by Hannah Capin
I say, “There’s no mercy left.”
When night comes they sit together outside my door until my breath comes deep and even. After a long time, my mother murmurs, “Then it’s done?”
I know my father nods yes.
Their shadows move away together and the lights go out.
Reflection
The fire-clouds are gone on Sunday. Time stretches long and strange. The morning shines too clear and waits too quiet.
I run. I plan. I turn through the scenes from Inverness, all filtered and fogged like Piper’s pictures:
the huge dark bird looms watchful on the oleander—
the metal gate, INVERNESS, catches the lightning and shocks bright against the dark—
Duncan brings the empty bottle down and it shatters spectacular—
his fingers dig at my skin—
the sheets bleed—
the water turns red—
Mack swears himself to me.
The whole night haunts me in the most perfect way anything could. It grows viney around my ankles and snakes up my legs and through my ribs. Blooms over the bruises and the scaling scabs.
Creeps over the broken static from the party at Duncan’s house.
When I closed my eyes last night sleep hardly came. Instead I saw white—only white. At first my eyes snapped open to bring in the dark. To fix on my knife and skim across the black-framed pictures on my desk—
my coven and me, last homecoming, in dresses all the same shade of red—
my coven and me, middle-school cruel at Holi, painted bright and brilliant—
my coven and me, New Year’s Eve in satin masks and lipstick smiles and fangs—
my coven and me, skinned knees and eight years old but already fierce and fearsome—
—until my breath hissed back out and I could close my eyes again.
But then the hours slowed their crawl so drought-dead that I let my eyes stay closed. The white came back again. I let it. I waited.
Then it bled to red.
I slept, finally, wrapped safe in the storm I brought down on Inverness.
But today my hands are too clean. I want my heart in my throat again. I want the moment that drowned everything away—all of it—so there was no past and no world outside. Only me with fate and a knife and the future in my hands.
Finally Mack texts me, I need you, after a too-long silence that chewed at my fingertips every time my phone buzzed with Piper’s dried-up gossip.
I say, I need you, too. It’s a lie.
I think it’s a lie.
He says, Come to the marina.
He sends the address and I drive fast with the wind in my hair. The whole huge sky over me shifts in sleepless blurs. I park close to the boats and even my darkest sunglasses can’t keep the water from searing golden gashes into my eyes. I wear a green dress that glows jewel-rich.
Green is our color. Green like his eyes. Like my name.
Mack stands on the upper deck of a blindingly blue-white boat, waiting for me, watching me walk out with my dress fluttering. He meets me on the narrow metal gangway that hangs us over the water. We kiss and everything between us brings us closer than anyone else could know.
“You’re here,” he whispers.
“I’m here,” I reply.
He leads me through the tight neat halls. The boat shines like new: the bar and the bedrooms and the sleek-windowed room where the captain stands.
“Let’s go out,” I say.
“We shouldn’t go alone,” he tells me.
I laugh at him. He laughs back, a little haunted but a little more mine.
He takes us out to where the water is all around us and the shore is just a paper strand in the distance. Then we idle where we are and climb the thin stairs to the roof. We lie in the sun, Mack and me: partners in crime, partners in greatness. I think of what Jenny said—
you’re destroying him, right?—
—and in the fever-hot sunlight all alone between the empty sky and the empty ocean I think, we’d be power. It’s all that feels true. I don’t need to know any more than that.
Mack says, soft enough to be dreaming, “They aren’t coming back.”
I say, “Good.”
He says, “I mean my parents. He’s in Tokyo. She’s in Doha.”
I say, “You don’t need them.”
He rolls onto his back. His shirt is off and the sun warms his skin. “The police told them what happened. That we can’t be at home until they’ve finished with everything—”
His breath catches.
“It was Porter,” I tell him. “Everyone knows it was Porter.”
He squints. He never wears sunglasses. Never hides his eyes. “The attorneys are handling all of it. They told me I’d be fine on the boat until the police are done. They said, ‘We’ll be home when we’re home.’”
“We needed a change of scenery anyway,” I say. I tip my sunglasses up and let him look into my eyes until his face says what it should. “You don’t need them.”
“But you know how crazy that is? I kill someone in our house and they still don’t come home. I can see it, you know—why Banks stopped giving a fuck. When he got so tight with Duncan and the boys. He said, ‘Mack, come on, they’re never going to see us anyway, the world’s ours.’”
“It is,” I say, and I sit up so he has to shield his eyes to see me in the sun. “It’s yours whether they see you or not. Yours to say, fuck them, and be great. Be the greatest. You don’t need them.”
He says, plain, “It’s lonely as hell.”
I lean down over him. Slide my hands under his shoulders and kiss him. “You’re not alone anymore,” I whisper when we breathe again.
His eyes close and he stays still for a long moment. He says, “They took me in. For questioning.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.” The word is a dark star against the blinding daylight. “My lawyer—he said, ‘Don’t say a damn word.’ And I didn’t.”
“Good.”
