shifted, trying to get comfortable on the hard floor, and something moved under her butt. She reached down, pulling free something long and narrow. A branch? She held it up to the faint light. A bone.

Sarah hurled it at the wall, unable to stop a horrified scream from clawing its way out of her throat. Maybe it was a prisoner's. It could be decades old. She had no reason to think there'd been another student left to die in the cell. She leaned forward, studying the bone from a distance. It looked old and human.
From a prisoner,
she told herself.
It's definitely from a prisoner. That's what makes the most sense.
She wrapped her arms around herself as tightly as she could and pulled her hands inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt, but a shudder still ripped through her body.

Sarah squeezed her eyes shut. Maybe it would help if she didn't have to look at her prison.
Wait!
Her cell. She could call someone for help. She pulled her cell from her pocket. “Call Dr. Diaz.”

No signal.

Of course. Even with all the cell towers, there wouldn't be a signal this far down into the stone of the island.

A groan suddenly echoed, pulling her from her thoughts. It wasn't like the moans she'd heard that night on the cliff. It was possible to believe those low, soft sounds could be wind in a cave. This groan was human. She was certain of it.

Was it the spirit of the man who'd become so desperate he killed himself? Was that why it was freezing down here, because so many men had died down in these holes, their spirits trapped in the prison that had held their bodies? If one ghost could make a cold spot, why couldn't hundreds turn the whole area icy?

Her whole body started to shake, so she hugged herself tighter, taking a deep breath. Her imagination was taking over. She wasn't in danger from the spirits of the dead. She was in danger from cold-blooded killers. The moan came again, and Sarah couldn't stop her thoughts from ricocheting back to the prisoner. Had he died instantly, smashed on the rocks? Or had the ocean sucked him away while he was still alive? Had it taken hours for him to drown, his bleeding body growing weaker and weaker as he struggled to the surface again and again for another breath?

At some point exhaustion must have claimed her because when she opened her eyes, the pale light of early morning shone down into her cell from the narrow opening high above her. How long were they going to leave her here? Her eyes caught on the bone. Had they decided not to come back until she was dead, until the flesh had rotted off her bones?

Sarah pushed herself to her feet, her legs cramped from hours on the cold, hard floor. For the first time, she could see the details of her surroundings. Despite the chill, droplets of sweat slid down her back.

What had happened here?

Someone had been tortured, had his mind completely destroyed. Every centimeter of the stone walls and floor had been carved with jagged, meandering letters and numbers, some crossed out with long, deep slashes.

One section was a calendar. Another might be a poem. Sarah wasn't sure. The way the lines of words were arranged made it seem likely, but they were all in German so she couldn't be positive. And etched into the floor, right along the base of the wall and running the entire circumference, was the same word, over and over and over, sometimes big, sometimes small, sometimes almost illegible.

Bromcyan.

Bromcyan.

Bromcyan.

She crouched down and traced one of the “B”s. Her fingertip ran over something sharp. Sarah leaned closer. Something was imbedded in the stone, something small and pale. She pried it free, holding it up to study it. It was a piece of fingernail stained with blood.

Bile rose in her throat. Could these words have been
clawed
into the stone? Was that even possible? How desperate would someone have to be to do that? To dig that word into the wall so many times. Bromcyan.