by Gregory Ashe
“What are you doing?”
Becca came down the hall in quick steps, her head swiveling as she checked each classroom she passed. Becca, at least, hadn’t changed over the last few months. She still had the same platinum hair. She still wore the same silver eyeshadow. She still looked terrifyingly fierce and lovely, and if I hadn’t been gay, I probably would have married her. When she reached me, she grabbed my wrist and jerked my hand down. Her eyes went to Mr. Spencer, who, for the first time in weeks, looked like he was genuinely seeing me. The red in his hair was almost auburn now.
“Are you trying to get suspended?”
“It seemed like a good idea.”
Waving at Mr. Spencer, Becca shoved me, and I stumbled down the hallway. “Come on.”
“I have to go to Mr. Hillenbrand’s office.”
She shoved me again, and this time, I had to jog a few paces to keep from falling over.
“Ease up, Becca. I’m not—”
“Vie, come on. I’ve got to talk to you about something.”
She tried to shove me again, but this time, I danced back. I grunted when I hit something solid. Something massive. Something like a goddamn brick wall.
Warm hands caught my arms and steadied me, and the air brought the fragrance of cedar and leather and tobacco. “I knew you’d fall for me,” Austin whispered in my ear. Then, even lower, “Are we in a fight?”
His breath on my neck prickled every hair on my arms, and I shook my head because I couldn’t get any words out.
“What’s going on?” I finally managed to say.
“Becca’s organizing the Great Escape.” He spun me so I was facing him. “She wanted all of us to talk.” He paused, and his eyes wouldn’t meet mine. “All of us.”
Then it sank in. I shook my head. “No.”
“Vie, she wanted all of us to—”
“Becca.” I whirled to her. “You didn’t—”
“Of course she did, tweaker.” Emmett slipped around the corner like he was all silk. “You guys need me.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Becca snapped. “I can’t keep up with when you’re fighting with Emmett and when you’re best friends, and anyway, he’s right, we do need him.”
“We don’t need—”
“Come on,” Becca said, “before he pitches a hissy fit right here in the hall.”
Austin, throwing an arm around me, tugged me after Becca. Emmett fell in beside us. Close enough for me to smell the metal-and-citrus of his cologne. Close enough for my hand to brush his if either of us shifted an inch. But he didn’t shift. He didn’t talk. He didn’t so much as look at me.
Becca led us to the girls’ bathroom. I balked at the door.
“Will you get in here already? Before someone sees us, for God’s sake.”
“It’s the girls’ room.”
“Then you should be fine,” Emmett said.
“Fuck you. You want to start—”
“All right,” Austin said with a sigh, hooking me forward with that arm around my waist. “You can claw each other’s eyes out later.”
The girls’ bathroom was, well, weird. It smelled better. It had more lights. There wasn’t toilet paper pasted all over the floor. And there were so many stalls. I was surprised to see Kaden and Jake and Temple Mae already in there. Jake and Temple Mae were holding hands. Kaden was trying hard to look like he didn’t care.
“Lock that, will you?” Becca said, and Emmett turned toward the door. Before he could touch the deadbolt, it spun to the locked position all by itself. I glanced at Temple Mae, who jerked her head in a negative, and then at Kaden. He had the good grace to blush and shrug; it looked like he, at least, was becoming more comfortable with his new ability. The red print my hand had left was gone from his cheek, and I couldn’t explain why that was such a relief.
Becca moved to the sinks and set a manila envelope on the counter. The clasp was bent at a vee, and something about that envelope, about the way Becca handled it, about the crease along one corner, about that brass vee of the clasp, made my stomach drop.
“What’s this about?”
“We’ve all been doing what we can since—since Belshazzar’s Feast.” She was the color of the tile now, an ugly shade of cream, and the silver on her eyes and lips sparked like fireworks. “Austin and Temple Mae and Jake and Kaden have been keeping an eye on you.”
“Wait, what? They’ve all been watching me? When? Like, all the time?”
