The Assassin Game

by Kirsty McKay

  A knock on the door makes me jump out of my boots.

  Shall I open it? Is this part of the Killer’s plan?

  I climb up onto my desk, grabbing my hockey stick and piling up some art textbooks to stand on. Leaning on the doorframe, I use the end of the stick to press the handle down and open the door slowly. I peek through the top of the door as it opens.

  Daniel stands there, violin case in hand. Relief floods through me. Even Daniel is better than the Killer.

  “Cate?” He’s clearly freaked out by the door being answered by Ms. Invisible. And he’s not holding anything. I decide to risk it.

  “Hi!” I wave lamely from above. “Just thought you might be the Killer.”

  “Oh! Hello, up there.” He smiles a little. “Killer? Maybe I am, but that’s not why I’m here.”

  “No, it’s not.” I hop down, pushing the mug behind the art books so he can’t see it. “Or at least if you are the Killer, I don’t think you’d come knocking. You wouldn’t be that ordinary.”

  He likes that, nods. Then we have that silence that I knew we’d have. At last, he breaks it. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Me too,” I say, exiting the room past him. Something makes me not want to share the cup situation. I haven’t figured out who to share Killer stuff with yet, apart from Vaughan.

  Daniel follows me, and I shut the door, babbling nonsensically. “When I say ‘me too,’ I mean that I’ve been looking for you too, not looking for myself in some kind of existential soul-searching way or anything.” I raise an eyebrow and sigh. “We need to talk, don’t we?”

  He gulps, blushes. Oops, too direct. Trust me to cut to the chase.

  “Yes, we do,” he says finally. “I know you’ve been avoiding me.”

  Hmm. I’ll let that one pass. I lock my door behind us. We rarely lock our study doors around here, but normal takes a rest during the Game, so Daniel doesn’t comment. We walk down the corridor and out into the quad where kids are still hanging out. Someone’s kicking a ball, and I can see Alex in one corner, with some of his cronies and groupies around him. He’s playing his guitar and pulling his best misunderstood-rock-star face. For a moment, I wish I was sitting there too, but I banish that thought.

  “Shall we go for a walk?” I say. “Far from the madding crowd?”

  “Absolutely.” Daniel looks relieved. More than two people is a madding crowd for him.

  We walk across the quad, dodging the skateboarders and ducking the football, and head for the archway. Then from behind us comes a scream. We both swing around.

  Tesha, who had been sitting on the bench directly in front of the library, is standing, shaking her hands, and some kind of liquid is flying off them. Her friends, Whitney and Anvi, have also evacuated the bench, which is dripping with something gooey.

  Splat! Splat!

  Little explosions on the ground, and the goo splashes on concrete. Something is falling from the sky.

  “Red,” Daniel murmurs.

  “Where are they coming from?” The sun is in my eyes, and I hold up a hand to shield my face.

  “Up there.” He points to the clock tower. Sure enough, another couple of missiles appear from a small window below the clockface.

  “Killer!”

  A shout from the archway—it’s Vaughan. He runs to us, pointing to the crowd of Guild. “Quick, Cate, take it in. Who’s here? Who’s missing? The Killer must be in the tower. We’ll catch him!”

  And he takes off, sprinting across the quad toward the library. I follow, and Daniel—never given to sprinting usually—follows me. We run past the Three Witches—Tesha, Anvi, and Whitney—who are all now wearing varying degrees of blood splatter, and into the building. In the entrance hall, Vaughan pauses to look back and forth, but I’m way ahead of him.

  “This way!” I beckon from a door in the corner. Vaughan doesn’t know about the stairs that lead to the clock tower. It’s usually out of bounds to kids, but a few of us art students were allowed up there last term to paint the view from the very window that the missiles appeared from. I race down a corridor through another door and then up the stairs. When my brain has time to catch up with my feet, I’ll try to remember which Guild kids were included in that art class.

  “This the only way in and out?” Vaughan bounds past me.

  “I think so!”

  Somewhere above us, a door slams.

  “Quickly!” Vaughan leaps up the stairs, seemingly without effort. I’m close on his heels, Daniel somewhere behind.