“They know something,” he says, eyes still closed but flickering uncertain anyway. “They asked all about Dunc—and about Lilia’s house, and Connor, and if Porter knew things about Dunc worth—worth killing for.”
I wait.
His eyes open. “They asked about you.”
I smile at him: certain, knowing, the girl he trusts too much. “What did they say?”
“They asked if you were in my room all night. And then the same questions they asked about everybody—if Dunc ever did anything to you, if you’d want to hurt him—”
Far off the words glitter: God damn, she’s feisty—
—but they’re only a whisper now, blotted out with his blood.
“They asked where you were before St Andrew’s.” He looks deep into my eyes. “Where were you?”
I draw my hands across his chest. Over his heart. “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’m here now.”
Under my fingers, his heartbeat climbs faster. “They kept me longer than anybody else,” he says. “Duffy was out in ten minutes.”
“Because even that detective can tell Duffy’s too weak to kill anyone.”
“But what if they have something on us?”
I kiss him again. Murmur close against his lips: “They’ll never catch us.”
We lie still again under the scorching sun, burned clean.
Finally he says, “I can’t sleep. All I see is Duncan—”
“It’s done.”
“Is it really?” he asks. “The guilt, Jade—it’s so much—it’s like there’s this debt I’ll never pay back—”
I bring my sunglasses back across my eyes because no matter how much I hide, I can’t hide all of it. Not in light this bright with the sleepless hours stacking up and up. “You did the world a favor,” I say. I keep it as even as I can, but the boat still shifts on the waves.
“I killed him. It’s unforgivable.”
I stand up all at once. Stand close to the edge,
so my toes curl over it. I won’t fall. “He’s the one that’s unforgivable. All of them. You’re paying their debts.”
Then I hear the way I said it: paying, not paid.
“No,” says Mack, hearing it, too. “I can’t.”
I say, “We already are.”
He breathes out so much guilt I can see it hazing the air. “I won’t kill again,” he says.
I reach out my hands—my spotless too-clean hands—and take his. He stands with me. We tower over the ocean. Everything looks flat and imaginary.
I say, “St Andrew’s is yours now.”
He says, “I know.”
I say, “Would you let boys like them take it back again?”
“No,” he says. Not even a heartbeat of hesitation.
“Would you let them do what they did to that girl?”
“No,” he says. “But killing—”
“Mack!” I grab his hands and make him look at me. Everything is tangled: I hate him and I love him. He’s noble and he’s ruthless. He’s brave and weak. “They deserve it. Duncan and Duffy and Connor and Banks. Their time is up.”
His face goes almost still. “They said that,” he murmurs.
“Who?”
“The girls in the masks. They said, ‘Their time is up. Your time is here.’”
“It is,” I say, coaxing and final. “We’re killing them because they need to be killed. It isn’t over until they’re dead.”
He breathes in deep and sighs. “Sometimes it feels like …”
He pauses. The wind whips up and lashes my dress close around my legs.
He says, “Like everything’s already been decided.”
I wrap my arms around him. “Maybe it has.”
He says, “Like it had to be me all along.”
I say, “It could never be anyone else.”
The wind rushes the words fast out to sea, but I know he hears them anyway.
Succession
St Andrew’s is ours now. I know it before I even walk through the door. The air feels different. The parking lot stretches broader and the school’s shadow clings deeper. The flowers I hate shrink into themselves more than they did a week ago. Drooping guilty away from the stone.
I pull into my spot and cross the lane to the sidewalk, past a police car idling too close. The shadows shift and I look up—
—and birds bury the roof, all across every span. Little dark birds, lined up and looking down at all the beautiful vain St Andrew’s Preppers pulling into the lot.
Waiting. Chirping secrets back and forth. Watching with bead-shiny eyes.
“It’s like—it’s not natural,” Lilia says. I look away from the birds and see her right in front of me, leaning weak against the wall.
“It’s just birds,” I say.
“It’s too much,” she says. She wears a long dress that hangs from her shoulders. Shapeless and colorless.
She brings one hand to her mouth and lights a Parliament. She says, “I’m leaving.”
Above us the roof rubs its thousand wings together.
Lilia says, “Rehab.”
It’s a lie. Not quite a lie, because she’ll go.
But it’s not why she’s leaving. She’s leaving because she can. Because she’s free to melt away, now that Duncan is dead.
I say, “For what?”
She blinks like she’s never thought about it. “Oh,” she says. “You know.”
We watch each other for a rustling feathered moment. The old queen and the new.
Then she darts forward and locks me into a strange sharp hug. She is bones and smoke. She is lighter than air. She won’t come back to St Andrew’s.
I pull away.
But just before I do, she breathes two words into my ear, whispered-nothing but bursting with all the ruffling conquest of the birds looking down at us—
thank you.
Marked
Duncan was never king at all.
