“I got you,” Brett said, grabbing hold of her before she hit the floor. With little effort at all, he pulled her toward the door. Just as she reached the threshold, Juniper heard a creak behind them, and she burst forward, passing through the doorway.
Together, they raced down the hall. Parker’s door was open, and it took only a glance to see that nobody was inside. Then they were thundering down the staircase, chasing the ghost of a scream that had trailed off moments ago.
They found the body at the foot of the stairs. Someone had dragged him out of the dining room, the better to wrap him up in pretty red ribbons. Except . . . the ribbons weren’t literal ribbons, and Juniper slapped a hand over her mouth as she realized what had been done. Bright red slashes covered Gavin’s face, his forearms, his neck. But this was no arbitrary hack job, oh no. On every inch of exposed skin, words had been carved into him.
“Oh God.” Juniper swayed on the bottom step. Someone must’ve brought a knife to the party, but who? Parker, with his wicked sense of justice? Brett, with his fists so powerful, he didn’t need to hold anything in them to get the job done? Juniper knew for a fact that Ruby had brought a revolver, and she’d brought a simple marker—
“Wait,” she said, as the others crowded around her. Ruby and Parker were there, dancing in her periphery like ghosts. But she couldn’t take her eyes off Gavin; she couldn’t breathe until her suspicions were confirmed. Kneeling beside him, she slid a finger across his wrist. Her finger came away clean. Gavin hadn’t been carved into with the sharp edge of a knife. He’d been written on in red marker.
Juniper actually smiled.
Then her gaze trailed up the stairway, toward the room where the permanent marker should’ve been hiding. She couldn’t see it from her vantage point at the base of the stairs. All she could see was the edge of that first creepy portrait, the one that reminded her of two very specific people. A girl and a boy.
“You guys,” she started, still looking up. Before she could give voice to her fears, Ruby cut her off.
“Shithead,” she whispered, and Juniper’s head snapped to the left.
“What?”
“Loser. Tool.”
“What the hell, Rubes?” Parker broke in, his laughter entirely inappropriate in that moment. “Do we need to hire an exorcist?”
“Screw off,” Ruby snarled, which didn’t exactly discredit his theory. But one glance at Gavin’s arm showed Juniper what she’d missed before. Ruby wasn’t spouting off nonsense. She was reading.
“Who would write this?” Juniper asked, studying Gavin’s skin. She was heartened by the fact that his chest was moving, up and down, like it had been when she’d checked his vitals in the dining room. Still, they should get him off the floor. They should get him out of this house, away from all the creepiness.
The danger.
And yet, there was a part of Juniper that wanted to understand, here and now. Maybe it was a design flaw, the part of the human brain that got pretty girls killed in horror movies. Things can’t possibly be as bad as you think, the brain reasoned, and sometimes it was a good thing. It kept you calm in dangerous situations. Allowed you to plot your next move. Other times, it rooted you to the spot just long enough for the killer to sneak up behind you, and the second you turned around, a dagger slid into your chest.
In that moment, a single phrase kept Juniper rooted to the spot, her eyes narrowing and narrowing but never focusing on the words. “White trash?” she said, turning Gavin’s arm as if it were a hologram. As if, when turned two clicks to the left, those words would transform into something that made sense.
Behind her, Parker snorted. “How can he be white trash? The dude’s Asian.”
“Gold star, Parker,” Ruby muttered, shaking her head. “You come up with that all on your own?” Still, her eyes were narrowed, just like Juniper’s, staring at those words as if there was a code inside them. Now that “white trash” had been discovered, the girls found more words that called the vandal’s rationality into question. “Deviant” was curled into the crook of Gavin’s elbow in grand, swooping letters. Juniper couldn’t make sense of it. It wasn’t until she looked up at Brett that her heart really started to pound. Sure, it had practically stopped beating when she thought Gavin had been carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey, and had sprung back to life when she realized he hadn’t. But now, looking at the understanding in Brett’s eyes, she felt all the blood in her body rushing to her heart.
“What?” she asked, holding Brett’s eye.
