The Rules

by Nancy Holder

  “You can smoke at the party,” Cage called after him. More to himself, he added, “We always smoke at the parties.”

  “Jerk,” Thea muttered.

  Beth’s cheeks went hot. Larson was permitted any level of jerkiness, but a nobody like Thea could not get away with commenting on it.

  “Let’s go in,” Beth said, leading her two lambs to the slaughter.

  Even Beth had to catch her breath as they entered the warehouse. August had outdone himself—correction, outdone himself and her—with a huge cavern of a room that was rippling with holographic projections of hellish flames reaching to the thirty-foot ceiling. It was amazing. Animatronic bats squeaked and dive-bombed from way high up in the rafters on filament wires. There was a hanging skeleton whose jaw dropped open with an ear-splitting shriek.

  Prismatic tumbles of scarlet- and pumpkin-colored light spilled across the floor, where leering devil faces grinned and stabbed with pitchforks. Along the walls, glow-in-the-dark coffins held shrouded figures clutching nosegays of dead, dried roses. The figures writhed and shifted very subtly. It was like the set of a Hollywood Halloween movie.

  Beth started picking out the faces of the usual suspects: Praveen, Heather, Morgan; Cage and Larson were outside. She didn’t see Jacob Stein. “Prince” George Frisen was missing, too. And yummy Kyle Thomas.

  A large white banner with dripping bloody letters proclaimed, WELCOME TO HELL! August was standing beneath it in a fedora, khaki trench coat, green silk shirt, and tuxedo pants. The mike of a headset curled in front of his mouth. The fedora hid his hideous bleached hair, and not for the first time, Beth considered that if he just had some pigment to his skin, let his hair grow out to its mousy brown, dyed his eyebrows, and got some permanent lash extensions, he would actually look good. He had great bone structure.

  He was holding an old-fashioned stopwatch and a clipboard. Combined with the mike, he had standard Pact scavenger hunt equipment.

  “Wow, this is cool,” Robin said.

  “It’s scary,” Thea whined, and Beth wanted to slap some sense into her.

  “Hey, Beth, ’scuse,” Cage said, scooting around the three girls to get inside. “August, my man!”

  Cage ambled up to August and clapped him on the shoulder. Two large glowing purple skulls rested on a black coffin-shaped table beside him. One skull was marked HELLNOTES and the other one LIFELINES.

  “Greetings, greetings, you know the routine,” August said to Cage. “Don’t open the envelope. And give me your phone.”

  Cage good-naturedly laid his cell phone in LIFELINES, which was already filled. A couple of them had the new sparkly cases that cost a bazillion dollars. Then Cage turned to the basket marked HELLNOTES and started going through a stack of black envelopes with names printed on them in red.

  “Alphabetical, Cage, as usual. I know those pesky letters can be confusing. Don’t break the seal. You will be disqualified.” And then August looked at Beth’s entourage. “Robin? Brissett?” he said, in complete shock.

  Cage lifted an envelope out of the basket and walked away.

  “Hey, August,” Beth said smoothly, moving in front of Robin. “So a bit of last-minute logistics. It’s a very long story, but Robin’s kind of stuck with me this weekend, and the more the merrier, right?”

  August’s yellow brows climbed an inch as his colorless eyes moved from Robin back to her. He was actually angry with her. Beth was astounded. But she was the other half of the Pact.

  Or maybe not. Maybe she was just plain old Beth Breckenridge again, a nobody. She felt the change come over her like she was morphing into Dr. Jekyll or something. It felt awful, so she fought it down. She had the power. August wouldn’t even be having this party if it weren’t for everything she had done for him.

  “Well, here’s the deal,” August said. “Jacob texted me. He’s not coming. And Prince George’s grandmother had a stroke, so he’s at the hospital. I figured you and Thea could be a team. But now we have an imbalance.”

  Beth was stunned. She had assumed she would be paired with Larson. August had as much as said so. Was he punishing her for daring to bring her own guest?

  “Robin can do the hunt with Beth,” Thea suggested. “I don’t really want to do it.”

  “Yes, you do,” Beth said quickly. Thea had to play or August would be insulted. “She totally does, August.”

