Summer gets out of the front seat. The sunlight weaves across her hair and she shimmers like heaven and treasure but I don’t care. I sit down where she was and she scrambles into the back next to Jenny. Jenny laughs, mean. I say, “Let’s go.”
Mads drives. I leave my window shut and turn the air-conditioning as cold as it goes. Colder than Summer can stand.
Jenny says, “I told you she’d be mad.”
I turn and stare them down. “I have a reason, don’t I?”
Jenny smirks.
And Summer says, timid, “So he didn’t tell you we texted.”
“He was seeing ghosts. He’s on the edge and you’re pushing him too far. You have to leave him to me.”
“He didn’t tell you,” Jenny echoes. “We told you not to trust him.”
“You should’ve fucking told me not to trust you, either!” The words fall between us, bloody and ragged.
Jenny and Summer steal a glance at each other. They don’t speak.
Mads says, eyes on the brake lights crowding ahead of us, “You know you can trust us.”
“No, I don’t! You’re all liars.”
She says, “We don’t lie when it matters.”
Jenny buries her laugh behind her hands.
“He’s not yours,” I say. “He’s mine. He’s doing this for me.”
And Mads says, “So are we.”
I open the window all the way and let the heat of the deadlocked cars wash over us. I’m right, but Mads isn’t wrong.
I say, over the humming waiting traffic, “Fine. If he needs you to meet him, you’ll meet him. We’ll use it.”
Jenny says, “That’s a terrible fucking idea, by the way.”
“Summer should’ve thought of that before she started chatting him up all on her own.”
“It’s a risk,” says Mads. “We don’t know what he’ll do. It’s not like it was before.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “We’re almost done. If this is what he needs we’ll make it happen. So when he walks away he’ll know the only way he has left is to finish what he started.”
“What you started,” Jenny sasses.
“Exactly,” I say. “Me. Not you. And what I’ll finish by Friday night.”
Mads says, “Ambitious.”
I don’t say, They’re closing in. I don’t say, It’s now or it’s never.
I say, “You know I am.”
The traffic moves a halting foot forward. We coast until the river of lights goes red again. I say, “Tomorrow morning. Before dawn. He’ll believe anything we want him to believe. He thinks Banks is haunting him. If you want him to, he’ll think you’re haunting him, too.”
Jenny grins. “We are.”
It sings true from one of us to the next to the next.
I’m angry with them still, but they’re mine. And soon, when the boys are dead and St Andrew’s is washed clean, we’ll be bound back together without this simmering between us.
I say, “We’ll make him as bold as he needs to be. He’ll come for them. All of them.”
“For Duffy,” says Mads.
“For Malcolm,” says Summer, mine again.
“For Piper,” Jenny finishes.
I place one hand between Mads’s seat and mine. She takes it. Jenny and Summer join in so all four of us are locked together.
And they know it without me saying it, because they’re mine:
He’ll kill them all for me.
Toil and Trouble
Day turns to night and he never tells. Not about the things Summer said without me, and not about the things we say together, all four of us casting our spell.
I trust him more and less.
But I trust Jenny and Summer and Mads with everything again. We have a plan and I’m alive the way I’ve only felt since we swore to kill the boys. Since we circled them in red and built plots like scaffolds that we’ll climb all the way to immortality.
It’s my most reckless plan yet and Mads tells me so three times, but she loves it.
They all do.
We meet so early it’s still all night. At Summer’s house, the way we always do before a party, because the vanity in her room stretches broad enough for all four of us to sit under the dressing-room lights. I arrive exactly when Mads pulls up. She and Jenny wait for me and we walk up the driveway together. Summer lets us in without a word and we slink up the stairs past the cleaning ladies still washing another party away.
The three of them paint themselves lethal and beautiful. Cheekbones carved sharp and lips curling. Hair gathered high. Black dresses and white masks. Dusted with gold.
Last night we told him where to be, and when. Or we tell, we said. Everything.
He’ll be there.
We arrive two hours before he will. Weave in through the back with the cars parked far away. Lock the chain back over the door so he wouldn’t be able to break in even if he tried. The theatre is long-dead, its gilded flash rotting the same way it was when Summer’s father bought the building. He wants to fix it up for premieres, Summer said, but keep it edgy. So he can pretend he makes art films instead of slashers.
Unfixed, it’s perfect for us.
By the time Mack arrives—one pair of headlights glowing muted far down the block—our stage is set. My coven is all in place and I’ve swung another door open. I lit his path with thin candles, waxy and crooked and burning nervous below cobwebs and neglect.
He’s alone. I’m sure of it, because from my high window I can see that no one pulls up behind his car or follows him out. And because I know I’m all he has left.
He stops in front of the theatre. He’s dressed all in black with his jacket collar pulled high around his neck. He almost looks sinister. I love him for it.
His gaze drifts up from the foundation to the roof. He looks straight into my eyes for a long moment without knowing it. Far off a dog howls and rattles at its chains.
He digs into his pocket and finds his phone. Types something. Puts it back away and straightens his shoulders. My phone is on silent, but I check it, and I’m right: he wrote to me.
No matter what happens I’m yours.
When I look back he’s gone.
I slip down from my perch and then up again, moving silent into the rafters. My coven waits below me in darkness so thick it would catch me if I fell.
I hear his footsteps. I wait, silent and shadowed.
The footsteps stop.
My coven says—
We know.
I smile so bright it almost breaks through the dark.
My coven says—
We know.
Summer pulls the ropes. They groan and creak and the curtains open. She said, I don’t know how long it’s been since they had a show here. Fifty years? My dad thinks it’s brilliant. Everybody else thinks it’s crazy.
But it’s just what we need—my coven and me. A dead theatre on a dead block where the streetlights are broken and the doors are nailed shut. As haunted as anywhere in LA, even before we crept in and made it our lair.
The curtains clank to a stop. Dust puffs and floats like smoke. They sit all in a row on the almost-empty stage, draped across mismatched chairs with the velvet molting off and the springs stabbing out. Jenny is on the left, spinning a bottle in her hands. Summer floats up to the chair on the right. And Mads sits ruling in the center with a gold crown on her head. Glowing in the shaky light of the dozen candles we lined up at the edge of the stage.