by Hannah Capin
He’s alone. I’m sure of it, because from my high window I can see that no one pulls up behind his car or follows him out. And because I know I’m all he has left.
He stops in front of the theatre. He’s dressed all in black with his jacket collar pulled high around his neck. He almost looks sinister. I love him for it.
His gaze drifts up from the foundation to the roof. He looks straight into my eyes for a long moment without knowing it. Far off a dog howls and rattles at its chains.
He digs into his pocket and finds his phone. Types something. Puts it back away and straightens his shoulders. My phone is on silent, but I check it, and I’m right: he wrote to me.
No matter what happens I’m yours.
When I look back he’s gone.
I slip down from my perch and then up again, moving silent into the rafters. My coven waits below me in darkness so thick it would catch me if I fell.
I hear his footsteps. I wait, silent and shadowed.
The footsteps stop.
My coven says—
We know.
I smile so bright it almost breaks through the dark.
My coven says—
We know.
Summer pulls the ropes. They groan and creak and the curtains open. She said, I don’t know how long it’s been since they had a show here. Fifty years? My dad thinks it’s brilliant. Everybody else thinks it’s crazy.
But it’s just what we need—my coven and me. A dead theatre on a dead block where the streetlights are broken and the doors are nailed shut. As haunted as anywhere in LA, even before we crept in and made it our lair.
The curtains clank to a stop. Dust puffs and floats like smoke. They sit all in a row on the almost-empty stage, draped across mismatched chairs with the velvet molting off and the springs stabbing out. Jenny is on the left, spinning a bottle in her hands. Summer floats up to the chair on the right. And Mads sits ruling in the center with a gold crown on her head. Glowing in the shaky light of the dozen candles we lined up at the edge of the stage.
A white sheet hangs high up behind them: a stretched-smooth waiting screen.
Mack stands below it all, with ten rows of broken seats between him and my coven. He can’t see me, but he can see my coven real and ready: the spirits he summoned.
They speak again, louder, rising—
We know.
Jenny holds the bottle out to him. Shakes it bright and tempting in the candlelight.
And then Mack says, “What do you know?” His voice is bolder than I thought it would be.
Jenny laughs mad and wild and raucous and throws the bottle straight into his hands. He doesn’t catch it. He lets it shatter on the floor.
Summer says, too inviting, “Don’t be afraid. It’s just a drink.”
Mack shifts and stands taller. “Tell me what you know.”
And Jenny says, “You killed them.”
“I didn’t—” he says, and the fear blooms bright in his eyes. “I didn’t.”
Mads laughs. Not wild like Jenny or teasing like Summer. Low and knowing. “They needed killing.”
Mack breathes in sharp and stays that way, frozen in guilt and flame.
Then he lets go.
He says, “How do you know?”
Summer spins her phone and says, hypnotic, “She remembers.”
It lights into him all at once—the truth all of them already know, no matter how much they won’t let themselves admit it. Because they’re innocent, innocent, innocent as long as they tell themselves they are. As long as they can tell themselves we’ll remember and she won’t. Because to them it isn’t real and it isn’t wrong and that little whore with the jade-green eyes would never come for them.
Because that little whore with the jade-green eyes is no one at all.
Because she’s just a girl, alone and trapped and powerless with their hands locked over her mouth—
—and they’re the golden boys today and the whole world tomorrow.
His legs go unsteady and he falls hard into a seat. Clutches onto it. His eyes light up dizzy with the dozen shivering flames. “It’s too much—I can’t—”
“Kill Duffy.” Jenny says it, shrill enough to pierce skin. “Or his guilt is yours.”
“I can’t.” Mack is gasping and gray. “The police. They’re coming for me. That detective knows something.”
“He can’t hurt you,” Summer soothes. “Not the way we can.”
He sits caged in wood and faded velvet. Sleepless and guilty and terrified, but holding onto the boy I’ve made him. He says, “Only Duffy?”
They wait.
“Only Duffy,” he says again, bargaining. “That’s all.”
Mads watches him. She is stone-still and remorseless. “Everyone who shares the guilt shares the blame.”
He flares up and stands and faces her down. “And what if I won’t? Everything is different now. I’ve killed for what they did to her—”
“You’ve killed,” Jenny echoes back. “We’ll tell.”
“But it was right,” he says, and the flames dance and dance. “That girl—”
“That girl,” says Mads. She stands. Stalking and strong. Towering tall at the very edge of the stage.
“She wasn’t the first,” says Summer, slithering up beside Mads.
And Jenny comes up, too, and says, “You knew.”
“But I didn’t—”
“But you did,” says Summer. And she and Jenny stoop down and blow out one candle and then another until only one flame is left. Summer holds it, kneeling on the stage.
Mads says, “You knew enough.”
A taunting, tempting pause.
Summer blows out the last candle.
“Wait—” Mack calls.
They rise up lithe and weightless, coiling away and vanishing behind the curtain. Out in the dark Mack trips and stumbles. “Wait—” he calls again—
Far off to the side, hidden in a pile of broken scenery, a projector beams to life. The light shines bright onto the sheet that hangs down over the stage.