Becca spoke over me. “And Emmett’s been—”
Emmett’s smirk could have started World War 3. “He knows what I’ve been doing.”
Becca cocked her head, her lips ready to form a question, and then she just said, “And I’ve been, well, researching.”
“Researching what?”
“Everything.” She grimaced. “Sometimes that actually feels like the truth. Everything I’ve had time to research, anyway. Belshazzar’s Feast and the Lady and Urho and these abilities and missing kids in Mather County and—well, everything.”
She had changed something. She had been planning on saying something else, and her eyes had flicked to Emmett, and then she had lied. Becca had lied. To me. About something to do with Emmett.
“What’s going on? You guys didn’t think you might want to talk to me about this. You didn’t think you should tell me what you’ve been doing? You didn’t think—”
Becca pinched the clasp, peeled open the envelope, and shook it out. Photographs printed on white copy paper tumbled across the counter. Becca shuffled them and then she paused. Her upper teeth had silver on them from biting her lip.
“They’re coming, Vie. They’re here, actually.”
“What? If you’re talking about the guy with your car—”
“Like last time. Like they did before Belshazzar’s Feast.”
I took a step forward to study the photographs. I fingered one. And then I knew what she meant. “You’re not just talking about that guy, are you?”
Becca shook her head. “The Lady and Urho are bringing their army to Vehpese.”
THEIR ARMY. BECCA PROBABLY hadn’t meant for it to sound like that. Becca probably hadn’t meant to scare the rest of them. But the words had slipped out. Temple Mae had her face buried in Jake’s flannel, and he was stroking her hair and glaring at me like he wanted to knock my teeth out for fun. Kaden bounced on his toes; behind him, the latches on every stall door rattled in time with his bounces, and he seemed totally oblivious to what he was doing. Even Austin’s arm tightened around me, and I could feel his breath like a gasp, like I’d just sucker punched him in the solar plexus.
Only Emmett seemed unaffected. His dark eyes roved the room and then settled on me. He still wore that mocking grin. His lips moved soundlessly as he mouthed the word army.
“Fuck you, Emmett.”
His eyebrows shot up, and his grin exploded, a thousand times brighter because, as always, he had gotten exactly what he wanted out of me.
I turned my attention back to the photographs. Five. There were Five of them. Five was a small army. But last time, it had been—three? Four? And we’d barely survived. My hand was shaking, so I clamped down on the first piece of paper to hide the tremors. Austin must have noticed; he was practically holding me up at that point. But he didn’t say anything. He still looked like he was trying to get air back in his lungs.
The photographs. I had to focus. Becca had printed them from her computer, but she must have had a good printer—even on white copy paper, the images were vivid and clear. The first one I recognized.
“That’s Ms. Meehan,” I said, sliding the photograph to the left.
“Lightning.”
“What?”
Becca cleared her throat. “She’s had four husbands die after being struck by lightning.”
“What?” Kaden said.
“She lived in Cleveland before she moved here. I guess after the fourth guy, people started talking. A r
eporter did a story. He—” Becca pressed her hands over her face and laughed. It sounded like she was choking. “He got electrocuted. In his bathtub. With nothing else in there. No loose wires. No radio that had fallen into the tub. Nothing.”
“Four?” Emmett said. “She’s not that pretty.”
“You’re such an asshole sometimes,” Austin said. “All right. I’m in chemistry with Vie, so at least he won’t be alone. We’ll have to watch where she goes during the school day; Mrs. Troutt tried to get him other places. The locker room. Damn. The showers. The sinks. Any place with water.”
“Sorry, Vie,” Emmett said. “Guess you won’t be able to spray off with the boys.”
“Will you shut up?” Jake said, still stroking Temple Mae’s hair. “Don’t you ever shut up?”
“It’s a joke. If you can’t take a fucking joke—”
“Enough,” I said. “Emmett, shut up for a while.” I thumbed the next photograph toward me. “What about this one, Becca?”
