by Lily Sparks
“Before we start with the bath, maybe I should break it to my boyfriend Hector that I’m a Star Bride now?” I suggest, as one of the girls sinks to my feet and wrestles off my shoes.
Lightbeam shakes her head. “He’s with Compass, and Compass really shouldn’t be told about the Star-Making until after it happens. Compass thinks enough Stars have been made.”
“I’ll bet,” I mutter, then almost fall backward as the girl kneeling at my feet grabs my ankle and knee and forcibly plunges my leg into the washtub. The icy water has a heavy sheen to it, some kind of essential oil? To keep my balance I quickly step in with my other foot, and the other girls kneel around the tub, splashing water up past my knees and sponging my arms as I wince.
Another girl is fetching something from the top of the hay bales. She runs back down with something gauzy and white in her hands, then unfurls it in front of me.
“Ta-da!”
It’s an old wedding dress from the ’70s, with long sleeves and a flowing skirt and a thin, lacy bodice that narrows at the waist. There’s no way I’ll be able to fit it over my sheath without ripping the fabric. My best hope is to roll my sheath into my shorts as I take them off, ball the knife up in the thick denim and stow it away in the hay, where I can retrieve it later if I have to.
I really hope I don’t have to.
But I’ll have to manage this while they all watch me.
She holds it out to me, and I throw it over my head so the skirt covers the top half of me like a white organza tent. Very carefully, I tuck the sheath into the denim as I roll down my shorts. Despite the icy water, the small of my back is slick with sweat. I wriggle one leg from my shorts, then the other, then ball my blouse and tank top around them.
The girls help pull the bodice down and button up the back. I protectively wad the shorts up under my arm.
“I’ll take the old clothes.” Lightbeam snatches them from under my arm before I can jerk away.
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!
With a clatter as loud as a hammer, my knife travels end over end across the wood floor and skids to a stop, spinning round and round in the full light of the window.
No one says anything for a long moment. Then Lightbeam walks over, picks it up, and turns it over in her hands, inspecting it calmly.
“Nice knife,” she smiles at last. “But you need something to hold it better. Like this.” She bends down and lifts her long cotton skirt, revealing a much larger knife tied just above her bony knee with a strap of leather.
No no no no.
“Anyway, you won’t be needing it now.” Lightbeam tucks it under her arm. “So I’ll just hang onto it, okay?”
The other girls close in wordlessly. They grip my elbows, my shoulders, standing so close I can smell their unwashed hair, the half-raw meat on their breath. None of them are smiling anymore.
As they steer me out of the tub, the girl who was muttering before gets right in front of me. Her front two teeth overlap slightly. What are they going to do now? I can’t move, they have my arms pinned to my sides. The others hold me tight as she pulls something from her pocket, a glint of metal flashing in the moonlight.
I wince back and swallow a scream as she holds up a tube of silver body paint.
“The finishing touch,” she says. “Don’t blink.”
She grabs my chin, hard, and starts to line my eyes with her fingertip, daubed in the silver. I’m utterly defenseless. She’s painting my face, but she could just as easily be slashing it, and there is nothing I could do to stop her.
BANG!
The door in the floor falls open again and Starbrite climbs back up. I can hear the sound of chanting floating up through the gaps between the broad old planks of the hayloft floor.
“Angel says of course you can have your Star-Making alone!” She takes both my hands in hers.
“Will Hector come?” I plead.
“No.” Starbrite shakes her head, her grip tightening on my hands. “He’s sleeping now. He said he needed to go to sleep.”
Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Javier told them he needed to sleep so he could loop back to the barn. He’s probably sneaking in right now, waiting for me to get Angel alone. He’s fine. Everything is going to be fine. We have a plan. Just stick to the plan.
I hear the creak of many feet on the wooden stairs, the chanting from below growing louder and closer. The sound is truly terrifying, the atonal, mindless chanting a reminder of how many people Angel has at his command.
“Heaven is coming! Heaven is coming!”