I have everything I need waiting ready on my phone. Today the story is all mine.
It comes to life, unflinching. Flung across the sheet and blown bolder and brighter and larger than life. It’s the party at Duncan’s house, pieced together from all the million pictures the glittering St Andrew’s Preppers posted that night. All silent and in black-and-white, from the dead-king masks along the walls to the pack, grinning hungry together.
The pictures fly faster and blur and then they freeze—
—and now they’re circled in dripping red.
Connor first.
Then Duncan.
Then Porter.
Then Banks.
Then Duffy.
Then Malcolm.
Then Piper—and Mack startles out a cry.
Then the screen goes white.
Mack’s voice trembles out again: “No. I don’t want to see any more. Stop—”
The last face fills the screen. A plaster mask, not the one I stood behind before the night shattered, but the closest we could find. It sneers hard and proud the way only a dead king can.
Sneering like the dazzle-smiled boy.
Mack says, “I’ll do it. I swear—”
But my coven is already gone, already running invisible to Mads’s car. It’s only him in the dark and me in my rafters and the story spinning out in white.
“You can’t,” Mack cries out, half-strangled. “I’ll do it—”
A red X slashes across the mask, one line at a time. It drips bloody and triumphant.
The mask disappears and for a long choking second only the red X marks the white sheet—
—and then I tap my finger down on the screen.
The light goes out.
The silence is better than the most thunderous applause in the world.
In the stunned dark I glide down barefoot from the catwalk. I pull the curtain shut again and the old rope bites my hands. A sliver of glass stab
s into my foot. I don’t flinch.
I wait.
In the theatre, Mack shouts, “Hello?”
No one answers.
He stumbles closer.
It’s time.
I pick up an old broken table we pushed off the stage for their show. It’s lighter than it looks, but heavy enough that it takes all my strength to send it toppling. It crashes into a row of music stands and they fall loud and angry.
“Stop!” Mack shouts, and the stage tremors as he jumps up.
I bloom into the innocent flower he thinks I only play for everyone else.
I step into my shoes and clatter across the stage too fast. Slip and fall and let out a flock-girl shriek.
Mack shouts, “Don’t move!” He grabs at the heavy hanging velvet.
I breathe in, scared, and let a frightened little cry slip out. I hate it so much my lips curl back when I hear it. I shout out, brave but still trembling, so he can be braver—
“I have a knife! I swear I’ll kill you!”
The stumbling at the curtain stops. Mack calls, “Jade?”
I say, “Mack!” The dust falls so heavy that I breathe it in and cough.
“Jade!” he shouts, desperate and raging and fighting only for me. He flings the curtain apart and in the solid black, the glimmer of the candles at the back of the theatre paints me his.
“Jade—” he gasps out, and he pulls me into his arms and holds me so tight I almost can’t breathe. “Did you see them? Did they come this way?”
I find my phone and shine the flashlight into the dark. Backstage is a cluttered wreck. The light catches on the huge webs that hang down from the catwalk. A spider skitters back up its silk. I shudder. “Who?”
His flashlight comes on and he says, “The girls in the masks.”
“No,” I say. “What is this place? Did they tell you to come here, too?”
He edges closer to the props crowding the wings. “I asked them to meet me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, and the anger in my voice is exactly as real as he thinks it is.
“I thought they’d hurt you.”
“I didn’t do anything. They can’t hurt me.”
He brings me back to him. “Because of me,” he says. “I thought they’d hurt you to hurt me.”
And I laugh, a pealing silver bell that destroys all the dark around us, because he isn’t wrong. Summer said, Don’t fall in love. Not with him, and she meant it. She knew he’d keep it from me, for me, if she told him not to tell. She knew it would make me pull away from him.
It’s because she loves me, but it’s hardly an excuse.
I say, “Mack. Nothing they do will ever hurt me.”
He kisses me so sudden I drop my phone. So true he drops his. And it’s the two of us in the cobwebbed dark, victorious over the girls in the masks and the threats on our phones and the police combing through Inverness to see how Duncan really died.
We don’t need anyone else.
Finally he says, “They called you here?”
“Yes,” I say. I find my phone in the dust and show him my coven’s texts from an hour ago, when the stage was set and he was already on the way. They sent the address and told me, Be here in one hour or we’ll tell Mack’s secrets. “I came in and there was a light at first but then it went out, and then something knocked everything over behind me—”
“You didn’t see anyone?”
I shake my head. “I thought they called me here so I’d be out of the way. When you texted me I thought maybe they were meeting you somewhere else—”
“No,” he says. “They were here. But Jade—” And all at once all the worry is gone from his face. “They’re on our side.”
He laughs. A real laugh. Not sleepless and second-guessing. He says, “They want us to do this. What we’re doing.”
He still can’t say it, so I do. “You mean kill the boys?”
He nods. “We have to. We’re right to.”
So I laugh, too. “Because three girls in masks said so?”
He takes me into his arms. The dust sifts up around us and shines in the flashlight-glow.
He says, “They’re not just girls.”
