Nocticadia: A Dark Academia Gothic Romance

The helmet pressed into my wound as the wind whipped around me. I’d never been on a motorcycle in my life, but I could honestly say I found nothing appealing about the ride right then–particularly with how fast Caedmon was speeding down the road. The fact that I was forced so closely to his body troubled me. It felt too intimate and wrong. Even so, I held on for dear life, terrified that I would fly off the back of the bike, if I released him.

He slowed his speed and pulled off the main road, down a wooded path where a sign read Cascadin Falls, with an arrow pointing deeper into the woods. Panic swelled in my lungs, my panting breaths beating against my face inside the helmet, while he rolled the bike to a stop and cut the engine.

As he sat up, his back pressed to my breasts, I immediately pushed off him and climbed from the bike, shoving the helmet’s face shield up. “Why are we stopped?

“We’re not sticking around.” He glanced down at his watch, which flashed with some kind of alert. “Get back on.”

“Caed, please. I’m not an enemy here. Just … tell me where you’re taking me.”

“I told you. To the university.”

“This isn’t the university.”

Brow quirked, he didn’t bother to look up at me. “I can see why he likes you. You’re brilliant.”

“You’re angry at him. Why?”

Like every other time, no answer. He stared at his watch, as if counting down to something.

I looked around at the surrounding trees, which had begun to darken with the oncoming dusk.

“Don’t even think of it. I’ll put a blade in the back of your skull, the moment you step off the path.”

His words somehow brought to mind the other night, with Angelo. The helplessness I’d felt then. The fear. It angered me that I had found myself in that position again. Imprisoned to some psychopath.

No. Anger wasn’t the right word.

I was pissed. Enraged.

I ground my teeth as the fury took hold and climbed from my belly to my throat. “If you’re planning to kill him, know that I’ll kill you first,” I blurted before I could stop myself.

Feral eyes lifted to mine, and he slowly lowered his arm. His lips twitched as if to smile. “Where I’m from, that’s called foreplay.”

“Where I’m from, it’s a promise.”

“Get on the bike.”

“Tell me whether you plan to kill him,” I challenged.

He stared at me for a moment, as if silently contemplating if I was worth the extra weight on his motorcycle. “Get on the fucking bike. Now,” he said, resting his hand on the holster at his hip.

Instead, I remained fixed where I was, as if my body refused to comply. Yet, every cell quivered with the uncertainty of whether I’d pissed him off just enough for him to follow through on his threat.

“You want to save him? Get on. Or I’ll leave your ass here.”

It might’ve been a bluff. He could’ve very well been lying to my face.

But it was better than every other alternative swimming through my head right then, so I climbed back onto the bike, as he commanded.

“You try anything tricky when we arrive at the gate, and I’ll gut you open in front of the guard.” Admittedly, the frequency of his threats had begun to wear on me a bit. They no longer held the same punch as when we were back at the mansion. While Caed’s intentions and motivations remained a blur to me, I had a sense he didn’t want to kill me. It was hard to say what it was exactly that gave me that impression. Maybe just the simple fact that he hadn’t put a blade in me yet.

He steered the bike back onto the main road, and within minutes, we arrived at the university’s entrance, where the tyrannical guard stepped out of the gatehouse.

Caed slowed his bike, and as the wind died down around my head, I pushed up from him a bit.

“Evening, Professor Bramwell,” the guard said.

“Evening,” Caed responded in a clipped tone.

The guard tipped his head, eyeing me, clearly unable to see my face through the black shield, the way he so brazenly stared. “That a student with you?”

“Just company.”

Another onceover, and the guard’s gaze lingered on my bare feet, where I curled my icy toes around the knurled foot peg. Frowning, he shook his head and turned his attention back to Caed, his hand resting on the gun at his hip. “This must be your midlife crisis ride, eh?” He chuckled.

I could’ve probably screamed right then, let the guard know that I was in trouble, but doing so would’ve surely put me back on Lippincott’s radar, and I didn’t know which was the lesser of two evils right then. At the very least, I was closer to Devryck by being on campus.

“Yeah,” was all Caed said in response.

The guard waved us on and strode back to the gatehouse. “Have a good night, Professor.”

Not a minute later, the bike lurched into motion again, and I watched Caed punch the same code onto a keypad that I punched to get into Devryck’s lab. The gate opened, and he drove through.

My heart pounded, waiting to see where he was going to go from there.

He turned the bike into a parking ramp just outside of the admin building and punched the code again. The gate opened, allowing us access to the ramp, and Caedmon parked on the ground level.

It occurred to me right then what he’d come to do. I climbed off the bike, and as I carefully pushed the helmet off, I winced at the burn streaking across my stitches. Blood coated the inside of the helmet when I handed it back to him. “You’re going to kill Lippincott,” I said boldly. It should’ve troubled me more that he planned to kill the provost, but it somehow felt like karma. For my mother. For me.

Lippincott deserved what was coming to him.

“Why bring me with you?”

