She must have seen my thoughts on my face because she crossed the room to put a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll get a day off to handle it soon. Promise. Now, I left you two a check for pizza on the counter. Buy enough for me to actually get a slice when I get home this time. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And I did your laundry. Did Tess have anything she needed washed?”
“She already washed all her stuff.”
“She does her own laundry?” Mom gave me a wry look. “Imagine that.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Have a good night, hon.”
“You too. Be safe.”
“Always.”
I waited until she left before closing my notebook on the doomed essay and taking out the stack of drawings. “Hey, Tess. She’s gone. I could really use your eye.”
No reply. Frowning, I headed down the hall and paused outside my door when I heard music.
“Tess?” I knocked on the door.
“One minute!” she called. Bedsprings creaked, then her feet hit the floor with thud. She yanked open the door, a blue streak of paint adorning one cheek. “What’s up?”
“You’ve got something . . .” I almost reached for her, then thought better of it and brought my hand to my own cheek. “Here.”
She blinked, then rubbed at the spot on her face, further smearing the light blue paint. “Did I get it?”
I resisted the urge to laugh. “No.”
“Ugh.” She entered the hall, pulling the door closed behind her and crossed to the bathroom, leaving the door open as she studied her face in the mirror. “Did you need something?”
“Mom said we could move the futon into the office, give you your own space. But first we have to move all of Dad’s old stuff out of the way. Could you give me a hand?”
“Yeah, of course I’ll help.”
She sounded so upbeat, I did a double take. “You okay? I thought after the funeral this afternoon you’d be—”
“Oh, I’m livid. But I’m done dwelling. We don’t know anything, they won’t tell us anything, and there’s nothing we can do about anything. So I might as well pretend nothing happened until that changes.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s not the healthiest approach, but it’s all I can do right now.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, unsure of how else to respond.
Tess hesitated once I led her into the office. “It’s not normal, is it?”
“What?” I grabbed one of Dad’s boxes.
“To be able to ignore what happened to me.” She picked up a box and followed me out of the room.
I shrugged. “It’s how you deal with everything else, why should this be any different?”
“Because literally every show or after-school special I’ve ever watched that bothers to acknowledge there’s an aftermath to . . . something like that happening, says I shouldn’t be able to do this”—She bumped her shoulder against mine as we walked down the hall. “—without flinching. And I should be all withdrawn and wearing baggy clothes and stuff.”
“Just because that’s a valid response doesn’t mean it has to be yours.”
She shrugged. “But it feels like I’m reacting wrong. And I don’t know if it’s because I can heal up here,” she touched her head, “or if maybe since Josh didn’t get that far, it doesn’t count. But if it doesn’t count, does that mean I’m actually overreacting?
A spike of anger toward Josh washed through me. “No.”
She followed me into Mom’s room. “But I mean, he didn’t get that far. So why do I feel . . .” She trailed off, looking lost.
I put the box down and turned her to face me. “It’s like death. There’s this expectation of weeping and gnashing of teeth thrust upon us, and reacting any other way feels wrong, even though everyone reacts differently to bad stuff.”
She set the box down against Mom’s wall and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I guess.”
“I know. You can react or not react whatever way you need to. But I do still think you should talk to someone.”
She rolled her eyes. “Like your mom, you mean.”
“It doesn’t have to be her.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t tell anyone what happened to me until I figure out . . . . I don’t know. I just can’t. I don’t want to. I want to bury it. To be done. I want to stop thinking about what happened, and I want to pretend it never did. But for me to do that, you have to get off the eggshells, and stop giving me those ‘go on, tell her,’ looks whenever your mom walks into the room. Because I can’t, Derrick. I can’t deal with this right now.”
“Okay.” It felt wrong not to do something, but what did I know? “One crisis at a time, right?”
Her smile lit up the room. “Right.”
Moving all the boxes to Mom’s room didn’t take long, and with Tess helping, I wasn’t tempted to open the boxes to take a painful stroll down memory lane.
As we moved the futon into the office, her playlist shifted. “Oh, my God,” I groaned, recognizing the score to one of Tess’s favorite movies. “This doesn’t even have words.”
Tess shifted her grip on the futon as we moved sideways into the room. “So?”
“So?” I recognized that spark in her eye. Hopeful, almost reveling in the prospect of more familiar banter, I continued. “I never got what you and Ainsley saw in these scores. I’m not saying there’s nothing to respect with instrumental music, but if you’re going to listen to it for hours on end, why not Mozart? Or something classical?”
“Or something impressive enough to be worth your precious time?” Tess mocked, walking backward.
“Well, yeah.” We sat the futon down. “What’s the appeal?”
“I don’t have a visual with classical music.” We went back to my room to grab extra bedding and Tess’s stuff. When we walked back into the office, a softer song began. “See there—” She jabbed a finger toward the phone. “I can tell you exactly what character walked on screen because that’s her song. But it ties in perfectly to this next part, because that’s his song. And the way they twine together?” She grinned, looking more at ease than I’d seen her in weeks. “It’s like a million little puzzle pieces, only better. They stand apart but put together, they make this big thing and there’s emotion and resonance and imagery. I mean, if I hadn’t seen the movie, this would have no meaning to me. Pretty, but incomplete.”