Five girls come up the stairs, each holding something in their hands—some kind of bowls? They climb the stairs and form a circle under the hayloft window, in the glowing square of moonlight that slants across the floor.
Angel comes up the stairs last, wearing the exact same getup as before, except now there’s a gold circle painted on his forehead. He grins at me and takes my hands from Starbrite, then leads me into the center of their circle, nodding, laughing a little, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Then he makes his hands into fists, brings them into his chest, and the chanting cuts off.
“I knew tonight was going to be pretty cool,” he addresses the Heavenly Brides. “Didn’t I tell you? Something good was headed our way!” He takes my hand and spins me around and all the girls laugh and whistle, like we’re two prom dates getting our photos taken, not a man in his thirties getting ready to have sex with a teenage girl.
Starbrite takes something from the girls and brings it over to Angel, bowing as he takes it from her hands and lifts it toward the moon.
“A toast to the eternity of space,” Angel says. “To seal our forever.”
As the creamy moonlight bathes the bowl, I realize it’s no bowl at all.
It’s a skull.
An upside-down skull, the eyeholes blocked in, the jaw ripped off at the hinge.
As he hands it to me, the eerie green glow of the thousands and thousands of stickers on the walls seems to press closer, swirling around the edges of my vision in slow, queasy circles.
The skull’s dry irregular surface fills the hollow of my hands. The joints under my thumbs are threaded with the vestiges of something now dried that was once juicy and strong. The sweet rotten smell I’ve been trying to place since I got here is at its strongest in the depths of the bowl, the skull, the thing I hold that used to be a human head.
“Drink!” someone calls from the back.
“Taste eternity!”
“You first,” I tell Angel through clenched teeth. There’s an awkward beat as he stares back at me. Then, grinning, he takes the skull and gulps from it, aggressively holding my gaze.
He hands it back to me and I pretend to drink, careful not to let any of the chemical-smelling liquid seep into my mouth. I hand it back and he passes it off to one of the girls, his eyes sparkling with mischief, not even close to fooled. Then he takes my hand tightly, pulling me closer, and turns to the room.
“Celestial has asked for the Star-Making to be private. I guess she’s a little shy!” He pats my hand and giggles, and they all laugh along. “You guys go back to your tasks. I’ll be down soon.”
As they troop down the stairs a chill travels up my spine, but I shake it off. I’ve done the impossible. We are alone, at last, in the cavernous Love Loft, me and the target.
“So …,” I say weakly. “What now?”
Angel grins down at me, taking both my hands in his.
“How about a little talk?” He smiles. “Tell me, how are Kate and Dave doing these days?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Wedding Night
I snatch my hands away as tumbler after tumbler of memories release and fit into place in my head:
The previous campers were all kicked out of camp when they were in their thirties.
“We won’t go quiet.”
Dog Mask had help, a beautiful device made by someone else, someone who wanted to kill us. Someone like Dennis’s target, the paranoid genius hidden away in a c
ompound?
Erik and Jada’s target knew they were coming for her.
Starbrite said Angel had insisted on new visitors having copilots in the last few months.
That knowing look in Angel’s eyes, his palm clamped over my kill switch scar: That’s not your name.
There was only one way our targets could have known we were coming. We’d been sent out to kill the previous campers. The generation who trained before us.
“You went to camp, didn’t you?” I fight to keep my voice calm. “You’re a Class A too.”
“We didn’t have fancy names for it back then.” Angel’s smile deepens. “They just called us psycho killers. Not very politically correct! But then, they didn’t have all that nasty technology either.” He pats the back of his neck. “We just have scannable microchips, same as you’d put in a dog. You guys get the fancy names but you also gotta deal with those neat-o kill switches. So I’d say you got the short end of the stick.”
“So all that ‘teaching’ about stars and angels is just …” I think of the girls downstairs, slavishly hanging on his every word. “Some act?”