  I reach a door and stop—but Vaughan runs on.

  “Here!” I hiss. “This is the room with the window!”

  He jogs down the stairs again. “What’s in there?”

  I shrug. “Nothing much. It’s a storeroom.”

  “And up there?” He points up the stairs. “Only the clock?”

  “As far as I know.”

  Vaughan nods. “You.” He points at Daniel, who has joined us, and is doubled over, panting. “Stay here. If the Killer comes down the stairs, yell.”

  Daniel looks up at him, raises his eyebrows. “Er, no.”

  “Please, Daniel,” I whisper. “We’ll just be a minute.”

  “I don’t even know why I’m here to be honest.”

  Vaughan looks shocked, offended even. “You’re Guild, aren’t you? You want to find the Killer.”

  Daniel sighs but nods. “Go on, then. I’ll play along. But if I get whacked standing here like an idiot, it’s on you two.”

  Vaughan claps him on the back. “Understood. Good man.”

  I sense Daniel stiffen, but he says nothing, and Vaughan doesn’t seem to notice. Vaughan nods at me and eyes the door. “After you.”

  Thanks. I give him a look, open the door slowly, and peek inside.

  The first suspicious thing is that the light is on. Incongruous fluorescent strips, buzzing away in the exposed rafters of the sloped roof. Dust has been stirred up; I feel it in the air, scratching my throat and making my eyes water. I blink. The room is large and almost bare except for a few stacked library chairs, a couple folded trestle tables, and half a dozen boxes of books. There is nowhere much to hide.

  I take a step in, and the bare, varnished boards creak spookily beneath my feet. There’s a pillar a couple feet away from the door, and the view to the window is obscured. Vaughan and I tiptoe to the pillar and peer around it to the window.

  Thock. Thock. Thock.

  The window is open, and red, circular things are flying out of it. Below the window is a black box with what looks like a big bowl on top.

  Thock. Thock.

  The balls are flying out of some kind of machine.

  Vaughan walks up to it. “It’s a tennis ball machine.”

  I join him and pick a gooey, red tennis ball out of the large bowl at the top of the machine. I’m saving the ball from its fate. There’s a hole in the bowl, and the balls fall down it to emerge a few seconds later out of the mouth of the machine at considerable speed. I squeeze the ball gently. There’s a long slit in the ball that almost cuts it in two, and it oozes viscous red. It’s gross—and highly effective.

  “This Killer certainly likes blood.” I shake my head. “I suppose it’s nice to have a theme.”

  “He’s reasonably inventive within the established tropes, I suppose,” Vaughan says. “Some might say these are classic Kills—the shower, the clock tower.”

  “The pool one was just icky. And they’re all so messy.” I put the ball back in the bowl and wipe my fingers on the rim.

  “Killer’s a boy. Boys like mess. They’re like dogs; they like to mark their territory,” Vaughan says.

  “Oh, yuck.” I can’t quite look him in the eye. “Don’t go applying your own disgustingness to the entirety of the male sex.”

  “We’re all the same, Cate.” He takes
a step closer, and this time I make myself look at him. He smiles when he sees the effort involved. “We’re animals, I tell you.”

  There’s a voice behind us.

  “So?”

  I spin around. Daniel. He walks up to us.

  “I checked up the stairs. Door is locked, no way in. And nobody in here, I see.” Daniel looks at the machine. There’s only my oozy ball left; it drops into the hole and comes out with a final thock. “Clever. The Killer didn’t have to stick around.”

  Vaughan is examining the machine. “The Killer didn’t even need to be here to set it going. These things have remotes.”

  “Wouldn’t you have to be in the line of sight?” I say.

  He shakes his head, impatient. “RF remote, not IR.” He sees my blank face. “These machines aren’t infrared like your TV. They work by radio wave. Like a car key fob. They can go through walls, thirty-yard range easily.” He gestures to the courtyard below. “The Killer was probably sunning himself with the rest of them.” He grabs my arm. “Got any face powder on you?”

  “You’re in need of a touch-up?” I raise an eyebrow. “Best I can do is ChapStick.”

  “Ach!” Vaughan paces up and down. “I should have come prepared. It’s an ideal opportunity to take some fingerprints off the machine.”

