“Tess!”
“—have either of us die. Just do this, and I’ll leave. I’ll get out of your hair. You’ll never have to—”
“Tess!”
“What?” she shouted.
“It’s you!” I whispered, glancing toward the living room for any sign Matt heard. “It’s using your body to kill everyone. And I know that because I fucking talked to it.”
“What?”
“That’s why I flipped out before. Why I said all that stuff I’d never say to you. I wasn’t talking to you.”
She stared at me, dark eyes wide. “How long?”
“What?”
“How long did it take you to figure out I wasn’t . . .” She waved her hands up and down, indicating her entire body. “Me?”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “Uh . . . well . . . okay, so don’t be mad.”
“Oh, my God.” She turned around, facing the door to the living room and took a deep breath. “What?”
“So . . . I’m pretty sure we were about to have sex when—”
“What?”
“Shh! Tess, Matt can’t know it’s you.”
“Well, duh, Derrick.” She leaned against the fridge, taking a deep breath. “Okay. We’re going to pretend none of that—” She waved her hand toward my room. “Happened. At all.”
“Tess, I don’t think—”
“Ah-ah!” She held up a hand. “None of it. Let’s get back to the whole ‘everyone will die if we don’t work this out’ thing. Matt said he saw Josh kill Aaron. So what if it’s not just me, Derrick? What if Josh wasn’t Josh earlier? What if Matt’s right, and it’s messing with us, trying to divide us up so we don’t figure out how to stop it?”
Shit. She had a point.
“I know they aren’t your favorite people, Derrick, and I don’t particularly want to help them either, but I also don’t want to die.”
“You don’t want to die.” Holy crap, could it be that simple?
“What? That surprises you? God, Derrick, how pathetic do you think I am?”
“No, I didn’t mean—there are rules to rituals, limitations. What were Chris’s last words?”
“I deserve this.”
“And the rest of them? What did they all say before they died?”
She blinked, realization dawning on her face. “I deserve this?”
“It needs consent! But your last thought wasn’t that you deserved to die. You thought of me.”
“What?”
“I can stop this. It’s just a matter of details. Come on.” I strode back into the living room where Matt waited. “Tell me everything.”
Chapter 39: Tess
Sunday, October 2nd
“START AGAIN.” Derrick held a pen poised over his AP Calculus binder. We’d added to the time line, recorded every second of the deaths, and wrung out every opposing detail we could from Matt’s nightmares, but we were still missing chunks of time from the night and important pieces of the puzzle. Like how the hell I’d gotten home.
“Come on, Hernandez,” Matt groaned. “We’ve been at this for hours. Can we—?”
“Did he stutter?” I demanded. “Start again.”
“You know what—” One look at Derrick’s face made Matt change his tune. “Everyone else got there early and set up while Josh took Tess to dinner, and then—”
“You drugged me.” I glared him down, daring him to meet my eyes. He didn’t.
“With a substance you refuse to identify.” Derrick raised an expectant eyebrow at Matt.
“Does it matter?”
“It was something different,” Derrick insisted. “You’d done this before, and the match never lit. The pills could have something to do with it.”
So could the eclipse, the fact that I was a virgin, or the fact that in the back of their minds, they didn’t care what happened to me the same way they cared about the cheerleaders or their girlfriends.
“I don’t know, man. I didn’t even remember there were pills until this last dream. Everything about that night is scattered, even the prep.”
I swore, pushing off the couch to pace. “What, you guys don’t have a go-to date rape drug?”
Matt ignored me, appealing to Derrick. “I still don’t buy that this thing needs consent. It gets in people’s heads, changes the way they think, makes ’em say and do stuff they don’t mean. That’s cheating.”
“Too much poetic justice for you?” Derrick asked.
“Huh?”
Yeah, a dialogue about compromised consent wasn’t going to go anywhere good. “What we need is the translation from that book.” I glanced at Derrick. “It’s got the rest of the answers.”
Derrick nodded. “Elizabeth’s working on it, but we might not have that kind of time. How did you guys translate it?”
“Google.”
Derrick closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “That’s . . . fantastic. Can you email me whatever you guys came up with? Today. We need to—” He cut off when his phone rang. “Two seconds.” He ducked into the kitchen, but kept the door open, maintaining line of sight to me and Matt.
His voice was low, but from the little I could hear, I gathered he was talking to his mom.
I kept my eyes on Derrick, pointedly ignoring Matt, so I saw the fatigue rippling across Derrick’s face before he carefully schooled his expression back in place. I saw the weight of my world crushing against his shoulders.
My fault, my fault, my—
Matt shifted on the couch, drawing my attention and pulling me out of my self-pity by thrusting me into the thrall of rage. It wasn’t my fault. It was his.
“How?” I demanded, voice raw.
Matt blinked, confusion written all over his face. “How?”
“How could you do it? You’ve known me your entire life. We see each other almost every day, and yeah, we’re not friends, but we’ve never outright hated each other.”
“No one was supposed to get hurt,” he said again, like that was supposed to help. Like it meant anything at all.
