by Hannah Capin
“Malcolm?” I don’t hide my scorn. “You think he’s the one fucking with you?”
She laughs through her teeth. “He’s gone, isn’t he? And he’s guiltier than all of them except his brother.”
That word, guilt, sits strange on her lips. “They’re all guilty. They had a choice,” I tell her like she told Duffy.
“Malcolm’s the one with the dealer.” She says it low, all defense and gutted sleeplessness. “Malcolm made the damn drink. Malcolm—”
She stops and waits.
“What?” I press, and I need to know exactly what she doesn’t want to say about him.
“Why do you even fucking care?”
That night Malcolm stood at the bar, mixing the just-for-me drink. Floated just outside the door and said you know I trust my dealer. But in between, in the static and the white—
“God, your priorities are fucked,” says Piper. “His brother’s dead and we all know Porter was too weak to do it on his own. So maybe Malcolm’s playing into all the bullshit from before until somebody admits they were in with Porter.”
All around us the murmuring-silent St Andrew’s Preppers bow low at their tables. Keeping their heads down so they don’t get swept up in the vengeance that’s picking off their A-team one by one. I say, smile-slicked, “Mack thinks it’s the girls in the masks.”
“God,” she says. “He might not even be wrong. Shit like that doesn’t happen without a reason.”
I let my smile go wicked. “You know what the reason is.”
“Yeah, fine,” she says in a huff. “Shit like this never happened before no matter what went down at Duncan’s parties.”
Her words knot tight together. I count them off—
Duncan
Duffy
Connor
Banks
—and I’m prouder of it than I’ve ever been of anything.
I say, “Maybe those girls will be back.”
“Maybe you’re one of them,” she says. Almost on fire again, but a weak fire that won’t last. “Maybe you know them. Maybe—”
Duffy sits down in, hunching and glassy-eyed. “Banks still isn’t here?”
We don’t answer.
Duffy says, like he can’t stop himself, “God. No.”
Piper sends a quick glare scything across the room. Against the far wall, the gray-suited detective stands watch. Sister María de los Dolores hovers close behind him.
I laugh at Piper and Duffy and their fear. “I’m sure he’s just skipping,” I say.
“Or he ran,” says Piper. “Like Malcolm.”
“Or he’s dead,” Duffy says, and the last bell tolls deep. “Like Duncan. Like Porter. Like Connor—”
“Shut up, Duff.” Piper’s voice grates harsh.
Duffy shakes his head and says, “Where’s Mack?”
“Don’t you fucking start,” I say, tugging at his fraying splintering nerves.
“I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean—”
“So don’t say it,” Piper snips.
Then Mack comes through the doors and crosses the crowd to our table. Edges around the dead boys’ empty seats and starts to say, “Jade—”
He stops. He stumbles back into the stone-and-wood arches that hold the low windows in place. His hand comes up, shaking, and his eyes lock on the seat next to me. His seat.
“What?” I ask, and something deep in my veins shivers colder.
“It’s you,” he gasps. Not to me or Duffy or Piper. To the empty chair.
Piper’s eyes cut quick to mine.
I say, “Mack—”
“He’s dead,” he says. “He’s dead.”
“Mack—” I say again, and then I think to laugh. Too late, but better than nothing. “Mack! Sit down. Stop fucking with us.”
He doesn’t look away from the chair. He reaches out closer and then draws away horror-fast. “Don’t you see him?”
I get to my feet and slip one arm around him. Whisper, “Stop talking. Right now.”
He gapes fear into my eyes. “He’s there. He’s right there.”
Duffy clutches at Piper. “Who is it? Mack—”
“No one.” I say it slow and clear and only to Mack. “You’re seeing things.”
Doubt flickers across his face and vanishes again under the terror.
I turn toward all the perking-up eyes. “He’s been like this,” I say. “Since Duncan. He’s not sleeping.”
Piper and Duffy shift, nervous. The murmurs are rolling louder now, and across the room the gray-suited detective pins his stare on us.
I say, laughing too much but not enough, “We’ll be right back.”
I pull Mack away, to the very edge of the room. Hold his face in my hands. He won’t look at anything except the ghost over my shoulder.
“Stop it,” I hiss. “There’s nothing there. Like this morning, with the blood—”
“He’s here,” Mack whispers. Behind him the detective starts across the room, slow but certain, with the sister shadowing him. “He can’t be here. He’s dead. He’s dead—”
“Mack!” My claws dig into his skin. His eyes come to mine, sudden and at last, and the terror in them shocks through the space between us. The man in gray is halfway to us now, close enough to hear if Mack cries out too loud—
—and we can’t end like this. We won’t. Not before we’re done.
I keep my hands on his jaw and in his hair. “Mack,” I say again, but soft enough to sift through the ghosts. “We did what we had to do. Don’t doubt us.”
He shakes his head. “We’re ruined. I’m ruined because he’s dead—because we—”
I kiss him all at once, before he can say because we killed him. Kiss him with the detective closing in and the sister grasping for his sleeve. Kiss him hard enough to bring him back to me, hard enough to remind him that he killed for her, hard enough to save us—
“Jade,” says Sister María de los Dolores. It floats over us like a corpse on the water. “That’s enough.”