  “Hey, what’s going on in here?”

  “Were you throwing those things?”

  Suddenly the room is filling up with the kids who all eventually had the same idea as us. The Triumvirate of Pretty—Tesha, Anvi, and Whitney—are here, looking like roadkill and talking ten to the dozen.

  “This is not a righteous Kill!” Tesha says. She’s as red in the face as the stuff on her clothes. “We all three got splattered, but the balls could have landed near anyone!”

  “The rules say no multiple Kills, and nothing that could affect any passersby.” Whitney is calmer, but only just. “We are not accepting that we’re Killed.”

  “Anyway,” Anvi shouts, bleached ponytail waggling and brown skin flushed. “I hardly got any. It’s just on my shoe. Tesha is covered!”

  “Yeah, by accident!” Tesha’s fighting for her life, globules of “blood” dangling off her curls. “The balls were falling nearer you but the first few bounced toward me. It was totally random!”

  Everyone’s monkeying with the machine now, and I can see Vaughan boiling at the lost opportunity to CSI the bejesus out of it. I’m actually a little surprised he doesn’t carry some kind of kit on him for just this eventuality.

  “Rick, Carl, take the machine away.” Alex has appeared. “Apprentices, clear the quad. Let’s do this before any teacher comes by.”

  “Alex!” Tesha squawks at him. “I’m not bloody dead, am I?”

  He guffaws at her. “You’re dead bloody.” Everyone laughs. “Seriously, enough for now. Get cleaned up and we’ll talk later at the Summoning.”

  I look around, and Vaughan has gone. I head down the stairs, Daniel following.

  “If Alex thinks I’m cleaning fake blood from the flagstones, he’s got another thing coming,” he mutters.

  “I suppose he doesn’t want to give the school any more ammunition to close the Game down.” We reach the ground floor. “The pool was an expensive prank.” Outside, Martin has already got a bucket of water and is washing the blood away. I turn to Daniel. “Do you want to get out of here and talk still?”

  He looks up into the sky, as if the answer is written in the clouds. “No need. Think we both know where we stand. I’ll see you later.” He makes a beeline for the archway without a backward glance.

  “Oh that really helps, Daniel!” I shout after him. Martin looks up from his cleaning, but I don’t care. And in that moment, I don’t care about Daniel either. He’s drama but not even in a fun way. He’s just an energy sap. Even before the ill-conceived kiss, he was hard work. I’d put in endless hours of dealing with his moods and the frequent Eeyore-type nonsense he habitually threw, in return for what? An occasional wonderful, funny afternoon when he was doing manic, rather than depressive? And now I’m supposed to feel bad because I made a mistake and kissed him?

  I close my eyes and groan. I do feel bad. I bounced into Daniel’s arms on the rebound—meaning to stick the knife in Alex before he could stick it in me—but really the only person who got hurt in all of this is Daniel. And I think he’s totally assuming I fancy Vaughan now. What a stupid mess. Daniel is my friend, and whatever bad romances are happening in my ridiculous life, I have to put this right somehow.

  “Hey, stop!” I run after him.

  “What’s wrong?” To my surprise he does stop and turn, pale face alarmed.

  “This!” I pant. “I don’t want things to be weird between us, and I’m sick of your attitude. I know you’re uncomfortable, and I know we, you know, kissed, but can’t we get over it?”

  He looks down at his feet, then up at me. I’m surprised by the fury in his dark eyes.

  “Get over it? Just like that?” He looks down again. “You have no idea, do you?”

  “What, that you ‘like’ me?” I flick my fingers in the air. “Can’t we just be friends though? We were good at that.” I take a deep breath. “I miss you, you know? I don’t like it when you’re not around.”

  “But I am around!” He says, ferocious. “You just don’t see me! Especially when there are other people on the menu.”

  “On the menu…?” My jaw drops. “What does that mean? Who, for goodness sake, is on my menu?”

  He turns and walks toward the music rooms again, refusing to answer me.

  “You’re not around!” I repeat. “When do you see me with all these people who are on my menu?”

  He turns on his heel and stares me down. “Oh, I see you, Cate. You may not notice me, but I’m always there.”

