Tonight I’ll fly.
After twenty minutes I leave the white-sheets bed behind me. I float silent to the door with my blinking screens. To the left, the hall stretches out to the sealed-shut doors with the two men guarding them, shoulders blocking out the windows, backs to me. To the right there’s a siren-red EXIT sign over a stairway door. Past it, another nurse walks away.
She disappears around a corner.
I yank the needles out of my arms and I run. I fly. I soar on the wings no one will clip. The screens beep shrill but I’m at the stairway door already and through it and running down and down and down. The echoing zigzag gray makes my head go light and my hands clutch at the railing but it doesn’t matter, because I will always fight.
I always fight.
The stairs dead-end at a heavy door and I crash through it and stumble out onto cigarette butts and sidewalk. My eyes skim across the parking lot and the buildings jutting high until I see the glowing beacon, EMERGENCY, calling me to my coven.
I dash breathless-fast down the sidewalk and across the pavement. A car honks and a man in a white coat shouts. I’m faster than they are. I am on fire.
I’ll never be theirs.
When the sign shines just above me an engine roars. Mads’s black car peels away from the curb and pulls up shouting and defiant. I swing myself into the passenger seat and slam the door and behind me Jenny and Summer yell, “Drive, drive, drive!”
Mads screams out of the parking lot so hard her tires burn the pavement away to nothing.
They shriek my name, Jade Jade Jade, and I love them. I love them more than anything.
Mads squeals across an intersection with the light flashing to red. She says, “Where are we going?”
And Summer shouts, “Anywhere!”
And Jenny shouts, “Away!”
And a third voice says, not quite shouting: “We’re free.”
I turn and she’s there, pale and with a cigarette between her fingers but the circles almost gone from under her eyes.
Lilia.
I say, “How did you—”
“She fucking texted us,” says Jenny, and she throws her arm around Summer’s shoulders to pull Lilia’s hair.
And Lilia sasses back: “You texted me first.”
“Summer did,” says Mads. “We didn’t.”
Summer beams at her and me and all of us. “I did. Lilia and Malcolm and Duffy and Mack.”
“Piper,” Lilia says. “Dead with Duffy’s name spelled out. And then you on a stretcher, and there was so much blood, but I knew—”
“You didn’t know,” says Jenny, and we turn a corner, and the sunset pours out into our eyes. “You flipped your shit when Summer said who’s next—”
“She knew,” says Mads. “She told Summer she wanted in.”
I look at Lilia who faded every time Duncan grabbed her arm.
Lilia who took her blue war-paint and carved GUILTY onto a dead boy’s banner.
“So where are we going?” she asks, alive the way she was when I cut three marks into her skin. “I ditched rehab for this.”
We scream with laughter, all four of us. Laughter that hurts deep under my ribs but raises a proud fist against everyone who isn’t us.
I say, when we stop, “Duncan’s house.”
They gasp delight and Summer says, “You’re back, you’re back, oh god. You’re back. I was so fucking scared, Jade.”
Jenny says, “I told you she’d be fine.”
And Summer says, “Don’t act like you weren’t freaking out as much as I was last night.”
“Useless bitches. Both of you,” says Mads.
“Thank fuck I’m here,” says Lilia.
They are perfect.
I say, “Do you have my phone?”
Jenny hands it to me.
She made me say, last night, when I was bleeding myself to death and the ambulance was shrieking up the street, I know.
I said to Mack, You gave her the drink.
I said, I hope someone kills you the way you killed Duncan.
The dagger in my ribs digs deeper.
I look at my coven and not at his desperate unwound replies and I say, “So everyone knows Piper’s dead?”
“Everyone knows.” Lilia scrolls and blows smoke. “And everyone thinks it was Duffy.” She shows me a picture: the gray stone of St Andrew’s, hemmed in with police cars. A news van parked half on the sidewalk. Boys with thousand-yard stares.
Jenny opens her window and shouts out into the bleeding sky, “He thinks she’s on his side. Malcolm does, too. They think she’s fucking harmless.”
“Jenny, God!” Summer grabs her and pulls her back. Jenny falls half into her arms and stays that way. “We’re harboring fugitives.”
The wind rushes loud and I say, just to Mads: “And Mack?”
“He’s sorry.” The car surges faster.
“Sorry I’m dead, or sorry I’ll kill him?”
She shakes her head.
Jenny shuts the window and Lilia lights another Parliament. Summer sighs into Jenny’s bleach-pink hair. I look out at the night flooding in over the lights and the cars and the city.
When I think of Mack the space between my ribs aches hollow like the gasping wound in Duncan’s chest. I didn’t love him—not the way he thought he loved me.
But I loved who we were together. Power, said Duncan. Twisted, said Banks.
And for one high wild instant, it was true.
I say to my coven, “Mack will die tonight.”
It sinks in and clings to our skin and our hair. Filling up the silence as we hum for the hills. Until Lilia’s cigarette is a burnt-short stub and she throws it out onto the road.
Then her cold hand finds mine and she says, “Are you really all right?”
I say, “Yes.”
Mads says, low, “Don’t lie.”
Their hope and their sorrow and their rage swirl tight around me. My beautiful deadly girls with their loyalty so strong nothing could break it. And Lilia, one of us now, hardening from glass to diamond.
I say, “I’ll be fine. When this is over.”
It’s the truth.
Summer sighs stars and wistfulness. Jenny elbows her. Mads says, “We’re yours.”
They are, even Lilia. Like Mack never was. And I wonder, spun up in their vow, if he told me all along—
when he said, maybe I’m worse than all of them—
—if the darkness I saw gleaming out from under his dull gold was something he tried to hide from me, not something I had to dig free.
I wonder what I really saw when I looked at his picture on the page Summer printed. If I saw his light or his darkness.
Or the dazzle-smiled boy.
The sky glows red. Bloody and bold and resolute.
Mads says, “Tonight. It ends tonight.”
Our Night
Thirteen days past sweet sixteen my claws are sharper than they ever were before.
We’re all flash tonight. Jenny and Summer and Mads and me. We’re vengeance and poison we spilled in a theatre so dark the truth hid like a spider where no one could see it. Red lips, each our own color. Jenny’s pink and Summer’s rose and Mads’s scarlet and my blood-red. Deadly smiles and whitest-white teeth.