“I . . . I’ve seen this,” he said, backing away. For a minute, she thought he might back out of the house that way, never turning around. She shuddered to think of what would happen if someone came up behind him before he made it to his car. Someone who decided a marker wasn’t powerful enough. “Last year,” Brett told her, “at Dahlia Kane’s Christmas party, I found that boy passed out by the pool with writing all over him.”
That boy, Juniper thought, as if Brett could ever forget his name. As if it wasn’t etched into each of their memories. Carved, the way she’d thought Gavin’s skin had been carved.
“Somebody wrote ‘white trash’ on him?” Juniper asked, her gaze returning to Gavin. Out of the corner of her eye, she spied Brett glancing at Parker. Parker nodded, the tiniest bit.
“Yeah,” Brett said, and then, still looking at Parker, added, “Gavin wrote it.”
Juniper’s head snapped up. “What? No, he didn’t.”
Brett and Parker nodded.
“No, Gavin wouldn’t do that. You’re setting him up.” Still, even as she said it, she realized how illogical it sounded. As illogical as someone writing white trash on Gavin. As illogical as being haunted. “Can everyone back up? I need to check his vitals—”
“No,” Ruby shouted, and her voice startled all of them. “Don’t you know what’s happening? He’s coming for us.”
“Who?” Brett asked, daring her to speak the boy’s name. But Ruby was too afraid to utter it, too afraid to dig up the secret they’d buried with a body so badly burned, he’d had to be identified by his teeth.
Parker wasn’t afraid. Maybe he simply refused to admit the possibility that the boy had come back for them. Or maybe he’d gone his entire life without suffering repercussions for anything, so he couldn’t see what was coming. Either way, Juniper saw Ruby close her eyes as the name passed through his lips. It should’ve been whispered like a secret, but Parker spat it like a curse. “Shane Ferrick.”
12.
FERAL CHILD
The morning of their arrival, Fallen Oaks was hit with a storm. The doors of the high school rattled and an oak branch crashed through a window during AP Bio. Then the fog parted to reveal two strangers. Skinny legs and tattered clothes. Pale skin and ebony hair.
At ten o’clock on December 3, they pushed through the great crimson doors of the school, bringing with them the rain. Everyone turned to stare. You couldn’t blame them, really; the Ferricks were mesmerizing. The kind of people who might’ve been ghosts slipping onto the mortal plane for a time, and then vapor.
And then wind.
Ruby Valentine was pulling a chemistry book from her locker when it happened. Later she would attribute meaning to this, as if the universe were some great, conspiring witch and everything she did, she did with a wink and a smile, giving you flashes of her grand design. Chemistry, indeed, Ruby would think, heat flooding her chest. But at the time, she wasn’t looking at the title of the book. She knew it by its cover, and besides, her focus was entirely elsewhere. She was looking inward, lost in some daydream or another, when Shane Ferrick walked by.
His twin sister must’ve been with him. They were always together, back then. But Ruby remembered Brianna’s presence the way she remembered the book: important in retrospect, but irrelevant at the time. A whisper in a storm. What mattered was that the chemistry book went flying out of Ruby’s hands the minute she met Shane Ferrick’s eye. All around her, boys looked on, perfectly capable of picking up
that book, of doing the gentlemanly thing. But none of them moved, and whether it was because Ruby was Parker’s, or because they wanted to see cleavage when she bent over, Ruby wasn’t sure. In the end, it didn’t matter, because Shane waved his sister along, dropped to one knee, and picked up her book.
Ruby froze. She’d dated Parker long enough to know the kinds of games boys played, and she squared her shoulders, preparing to fight Shane for the book. First he’d tuck it under his arm and rise to his feet. Then he’d take a step back, holding it over his head. Before long, she’d be standing on her tiptoes, bouncing and reaching and making a fool of herself.
Down on the floor, Shane looked up. Ruby shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. She was wearing a pale pink cardigan with little strawberries all over it, and a short, kind of swishy pink skirt. She knew she looked adorable. But Shane wasn’t looking at her like she was cute, or even like she was beautiful. He was looking at her like he could see right into the core of her being and was awed by what he found there.