  He turns and disappears into the music department building. I groan, frustrated. What does he mean, he’s always there? What kind of cryptic crap is that?

  It’s only when I’m dragging my heels back to my study that I remember the mug.

  I’m watching you…

  Chapter 10

  Saturday afternoon and my heart is still beating. Just.

  I’m early for the second Summoning, but when I arrive the cave is already over half-full. Daniel is there, sitting at the back next to Marcia, his head buried in some old, dusty book. I’m not even sure that there’s enough light in here for him to read, but he’s certainly giving his best impression of it. There’s a golden oldie Evanescence song playing in the background, and the atmosphere is hyper, fueled no doubt by the morning’s pseudo Killing. There was already so much to talk about, but now the chatter is threatening to spill over into the surrounding chambers of the caves and flow out on to the sand and to the sea.

  “Were you followed?” Alex calls out to me as I enter. I shake my head. “Sure?” he presses.

  “I’m sure!” Blimey. If we ever were on our guard, it’s now. I find a crate to sit on and park myself. It’s cold in here, maybe even colder than outside. The generator isn’t on, and the cave is only lit by a single oil lamp and half of the candles. There’s a sense of everything being rushed. I eye the electric heater with longing, but clearly Alex is saving the juice for when we really need it. I plunge my hands into my parka, and pull out gloves. Stuff clatters to the floor—my keys, my Guild rule book, tissues, lip balm. I scoop everything up and shove it back in.

  The cave is filling up, slowly but surely. People arrive in twos and threes; maybe everyone had set off individually as requested by Alex but recklessly gave in to the herding instinct when close to the caves.

  “Sit quickly,” Alex says. “We have a lot to talk about.” He casts around the room. “Are we all here?”

  “Tesha almost didn’t come,” Carl says, a sly smile on his face. He’s stirring the pot, but ever so casually, chin leaning on hands, his auburn hair looking
startlingly red in the candlelight. “Tesha’s in a huff at getting that crap all over her old-lady cardigan. Nice one, Killer.”

  “Shut up, Carl.” Tesha sighs. “It’s cashmere, and that paint won’t come off.”

  “You’ll get over it, Tesh.” Alex can’t quite suppress his own smile. With any of his ex-conquests, he’s secretly a little delighted when they look foolish. “We are joined by the rest of the dead, and you don’t hear them complaining.” He looks over at Cynthia and Becky.

  Tesha looks ready to explode. “We’re not dead though—are we, Alex?” She glances at her friends for support, but Whit and Anvi sit tight, black and blond heads bent together, yin and yang, twins in negative. Their best bet could be to stay silent and hope that the victim is decreed to be Tesha. “It was a mass Kill, and that’s not allowed—”

  Alex holds up his hand. “Tesha, we’ll get to that. Don’t pee your pants.” There’s a tittering. “Now can we get started?”

  “We’re all here.” Marcia has done a headcount.

  “One missing,” Rick says, jaw set.

  “No,” Marcia says, “Thirteen players, one Grand Master.”

  “You’re forgetting our new recruit…” Rick growls.

  “Hello, folks!” Vaughan is on cue at the doorway, waving like an over-animated clown. “Thought I’d give you all time to settle down before I landed on you.” His entrance is not quite as crazy as last time, but it makes as much of an impression.

  “New recruit?” Martin cries. “He’s in for definite?”

  “In like Flynn!” Vaughan grins, then looks at me. “Oh—no offense, I know how keen you are on your mentor.”

  I choke; I die and try not to look like I’m dying.

  “We don’t get to put it to the vote?” Daniel speaks up. Everyone looks at him, because it happens so rarely.

  “Oh, you’re still here, Daniel?” Vaughan says, all smiles. “Only this morning you didn’t look like you were that keen. Not interested in getting to the bottom of anything, really. That being the case, the Killer would do well to spare you and keep you in the Game. Unless, of course, it’s all an elaborate ruse and you’re actually the Killer.” Vaughan puts his head to one side, genuinely interested. “No, I don’t think you are. All that blood, eh?” He tuts sympathetically. “Not sure that you have the stomach.”