The picture showed someone familiar: a red-headed boy, big in the shoulders, big in the thighs, built like he could break through a wall, Kool-Aid Man-style. I recognized him from the hallway. And from the Greasy Spoon’s parking lot.
Austin, though, grabbed the paper, and it wrinkled in his grip. “That’s the kid who blew up your car.”
“I’ve seen him,” Jake said. “He’s the one that’s always tagging after Emmett.”
“He doesn’t tag after me.” Emmett snatched the paper, glanced at it, and tossed it back at the sink. Becca caught it out of the air and passed it to Jake. “He’s been hanging out with JR and Welch. They just bring him along sometimes. His name’s Leo. I don’t know his last name.”
“Leo Lyden,” Becca said.
“What can he do?” Jake asked.
Becca frowned. “Blow things up, I guess.”
“You’re sure it was him?” I said. “It wasn’t the driver?”
“There’s one article about him. It’s not even an article. It was in the police beat, and I had God’s own luck finding it. A little newspaper in this flyspeck Kansas town. Barbarossa. Something like that. And it was about his homecoming. He got arrested. And then I couldn’t find anything else.”
“Explosions, huh.” Emmett slouched against the wall, arms folded, leering at me. “Literal? Or metaphorical?”
“What kind of explosion is metaphorical?” Kaden asked, even while I shook my head, trying to forestall the question.
Emmett smirked. “Like some kind of spontaneous, remote orgasm trigger. Maybe Vie should ask him to prom. Get some real action.”
“That’s enough,” Jake said.
“Cool it, cowboy.”
“You need to stop talking.”
“I can talk whenever I want. If you don’t like it—”
“I don’t like it. And I’m going to break your face if you keep talking to him like that.”
I wasn’t exactly used to Jake taking my side; a few months ago, he’d beaten the shit out of Austin for being a fag and then tried to beat the shit out of me. A lot had changed, though. And some of that change, I was starting to realize, had made both the Miller boys fiercely protective.
Emmett’s face screwed up with anger, and he opened his mouth. I laid my hand across his chest.
“Not right now.”
He blinked. His jaw shut. With a goofy smile, he pushed my hand away, and the sleeve of his tee hitched up, and the inside of his arm came into view, and I saw what I knew I’d see.
Emmett didn’t notice. He just said, “All right. Later, then.” And he crossed his arms, and his sleeve slipped down, hiding the track marks.
“What did he get arrested for?” Austin said.
“Blowing up a cow.”
“What?”
Becca mimed an explosion in the air. “A cow. It was the school mascot. And it exploded during halftime.”
“He shot it with something?” Jake said. “A big caliber gun? Something that tore it to pieces?”
“No. It blew up. Thousands of pieces. Millions of pieces. They thought somebody had managed to get an explosive device inside the cow, and then somebody remembered seeing Leo near the holding pen, and that’s why they picked him up.”
“But there wasn’t an explosive device,” I said, my eyes searching Becca’s face. “There wasn’t anything.”
“There was a lot of ground beef,” Emmett said, and then he glanced at Jake and zipped his lips with two fingers.
“Emmett’s right. The police report was just a blurb, but it said pieces of the cow were found in the parking lot. On the cars. All the way from the center of the football field.”
“Was anybody hurt?” Temple Mae lifted her head from Jake’s chest. Her tilted, feline eyes were red. Her nose was puffy. The hard slash of her mouth was harder than usual. “Besides that poor cow, I mean.”
“No.” Becca’s voice was gentle. “Nobody else. And Vie was right: they dropped the charges after they realized they couldn’t prove anything. I mean, I don’t even think they really believed there was anything to prove. They never found evidence of an explosive device, and they issued a public apology to Leo.”
“It was a cow. At a football game. And one person saw Leo near it.” Emmett shook his head. “That’s not a really convincing case for the theory that he has magical powers. I mean, what’s the explanation? His ability is that he can blow up cows?”
