by Hannah Capin
—and now he knows it, too.
“Fuck you,” says Connor. “Fuck your setup. I didn’t do shit.”
Duncan takes one step closer. “You did plenty.” Next to him, Banks lunges for the phone; swipes it open; deletes the post. Deletes Connor’s whole account.
“Fuck you,” Connor says again. “I’m not taking the fall for this. You and Duff and Banks did the exact same shit.”
“Except they aren’t broadcasting it to everybody in America,” says Piper.
Duffy grabs her arm too hard. “Shut up.”
“I’m not the one who cheats with some roofied slut—”
“Get her out of here,” says Duncan. His voice stays even.
“I’m not leaving if the new girl gets to stay.”
“She’s leaving, too.”
For a second nobody speaks. Behind Connor, the sky burns down to dirty gray and the lights slide brighter.
“Come on.” I pull at Mack’s hand. “Let’s go.”
“Mack stays,” says Duncan.
Piper snickers. “Damn, Mack, look at—”
“Enough,” says Duncan, deadly hard, and Piper clamps her mouth shut.
“Just give us a minute—” Duffy starts.
“Fuck off.” She yanks free and looks at me. “Coming, new girl?”
I give Mack one last look and whisper Soon again, so soft it isn’t even a sound.
But I know he hears it.
I let go of his hand and follow Piper back across the roof. At the very last second, right before I turn the corner, I look back.
They’re circling closer—the golden wolves. The pack. Connor takes a step back, almost to the very edge.
Caught.
“What the fuck,” Piper hisses. She’s inside already, propping the door open with one hand. Her skin puffs red where Duffy grabbed her. “You’re twisted, you know that?”
And then I catch my reflection in the glass. I’m smiling.
“They’re going to fucking kill him,” she says.
A flock-girl wouldn’t smile. A flock-girl would be downstairs with Lilia, giggling and blushing and drinking until she couldn’t remember why the boys went up to the roof.
“He asked for it,” I tell her.
I grab the door and step around her and go back to the starlings and the second-string. Malcolm stands blessed but uneasy at the counter, lining glasses up in too-even rows. Not quite smiling. Not quite ready to rule the way his brother does.
Not like Mack.
I sit down where I was before, across from Lilia. She hasn’t moved. She has both hands around a bottle and she’s staring out at the city with her eyes glazed over.
Piper sits and grabs the bottle. “Turns out your new girl’s a sadistic bitch,” she says.
Lilia smiles. “Good.”
It’s almost dark out, but the only lights on in the living room are the gallery lamps shining on three canvases on the wall. They’re thick with silver-blue paint.
In the half-dark, they drip like shining blood.
The music swells. Piper drinks. The skyline glows bright and brighter, filmy white-gray.
The boys come back.
First Mack. Then Duffy and Banks. Then Duncan, pausing halfway down, his shadow darkening the space behind him.
“Out,” says Duncan. “Everybody. Her parents will be home soon.”
“Where’s Connor?” a flock-girl asks. Wide-eyed, with one hand trembling near her lips.
“Up on the roof, drunk off his ass.” Duncan’s voice is satin.
He waits. He doesn’t ask again.
Malcolm’s second-rate boys cave first, and then the girls. The music stops. They trickle back out onto the concrete and thorns.
Then Banks.
Then Duffy, scared and sweating, one hand tight around Piper’s shoulder with her shrugging him away.
“Mack,” says Duncan when the rest of them are gone. Across the room, Lilia sinks deeper into the white leather. The shadows wind around her. She could almost be a ghost.
“Thanks for keeping their story straight,” says Duncan.
Mack waits at the front door. He looks taller. Different.
I go to him. He takes my hand—
like we’ve been together for years—
like it’s instinct, the two of us—
—like he’s mine and I’m his, already.
“Connor,” says Mack. “You’re really going to do it?”
Duncan nods, once and certain.
And Mack says, “Are you sure?”