“I’m someone,” I reminded him. “And while I was lying there, scared out of my mind because I couldn’t move, you laughed and took pictures and made jokes about raping me like I was nothing. How could you?”
Matt studied the floor, opening his mouth, then closing it as if even he couldn’t buy his latest excuse.
“We’re out of time,” Derrick announced, striding back into the room. “Mom’s got unmarked cars on their way to all our houses. If that’s how she’s reacting to Aaron’s death . . .”
“The Worthingtons are going to flip,” Matt and I said at the same time. We glanced at each other, then quickly away.
Derrick nodded. “I figure we’ve got maybe two hours before we all land in protective custody.”
“What are the cops going to do?” Matt demanded. “Shoot at the shadows?”
A muscle worked in Derrick’s jaw. “We’ve got that picture, we’ll get your translation, Elizabeth’s working on her translation . . .” He waved off Matt’s questioning noise. “If there’s a ritual, maybe there’s counter-ritual in there. Either way, it’s not something we can explore while being watched.”
“Protective custody seems a bit extreme,” I argued. “There’s no way a person could be behind all the deaths since the bonfire. And a supernatural predator just isn’t something your mom is going to consider, no offense.”
Derrick shrugged. “This many dead? They aren’t going to take chances. I’m honestly amazed it took this long.”
His mom wouldn’t consider a supernatural killer. But a more mundane one . . . I glanced at Matt. “Tell them it was a suicide pact.”
“What?”
Derrick was nodding. “That gets them off our back and puts Josh
under observation. Two problems solved. You can say you couldn’t bring yourself to do it. Say you’re worried about Josh, you heard he’d gotten ahold of a gun . . .”
“I’m not throwing him under the bus. Especially not if I get pulled under with him. Do you know how much trouble I’ll get into if I say—”
“Are you kidding me?” I snapped. “Trouble? You’re worried about getting into trouble?”
Matt worked his jaw.
I glared at Matt, considering my next move. I was dead. Derrick was still convinced the condition wouldn’t stick if we played our next moves right, but even if I somehow survived the next week, Matt had left me to die that night.
Dead girls didn’t pull any punches. It didn’t matter what anyone thought of them. I was in uncharted territory now. This next week was a blank slate, and there was no telling how much time I had left.
I wasn’t going to waste a second being meek.
“You’re next, you know,” I snarled. “Tuesday, 4:30 a.m., you’re going to die.”
Matt blanched.
“And it’s your fault,” I continued, merciless. “Aaron, Isaac, Harrison, Chris, Ryan—”
“Stop it!”
“You killed them!” Tears streaked down my face. “And you put us all on that thing’s supernatural hit list. You did this! And despite all of that, we were still willing to help, but you won’t let us because you’re afraid of getting into trouble?” I glowered at him. “I hope whatever that thing concocts for you hurts like hell. You’ve earned it.”
I spun to leave, heading back toward my room, when Matt’s broken voice froze me in place. “I’ll do it.”
Chapter 40: Derrick
Sunday, October 2nd
MATT EMAILED A gibberish translation of the ritual within an hour after he left. Assuming he stuck to the plan, his next step would be calling my mom to “’fess up.” He’d be certain to mention Tess had no part in the pact, and hopefully, it would be enough to get Mom to relax her guard.
Tess retreated to her room without a word to me after Matt left, and I’d let her go. Too much hung between us right now, and we both needed time to process.
I rubbed at my burning eyes and tried to focus. Notes, sketches, and timelines littered my desk. The words blurred together.
Ringing pierced my ears. I felt so tired, it took a few seconds for me to place the strange noise as the dumb-phone. “What?” I asked once I got the flip phone to cooperate.
“Wow, what a greeting.” Elizabeth Dare’s voice flirted through the speaker. “Much enthusiasm. Such manners.”
“Yeah, sorry, it’s been a hell of a night.”
“I can relate. Translating creepy demonic texts from local ghosts does not make for pleasant dreams. But now you’re in my debt for eternity, so there’s that.”
“You’re done? We can head over to the shop, and—”
“Send your girlfriend into anaphylactic shock? Mr. McPherson restocked the incense. How about I meet you after work?”
The incense. Maybe Tess wasn’t allergic to the stuff. Maybe it was the thing inhabiting her.
“Why would he restock it?” I asked, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. “What does he say it’s for?”
Given her attitude toward the incense before, I’d expected a snarky reply, but instead Elizabeth grew silent. “He says . . .” She cleared her throat. “He says it protects the shop from evil spirits.”
I snatched the triple-wrapped plastic bag out of my desk drawer and tore it open, searching for an ingredient list. “What time do you get off?”
“Six.”
“Okay, so six-thirty?” I rattled off my address with a few directions for the bits GPS always screwed up.
“Whoa, whoa, there, handsome. I’m not meeting you at your house.”
I blinked. “I guess we could meet you at your grandmother’s.”
“God, I hate small towns. Look, you’re cute, but I barely know you. So even if teenagers in this town weren’t dying mysteriously every five minutes, I’m not meeting you at your house. And you’re sure as hell not coming to mine.”