And it is, because all at once Mack whispers against my lips, “He’s gone. He’s gone.” And he pulls me close and his relief drowns me as deep as the waves that drowned Banks.
“He was never here,” I say, still coaxing soft. I kiss him again and he’s real this time. For a soaring shining moment there is nothing else at all—
only Mack and me, fearless—
only Mack and me, bound by blood—
only Mack and me, sworn to each other.
“Jade,” says the sister again.
My lips leave Mack’s. His gaze is clear now. His fear still lingers but he’s slashed it down and left it powerless. He is brave and mine. The sister and the detective stand waiting in their matching gray, but I don’t care, because nothing they do can pull Mack away from me.
“Miss Khanjara,” says the detective, eyes flicking between us. “Mr. Mack. Your friend Brody Banks never came home last night—”
“We’re not saying anything without our attorneys present,” I say. Sweeter than sweet with all my relief sinking in.
The detective looks at Mack. “Andrew,” he says, and he doesn’t know anything about us at all. “You and Brody go back a long way.”
Beside me, Mack nods. His arm is still close against me and it trembles, just a little, and I slip my hand into his and hold tight.
“You’re sure you don’t know where he is?” the detective asks.
Mack takes a breath, stuttering at first but then even.
And he says, “You’ll have to speak with my attorney.”
I’ve made him perfect, right in the last desperate moment.
“Well, you heard them,” says Sister María de los Dolores. “They’ve asked for their lawyers.” Her stare hooks doleful into the detective.
He steps back and says, “We’ll talk again.” Looking too close at Mack’s bruise-dark eyes.
The sister says, “Until then—Jade, behave.”
But she winks when she says it. Fast enough to miss and h
idden under her wimple and the heavy sag of her cheeks, but there.
When they fade back across the room Mack sighs out guilt and ghosts. We should go back to Piper and Duffy, be our shining best selves, but right in this second I can’t. Right in this second it can only be us.
Right in this second I pull Mack around the corner and tuck us in by a window where two walls come together.
Mack says, when we’re alone, “I thought I was brave.”
Somewhere far away there’s the faintest rustle of feathers and wings.
“After Duncan,” he says. “When I woke up the next morning I felt—proud.”
His voice slips through the space between us and dances across my skin. His darkness and his light are circling each other.
He doesn’t know which side will win.
“But I’ll never be as brave as you,” he says. “You’ve seen all of it. Everything we’ve done. And look at you.” He traces two fingers across my cheek. “You’re beautiful. You’re glowing. There’s no guilt on your face.”
His fingers trail down my neck and over my collarbone. He takes the crucifix between his fingers. The silver links us together here in our stone corner.
His eyes flicker to the window. “Those birds yesterday—did you see them?”
I nod.
“I wonder where they went.”
I think of the whole flock taking wing when I screamed into the sky. Their huge shadow rushing west to the water.
“I wonder what it means,” he says. “I wonder how it ends.”
“With us,” I tell him, and I wrap my hand over his and close his fingers tight around the crucifix. “It ends with us.”
Caught
He sleeps, finally, after school. In my arms, with the curtains drawn tight. In my arms, with the little waves lulling us toward dreams. In my arms, with no one else to make him doubt.
In sleep he looks younger. The boy who wouldn’t raise the knife until I locked his hands around it and told him it was the only way to keep his honor.
But I know better.
He sleeps because he isn’t that boy. He’s found his dreams and darkness.
He’s found himself.
I lie sleepless in the dark with my good cruel king. My thoughts float and fly and swim. I should leave, but I don’t.
When I finally stand he doesn’t stir. I get dressed and fix my lips and my hair. I’m slipping almost out the door when Mack’s phone buzzes on the floor.
The message is from the coven: Not even her?
I never asked them to send it.
I flare. I unlock his phone—what’s yours is mine; that’s what I told him when I leaned close last night and watched him unlock it. I delete their message and scroll back up.
He asked them, this morning, before he came to lunch with Banks’s ghost hobbling behind him—
What do you know?
They said, Everything you don’t want told.
He said, You mean Duncan.
They said, Everything.
He said, I need to see you.
They said, You can’t be trusted.
He said, I won’t tell anyone.
And they said, hours later and already knowing, Not even her?
He didn’t answer.
But he didn’t tell me.
The anger closes over me as hard as the rolling waves did last night.
They tell me, Don’t lie. They say it all the time. Summer sweet and Jenny sharp and Mads silent. They all say it, even though they know I only lie when I have to. Not when it matters. They say, We’re yours.
Don’t lie.
They’re the liars.
I type fast and thoughtless: Don’t ever talk to him again without talking to me first. Then, Meet me at the marina. Right now.
Then I delete all of it.
I kiss Mack good-bye with my lips brushing his like hummingbird feathers. I leave him dreaming.
I go to my coven with a storm gathering under my wings.
Liars
Summer had the secret phone this morning.
Jenny rats her out, Jenny the girl she loves, Jenny the girl she won’t tell with words even though she’s already told her a million other ways.