On Friday night, when the room twisted in on itself and the sound and the light bled hot together, Connor was the first one to grab my wrist. To lock his arm around me and pull me down the hallway to where Porter stood by the door at the end, melting into the floor, melting into the wall.
Then I knew.
And I fucking fought.
But his grip was steel and everything else was smoke and he pushed Porter out of the way. Took my earring and talked back. The room was all white and sparkling, dizzying, glittering. And I sank my claws into his arm and my heel into his foot and he laughed. Outside the door, Porter said, are you sure?
I bit down hard. Sank my fangs into Connor’s skin. He pulled his hand free and I said, you picked the wrong girl—
He threw me down and I tasted blood: his and mine.
He said, yeah, I’m fucking sure.
Tonight, right now, I look at Mack and his king, and I say, “Yeah. He’s fucking sure.”
Duncan’s teeth shine in the dark. “Don’t let that one go,” he says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
We pick up our bags from next to the door. Only Connor’s things are left—his wrinkled blazer, his too-soft leather bag, his crosse.
“Lilia,” says Duncan. “Come up.”
She’s almost invisible. “No,” she breathes out.
“That wasn’t a request.”
Light catches on a bottle as Lilia tips it back. She drinks for a long second, and then she lets the bottle fall and shatter on the floor.
Duncan doesn’t move until his queen is next to him. She’s fading. When he puts one arm around her, she almost disappears. “Dunc,” she says, “I don’t want to watch.”
“Yes, you do,” he says.
Mack and I walk out into the night. He reaches back to shut the door that’s been open since before we were here—
—and good-king Duncan turns. “Mack?”
“Yeah?”
Duncan says, “You’re one of us.”
They disappear up the stairs. Mack shuts the door behind us and we cross the driveway, together and silent. My heartbeat is so loud I can hear it. The whole night shines, from the concrete to the sky.
We get in the car. On the roof two silhouettes stand dark against the last red glow over the hills.
Two wolves. Moving closer and closer to the edge.
“Connor will fall,” says Mack, so quiet it’s almost reverent. “They said—”
I don’t pretend to be a flock-girl. I take his hands in mine and we shift closer together until his eyes are all I see.
Golden-boy Mack. Noble Mack.
“He can’t,” he says.
“He will,” I say.
And he says, “The girls in the masks. They were right.”
The air goes so still I almost can’t breathe.
I kiss Mack.
Lilia screams.
Connor falls.
Loyalties
“What the fuck,” says Jenny. “What the actual fuck. You like him.”
We’re in Summer’s room, the four of us, drinking wine from the Horowitzes’ cellar, so dark red it’s almost black. Or Summer and Jenny and Mads are drinking it. I’m drunk enough without it, on Lilia’s vodka and Mack’s kiss and Connor’s blood.
“Stop it,” says Summer. “I think it’s beautiful.”
Jenny grabs the bottle out of her hand. “Right. Because you know all those boys who got all stupid over you turned out so well. You
know they totally could’ve held themselves together to finish another three murders—”
“Come on,” says Summer. “That was boys. This is Elle.”
That name pulls me out of the warm night haze. “It’s Jade,” I say, dagger-sharp. “And I’ve known him for five hours. I don’t like him, Jenny.”
She drinks. “Yeah. You better not. You better just be drunk.”
I turn my back on them and cross back past Summer’s bed and out to the landing. From the railing I look down on the living room and the lazy crawl of people out to the patio and back. Circling with champagne flutes while a man in a white tux and a bronze tan clatters jazz on the grand piano. It’s Monday night—still, somehow—but every night is a party at the Horowitzes’.
I stand on the landing in my St Andrew’s blue, staring down at them. Nobody looks up—
—nobody even thinks that maybe there’s a girl looking down on them, fresh off the kill.
“You did it,” says Mads, low. She’s next to me now, quiet but coiled to spring. Always, and especially now. Especially since Friday night.