“It’s part of a bigger picture.” I thought back to my stargazing.
“I like the pieces.” She shrugged, throwing a pillow on the futon. “I like the familiarity of them when I hear them in the next song.”
“I get that.” I glanced around the room to make sure none of her stuff had been left behind. The bed was made, the boxes gone, Tess’s clothes and stuff sat beneath the desk. “Where’s your sketchpad?”
“I threw it out.” She glanced down. “I can’t draw anymore without thinking about—” She cleared her throat. “It’s really not a big deal.”
Drawing was a part of her, something Tess had always had. Losing something so defining felt extra wrong on the heels of everything else. But maybe the ridiculously stressful battle music playing in the background was just amping up my tension. I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to second-guess every line she sketched after that creepy-ass card puzzle. Besides, she was still painting. It wasn’t like she’d left art completely behind.
A particularly harsh moment of dissonance emitting from the speakers made me jump. “Tess, this is ridiculous. If you want to listen to this crap, why not just watch the movie?”
Her eyes sparked in excitement. “Could we?”
I hadn’t meant right now. “I was hoping you could sketch out those symbols for me when we finished this.”
Tess visibly deflated at the prospect. “O
h, yeah. Okay.”
“You know what, screw it.” The drawings weren’t going anywhere. “It’s on iTunes, right? You know my password. Mom left pizza money. I’ll order, then we can make some popcorn, and—”
“Chocolate!” She bounded to the frosted glass doors of the office. “Have you tried that chocolate peanut butter spread your mom got? It’s epic.”
And it was. We spent a couple hours gorging on junk food and completely overanalyzing the plot, symbolism, and character arcs of a children’s movie and its sequel. Then after some internet searching, we found a tie-in TV show that actually didn’t suck. We stayed up way too late watching seasons’ worth of twenty-minute episodes and battling each other for top score on the apps inspired by the movie. It was the most fun we’d had since . . . well, since everything happened.
“Told you helping Mildew was gonna come back and bite Hiccup in the a—” I shut up when I realized Tess had fallen asleep on her arm of the couch.
So much for trying out her new room tonight. I tossed the blanket over her and stood, stretching as I turned off the TV. As I returned the empty popcorn bowl to the sink, my gaze fell on the stack of papers. One more look wasn’t going to hurt anything.
Thinking of bigger pictures and tiny details, I used the camera on my phone to zoom in and take pictures of each symbol drawn on Tess and their match from the faces of the football players. Most of the football players had stars with differing numbers of points painted on their faces, but a few of them had something different.
“Weird.” I compared two symbols I’d assumed were identical. Both symbols had the same basic shape, circular with some squiggly lines sticking out on the sides. But the lines weren’t dissecting the circles on the same spot. I compared the other shapes and ran into the same problem. Were they all different, or—? Oh.
I stepped back, rubbing my eyes and looking at the whole picture again. What if the lines weren’t part of the symbols? What if they were bits of smoke or pencil smears? I sketched out the symbols on a blank sheet of paper, eliminating all the lines that didn’t occur on both versions, and then groaned at the simplicity of it all.
Moon phases. Waxing and waning moon phases.
I tapped my pencil against the table then moved to the computer. The ritual took place on the night of the eclipse, right? And the slaughter had gone down at about midnight. I’d assumed the time correlated to the eclipse itself, but what if it didn’t?
“All right, Google,” I muttered, keying in my search. “Work with me here.” Midnight on the night of the eclipse wasn’t just when the moon became completely covered—it was also the moment the moon entered the full phase in this region.
I pulled up a moon phase calendar, heart thudding as I realized the connection. The kills were happening on the first day of each lunar phase. When was the next—?
First Quarter. Tonight. Two thirty-four specifically. “Shit!” It was two-thirty. “Tess!” I raced into the living room and found the couch empty. Maybe she’d woken up and gone to the office to sleep. I knocked on the frosted glass of the office door, squinting to see if any of the fuzzy shapes I could make out through the glass were her. “Tess!”
I threw open the door. It was empty. Cursing, I ran to my room. When my hand brushed against the doorknob, my head exploded in pain. Loud buzzing and painful whispers ricocheted through my brain. My knees hit the ground as I cried out in agony.
Chapter 34: Aaron
Sunday, October 2nd
“OUR SCARS REMIND us the past is real,” Aaron sang, drumming his fingers against his leather steering wheel as he waited for the red light to turn green.
He’d driven all night and had no intention of stopping till he hit the California coast. Hell, he might hop a plane and keep going. New Zealand was supposed to be awesome pretty much any time ever. Taking off after the funeral and popping up in New Zealand would be a bitch to explain to his dad later, but he’d rather face the music than end up six feet under.
“Play it off as grief!” About time he got to use something from this whole fiasco. Everyone was waiting for him to snap. Maybe they’d back off when he came back, figuring he’d got it all out of his system.