  August exhaled with the exasperation of a genius confronted by a sea sponge. “You know how precise I like things,” he said. “I don’t have a prize for Robin.”

  “That’s no problem. She’ll just hang out with us, okay?”

  Beth flipped through the basket of clues and then held up the envelopes with her and Thea’s names on them. “She’s not even all that smart”—she flashed Robin a warning not to contradict her—“so she won’t be that much of an advantage.”

  August’s face tightened, his eyes bugging out, as if he had bitten into a lemon. He was more than upset. He was seriously angry. Beth stood her ground.

  “We’ll be a ménage à trois. Wouldn’t you like that?” she asked silkily, which she realized immediately was the wrong thing to say. She and August didn’t tease about sex. They teased other people about sex.

  She dropped the act. “Hey, August, may I speak to you for a second?” she said evenly.

  He very calmly led her to a spot about ten feet away. Then he looked down on her, as in really looked down on her, like she was beneath him. There was definitely something wrong—more wrong than simply bringing one uninvited guest.

  “Why did you already pair up Thea and me? We have to play the hookup game to organize the partners. And I thought you were going to make sure I got to be with Larson.”

  August gazed over at Robin as if he’d never seen her in his entire life. Robin and August had AP Spanish together, for heaven’s sake.

  But Beth had to admit she would have done the same thing in his place—acted like he didn’t know her. Because in their world, Robin Brissett was insignificant.

  “Larson’s been strutting around since he got here, bragging about how he’s going to nail someone. Anyone. He’s a pig. You deserve better.” He reached out and patted her cheek as if she were about seven years old.

  “I know how to handle him,” she snapped, and the back of her neck flushed hot, her cheeks prickling with panic. Things were wrong between them. “I just want to toy with him.” She heard the frightened bravado in her voice.

  He shrugged. “Trust me. I’m sparing you.”

  “But I don’t want to be spared!”

  His lips twitched as if at some hilarious private joke. “You say that now.”

  Sudden clapping and hooting provided some distraction so that she didn’t have to say anything in reply. Maximum Volume, the soon-to-be-very-famous local band, was climbing onto a wooden stage painted with glow-in-the-dark flames. Strings of white skull lights dangled behind them like a curtain. Cut into the wall above them was a sort of loft, an empty, black space. The ends of the skull strings were drawn through it.

  Mick, the lead guitarist, settled his guitar strap across his shoulder and carried his cord toward an amp on the left-hand side. Hiro, the drummer, wrapped a white bandana decorated with a Chinese ink brush character around his forehead as he sat behind his drum kit. He wore a sleeveless white T-shirt and his arms were sculpted muscles. Drew, bassist and songwriter, had on a gray Grateful Dead T-shirt with his typical shaggy grunge hair. Tucked into his pocket was a big green silk handkerchief that was very close in shade to August’s shirt.

  Stacy, their singer, teetered on her super-stiletto boots and would have gone down if Drew hadn’t caught her forearm and held on to her. She lifted a travel tumbler over her head and waved it, pouring a little bit of liquid down over her chest, and everyone burst into cheers.

  “That’s my cue.” August turned to go, then turned back. “You, Thea, and Robin are a team of three. But there’ll be a penalty. Put your phones in the basket.”

  Without lo
oking at her, he walked away, extending his arms into the air as the partiers clapped and stomped their feet. Heather and Morgan had arrived and were swaying their hips like belly dancers.

  “August!” Beth called after him, but he just kept going. She watched him as if she were memorizing him. As if he were someone new and different, someone she’d never met before. Because he was.

  He was August with balls.

  I’ve blown it. Beth’s stomach dropped to her feet as she went into total free fall. I should have been more careful with his feelings. She looked around the room at all the beautiful people laughing. They were already farther away, as if they were on a beach and she were in the ocean, caught in an undertow that was dragging her out to sea. She had to work fast, collect them like pearls on the half shell, before they realized that she was out.