St Andrew’s has swallowed him down into the crypt they’d find if they dug up the dark wood floors. James Duncan, last week the boasting pride of the school, king and captain, Dartmouth-bound, leading his pack through halls that parted for him—
—this week a ruin. The rumors swirl around the empty space where he used to stand and reign. No one says it out loud, but everyone whispers it: the jealous greasy-haired boys who hover at the edge of the commons, the mousy girls who couldn’t look him in the eye, the baby-bird freshmen who couldn’t look away.
Last week was silence. This week the truth seeps out in whispers.
Next week will be a scream, gutted and gutting.
I stand in Lilia’s place in front of the Virgin Mary. When Piper comes in and sees me her sword-hand slides to the ready.
I smile.
My hand comes up the way it did last week when they walked in and found me standing exactly in this spot and Piper said—
who the fuck is that, and who does she think she is?—
—and the same as last week, I spin my crucifix.
Piper nods her fencer’s nod. I’ve won this bout and she knows it.
She stands right-hand ready the same way she did for Lilia. She’ll play friendly for now. Keep her friends close, if she had any, and her enemies closer, and her rivals where she can see them every second.
Today there are three boys instead of four. Duffy and Banks and Mack. They walk in together. I can almost see the blood flung across them and hear the weight of these ten days dragging behind. Scraping and clanging against the floor so loud that every single St Andrew’s Prepper turns and stares.
They’re marked. The hunters and the hunted. Culled down already and everyone knows they’re not safe. Everyone’s eyes say it, even if their lips don’t: who’s next?
I can feel the whole building sighing wicked and content. The buried secrets are spilling up at last. This has always been a place for knives sheathed in flesh and bone—
a place for traitors and killers—
a place for tyranny and anarchy—
—and now, finally, its true colors are bleeding through the sky-blue flags with their white-X badges.
The golden fuckboys on the walls smile harder. The sepia prints behind the glass sweat poison.
I love it. I rule it.
At lunch Mack sits in the king’s place. It’s never been anyone’s other than his. I sit next to him and my heart almost bursts with pride for him—for us. He reaches for my hand at exactly the instant I reach for his. The rest of them lock into place around us, circled tight against the stares and the whispers. Circled tight against who’s next.
But carefully apart because most of all, we’re scared of the rest of us.
No one speaks louder than a secret-strained murmur. Everyone glances furtive over their shoulders. We’re quiet terror. Waiting for the next shriek.
“Malcolm ran away,” says Duffy.
Everyone’s eyes hook to him.
“We’re all thinking it,” he says, hurt.
“The whole family’s gone. They’re burying him out east,” says Banks. Talking around the dead king’s name. “Where they’re from.”
“They’re not gone yet,” says Duffy. “Not east, anyway. Just away from the house.”
Piper levels him a look that’s all contempt. “So what?”
His hand hovers away from the table for a second. He wants to hit her. Even here. Even though on a day like this it would bring her hand to her sabre faster than his fist could land. “So Porter ran, too.”
I scoff and scroll down my phone. Text the coven: Go. Glance across the table at Duffy, still second-place even with Duncan dead. “You mean it was Malcolm and Porter together? Baby Malcolm killed his own brother?”
“No—” Duffy stammers. “But—”
“But what?” says Banks, sneering cold.
“Maybe—I don’t know—”
Mack’s phone buzzes first, on the table between us. Then Duffy’s, and he jumps. Then Piper’s and Banks’s, both at once.
A text lights up Mack’s screen: Who’s next?
“God, fuck this shit,” Piper yelps out, loud enough that every face in the room turns toward our table.
Banks grabs his phone and types fast.
“What are you doing?” Duffy’s voice pitches high.
“What do you think? Texting this asshole back,” says Banks.
“It’s a private number,” Mack says.
“So? That doesn’t mean it won’t go through.”
Duffy grips his phone tight, like he’s waiting for the screen to crack open and spill Duncan’s blood across his blazer. “What if you piss them off and—”
Their phones buzz again: Who can you trust?
This time not even Banks punches back.
The third message comes through: What if someone set Connor up?
A picture comes with it: Malcolm running for the locker room, looking over his shoulder. Time-stamped last Monday, during the game. Just before Connor unraveled.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” says Piper.
The fourth message comes through: What if someone set Porter up?
There’s no picture this time. We fill in the space with our careful sideways glances.
“Someone’s fucking with us,” says Banks.
“No shit,” says Duffy. “And it’s working.”
The silence strains tight enough to shatter.
I shatter it.
I laugh.
“What the fuck,” Duffy almost shouts. He drops his phone and it hits hard against the table. All of them stare furious at me. Even Mack.
“You’re nervous,” I say, teasing. “Guilty conscience much?”
“Jade,” Mack hisses.
I face him. “What? Do you have something to be afraid of?” His eyes flash guilt and panic. I turn before he can break. “What about you?” I say to Duffy.
“No—no—” he says too fast.
“God, Duff, go to confession,” says Piper. “Maybe it will help you sleep at night. I’m the one who shouldn’t be getting this shit. I didn’t do anything.”
“You knew what they did. You were with them at Duncan’s house,” Mack tells her. “That’s what it is. It has to be.”