“Don’t do this,” Josh had begged after the funeral. “We’re safer together.”
Aaron snorted. “Safer together, my ass.” He didn’t trust Josh not to throw him under the bus when death came knocking.
“She’s not going to get any more of us,” Josh had promised, grabbing at Aaron when he tried to walk away. “That bitch is going down.”
“You heard Hernandez!” Aaron had snapped, shoving past Josh and throwing open the door to his car. “She was with him when Harrison died.”
“He’s lying. Covering for her. She probably told him everything.”
But Aaron had seen Derrick’s face before Josh told him to fuck off. He looked scared, not furious. God help them all if Derrick Hernandez ever figured out what they’d done.
“At least, what I think we did.” The emptiness in his memory gnawed at him, but he could fill in some gaps. “I’m not insane, I’m not insane,” he sang, laughing in time to the music. God, he hoped that was still true.
Once he’d slammed the door on Josh and peeled out of the parking lot, he hadn’t dared stop driving for anything but gas. Speaking of . . . . Aaron glanced at the fuel gauge. The needle sat at a quarter of a tank. Already?
He kept his eyes peeled for an exit, shuddering at the murky shadows stretching beneath the street lights. His mind flashed back to the nightmare vision of shadows entering Harrison’s body. Man, he was going to need so much therapy.
“I’ll take it,” he muttered, shielding his eyes against the headlights of an oncoming car. “If it means I’m alive, I’ll sit in therapy sessions all day.” His stepmother would be thrilled. Another fault to pick apart.
Light rain splattered against the windshield, intensifying as he drove deeper into the storm. The brights did funny things to the rain pouring from the sky. Raindrops transformed into sheets of water, driving into his windshield. He flipped the brights off and eased up on the gas when brake lights flashed ahead of him. No sense outrunning the shadow monster only to end up a splatter on the side of the road. “Take a breath, man. You’re far enough away.” He’d driven all night and felt confident in his escape, now that several state lines separated him from Fairdealings.
The cars in front of him started moving again, and before long, he found himself on an empty stretch of road, able to drive as fast as he wanted. Normally he loved driving like this, but he couldn’t take his mind off of Josh, begging him not to go.
“I don’t want to bury any more friends, man. Please. Stay here.”
Stupid Josh. Team building, good luck charms—hocus pocus the lot of it. He’d never wanted to go along with Josh’s good luck ritual because the whole thing sounded stupid and wrong, on lots of levels. He was Baptist, for Christ’s sake.
His fuel light pinged on, and Aaron tensed, his eyes scanning the horizon for signs of civilization. God, what if he got stranded out here? He couldn’t risk calling home. This was all Josh’s fault. If he hadn’t guilted Aaron into holding his tongue and made him go along with—
“He can’t make you do anything. Man up.” Aaron refused to play the victim.
Besides, Josh’s crazy ideas worked. Aaron could have written off their first win as luck or coincidence, but he’d felt the way they’d played. They’d been unstoppable. So the bonfires became a tradition, and they hadn’t lost since. Obviously, something went wrong the night of the last bonfire, but he couldn’t remember what. Maybe he should have told the sheriff everything he knew. But they were a team, damn it. Teammates had each other’s back. They worked together, they—
“Die together?”
Aaron whipped around in the driver’s seat and almost sent the car sailing off the roa
d. “Who said that?”
The voice laughed. He’d heard that laugh in the school hallway so many times but never with so much darkness. “It wasn’t me,” he protested, scanning the backseat as his memories came flooding back.
The backseat was empty. Stiffening, he turned to check the seat beside him. Nothing there, either.
“Oh,” he breathed, turning his attention back to the road where he’d somehow managed to stay in his lane. Awesome driving skills for the win. Maybe hearing voices was a sign he should turn in for the night. Too much Red Bull, not enough sleep.
Aaron took another breath and laughed at his overreaction. Up ahead, his headlights illuminated a road sign, and he sat up straight, squinting to make out the glowing white writing.
“Now Entering Willow County, Alabama?” No. He’d crossed three state lines. There was no way in hell—
A whimper tore at his throat when he realized the next exit led to his house. “Oh, God.”
Yeah, he’s got nothing to do with this.
A symbol flashed through his brain, burning like a brand. A crescent moon painted in blood on trembling flesh. The same moon glared down at him from the heavens in accusation.
“I’m not the one who lit the match.” Aaron’s mind raced. He couldn’t die. Not like the others. “It wasn’t me. I’m sorry!”
You’re sorry?
Aaron screamed as the voice rebounded in his skull, reverberating, vibrating in blistering agony. “Please,” he begged, tasting blood.
“Please!” A distraught scream reverberated through his mind. “Don’t do this! Please! What are you doing? Stop!”
“Stop,” he echoed, desperate to stop the siege of memories and guilt.
I deserve this.
“No,” he choked out around a mouthful of salt and copper. “I don’t deserve this!”
A lie. He’d known the second the match caught flame they’d screwed up. Big time. Everything that followed was bought and paid for with their stupidity.
I deserve this, the voice insisted.
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