  Is the Pact dead? Did I kill it? For a second she was rooted to the spot, shaking. Her mind replayed all the long hours she and August had gossiped about their peers—correction, August’s peers—and how smug and safe and dangerous she’d felt making fun of them and using them to get ahead. Drinking August’s parents’ five-hundred-dollar bottles of wine with half-defrosted Sara Lee cheesecake. Microwaving popcorn and drinking the same tequila they served Johnny Depp after hours in their Manhattan restaurant’s bar.

  She didn’t feel dangerous now. Waves of despair were washing up and over her. She was drowning in remorse. She probably felt as vulnerable as Thea, who had just broken up with a brain-damaged criminal with anger-management issues.

  “Screw you,” she muttered under her breath as August climbed onto the stage. “I’ll do it all on my own. I’ll get Larson myself. Spare me.” She sneered at him. “Dream on, August. You can’t do anything to me.”

  As Mick plugged his cord into his amp, there was a crackling noise and an intense white flash as his body was flung halfway across the stage.

  And all the lights went out.

  CONSPIRACY THEORY

  DREW’S RULE #1: Rock is a matter of life and death.

  “Holy shit, Mick is dead!” Stacy screeched in the darkness.

  Dude, Drew thought, but that one word was the sum total of his reaction. He was a little more wasted than he had realized.

  He tracked a bobbing light that flared with shimmering rainbows as it swept across his field of vision. Shadows crashed and stumbled backward, and August raced across the stage. Drew trailed unsteadily behind. Mick was on the ground. Holy shit indeed.

  Someone yelled, “Call nine-one-one! Turn on the lights! August, where are the phones?”

  Drew automatically reached for his own phone before he remembered that August had collected them during setup, explaining it was one of the rules of the scavenger hunt. No cells. None. There wasn’t supposed to be any Internet available at the cannery but you never knew. August didn’t want his game contestants calling their friends for help with their clues. Drew had started to argue, but Mick agreed to it. They had to keep the customer satisfied.

  “I’m okay,” Mick moaned, slowly getting to his feet with an assist from a black-haired chick. Beth. Drew remembered her name. August’s girlfriend. “Who the hell spilled water on my amp?”

  “Oh,” Stacy said beside Drew, her voice oozing guilt. She looked down at her tumbler. “No, wait. I didn’t. It’s nearly full, see?”

  “Uh-huh. Full of vod—” Mick practically spit nails as he clenched his mouth shut. Then Drew looked out at the kids watching them. Someone had turned on a couple of electric lanterns on the tables. These guys were their public. They might not have phones to snap pix and tweet right now, but they would later. And if they talked about Maximum Volume sniping at each other and Pascha or Samurai heard…that would be bad for business.

  August walked to the front of the stage. “There are more battery-operated lanterns on the tables. Please turn them all on. I’m going to check out the electrical.”

  Drew absently strummed his guitar and the sound reverberated around the room. A few people whooped. They liked that. He strummed again, struggling to clear his mind.

  “Okay, we’ve got some electricity,” August said.

  An intense reconfiguring of plugs and cords and discussions among Mick, Hiro, and a couple of the kids who knew a thing or two about electrical engineering followed. Drew didn’t follow the details. Technical and boring wasn’t his thing.

  Drew looked at Stacy and said, “I’m going outside.”

  She tottered after him in the ghoulish lantern light. “I didn’t do it, Drew. Really.” She brushed her bangs away from her forehead. Her skin was uncommonly white beneath her makeup and she was sweating like crazy, even though it was cold enough outside to see your breath. Drew decided to light up before they had to go back inside.

  “I’m feeling bad,” Stacy said. “I think I’m getting sick.”

  “Don’t get sick before L.A.,” he said, and she smiled crookedly at him. Then her smile winked out of existence. Stacy went through emotions at lightning speed. Same way she burned through guys. She looked around very dramatically, then tapped his forearm with her dragon-lady fingers.

  “Drew, that was your amp,” she said. “Not Mick’s. I saw the tape with the big D on the back when Hiro carried it in. August helped us set up. He must have confused them and we didn’t notice.”

  Then, as if stringing all those syllables together had exhausted her, she slumped against the railing. The dock rail creaked and she jerked backward, raising her hands as if to show the bleached, brittle redwood that she meant it no harm. Her heels clattered like someone shooting off a staple gun.

