A white sheet hangs high up behind them: a stretched-smooth waiting screen.
Mack stands below it all, with ten rows of broken seats between him and my coven. He can’t see me, but he can see my coven real and ready: the spirits he summoned.
They speak again, louder, rising—
We know.
Jenny holds the bottle out to him. Shakes it bright and tempting in the candlelight.
And then Mack says, “What do you know?” His voice is bolder than I thought it would be.
Jenny laughs mad and wild and raucous and throws the bottle straight into his hands. He doesn’t catch it. He lets it shatter on the floor.
Summer says, too inviting, “Don’t be afraid. It’s just a drink.”
Mack shifts and stands taller. “Tell me what you know.”
And Jenny says, “You killed them.”
“I didn’t—” he says, and the fear blooms bright in his eyes. “I didn’t.”
Mads laughs. Not wild like Jenny or teasing like Summer. Low and knowing. “They needed killing.”
Mack breathes in sharp and stays that way, frozen in guilt and flame.
Then he lets go.
He says, “How do you know?”
Summer spins her phone and says, hypnotic, “She remembers.”
It lights into him all at once—the truth all of them already know, no matter how much they won’t let themselves admit it. Because they’re innocent, innocent, innocent as long as they tell themselves they are. As long as they can tell themselves we’ll remember and she won’t. Because to them it isn’t real and it isn’t wrong and that little whore with the jade-green eyes would never come for them.
Because that little whore with the jade-green eyes is no one at all.
Because she’s just a girl, alone and trapped and powerless with their hands locked over her mouth—
—and they’re the golden boys today and the whole world tomorrow.
His legs go unsteady and he falls hard into a seat. Clutches onto it. His eyes light up dizzy with the dozen shivering flames. “It’s too much—I can’t—”
“Kill Duffy.” Jenny says it, shrill enough to pierce skin. “Or his guilt is yours.”
“I can’t.” Mack is gasping and gray. “The police. They’re coming for me. That detective knows something.”
“He can’t hurt you,” Summer soothes. “Not the way we can.”
He sits caged in wood and faded velvet. Sleepless and guilty and terrified, but holding onto the boy I’ve made him. He says, “Only Duffy?”
They wait.
“Only Duffy,” he says again, bargaining. “That’s all.”
Mads watches him. She is stone-still and remorseless. “Everyone who shares the guilt shares the blame.”
He flares up and stands and faces her down. “And what if I won’t? Everything is different now. I’ve killed for what they did to her—”
“You’ve killed,” Jenny echoes back. “We’ll tell.”
“But it was right,” he says, and the flames dance and dance. “That girl—”
“That girl,” says Mads. She stands. Stalking and strong. Towering tall at the very edge of the stage.
“She wasn’t the first,” says Summer, slithering up beside Mads.
And Jenny comes up, too, and says, “You knew.”
“But I didn’t—”
“But you did,” says Summer. And she and Jenny stoop down and blow out one candle and then another until only one flame is left. Summer holds it, kneeling on the stage.
Mads says, “You knew enough.”
A taunting, tempting pause.
Summer blows out the last candle.
“Wait—” Mack calls.
They rise up lithe and weightless, coiling away and vanishing behind the curtain. Out in the dark Mack trips and stumbles. “Wait—” he calls again—
Far off to the side, hidden in a pile of broken scenery, a projector beams to life. The light shines bright onto the sheet that hangs down over the stage.
I have everything I need waiting ready on my phone. Today the story is all mine.
It comes to life, unflinching. Flung across the sheet and blown bolder and brighter and larger than life. It’s the party at Duncan’s house, pieced together from all the million pictures the glittering St Andrew’s Preppers posted that night. All silent and in black-and-white, from the dead-king masks along the walls to the pack, grinning hungry together.
The pictures fly faster and blur and then they freeze—
—and now they’re circled in dripping red.
Connor first.
Then Duncan.
Then Porter.
Then Banks.
Then Duffy.
Then Malcolm.
Then Piper—and Mack startles out a cry.
Then the screen goes white.
Mack’s voice trembles out again: “No. I don’t want to see any more. Stop—”
The last face fills the screen. A plaster mask, not the one I stood behind before the night shattered, but the closest we could find. It sneers hard and proud the way only a dead king can.
Sneering like the dazzle-smiled boy.
Mack says, “I’ll do it. I swear—”
But my coven is already gone, already running invisible to Mads’s car. It’s only him in the dark and me in my rafters and the story spinning out in white.
“You can’t,” Mack cries out, half-strangled. “I’ll do it—”
A red X slashes across the mask, one line at a time. It drips bloody and triumphant.
The mask disappears and for a long choking second only the red X marks the white sheet—
—and then I tap my finger down on the screen.
The light goes out.
The silence is better than the most thunderous applause in the world.
In the stunned dark I glide down barefoot from the catwalk. I pull the curtain shut again and the old rope bites my hands. A sliver of glass stabs into my foot. I don’t flinch.
I wait.
In the theatre, Mack shouts, “Hello?”
No one answers.
He stumbles closer.
It’s time.
I pick up an old broken table we pushed off the stage for their show. It’s lighter than it looks, but heavy enough that it takes all my strength to send it toppling. It crashes into a row of music stands and they fall loud and angry.
“Stop!” Mack shouts, and the stage tremors as he jumps up.
I bloom into the innocent flower he thinks I only play for everyone else.
I step into my shoes and clatter across the stage too fast. Slip and fall and let out a flock-girl shriek.
Mack shouts, “Don’t move!” He grabs at the heavy hanging velvet.
I breathe in, scared, and let a frightened little cry slip out. I hate it so much my lips curl back when I hear it. I shout out, brave but still trembling, so he can be braver—
“I have a knife! I swear I’ll kill you!”
The stumbling at the curtain stops. Mack calls, “Jade?”
I say, “Mack!” The dust falls so heavy that I breathe it in and cough.
“Jade!” he shouts, desperate and raging and fighting only for me. He flings the curtain apart and in the solid black, the glimmer of the candles at the back of the theatre paints me his.