Tyranny
Duncan and his pack thought they were untouchable.
Mack and I really are.
We walk in together. We’re all the power Duncan promised and all the glory we deserve. We are united. Our uniforms are starched so sharp they’d cut anyone who tried to touch us. Our strides are so strong the crowd falls back.
We are terrific and terrifying. We are conquerors of St Andrew’s and of fate. We show our faces proud when all the rest of our pack has run fast and fearful.
The ones who are still alive, anyway.
The whole world whispers even though they won’t say it out loud to the detective in his gray or the KTLA reporter the sisters chased down the stairs. They whisper—
Duncan—
I heard his family’s paying the school to be silent—
Malcolm—
he ran because he knows he’s next—
Connor—
it wasn’t an accident—
Porter—
somebody made him do it, and then they made sure he’d never talk—
Banks—
they got him, you know they did—
Duffy—
he’s gone too now, and why did he REALLY run—
The same cruel current shivers through it every time: they deserve it.
They’re glad to see the pack fall.
Some of them even say—and it’s girls, not even flock-girls because they’re afraid to straggle out of line; it’s the not-it girls who say it and the flock-girls who listen too long—what if it’s her?
They never give her a name, but they know who they mean.
They want it to be her, I think. The girl from the party at Duncan’s house.
Or from the party before, or the one before that.
It’s a ruined kingdom that we rule but I wouldn’t have it any other way. So I walk in with Mack, the king and the queen stepping bloody and bold and resolute through a battlefield where the dirt is wet and red.
They’re afraid of us because we aren’t afraid of anyone.
The old theatre is a secret we’ve buried together. We left the way Mack came in, past candles burning low. I blew them out and left them smoking in the dark. When we broke out the sky was glowing with dawn. The street was empty. It was just the two of us in the apocalypse and the daybreak.
He said, “Duffy. We can’t let him live.”
He said, “We’ll finish what we started.”
And we kissed in the red-gray light with cobwebs still hanging from our shoulders.
When we get to the statue Piper stands alone in front of it. She says, “Isn’t this lovely. Mack and Jade, stealing from the corpses.”
I smile sweet and curl closer against Mack. “So did they come for Duffy yet?”
She doesn’t bother faking nice anymore. “He ran,” she says. “Like half the fucking school.”
I laugh. Beside me, bound to me, Mack says, “Of course he ran.”
“Shut up.”
I shrug. “Well, you’re not surprised, are you?”
Her eyes narrow to slits.
“But it’s still embarrassing.”
“Shut up,” she spits again. “He’s with Malcolm. He told me.”
“Are you sure it was Duffy?” I ask. I’m reckless again. It doesn’t matter what she thinks anymore, because there’s no one left to listen. “Are you sure it wasn’t the ghost girls on his phone?”
“Fuck you,” she says. “I don’t need him.”
I ease closer to her. Let my serpent-self coil around her and bind her tight. “You’re scared,” I say.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Whatever,” she says. “You’re fucking twisted. I knew it the first day you walked in.” Her eyes slash over to the men standing guard across the co
mmons: on one side two security guards, brand-new and in bold St Andrew’s blue; on the other, two policemen with their badges winking in the dusty light. “I told that detective about you.”
“Leave Jade out of this,” says Mack. “She’s the only one who doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
But I stay fearless and flawless. “I’m flattered.”
“I told him it’s no fucking coincidence that some bitch shows up on parole and everyone starts killing each other.”
“You know Duncan killed Connor,” I say. Not watching her; not watching the guards or the dwindling leftover flock-girls. Watching the boys instead. Watching their teeth. I want Malcolm back so I can tempt him until he stops chewing at his lip, stops pressing his mouth tight, stops hiding the smile that will give him away if he’s the reason Banks never dazzled through the static. “You know Porter killed Duncan.”
“Yeah, and I know nobody was killing anybody until you came in with your smirk and your first-date fucking and started playing your games—”
“Piper,” says Mack, and he’s more the king than Duncan ever was. “Don’t say another word about her.”
She smiles through her fear, grim and gritting. And she leans close and says, “I think maybe you’re the guiltiest of all of us, new girl.”
The bell tolls from the chapel.
I whisper to her, soothing, “I didn’t do anything I shouldn’t have done.”
Piper hisses back, “Neither did I.”
She pushes past us and stalks into the commons. The guards and the starlings watch her go.
She’s all alone and she knows it. All alone with fate closing in.
Mack says, “Is Duffy really with Malcolm?”
I spin my crucifix. “I don’t know, but Piper does.”
“We need to find out,” he says, all edge. “We need to finish this.”
“We will,” I say, and I love him for it, and I love my coven for turning him into the hardened king he is. I step back until I feel the statue behind me. Her arms cradle me close. I pull Mack to me under her dead white eyes. “I’ll talk to her tonight. I’ll make her tell.”
“If she won’t,” he says, low, “maybe she’ll have to be next. To bring Duffy out.”
Behind me, the Virgin Mary’s head bows lower. Praying for lost Mack and the soul he’s shaded darker every day since he met me. I say, “We can’t be rash. They’re all watching.”