I stand. Summer’s dress blacks out the white sheets behind me. My heels are so high my arches curl into talons. I’m the huntress and she’s the kill and she knows it now, too late to do anything.
I hold out one hand, palm up, and she places her mouse-hand into it like it’s automatic.
“But I would prefer—” I say, and I lift her hand and kiss it. My eyes are still locked on hers. Her pupils shrink to tiny panicked pinpricks—
“Avenger,” I say.
I drop her hand and walk out.
I am exactly the wrong way to be a victim.
Run
I hate running. I always have.
Losers run, sweaty and red-faced. Glowing in neon or slumming in T-shirts. Flailing and obedient.
I hate running, but I run anyway, because my coven and me, we’re the very best girls at Hillview. Running carves us hard as marble, and it means we can dance all night and fly fast away from the men who want their drink-money back when they don’t get what we never promised.
So I run on Sunday, at dead noon. Alone, on the smoothed-glass sand where the waves wash everything away. In black on black with the ghost of my long hair shadowing me. The ghost of my hair and the ghosts from Duncan’s party—
the things I remember, jabbing at my skin—
the things I don’t, bubbling under it—
—matching my pace no matter how fast I run.
It’s supposed to be two miles out and two miles back to my father’s red car. But I don’t turn even when I’m past the boardwalk, all the way to where the waves crash almost against the rocks. When the sand runs out I climb up and run on the road, straight up the coast and straight toward the traffic, until I can’t feel my feet at all—
until it’s only my black wings carrying me, reaching so wide the cars swerve into the other lane to make room—
until the hills stretch higher and closer, bare dark rock pressing in behind the houses—
—until my feet stop all on their own and I’m crashed against the pavement and a truck roars past with its horn screaming in my ears.
Across the road a silver Lexus pulls over. The window comes down. Another car flies past, so close I can taste the exhaust. The traffic splits the car that pulled over into cut-up frames: a woman yelling something, sunglasses coming off, a door opening.
My wings are gone and my hair is gone and the sun blazes down too bright.
The woman is next to me, all of a sudden: “Sweetie, wake up—are you okay—”
She crouches down too close.
“Sweetie, can you hear me?”
Hey, slut, said Connor on Friday night, can you hear me? Wake up—
She touches my shoulder—
—and I push her so hard she falls almost into the traffic. She lets out a little cry and scrambles back on all fours, grinding freeway dirt into her white jeans.
I’m on my feet again. My shadow covers all of her. She cowers, wide-eyed and scared, and it breathes life back into me, and my hands find my phone and hold it straight out like a gun.
I leave her there, oil-streaked and trembling.
Mads finds me, twenty minutes later, straight down the cliff on a blade-thin crescent of sand the waves can’t reach. She sits so close our arms seal together. The wide gold band halfway between her shoulder and her elbow is cold against my skin.
She doesn’t say one single thing. She stares hard at the ocean. Gold-rimmed sunglasses and scarlet-orange lipstick.
She’s the most beautiful girl in the world. I love her more than anything.
The waves rush in. Washing everything away, again and again, to clear blue nothing. The sun sinks just enough to shine straight into our eyes. White-hot and blinding.
I stand up and walk into the ocean. The waves are stronger than they look and cold enough to crack bone. I should fall, but I don’t. I won’t. I keep walking, steady, until my feet barely touch the sand and I float closer to the sun with every wave. Keeping my head above the water—
daring every fucking wave to try to drown me—
daring the sharks to find me—
daring the St Andrew’s boys to come back—
—until my feet can’t touch the sand at all and the waves are breaking all around me and the water washes out the sun. All I see is the biggest wave yet, blue and gleaming, closing in, and nothing else is real.
It breaks.
The blue goes black. I spin hard away from the light and skid through sand. My lungs burn and then they burst and the water rushes in.
I can’t find the sky.
And then strong hands grab my arm and pull hard against the tide, and the sun comes shouting back.
We wash up on the sand. Mads and me, snarled together. I cough out water and blood. The sky is even brighter than before.
Finally Mads says, “You can’t swim for shit.”
We laugh, not like our siren call on Friday night, but raw and ripping open.
“Swimming fucking sucks,” I say.
“Swimming is for flyover bitches on vacation,” Mads says.
I cough again. There’s water in my lungs; salt beating through my heart. “Swimming is for jock bitches who get up at five A.M. for practice.”
“Swimming is for reality-show bitches who jump into pools in their bridesmaid dresses just to keep the attention on them.”
I slither closer to Mads so my head is against her shoulder. Our hair blooms water into the sand. We laugh again, but there’s something in it that isn’t a laugh at all—
—something like a scream instead, hollow and full.
It dies but the echo doesn’t.
I stare at the sun. “Did you see them?”
Mads’s jaw shifts. “They were by that big window that looks out at the pool—”
“The one we broke?”
“The one we fucking smashed,” she says. “They were together when we went out looking for Summer’s boy.”
It seeps in like the water in my lungs. The lights spinning through Duncan’s house. Everything white, every room with corners hidden away, spotlights beaming down into secret alcoves with plaster-white statues of dead Roman kings—
—just enough space for a glowing girl and a dazzle-smiled boy to hide away right there with everyone watching.
“You and Jenny and Summer,” I say.
“Me and Jenny and Summer,” says Mads.
The silence hangs so heavy it drowns out the waves.
“We couldn’t find you,” she says. Her voice makes every inch of me sting.
We were together at first, Jenny and Summer and Mads and me, dancing and drinking and shining so bright the St Andrew’s Preppers needed sunglasses to look at us. Then Summer found a boy, and she chased after him and pulled Jenny with her, just their fingertips touching. We danced and we drank and we danced. The St Andrew’s Preppers were everywhere, blond and tan and laced together with white powder and pills, and then Jenny was calling for Mads and me and a new song came on, loud enough to see it in the air, the best song all night. And everything was silver, and I spun away from Mads and into the middle of the biggest room. A sunken floor and a soaring ceiling with more lights beating down.
I danced. Alone. A whirl of platinum and white, too fast to catch, cutting the air and sending gold sparks flying.
And then when the song was over and I spun out to one of the niches with the dead-king statues—