“And Fords,” Becca said. “He touched my car last night. Remember? He was pushing on the trunk. And then he got in the car and drove off.”
“He did something to it,” Kaden said. He glanced at each of us and blushed. “I don’t know how to explain it. The metal got . . . excited.”
“See?” Emmett said. “He’d be perfect for Vie on prom night.”
“It didn’t explode when he touched it,” Austin said. His voice was calm, but his fingers bit into my side, and his eyes never went anywhere near Emmett’s face. “Same thing with the cow. So there’s some sort of delay.”
Becca paled. “I could have been in the car. I could have been driving when it . . .”
“But you weren’t,” I said. “Kaden warned us.”
“Vie, if he can start a countdown, he might do it to anything. Anywhere. Austin’s car, for example. Or a drinking fountain. Or the propane tank behind the school.”
I nodded. “So that means Kaden needs to be on the alert.”
“If it’s metal.” Temple Mae’s feline eyes looked redder and puffier than just a few moments before.
“What?”
“Kaden will only be able to help if the explosion has metal elements. If it’s an animal like that poor cow . . .” She brushed at her eyes, her whole face twisting as she fought not to cry.
“There’s nothing we can do except be careful,” Jake said. “Next.”
I grabbed the third photograph. It was a boy with dark braids and the amber skin of a Native American.
“I don’t know his name,” Becca said. “But I saw him lurking outside school and snapped a picture. When I ran a reverse image search, he came up on a conspiracy theory blog. They call him Old Man Coyote. That’s from a Crow story, by the way. He’s a kind of creator figure. And the traditional trickster figure.”
“This boy’s supposed to be a god?” Austin slid his hand across mine, toying with the edges of the page. “He doesn’t look like an old man.”
“The blog doesn’t talk about him being a god. It talks about—”
Jake spoke over her. His eyes were wide, and his arms dropped away from Temple Mae for the first time since we came into the bathroom. “Conoco. That goddamn Conoco station.”
“You read that blog?”
“He was there at that Conoco station when it got robbed. Austin, remember. After the rodeo in Billings, when we were driving back, Dad and I, and we stopped at the Conoco.”
I opened my mouth, but Austin squeezed me around the waist, and he said, “Yeah,
I remember. You said the guy behind the till was dead. Dad wouldn’t let you see, but he told you—” Austin swallowed. “He told you the clerk was shot right through the head. And there was a kid carrying an armload of those cupcakes or—”
“Sno Balls. He had a mountain of them, and he was barefoot and running as fast as he could.” Jake wiped his face. “Damn. Do you think he killed that guy? I just thought he was robbing the place. He looked too young—I just thought the killers were already gone and he was taking advantage.”
Becca shrugged. “It’s . . . a possibility. He’s on a handful of security camera stills that people uploaded to that conspiracy site. People say he comes before a robbery. Or after. Like a black cat.”
“Crossing a black cat doesn’t get you shot in the head,” Jake said. “A kid like that? How old is he? Twelve? And he’s out there shooting up gas stations and killing people for a bunch of Sno Balls.”
“What’s his ability supposed to be?” Emmett asked. “Eating disgusting junk food?”
“I’ve got no clue.” Becca shrugged. “But a kid sitting on the edge of campus, watching the school like he’s here to stay, that makes me curious. And when the same kid shows up on a conspiracy theory site, as an omen of bad luck, and linked with a series of robberies and murders, that’s enough for me to want to keep an eye on him.”
“Two more,” Austin said. “God, how did you do this, Becca? Did you hack every security camera in town? Cross all the images against a visual database of Vehpese? Run anybody who didn’t fit through facial scanning software?”
She glowered at him. “You’re starting to sound like him: stupid with lots of muscles.”
Austin wrapped both arms around me and pulled me against him. His chin settled on my shoulder. “Good.”
“I couldn’t hack every security camera in town. Not even if I wanted to, and I don’t. There’s no point.”
“So what’d you do?” I asked.
“I paid off Mrs. McLees.”
“The registrar?”