“Thank you,” I say, because she’s the first one to even say it. That I’m one day into St Andrew’s and already, nestled safe in Hollywood Hills, there’s a bloodstain Lilia’s father’s gardener will never be able to power-wash out of the concrete.
Downstairs Summer’s stepmother, twenty-seven years old and straight off a reality show, squeals as obvious as a freshman flock-girl. She needs them to believe that she’s holding court. That she’ll last longer than the other two wives, or at least long enough to lock down the alimony to keep her in Beverly Hills. She’ll never be a good enough actress to pull it off, or Summer’s father would’ve bothered to get her something better than a reality show. He’s a producer. She’s no one.
“Connor,” says Mads. Without even turning I know her eyes are on me, ringed with gold shadow. Red-orange lips, like always. Hair in Bantu knots. “It’s good he was first.”
I nod.
“Duncan next?” she asks.
I nod again. I’m still looking down at the party instead of back at her. I know exactly what I’ll read in her eyes.
“Oh, come on,” Jenny yells from Summer’s room. “Don’t be a bitch. It’s actually really fucking entertaining to see you in love.”
“Oh my god, it’s not love,” says Summer.
“Like you’d know,” Jenny shoots back.
And it shuts Summer up, because all the boys and the girls she’s destroyed have always been nobody. Just for sport. Except she’s only playing the game because she’ll never tell Jenny the truth and Jenny won’t ever see it. Because Jenny is Jenny, loud and blunt, and Summer is sweet black-widow poison—
—or that’s what she wants us to think, but Jenny’s the only one who doesn’t see through it. We’ve known, Mads and me, for so long I can’t remember not-knowing.
Summer loves Jenny and only Jenny. She’ll never settle for anybody else.
And right now Mads is looking at me the same way she looks at Summer when Summer pretends Jenny doesn’t matter.
“Mads—” I say, but I still can’t look. Downstairs, Summer’s stepmother spins in a circle. Her dress is fringe and thirst.
I start again. “Duncan’s easy. Mack already wants to take his place. He just doesn’t know yet.” Mack, their golden boy. He might think he’s noble, but he’d kill just like any of them would if he wanted it enough.
“He thinks he has his honor,” I tell Mads. “He has to be able to tell himself what he’s doing is the honorable thing. He hates who they are.”
“Does he?”
I think of the way Mack’s eyes went dark when he said, Dunc had a party Friday night. Something happened. The way he flinched, pride and shame and rage all at once, when Duncan told him, You’re one of us.
Mack has never done the things that bind the wolves together in rule and ruin. And Duncan let him in, still and at last, because Mack found his own way: standing steady with Connor’s fate spelled out between them.
But he didn’t find his way. I found it for him.
“I can make him do whatever I want,” I say. “Trust me, you know I never lie—”
She laughs.
I turn so my back is against the railing and we’re shoulder to shoulder. Lean back and look down. The marble floor is straight under me with nothing to stop me from falling as hard as Connor did.
I look at Mads. She blinks a slow flash of gold.
“I don’t lie when it matters,” I say.
She doesn’t answer.
“I’m not lying now.”
She shrugs. “Not about the plan.”
Mads never lies, ever. No matter what the consequences are for telling the truth.
“I don’t like him,” I say.
“It doesn’t matter either way,” says Mads. “You’re still going to kill them. You’re still going to make him take the fall.”
“Of course I’m going to kill them,” I say, and the hot thrill comes back as sharp as Lilia’s scream cutting through the almost-night and Connor’s shadow plunging hard and fast to hell.
“Jade, come back. Jade,” Jenny whines from Summer’s room. “We’re supposed to be planning how you’re going to get your precious Mack to murder somebody. Not fucking around on balconies like we’re in a fucking movie.”
Mads tips her head toward mine and I do the same. Until we’re foreheads-together, eye to eye, no room for lies. “You tell me when you need me.”
I say, “I don’t need anyone.”
She laughs, but it’s the most beautiful sound in the world. She says, “I know.”