The hardness in his eyes softened only a bit, and he reached out to thumb the blood from my jaw. “You’re better off with me.”

“Better off?” Scowling at the implication behind his words, I shook my head. “What the hell does that even mean?”

“Weeks, I’ve watched you. In class. While you sleep.” His confession sent a shiver of distress up my spine, while the visual of him watching me sleep played inside my head. “He doesn’t deserve you. None of them do.”

“He loves you, you know. I have no idea what you’ve been through, but I know he still grieves for you.”

His lip snarled. “He’s a liar. Or have you forgotten already?” he asked, undoubtedly referring to his involvement in The Rooks.

I didn’t know what Devryck had done to him, how he’d lied to his brother, and I suspected Caed wouldn’t tell me. “I haven’t forgotten. He did lie to me. And for that, he’s an asshole. But I’m allowed to forgive him. That’s my choice, Caed. Not yours.”

Jaw shifting, he studied me for a moment. “Then, I guess this is where we part ways.”

As he climbed off the bike, I turned for the exit, but paused. “You don’t have to do this, you know? Devryck would help you.”

He sneered and unlocked a small storage compartment strapped to the back of his bike, from where he lifted out the plague mask. Moving to his pocket, he fished out a chip, presumably the one he’d swiped from Gilchrist, and handed it to me. “Get out of here. Don’t make me regret letting you take off on your own.”

I tucked the chip into my pocket. “I can handle myself.”

“I’m sure you can, Covington.”

Not sparing another minute, I sprinted out of the garage and across campus, barefoot. By the time I reached the incinerator room, my feet throbbed, cold and stiff as a day-old corpse. I nabbed one of the lab coats on the way into the lab to stave off some of the chill still wracking my body.

When I entered Devryck’s office, I skidded to a stop on spying his upturned chair, and dashed around the desk to make sure he hadn’t had another seizure. Something pricked the bottom of my foot, and I lifted it to find a tiny shard of glass sticking out of my heel. After plucking it out, I looked around to see a shattered decanter and a spattering of blood across the floor. The scene suggested a fight had broken out, and my thoughts spun back to the notification he’d received on his phone earlier, that someone had broken in. Oh, God. Had he fought someone, or had someone ransacked his office?

What to do …

I ran another search of the lab and offices, peeking into the doors and the cadaver fridge, in search of Devryck. Jogging out to the cadaver entrance showed that his car wasn’t parked in the lot there.

Perhaps he really had fought an intruder, then headed back to the mansion.

Damn it.

I decided to return to his office and wait, in the event he called the phone there. Skirting the broken glass, I uprighted the chair and noticed that the computer cord lay unplugged from the wall. Frowning, I plugged it back in, and when the login screen popped up, I punched in the password I’d seen Devryck type at least a dozen times over the last week.

The screen populated all of the applications he’d had open before it’d gotten unplugged. One of which was a video. I clicked on it.

The scene played out a gruesome attack on what I was certain was Jenny Harrick, given the features I recognized from missing persons posters I’d seen around campus. When the hand appeared on the other side of the incinerator window, I tumbled backward into Devryck’s seat, both hands covering my mouth.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my fucking God!

An eerie dread crept over me, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. I stared off for a moment, trying to absorb what I’d just seen, my pulse pounding in my ears. Lippincott had killed her. Murdered her by burning her alive, and had remained silent about the whole thing, letting the campus turn Devryck into a monster.

I hoped Caed gutted the sick bastard.

Rubbing a hand over the back of my neck, I mentally batted away the last ten seconds of the video clip that played on loop inside my head, and stuffed the chip from Gilchrist into the drive. Numerous files popped up, all of them dated and labeled in order.

I clicked on one of the files–a letter to the board that appeared to have been written by Bramwell, describing an adverse event: swapped inoculations. “January fifteenth,” I read aloud. “Dr. Darrows administered doses of toxins that he’d noted were discolored. Possibly contaminated.”

Who’d swapped them?

A vision of Lippincott rifling through Jenny Harrick’s bag just before he’d killed her slid into my thoughts. Was it possible those files contained the same information?

A notification flashed across the computer screen at the same time that I heard a loud thunk echo down the hallway. The only time the notification popped up on screen was when a code, other than Devryck’s, had been punched into the keypad.

“Shit.” I scrambled to remove the chip, which I stuffed into my pocket, and unplugged the computer, just as it had been before. Glancing around the office showed very few places to hide, and with the sound of approaching footsteps, my pulse roared through my veins.

I dashed across the office for the closet and shut myself inside.

Less than a minute later, I heard a crunching sound, like whoever it was had stepped on some of the glass–slow footfalls that seemed to trail off, as if they’d retreated.

I cracked the closet door enough to see a figure standing in the doorway, peering out into the hallway. When they turned back toward the office, I was greeted by the plague mask.

Caed?

I didn’t dare utter a word as I watched him twist away again. He stepped out into the hallway, and I exhaled a sigh.

The closet door swung open.

A second figure wearing the plague mask loomed over me.

A scream ripped from my throat.