by Jessica King
Ransom shook his head. “It is way too late for us to do that. I don’t care if we go to the moon; those Kingsmen will find a way to track us down.”
“I—”
“No,” Ransom said, holding up a hand. He hopped over boxes and bags until he was standing in front of her. “We got ourselves into it. I’m not letting you choose the lives of strangers over our own, okay?” He put his hands on her shoulders.
The two of them had never been romantic, and both of them had always dreamed of marrying rich. But she knew he’d do anything to make sure they got out of this. Together. They’d made plans to make their millions since they were kids.
“Who cares if a few people get hurt, Delilah, really? It’ll be a big news sensation, yeah. So? We’ll lay low. This is our dream. We of all people deserve to come out on top here.”
Delilah narrowed her eyes. She’d watched Ransom grow more hardened year by year since they were young. She hadn’t seen him cry since they were just a few feet tall. He called tears foolishness, though he never called Delilah a fool for how much she cried. She’d asked him about it one time.
“Why do you make fun of everyone else when they cry, but not me, Ransom?”
“Because. You crying will make us a lot of money one day when you’re an actress. One of my friends said their sister was going to go to school for acting, and that she said an actress always has to be ready to cry.”
Delilah considered this. She hadn’t cried when she’d scraped her knees on the concrete last night when the kids had gotten together for street hockey. Did that mean she wouldn’t be a great actress? The thought of it made her tear up, and she decided her worries were for naught.
“Yeah,” he said, dragging a stick through his mostly-dirt front yard. “That’s good. Keep your tear ducts all moist. Don’t want ‘em to dry up like mine did.”
She cried now as she stared at this older version of her tearless friend. He’d never discarded another’s life so simply. Was it her fault that she’d let him grow so cold? “The people who follow me are not just collateral damage,” she said.
Ransom nodded. “You’re right. But I think what you need to consider right now is—are you ready to die for them?”
Delilah felt like a coward at the immediate response. The word that burst through her mind without hesitation.
No.
+++
Saturday, March 18, 2017, 10:20 a.m.
Jayda fished the last piece of cereal around the bowl with her spoon. She would forever insist that two percent milk made this particular task more difficult. “Not worth it,” she mumbled and placed her bowl in the sink.
It had seemed likely that a Kingsman would visit the Sanchez house in the week or so after Marisol’s initial attack. Marisol and her mother had taken the main bedroom Jayda used to use for her sound equipment as a temporary measure; she was used to sleeping in the living area. Jayda loved being around Marisol and Mrs. Sanchez, but they both tended to sleep in late. She heard noises from behind the door that suggested one of the women was up suspiciously early, but it could also be the half-snore shuffling turns that Marisol often performed in her deepest sleep.
Jayda scrolled through her newsfeed, a video popping up: Prophetess Responds to Accusations of Selling Followers.
Jayda had scrolled three times before she backtracked. Why couldn’t she just ignore this stuff? She wanted distance from all things witch in her life now that she’d actually had to fight off a witch hunter.
She clicked the video, already cringing.
The Prophetess stood in front of a camera, a mirror covered in lights at her back.
“As you might have seen, a nasty article has been released about my followers and me.” She glared into the camera, her dark makeup causing her blinking eyes to look like black butterflies fluttering their wings. “In this article, my name was dragged through the mud. My reputation was blackened by someone who seems to believe I have had contact with Kingsmen in the past weeks in an attempt to destroy my followers.”
She looked away from the camera, her dark lipstick wavering. She ran a lime green nail under her eyeliner, catching a tear. She turned back to the camera. A few tears escaped, pulling bits of mascara with them. “This is not true.” She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, composing herself. “I love my followers. I love providing them with tools of empowerment, whether that be the Enchanting Eyes pallet or blessed stones.”
Jayda’s eyes skittered to the coffee table, where Marisol had left one of the pink stones. Her mother hadn’t asked what it was, and Jayda hadn’t asked if Marisol was serious about it. In fact, they’d hardly talked about what Marisol believed about the witchcraft gear she’d bought before her attack and if she’d tried using it since that awful day. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. It felt odd to think that her friend might consider herself to be a witch, even after she’d been attacked for even being associated with one.
“After careful consideration, I have invited several women to be disciples in the name of the Prophetess,” she said. “You’ll find a link to that page below this video so you can meet all of these women I’ve carefully vetted and trusted.”
A link popped up on the bottom of the video, along with an announcement that the link was in the description of the video.
