𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐏𝐄 𝐍𝐎𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐌. isaac lahey

seventeen.

chapter seventeen

[ season 2 | episode 9 ]
[ party guessed ]

               THREE DAYS. Seventy-two hours. 4,320 minutes. 259,200 seconds since Marlowe nearly died. Each one felt like a cavernous lapse of time, millions of moments all pancaked into one simple second. Yet she couldn't bring her mind from that night, as Victoria Argent knelt above her withering body and told the harsh truth.

When she woke up in the veterinary clinic, she swore she was in heaven. She'd passed on and her brain was giving her these last minutes of normality before she was sentenced to a forever prison of nothingness. And, in that delusion, she was glad.

Then reality stepped in as the rest of them became aware of her consciousness. She was tethered back to the world and everything she'd been through had settled in.

Now, it was Monday. Four in the morning. And Marley was simply staring up at her ceiling with a glaze shielding her eyes. Since that night, when Victoria Argent knelt above her withering body and told the harsh truth, everything else had fallen numb. There wasn't anything but a dull ring, blurred edges, and overbearing silence.

The darkness of the night hugged her like a blanket, its emptiness bringing a sense of comfort. She accepted the darkness willingly, bathing in nothing but its vast expanse of emptiness. Her mind flickered back to the rave, small bits of memory tormenting the backs of her eyelids.

A monster. She could still hear the way Victoria said it, the disgust in her voice as she looked upon the dying teenagers. I would be disgusted. She could feel the vaporized wolfsbane sitting in her lungs as she laid on that concrete, accepting a tragic death.

A muffled ring rang out, her phone vibrating beneath the pillow it'd been stuffed under. As she moved to pick it up and check the caller ID, her limbs felt weighed down, like an anchor had been tied to her joints and was sinking down, down, down.

With a heavy arm, she yanked the pillow up. It was an unknown number, just a string of ten nonsensical numbers with no meaning. Huffing, she swiped her thumb across the answer button. "Please, take me off the caller list—"

"Hi." It was a boy, his voice groggy and congested. She did a double take at the sound, expecting anything but that voice.

Sitting up, she held the phone tighter against her ear and scrunched up her face. "Isaac?" Confusion pinched at her brain as she spoke, the name foreign against her tongue. She didn't even know Isaac had her number.