  Mick and August came out of the warehouse. “We’re going out to the generators to check on things,” Mick announced.

  “Yeah, good idea,” Drew said. “Glad you weren’t electrocuted, man.” He knew he sounded insincere, but he didn’t care. He blew the pungent smoke out of his mouth as Mick the Dick and Mr. Moneybags disappeared into the rolling fog.

  “This is our last gig before L.A. and it’s cursed,” Stacy murmured.

  “Not really,” he said, but he saw her point.

  She coughed and gently clutched her neck.

  “God, I’m burning up.”

  “Don’t think I don’t know…,” he began. Then he stopped himself. Why go there? What was the point? He was not looking for a confrontation.

  She looked genuinely confused. “Don’t know what?”

  Maybe she wasn’t in on the plan to boot his ass out of the band. Hiro and Mick thought they were so cagey, but he knew they were trying to figure out how to get rid of him. Well, cage that, douche bags. Let them get decent equipment and write great songs (and if he heard the word plagiarize one more time…He had sampled—everyone sampled) and find half-talented musicians who didn’t have issues. Well, okay, he sure as hell had blown that part. Hiro and Mick should be bowing down and kissing the toes of his Converse sneakers. They had been nothing when he found them. Less than dog crap. He had practically tutored Mick in how to sound like Eddie Van Halen. And now they thought they could make secret deals behind his back? He could replace them in two hours.

  Just watch me.

  “Drew? What do you know?” she asked anxiously.

  Stacy. Sweet. Naive. Stoned. He reached out and tousled her hair. Then he took her tumbler and said, “Let’s try some good old-fashioned water, okay? August brought a ton of water bottles. He’s got all kinds of munchies. Get something in your stomach.”

  “You’re so good to me, baby,” she purred, putting both her arms around his neck. “Why’d we break up?”

  “We were never actually together,” he said, easing her arms away. “So we couldn’t really break up.”

  She let her head fall back so she could smile up at him and nearly lost her balance. She ran her fingers down the side of his face. “Your eyes are jittering. They look like kettle corn kernels about to pop. What did you take?”

  “Stuff I can’t even pronounce,” he said. “Good stuff.” It took the edge off. Made it p
ossible to function. But he was still damn edgy. He needed some more.

  “Share,” she said, pouting.

  “Water,” he said. “I will get. You will drink. A lot. Promise?”

  She crossed her heart. “Enough to drown in,” she vowed. She looked out at the ocean, then turned and peered up at the bell tower. “That thing looks like it’s ready to fall over.” She slid back into Drew’s arms and laid her head on his chest. “Someone’s going to die tonight, Drew. I just know it.”

  She was freaking him out.

  “Well, let’s make sure it’s not us when this deck collapses,” he said, and led her back toward the warehouse.

  THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS

  ROBIN’S RULE #2: Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.

  “Why didn’t you tell me I wasn’t actually invited?” Robin knew she was yelling but she seriously doubted anyone but Beth and Thea could hear her.

  “I invited you,” Beth said coolly.

  “This is August’s party,” Robin insisted, and Beth pursed her lips.

  “Would you have come if I had told you?” Beth asked, as if that would prove some kind of point.

  “Are you kidding? Now I’m stuck here with no way to call someone to come pick me up,” Robin shot back, and Thea started biting her thumbnail—her nervous habit.

  Beth gently pushed Thea’s hand away from her mouth. “Oh my God, sweetie. All August was worried about was the logistics of the hunt. It’s not as if he doesn’t like you.”

  Robin opened her mouth for a retort, but Beth obviously didn’t want to hear it. “At least you could have thanked him,” Beth said.

  “Oh, right. For his good manners. Sure.” Robin narrowed her eyes at Beth and turned to do just that.

  Immediately, Beth grabbed her wrist, digging her nails into Robin’s arm. Painfully.

  “Wait. I’m kidding.” Beth smiled her plastic smile, finally letting go. “I am, okay? You don’t need to apologize to him. We’re here. He said yes. Everything is fine.”