Diana Peterfreund - Under the Rose

ELYSION MEMBERS

Hades = Kurt Gehry

Hector = Nikolos Kandes

Theseus = George Harrison Prescott

Ajax = Benjamin Edwards

Orion = Omar Mathabane

Orpheus = Kevin Lee

Nestor = James Orcutt

I swallowed hard and leaned back against my seat. Stay cool. You don’t have enough energy left to indulge in rage. Deal with it. “Who started this?” I choked out.

“I’m not sure. It hasn’t been discussed on e-mail. But I bet it happened this summer. Nikolos appears to have been one of the first organizers.”

No surprise there. Learn of the thief who can be bought. It was a reference to Graverobber. I was right again. Go, me. “And there are five of them. Every man in the club except—”

“Josh, Greg, and Harun.”

George was on the list. And Poe. How could I not have known this? Of course, Poe was no big shock, though it did make my little street performance ring with a sudden truth. But George! How the hell had he made time for Elysion with all of our other activities? If he was involved in both societies, he definitely wasn’t seeing anyone else. It wasn’t a matter of desire, it was a matter of scheduling.

She picked up another sheet. “I’ve been trying to track the other patriarchs involved as well, but it’s much harder to learn their identities. They don’t send e-mails. Here’s what I’ve got so far….”

But I never got a chance to look. Someone started pounding on the door. “Jennifer Santos!” an angry voice called. “Open this door. We know you’re in there.”

We both froze, but Jenny regained her wits quickly. “Put these in your bag,” she whispered, and handed me a stack of papers. “We’ve got to run.”

“What?” I said. “What if that’s the police?”

Jenny was busy doing something to her computer. Within a few seconds, she’d closed everything down and was pulling out flash drives and unplugging little metal boxes. “Please,” she said. “It’s the Elysions. They’re back, and this time, my super didn’t hold them off. We can’t let them catch us. We can’t let them find out how much we know.”

“I think they know exactly what it is we know,” I said. “Why else would they be here?” Had Poe called them? Had he figured out that I’d ditched him because I’d found Jenny?

The pounding on the door gave way to a much more insidious sound—that of locks giving way. Apparently, some pockets ran even deeper than Jenny’s. Wonder what bribe—or threat—had finally won over the prickly super? So much for all bark and no bite. “What are we going to do?” I said. “This is an apartment. There’s only one exit. They’ve definitely got the fire escapes guarded.”

“Got it covered. Let’s go now.” Jenny pressed a few more keys and all of the computers in the room began making a hideous grinding sound. She grabbed my hand and pulled me across the room to one of the windows. “Go!”

I looked out and down, and for a second wasn’t sure what I was seeing. A ladder stretched diagonally from the window across a tiny space. I stared down into a minuscule courtyard ringed by tall, thin walls studded with windows. “What is this?”

“A light well. Go.”

I swung my bag over my shoulder, gave her a look of skepticism, and went. The ladder was freezing, wet, and slippery. It also bent and popped with every step. I was sure that any second it would slip from its mooring on the lower ledge and send us both clattering to the refuse-littered ground four floors below. The only thing keeping me moving was the sound of the Elysions hammering at the door and trying to get the chain to break off.

At last, I reached the bottom, where the base of the ladder rested against another window ledge on the opposite side of the light well. I slipped inside. Jenny clambered down after me then swung the ladder away from her window. It crashed to the ground.

“They’ll be back down any second,” she said. “We have to hide.”

She pulled me farther into the room. There was a narrow, steep set of stairs leading down into the floor. We descended, and I found myself in some sort of storage area. Giant crates of pop and pallets stacked with snack foods surrounded us. We were in the back room of the bodega.

Jenny leaned against the wall. “So now you see why I’m scared.”

“Yeah. All this on-the-run stuff really does a number on your adrenaline levels.” Speaking of which, I’d just about run out. All-nighters, too much caffeine on top of too little food, and thrilling escapes—not to mention I hadn’t exactly slept well the night before last—and you had a girl ready to drop. “Explain why we ran?”

She blinked at me. “Because they were trying to break into my apartment.”

“Then we call the police,” I said. “We don’t need to hide. What are a bunch of businessmen going to do to us in broad daylight on the streets of Manhattan?”

“This from the girl who a few hours ago thought I’d been kidnapped,” she snapped. “I don’t want to find out what they’d do to me. Hence, I don’t want them to catch me.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “So what do we do now?”

“You mean what are you going to do, Amy. You’ve got the information now. Are you going to let them snatch your society out from under you?”

“It’s your society, too, Jenny.”

She looked down at her feet. “Not anymore. If it ever was.”

So the fifty-dollar bill Jenny had slipped the bodega employee had nothing to do with overpriced Manhattan energy bars. Instead she’d charged him with taking her car out of storage. Within half an hour, we were on the highway heading back to New Haven. I spent the time text-messaging Josh and Clarissa that they could stop worrying about Jenny, but please don’t spread the word until I’d spoken in detail to them both. After that, I tried again to get in touch with my old boss, Gus Kelting, member of the TTA board. Gus was on a business trip to Reykjavik, and according to his secretary, he wouldn’t be available for several days. I was transferred to his voice mail and pressed the 312 code, which I’d learned last summer took me to his special Rose & Grave mailbox. I hoped like hell he was checking his messages from Iceland. If not, we kids would be on our own with this one—though maybe it was time to see if we could hack it without help.

I stayed awake as long as possible, watching to see if we were being followed and debating with Jenny the necessity of our thrilling escape.

“These guys’ idea of being a badass is sabotaging a summer internship, not breaking kneecaps,” I said, finally agreeing with the argument everyone had been throwing at me since Jenny vanished.

“How about hiring thugs to break kneecaps?” Jenny asked. “I’m from the Bronx. I don’t take chances.”

Fair enough.

I fell asleep soon after, and awoke only when Jenny parked in the York Street garage and turned off the ignition. Home sweet home.

“I don’t want to go back to my room,” she said.

“Why not? It’s nice and clean now.” I gave her a weak, sleepy smile. “Come home with me if you want. Josh will probably be in the room, and we can tell him the whole story. I promise he’ll be more coherent than I am.”

She bit her lip. By this point, I was surprised she hadn’t bit it through. “I don’t know how I can face Josh. I don’t know how I can face any of them.”

Frankly, I didn’t know how she was going to do it either, but hopefully we’d be able to steer quickly past accusations and recriminations and straight on to the issue at hand: Elysion.