“I needed an army.” He looks at me seriously. “We knew you little kiddies were coming because we killed the class ahead of us. New class kills old class. That’s the job interview. Back then, they seemed so old …” He laughs and shakes his head. “Some of us decided to prepare. Some of us had no intention of going quiet.”
“Like the guy in the Dog Mask?”
“Mutt. Yes. Came through about a month ago, asked me if I wanted to come help him take you all out. How’d he go? Did Dave do it?”
“We killed him.” I lift my chin.
“Well, good for you,” Angel says sarcastically. “Guess what that wins you? A full-time job killing and cuttin’ up some of the nastiest, dirtiest rats on this earth’s surface. Five, six of ’em a year. You survive fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of butcherin’, then you’ll wind up right in my shoes, with some little pissant showing up to take you out without even a first thought to why you should die.”
He shakes his head, then leans heavily on his knees. “Hey, it was an honest question before: how are Kate and Dave?” His tone is casual but his stance is not relaxed. I shift my weight to my back foot.
“They’re good.”
“They always were a pair of suck-ups,” he says flatly. “Worst campers in the place.”
I shake my head, stunned by the thought. “Dave and Kate were campers?”
“Little goody two-shoes, the pair of ’em. Just about broke their arms clappin’ themselves on the back when they got picked to stay behind and train the new recruits. Still. That’s rough that Kate had to see Mutt taken out, they had, uh …” He wiggles his eyebrows. “Had quite a thing going for a while. Lots of hookups at camp! It was some wild times, man …” Angel leans forward then, his grin faltering.
“Speaking of which … you sure look like that one … don’t tell me, Deer something … the one who killed Nene’s little girl?”
“… What?”
“Nene’s little girl, who got her head cut off?” Angel says impatiently.
I’m going to be sick.
I remember the sheet Dennis showed us. The one entry who had been pardoned. He means Nene like Janeane. Janeane who came from a powerful family, and had gotten pregnant when she was sixteen.
“Janeane got pregnant … at camp?”
“Oh yeah,” Angel says with a dark smile. “Nene’s fancy family got her out for the baby’s sake. When she and the kid popped up in the news, well, we were all following that case.”
The newspapers about Rose’s murder that I found in the pantry, I’d assumed they were saved because they were about me. But they were saved because they were about Janeane.
“’Specially Dave, I’m sure,” Angel says. “Seeing as how the little girl was his kid.”
Dave’s face, the first day he met me, the way he’d spilled out the crime scene photos and jeered that I didn’t feel remorse. The way he’d saved me the bleeder that looked like Rose, and pushed me harder than anyone else. Because Rose was his … daughter?
Impossible. But my head starts spinning. Rose’s grandparents had put aside a trust for her that couldn’t be touched until she turned eighteen. Why not just give it to Janeane? Or have her move back in? They wanted to keep their distance from Janeane. Because she was a teen killer.
Rose had said her mom was always snooping around her room. The message board had said Janeane had found the pentagram necklace that linked Rose to Jaw.
I had thought Erik was saying that Tom, Rose’s stepdad, had killed Rose. That Tom was obsessed with controlling Rose, and could have followed Jaw to the shed. But the killer had drugged the thermos, that was one of Erik’s three main points. How would Tom know about the thermos in the floor? That was a detail only someone close to Jaw would know. And if Jaw was taking Janeane to his hookup spot, then they were … hooking up?
That would explain why Mr. Moody was such a secret. Jaw couldn’t risk his ex, Janeane, finding out he was with her daughter, Rose. Maybe he sensed how disturbed she was. Rose had known a long time. I just hadn’t taken her seriously.
From Janeane’s point of view, Rose was about to get her “rightful” inheritance in a month. Then she found the necklace, and realized Rose had taken Jaw as well. She drugged the thermos, intending to kill Rose and frame Jaw if they ever met in the shed. To punish them both. The burning smell from my dream. The skinny nightmare creature. That was my drugged memory of Janeane clearing the scene with bleach, just like they trained her to at camp.