Jenny says, the second Mads stops her car, “It was Summer.”
And Summer says, “Jenny!”
And Jenny says, “What? It fucking was.”
Summer blushes pretty and perfect. She gives me her fluttery praying-mantis eyes. They don’t work on me. She can’t charm me like she can charm boys at bars and girls at parties and Jenny spinning circles in the boxing ring.
I say, “Get out.”
Mads has her car pulled up at the edge of the marina. Her sunglasses are on and the engine is running. I was at the end of the dock waiting when she drove in. I could feel six eyes on me through the black glass. Feel the secrets they never should have spun without me.
Summer gets out of the front seat. The sunlight weaves across her hair and she shimmers like heaven and treasure but I don’t care. I sit down where she was and she scrambles into the back next to Jenny. Jenny laughs, mean. I say, “Let’s go.”
Mads drives. I leave my window shut and turn the air-conditioning as cold as it goes. Colder than Summer can stand.
Jenny says, “I told you she’d be mad.”
I turn and stare them down. “I have a reason, don’t I?”
Jenny smirks.
And Summer says, timid, “So he didn’t tell you we texted.”
“He was seeing ghosts. He’s on the edge and you’re pushing him too far. You have to leave him to me.”
“He didn’t tell you,” Jenny echoes. “We told you not to trust him.”
“You should’ve fucking told me not to trust you, either!” The words fall between us, bloody and ragged.
Jenny and Summer steal a glance at each other. They don’t speak.
Mads says, eyes on the brake lights crowding ahead of us, “You know you can trust us.”
“No, I don’t! You’re all liars.”
She says, “We don’t lie when it matters.”
Jenny buries her laugh behind her hands.
“He’s not yours,” I say. “He’s mine. He’s doing this for me.”
And Mads says, “So are we.”
I open the window all the way and let the heat of the deadlocked cars wash over us. I’m right, but Mads isn’t wrong.
I say, over the humming waiting traffic, “Fine. If he needs you to meet him, you’ll meet him. We’ll use it.”
Jenny says, “That’s a terrible fucking idea, by the way.”
“Summer should’ve thought of that before she started chatting him up all on her own.”
“It’s a risk,” says Mads. “We don’t know what he’ll do. It’s not like it was before.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “We’re almost done. If this is what he needs we’ll make it happen. So when he walks away he’ll know the only way he has left is to finish what he started.”
“What you started,” Jenny sasses.
“Exactly,” I say. “Me. Not you. And what I’ll finish by Friday night.”
Mads says, “Ambitious.”
I don’t say, They’re closing in. I don’t say, It’s now or it’s never.
I say, “You know I am.”
The traffic moves a halting foot forward. We coast until the river of lights goes red again. I say, “Tomorrow morning. Before dawn. He’ll believe anything we want him to believe. He thinks Banks is haunting him. If you want him to, he’ll think you’re haunting him, too.”
Jenny grins. “We are.”
It sings true from one of us to the next to the next.
I’m angry with them still, but they’re mine. And soon, when the boys are dead and St Andrew’s is washed clean, we’ll be bound back together without this simmering between us.
I say, “We’ll make him as bold as he needs to be. He’ll come for them. All of them.”
“For Duffy,” says Mads.
&nb
sp; “For Malcolm,” says Summer, mine again.
“For Piper,” Jenny finishes.
I place one hand between Mads’s seat and mine. She takes it. Jenny and Summer join in so all four of us are locked together.
And they know it without me saying it, because they’re mine:
He’ll kill them all for me.
Toil and Trouble
Day turns to night and he never tells. Not about the things Summer said without me, and not about the things we say together, all four of us casting our spell.
I trust him more and less.
But I trust Jenny and Summer and Mads with everything again. We have a plan and I’m alive the way I’ve only felt since we swore to kill the boys. Since we circled them in red and built plots like scaffolds that we’ll climb all the way to immortality.
It’s my most reckless plan yet and Mads tells me so three times, but she loves it.
They all do.
We meet so early it’s still all night. At Summer’s house, the way we always do before a party, because the vanity in her room stretches broad enough for all four of us to sit under the dressing-room lights. I arrive exactly when Mads pulls up. She and Jenny wait for me and we walk up the driveway together. Summer lets us in without a word and we slink up the stairs past the cleaning ladies still washing another party away.
The three of them paint themselves lethal and beautiful. Cheekbones carved sharp and lips curling. Hair gathered high. Black dresses and white masks. Dusted with gold.
Last night we told him where to be, and when. Or we tell, we said. Everything.
He’ll be there.
We arrive two hours before he will. Weave in through the back with the cars parked far away. Lock the chain back over the door so he wouldn’t be able to break in even if he tried. The theatre is long-dead, its gilded flash rotting the same way it was when Summer’s father bought the building. He wants to fix it up for premieres, Summer said, but keep it edgy. So he can pretend he makes art films instead of slashers.
Unfixed, it’s perfect for us.
By the time Mack arrives—one pair of headlights glowing muted far down the block—our stage is set. My coven is all in place and I’ve swung another door open. I lit his path with thin candles, waxy and crooked and burning nervous below cobwebs and neglect.