Humbled.
“You dropped this,” he said, holding out the book. Ruby took it before he could change his mind. Still, he knelt there, staring up at her, and she wasn’t chilled anymore. A warmth was spreading from her head to her toes. She curled the latter, wanting to dance. To spin. To twirl.
Just that moment, someone’s phone started to ring. It could’ve made Ruby jump, could’ve broken the spell she had over Shane, but it didn’t. A smile curved over his face. Everything about him was celestial—moon-pale skin, a smile as bright as the glittering stars, and those twilight-blue eyes—and Ruby felt she’d do anything to step into his universe, for even a second.
As the sappy, poppy love song blared from the nearby phone, he held out his hand. “May I have this dance?”
Ruby didn’t think. She didn’t breathe. Instead, she slipped the book into her backpack, then pulled the boy to his feet. Her arms went around his neck, his hands slid onto her hips, and for the briefest of moments, they danced.
What Ruby would remember, later on, was that his eyes never left her face. She could feel a blush creeping over her cheeks. But when she tried to duck away from him, resting her head on his shoulder, he whispered, “You don’t have to do that with me.”
“Do what?” She looked up.
“You don’t have to hide.”
Tears sparked in Ruby’s eyes. She’d been hiding for a very long time. Ever since her father disappeared, and people started looking at her with pity, she’d boarded up the windows to her soul and kept a mask on at all times.
No one could get inside.
Now this stranger was looking at her, and the sadness in his eyes mirrored her own. Did he understand what she’d been through? Had he been through it too? Ruby was desperate to know more about him, and she opened her mouth to ask his name.
When the bell rang, it nearly jolted her out of her skin. The boy stepped back, bowing deeply, like this was some grand masquerade ball and she’d picked him to be her partner. Like he’d been honored by her choosing him. And she felt, as he looked up at her, that they were both wearing masks, and no one could see her true face except for him. No one could look into his eyes and recognize his soul the way that she could.
She stepped away, shaken. The bell had stopped ringing, but she could hear the echo of it, and it was so much less pleasant than even a cheesy pop song could be. Ruby was cringing at the thought of saying goodbye. She hadn’t noticed the boy’s clothing before, but now she could see that his jeans were faded and his T-shirt had a couple of holes. He was a feral child, dropped into the land of domesticated, obedient humans, and Ruby wanted to run away with him to the forest.
She wanted to keep dancing.
He rose from his bow, his cheeks pink and his hair falling into his eyes. “Until next time, Strawberry.”
She frowned. “Strawberry?”
He nodded to her top. The silly pink cardigan covered in berries. Suddenly she felt like a child, dressed that way. But he leaned in, as if to brush her cheek with his lips, and whispered, “They’re my absolute favorite. How did you know?”
“The universe told me,” she replied, not wanting to play the baffled, blushing girl anymore. That wasn’t her. Not really. “But she looked like a wrinkled wicked witch, and she promised if I wore this today, my life would change.”
His eyebrows shot up. They were dark and expressive, and Ruby wanted to trace her fingers along them, feeling him lean into her touch. “Was she right?” he asked.
Ruby shrugged, growing aware of the people gathering around them. “We’ll see,” she said, disappearing into the crowd.
+ + +
By fourth-period lunch, everyone was talking about the exchange in the junior hallway. Ruby knew she’d made a mistake. When Parker tracked her down in the courtyard, he sat next to her so hard, the bench shuddered under his weight. And he looked at her, with this searing gaze that seemed to say, Do you have anything to say for yourself?
Ruby didn’t. The high school rumor mill was just that, and if she didn’t cave under the pressure of Parker’s stare, he’d never know the truth. Not for sure. Still, later on she would think, Maybe that was all it took. One dance in the hallway, and Parker would start plotting his revenge. Ruby was, after all, his girl, and everyone in Fallen Oaks knew it.
Shane Ferrick would know it soon enough.
13.
POKER FACE
“He’s coming for us,” Ruby said, backing away from the staircase. Away from Gavin, and the ugly red words written on his skin. “We have to go now.”
