Atlas
It didn't take as long to drive back to the academy as I had been expecting. Once the sprawling campus had come into view, a near overwhelming feeling of relief had crashed through me.
Because students weren't allowed to have cars, I had been forced to park in the lot in the middle of campus where the teachers and staff members parked.
When I was walking to my dorm building, I thought back to when Henry had told me to be careful because we weren't sure if there were any guards posted with the task of keeping an eye out for any of us.
As I strode across the sidewalk, I began picking at my cuticles -- a habit I had developed because of the heroin. Whenever I was stressed and craving its euphoric effects, I would begin to pull at the skin surrounding my nails. At a point, it had gotten so bad, in fact, that when I was sent to rehab, they made sure that my nails stayed as short as possible so that I wouldn't be able to tear my fingers to shreds.
My nails were still short now, of course, but they were just barely long enough for me to run them through the crease between the skin and the nail.
A couple of minutes passed, and before I knew it, I had arrived at the familiar double doors of my dorm building, glad I hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary.
The ache of homesickness slowly released its clutches, and a feeling of weightlessness overtook me as I finally made it to my home sweet home.
I grasped the gold handle, twisted it, and pushed the door open.
After I turned on the lights, I noticed all of our forgotten belongings: backpacks, chargers, clean clothes, dirty clothes. Seeing all of those mundane items brought me back to when life had been simple -- when all I had to do was go to school, go to football, and take just a few steps to knock on the connecting door between me and Gwendolyn's room.
I longed for life to be that leisurely again. But somehow, a small part of me sensed that maybe the hell we'd been through over the past few days had a minuscule trinket of a blessing disguised in it. After all, it had brought us closer together, but it was never like we asked for any of it to happen.
Reminding myself that I was on a time crunch, I shook myself out of a rabbit hole of thoughts and began to rifle through all of the things I needed to grab in my mind.
But before I could look for a bag to put everything in, I heard footsteps sounding into the room from somewhere in the hall.
Slowly, carefully, I paced over to the doorway and peered down both ends of the hall.
There wasn't a single person in sight, which was interesting because I hadn't heard a door open and shut.
Once a few seconds of silence passed, I convinced myself that it must have been caused by my own paranoia, and I strode back into the room to continue gathering my required items.
But the footsteps persisted.
I swiftly pivoted on the balls of my feet and rushed over to the doorway yet again. Staring down the hall on either side, I still found no one. But I knew that hearing those footsteps twice couldn't have been a coincidence. Especially because they sounded nearly identical both times that I'd heard them.
I almost missed it, but I just barely saw someone peek out from the communal bathroom area, which was carved out five feet from the wall to allow for the width of the doors.
What I didn't see, though, was the small dart gun gripped in their hand. I didn't realize what had happened until I was bringing a hand to my neck, having felt a slight sting in the area.
YOU ARE READING
My Devoted Demons
Romance"Um, hi," I say, my voice quivering under their gazes. "Hello, little one," the leader -- Caspian -- says. "I think we're going to have a lot of fun, don't you?" ~~~~~ When Gwendolyn Sage waltzed into Whitmore Academy, she didn't expect her dorm to...