“Good times, good times,” Angel says, shifting his weight forward. “So you and the guy you’re with, you’re together too, huh?”
“You can ask him,” I say coolly. “When he gets here.”
Angel’s eyebrows go up. “Is that what you’re waiting for? I wouldn’t hold my breath. He’s where Compass put him now.”
“And where’s that?”
“Root cellar,” Angel says, rising to his feet in one powerful gesture. “I call it the ‘guest house’ when I want someone shut up in there.”
No no no no.
“She either cut him or drugged him—probably she drugged him. Compass doesn’t like blood. That’s why she doesn’t come to Star-Makings.” He cracks his knuckles and then his neck. “She likes the Heavenly Weddings all right, but she has a hard time watching me, uh, ‘release an angel back into a star.’”
It’s important I do not flinch. I must not show fear. I must not show weakness. I force myself to grin.
“So that’s what you’ve been doing out here?”
He imitates my smile, a mocking gesture, and then drops it.
“You’re no good at bravado, little girl. I’d say you’re shaking in your shoes, but I always have them remove the shoes. In case I got a kicker on my hands.” We circle each other. His arm is angled so his hand hovers at his hip. He grows still. Too still. Like a bowstring pulled back before it’s let go. What is he waiting for? Why not just attack me?
“Alright. Show me what you got,” he snaps.
Of course: he’s waiting for me to make the first move. He wants to see what they’re teaching us at camp these days.
“Your girls took my knife.”
“So what, you want me to give you a weapon to kill me with?”
“Unless you’re afraid of a fair fight.”
He laughs again. “Nothing fair about this. You know how many targets I’ve taken out in the last fifteen years? I could break you with my bare hands.”
“So let me have a knife then.” I lift my chin. “Unless you’re afraid.”
“You’re the one backing away,” he says, and there’s a flash at his hip as he unsheathes the bowie knife.
Then he sets it on the floor and kicks it my way.
He holds out his arms. “Come and get it.”
I move to pick up the knife, but I am quick, or too relieved. Something betrays me, because as I snatch it up his
tongue flashes out of his mouth and licks his lips in animal anticipation.
He knows I’m prey.
Run.
I feint right, and then as he lunges left toward the trap door I turn around and run in the other direction, toward the hay bales, racing up the tall stacks as he rages after me.
“What the hell is this?! You can’t even hold the thing right!”
I scrabble up the scratchy hay, slipping on the blankets and dirty sheets, clutching the knife in my hands with the blade stuck out to the side. If I can make it to the beam, I can climb up and out of reach. Get across the beam to the open window, climb down—
A hand closes on my ankle, and he swings me by my leg, throwing me sideways down the stack of hay bales. I go end over end and feel my skin crushed between my bones and the floor, my breath knocked out of me by the impact.
Before I can roll to my side he’s above me, the black sole of his bare foot across my throat. He stares down at me, not even winded. I hold the knife with both hands against my own chest, which rises and falls, rises and falls, faster and faster.
“I had a feeling Nene did it.” He bends down, peering into my eyes. “Not a lot of maternal instinct in that one.” He shakes his head. “So you didn’t even kill anyone, huh, little girl? Man, that’s tough.”
His foot is so hard against my neck I can’t answer. I can’t breathe, there’s only a thin thread of air getting through, it’s not enough. My heart is trying to punch through my straining chest.
“Man, that’s got to be the worst luck I ever heard.” My vision swims, I can only hear his voice. “A zero gets sent to camp for killing the counselor’s kid!” The floor feels strangely hot under my back, and the stars swirl above me, looping down and around and evaporating in front of my eyes.
“And then you get assigned to kill me?! To kill me. You! Oh man!!”
Angel releases his foot from my neck and air rushes back into my lungs. It tastes unmistakably of smoke. I sit up, gulping it anyway, my vision clearing as he sits down on the hay bale across from me, throws his head back, and laughs.