Parker hurried to her side. He could not let her leave this house. If she left, he’d never be able to win her back. And so he looped an arm around her waist, led her right to the patio doors . . . and stopped.
“Park?” She looked up at him. “What is it?”
Parker paused, inhaling sharply. His eyes were narrowed as he stared at the patio, and the sparkling pool beyond. “It’s nothing,” he murmured, reaching for the doors.
Just like he knew she would, Ruby stopped him. “Tell me,” she said, peering into his eyes.
“Shane can’t be coming for us. You know he can’t.”
“I know,” Ruby said softly. Then, even more quietly, she added, “I know, and I don’t.”
“Look, I get where your mind is going. We’re all thinking it: dental records can be switched. What if he pulled off some grand illusion last year and is coming back to—”
“I wasn’t even at the party,” Ruby interjected.
“I know.” Parker sighed, brushing the crimson hair out of her face. “And you don’t deserve any of this. You don’t deserve to be messed with. But we are being messed with, Ruby. Some punk saw too much at that party last year and wants to screw with our heads. Shane Ferrick is exactly where he was the last time we saw him. At the Fallen Oaks Cem—”
“Please.” She twisted out of his grip. “I can’t talk about him. I just want to go home.”
“We will.” Again, Parker paused, looking out into the darkness. “But really think about that night, Ruby. Think about how it ended. If someone isn’t messing with us . . . If they’re actually trying to hurt us, then what happened to Gavin is just the beginning. The first in a long series of attacks. And it all comes to an end—”
“In a car,” Ruby whispered, pressing gloved fingers to the glass. Brett and Juniper had followed them into the dining room, and Gavin was dangling from Brett’s arms.
“Look, it’s probably some jackass playing a prank,” Parker said, guiding Ruby away from the glass.
“And if it isn’t?” she asked. “If this person is trying to hurt us?”
Parker caught her gaze and held it. “Then getting into a car is the most dangerous thing we can do.”
Ruby sucked in a breath. She looked small and helpless, staring up at Parker with her big blue eyes. He wanted to pull her into his arms. Instead he ushered her out of the dining room. He was the leader now, the protector, and he was going
to lead this ragtag crew to salvation.
He waved them down the hall.
“Wait! Where are you going?” Juniper demanded, tossing glances back the way they’d come. Out of everyone, Parker pitied her the most. Gavin’s punishment had been fairly tame. But Juniper, well. Parker still didn’t understand why she’d lashed out at Shane Ferrick the way she had. Even if it had been a desperate attempt to get into Ruby’s pants, it wouldn’t have made sense. Juniper was the save-the-world-or-die-trying type.
Girls like that didn’t try to drown people.
“Living room,” Parker called behind his back, leading the group past the stairs. He could feel Ruby tensing the farther they got from the exit. Leaning in, he whispered, “We need to keep Juniper away from the pool.”
She nodded, pressing into him.
They came to a set of double doors, so dark they were almost black, and Parker pushed them open with absolutely no fear. Inside, black velvet sofas lounged about like lazy panthers. Someone had lit a fire in the fireplace. The others fussed over this, feeling their tormentor’s presence behind every closed door, but Parker appreciated the warmth. Between the soft sofas and the flickering light, he’d have Ruby cuddled up in his arms in no time. But first, the investigation. Every mystery had a detective running the show, and Parker was happy to slip into that role. After Brett laid Gavin down on a sofa, Parker enlisted his help in blocking the doors. There was no lock to keep people out, but the glass coffee table was sturdy enough to keep someone from entering the room silently, yet light enough to toss aside if they needed to escape.
He gestured to the doors. “I want everyone on alert. Until we know what we’re dealing with, it’s best to assume the worst.”
“I thought you said some punk was messing with us,” Ruby said, perched on the edge of a sofa. No one had really gotten comfortable yet, in spite of the room’s warmth.
“I did,” Parker told her, keeping his distance. Now that he’d led her here, he wasn’t going to crowd her. “But until we have proof, you’d better believe I’m going to do everything I can to keep you safe.”
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