We go back to Jenny and Summer and settle in close. All four of us, pressed together on a comforter the same color as Summer’s lipstick. Jenny scrolls through trash-news with blurred zigzags of light in front of Lilia’s driveway.
Cops + paps outside composer John Helmsley’s house. Blood + body bag. Guess who?
“Guess who,” says Jenny, and she laughs. “I fucking love this town.”
Summer elbows her.
“Oh, shut up,” says Jenny.
I lean closer. “Are there pictures?”
“Jesus, Jade, wasn’t it enough to see it in person?” Jenny grins at me, and her eyes glow with the light from her screen.
“I didn’t see all of it. He wasn’t dead when I left.”
“Okay, but can’t you trust this Z-list update shit? They said body bag.”
“I need to see it,” I say.
“It’s such a beautiful story,” says Summer, and Jenny shrieks laughter in her face. “For real. It really is a movie—”
My phone lights up. Summer is still talking, screenwriting Connor’s fall even though he doesn’t deserve a fine-print line at the very end of the credits, but I’m not listening, because the message on my screen is from Mack.
He’s dead.
Just two words, but the best two words I’ve ever read.
“Jesus.” Jenny cuts Summer off. “That’s him, isn’t it?”
I can’t look up from those two perfect words. “Who?”
She crows. “Mack. God, you’re fucked.”
I stare at the words for one more second, and then I hold the screen up for her—for all of them. They crowd in.
“Well, I’m not wrong, am I?” says Jenny with a smirk.
“Fuck you,” I say, but I’m smiling broad and brilliant.
“Jade,” says Summer, and she throws herself back into her ten pillows and sighs a beautiful deep sigh that warms up the whole room. “I knew you’d do it.” She pushes her hair out of her face. “You better tell us we can wear those masks again.”
I nod. And I take my phone back and steal one more look at Mack’s words: He’s dead.
I type, He deserved it.
“Are you sure—” Mads starts to say, but I send the text before she finishes.
“That’s one way to play it,” says Jenny. “I hope he likes sociopaths.”
“It wil
l work. I know it,” I say.
Summer is still staring up at the ceiling. “You always know everything.”
“Of course she does,” says Jenny. “Just ask her.”
My phone lights up again: They’re terrible. You don’t know how terrible they are.
I text him back: Take Connor’s place. You’re better than he ever was.
“Duncan,” says Mads, to bring us back. “When?”
“Soon,” I say, the same as I said to Mack this afternoon.
“How soon?”
I look at my coven. Summer is sitting up now, and they’re all watching me—bright eyes, lips just barely parted, drinking everything in.
“As soon as I can turn Mack into exactly who he wants to be,” I tell Mads.
“Who you want him to be,” says Jenny, proud. “You evil bitch.”
“But really,” Summer says, “you’re almost there, right? With Mack.”
My phone blinks on again. Mack says, I will.
And a second later he says, WE will.
Under the fake nails from Saturday morning, my claws grow a little. They’ll be back soon, longer than before.
I feel fucking high—
better than the second before the wave closed over my head and crushed the air out of my lungs—
better than when I looked into Connor’s eyes and saw a dead boy looking back at me—
better—or close to better, at least—than when Lilia screamed and Mack’s kiss went from careful to triumphant.
I tell Summer, “Almost.”
Eulogy
By Tuesday morning everyone knows.
I’m early again, but when I get to the Virgin Mary statue the whole flock is already there. Lilia and Piper stand a little apart. The rest of them are a nervous gleeful knot.
“Jade, did you hear—” one of the starlings says, all in a rush.
I walk past her, to Lilia and Piper.
“So apparently you’re inner circle material now—” Piper starts.
Lilia cuts her off with one blink. Her glass-blue eyes are shot through with red and circled twice as dark as yesterday. She tips her coffee cup back, but it’s empty. She lets it fall. Piper snaps her fingers and a flock-girl shimmers over and snatches the cup from next to our feet.
Lilia looks at Piper and me. “He killed him. He killed him.”