“Jade—” he gasps out, and he pulls me into his arms and holds me so tight I almost can’t breathe. “Did you see them? Did they come this way?”
I find my phone and shine the flashlight into the dark. Backstage is a cluttered wreck. The light catches on the huge webs that hang down from the catwalk. A spider skitters back up its silk. I shudder. “Who?”
His flashlight comes on and he says, “The girls in the masks.”
“No,” I say. “What is this place? Did they tell you to come here, too?”
He edges closer to the props crowding the wings. “I asked them to meet me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, and the anger in my voice is exactly as real as he thinks it is.
“I thought they’d hurt you.”
“I didn’t do anything. They can’t hurt me.”
He brings me back to him. “Because of me,” he says. “I thought they’d hurt you to hurt me.”
And I laugh, a pealing silver bell that destroys all the dark around us, because he isn’t wrong. Summer said, Don’t fall in love. Not with him, and she meant it. She knew he’d keep it from me, for me, if she told him not to tell. She knew it would make me pull away from him.
It’s because she loves me, but it’s hardly an excuse.
I say, “Mack. Nothing they do will ever hurt me.”
He kisses me so sudden I drop my phone. So true he drops his. And it’s the two of us in the cobwebbed dark, victorious over the girls in the masks and the threats on our phones and the police combing through Inverness to see how Duncan really died.
We don’t need anyone else.
Finally he says, “They called you here?”
“Yes,” I say. I find my phone in the dust and show him my coven’s texts from an hour ago, when the stage was set and he was already on the way. They sent the address and told me, Be here in one hour or we’ll tell Mack’s secrets. “I came in and there was a light at first but then it went out, and then something knocked everything over behind me—”
“You didn’t see anyone?”
I shake my head. “I thought they called me here so I’d be out of the way. When you texted me I thought maybe they were meeting you somewhere else—”
“No,” he says. “They were here. But Jade—” And all at once all the worry is gone from his face. “They’re on our side.”
He laughs. A real laugh. Not sleepless and second-guessing. He says, “They want us to do this. What we’re doing.”
He still can’t say it, so I do. “You mean kill the boys?”
He nods. “We have to. We’re right to.”
So I laugh, too. “Because three girls in masks said so?”
He takes me into his arms. The dust sifts up around us and shines in the flashlight-glow.
He says, “They’re not just girls.”
Tyranny
Duncan and his pack thought they were untouchable.
Mack and I really are.
We walk in together. We’re all the power Duncan promised and all the glory we deserve. We are united. Our uniforms are starched so sharp they’d cut anyone who tried to touch us. Our strides are so strong the crowd falls back.
We are terrific and terrifying. We are conquerors of St Andrew’s and of fate. We show our faces proud when all the rest of our pack has run fast and fearful.
The ones who are still alive, anyway.
The whole world whispers even though they won’t say it out loud to the detective in his gray or the KTLA reporter the sisters chased down the stairs. They whisper—
Duncan—
I heard his family’s paying the school to be silent—
Malcolm—
he ran because he knows he’s next—
Connor—
it wasn’t an accident—
Porter—
somebody made him do it, and then they made sure he’d never talk—
Banks—
they got him, you know they did—
Duffy—
he’s gone too now, and why did he REALLY run—
The same cruel current shivers through it every time: they deserve it.
They’re glad to see the pack fall.
Some of them even say—and it’s girls, not even flock-girls because they’re afraid to straggle out of line; it’s the not-it girls who say it and the flock-girls who listen too long—what if it’s her?
They never give her a name, but they know who they mean.
They want it to be her, I think. The girl from the party at Duncan’s house.
Or from the party before, or the one before that.
It’s a ruined kingdom that we rule but I wouldn’t have it any other way. So I walk in with Mack, the king and the queen stepping bloody and bold and resolute through a battlefield where the dirt is wet and red.
They’re afraid of us because we aren’t afraid of anyone.
The old theatre is a secret we’ve buried together. We left the way Mack came in, past candles burning low. I blew them out and left them smoking in the dark. When we broke out the sky was glowing with dawn. The street was empty. It was just the two of us in the apocalypse and the daybreak.
He said, “Duffy. We can’t let him live.”
He said, “We’ll finish what we started.”
And we kissed in the red-gray light with cobwebs still hanging from our shoulders.
When we get to the statue Piper stands alone in front of it. She says, “Isn’t this lovely. Mack and Jade, stealing from the corpses.”
I smile sweet and curl closer against Mack. “So did they come for Duffy yet?”
She doesn’t bother faking nice anymore. “He ran,” she says. “Like half the fucking school.”
I laugh. Beside me, bound to me, Mack says, “Of course he ran.”
“Shut up.”
I shrug. “Well, you’re not surprised, are you?”
Her eyes narrow to slits.
“But it’s still embarrassing.”
“Shut up,” she spits again. “He’s with Malcolm. He told me.”
“Are you sure it was Duffy?” I ask. I’m reckless again. It doesn’t matter what she thinks anymore, because there’s no one left to listen. “Are you sure it wasn’t the ghost girls on his phone?”
“Fuck you,” she says. “I don’t need him.”
I ease closer to her. Let my serpent-self coil around her and bind her tight. “You’re scared,” I say.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Whatever,” she says. “You’re fucking twisted. I knew it the first day you walked in.” Her eyes slash over to the men standing guard across the commons: on one side two security guards, brand-new and in bold St Andrew’s blue; on the other, two policemen with their badges winking in the dusty light. “I told that detective about you.”
“Leave Jade out of this,” says Mack. “She’s the only one who doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
But I stay fearless and flawless. “I’m flattered.”
“I told him it’s no fucking coincidence that some bitch shows up on parole and everyone starts killing each other.”