Fair enough. “Okay. Did you want to email the—”
“It’s way too complex. How about we meet at the bowling alley in Jasper right after work? Mr. McPherson said we could use his coupons for free games.”
In other words, someone would know where she was going tonight and who she’d be with. I rubbed my eyes, way too tired to keep up with regular conversations, much less this one. “You want to go bowling?”
“It’s loud. No one else will be able to hear what we’re talking about, and even better, everyone in the building isn’t going to recognize us on sight. Can you say the same for anywhere in Fairdealings?”
Nope. People stopping to stare had become par for the course around here. “Yeah, okay.”
“Get some sleep. You sound terrible, and trust me, you’ll need a working brain to keep up with everything I found.” She hung up before I could articulate a response.
I rubbed my eyes again, exhausted beyond measure, but sleep was out of the question. I kept dreaming about making out with Tess. Her mouth on mine, the way her breath caught when I touched her, the feel of her skin beneath my hands. It was a good dream, a really good dream. Right up until the point of no return, when awareness and horror dawned in her eyes, and I realized I hadn’t been kissing Tess at all.
I’m out of time. Tess’s voice, if not her words, echoed through my head.
Out of time? I pulled up the search page on my computer and scanned for moonrise and moonset in my zip code and checked the time for last night.
It matched.
I printed out a weekly calendar dating back to the bonfire, plugging in moonrise, moonset, and the beginning of each moon phase. Then I plugged in estimates for all the times I recalled Tess waking up disoriented and confused. I thought back to the times I remembered Tess working on the sympathy cards and filled those in as well.
“It fits.” Could the creature only control her when the moon was out? Or did it just want me to think that? Groaning, I shifted my attention to the incense and scanned the list of ingredients, searching for a weakness.
What if she’s legitimately allergic to the stuff? I dismissed the thought as unhelpful and typed in the first ingredient. “Known to cause seizures, coma, or in more severe cases, death.” Whoa. Then I realized I’d mistyped the ingredient by a few letters.
“Okay.” I pushed away from the desk. I needed to get some sleep, nightmares or not. The beginnings of a plan came together in my mind. Maybe there was a way we could beat this.
Chapter 41: Tess
Sunday, October 2nd
AFTER AN EXTREMELY weird trip to the grocery store for incense ingredients, I sat cross-legged on the floor of Derrick’s room, breathing in the scent of cedar. We were trying to isolate which ingredient caused my crazy reaction in Stalker Ed’s shop.
I risked peeking one eye open to look at Derrick. “Nothing.”
“Damn, that was the last one.” He crossed the final ingredient off the list and checked the time on his nightstand.
“Should we start trying them in pairs?” I fought back a yawn.
“No, we need to make sure something wasn’t left off the list of ingredients. If I mix these . . .” Derrick set to work, eyes narrowed in concentration. “It should have the same effect. If it doesn’t, we’re in trouble.”
I watched him, wishing I could blame my imminent death for the tension between us. But I knew the real problem wasn’t the clock. The love, the lies, everything hung between us. We danced around each other like ice skaters circling a fractured pond. The cracks were widening, growing ever more fragile, and all it would take was one wrong move to send us crashing through the surface into the murky waters beneath our polished pretense.
“You don’t have to do this.” My voice cracked.
His hands paused. “Of course, I don’t. But I’m not going to sit back and let you die.” He snorted and returned his attention to the collection of powders and sticks in small bowls in front of him. “So can I ask how you’re going to balance the scales when this is all over?” He added a teaspoon of clove to cinnamon. “Or would that ruin the act?”
I closed my eyes against the bitterness in his voice. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like, Tess? I’m really curious, because normal people aren’t doing mental math every time they do something nice for someone.”
“They don’t think they do.” I dug my hands into the beige carpet. “But they have a script. In their heads when they do ‘X’—” I waved one hand. “—I’m supposed to do Y.’” I waved my other hand. “And if that doesn’t happen, if I don’t smile enough or act grateful enough or if I don’t do their lab homework or give them a blow job under the bleachers—”
“Who—?”
“—or leap to my feet every time they say jump, then they feel taken advantage of.”
Derrick drew back, the struggle to keep his voice even visible on his face. He lost. “That’s how that rumor started? Because someone got pissed off that you wouldn’t give them a—Jesus Christ, Tess, why don’t you tell me this stuff! I could—”
“Because then you’d do something about it, Derrick!” I pushed off the ground and stood. “Even if I begged you not to. And then it would be one more thing I—”
“What? Owe me?” Derrick stood. “I told you. I am not keeping score.”
“You keep saying that like that’s an accomplishment. It’s a luxury.” I unclenched my fists and wiped my palms against my dress. “I live off the generosity of others, and it’s exhausting. After a while, you lose track. You don’t know if you’re doing something nice because you want to or because you have to, much less if you’re actually smiling. Every single aspect of your life becomes wrapped up—” I waved my hands so wildly Derrick moved back. “—in maintaining this balance, and it’s not enough.” My voice broke.
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