The Prophetess’s eyes grew soft. “Be careful, friends. There are Kingsmen out there. I’ve never met them. I would not sell our information to them. But to think that they have no way to figure out who we are, where we might meet—it would be naïve. They have stolen many of our young witches from us already. We are obviously not immune. But in these trying times for our kind … please, be careful with yourselves, with your spells, with your hexes, with those around you, and most of all, with the new people you meet and trust your identity to.”
The Prophetess pushed her white hair behind her shoulders. Sharp collarbones stood out against the neckline of her black bodysuit. “Considering the rumors this article has spread about the possibility of shootings or similar attacks at our upcoming gatherings this afternoon, we have been working very hard to increase security to make sure everything goes smoothly. I hope you’ll still choose to come, but I entirely understand if you would prefer to join via satellite, which will be an option for those of you who wish to join a specific gathering from your computers. However, this will be the reveal of thirty-three disciples, who will be there to meet you in person, lead spells and blessings—which will not be broadcast for our satellite viewers—and will be more than happy to help you with the hexes I know several of you have been working toward to keep the Kingsmen at bay.”
She blew a kiss. “See you soon!”
Jayda heard Marisol’s heels before she saw them. Her hair was high up in a bun, her lips were emerald green, and she was in all black.
“Nope. No. Absolutely not,” Jayda said. “You cannot go to one of those Prophetess gatherings!”
“It’s going to be on the beach,” Marisol said.
Jayda eyed Marisol’s heels, confused. Marisol poured herself a glass of milk.
“How on earth do you still enjoy drinking milk?” Jayda asked. She’d nearly rejoiced when her parents told her she was allowed to drink juice instead of milk with dinner.
“Never grew out of it,” Marisol said.
“And you never will if you go to that thing today,” Jayda said.
Marisol tilted her head. “That didn’t sound overdramatic at all,” she said.
Jayda slid her phone across the table. “Did you see the article released about the Prophetess selling her followers out to the highest bidder?” she asked.
Marisol played the video on Jayda’s phone and looked up the article on her own. Her eyes shimmied back and forth between the two screens as she took in the conflicting pieces of media.
“This one doesn’t even have an author,” Marisol said.
“Because I bet whoever wrote it is already dead,” Jayda said. She closed her eyes. “Marisol. Please don’t go.” S
he looked at the girl who was nearly her own sibling. “I’m not going with you this time.”
Marisol stared at the screens, and Jayda ticked off the moments in her head. “Okay,” Marisol finally whispered. She took a napkin from the center of the table and swiped it across her green lips.
Waves of relief poured over Jayda. Marisol hadn’t called her bluff. If she’d left the house, Jayda would have followed. She wondered if Marisol knew that, and had decided not to go for her, or if she’d convinced Marisol. She’d ask her tomorrow.
“Now your lips just look gray,” Jayda said. Marisol gave her a half-hearted kissy face, but Jayda could live with Marisol pouting the rest of the day. “How about we record instead?” Marisol looked interested for a moment. Jayda had waited for the right moment, but she figured now was as good as any. She took an envelope from the bag sitting on the chair next to her and slid it to Marisol. She looked at the envelope first, and then at Jayda.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jayda said. She twirled a curl around her finger. “Might just be your royalty check from 97.6 Pop.”
“They wanted to play my song?” Marisol’s eyes went wide.
Jayda grinned.
+++
Saturday, March 18, 2017, 11:02 a.m.
“Ivy, answer your phone!” Vince yelled. Joyce shushed him as the GPS directed them to the Cline residence.
“Don’t call again yet,” she said. “If her phone is on Do Not Disturb or silent, she might have you set as a person who can turn the ringer on with the second call. What if she’s hiding?”
Vince ground his teeth. She was right, of course. The last thing he wanted to do was give her position away if she needed stealth, but the uncertainty was driving him insane. Her GPS tracking was stills set to “Unavailable,” and the video she sent showed her in a house he didn’t recognize with a nasty scratch on her face.
“Do you want to question the senator?” Joyce finally asked. It was the question they hadn’t asked yet, but it seemed likely that he was one of the few people with access to Chloe’s medication.
“No,” Vince said, and he managed to chuckle. “Do you?”
“Let’s question other people first?”
“Deal.”
It wasn’t the most professional deal, but if they came in with questions for him before asking other people who had access to their room, they could end up with a media frenzy. Vince was not ready for yet another media frenzy after all the Oliver Corbyn coverage, not to mention the camera crew in the van behind them.
“Lindsey asked me the other day if we thought we were going to catch the King by the end of next week.” Vince rubbed his eyes. It was already exhausting trying to catch dozens of killers all at once. It was more exhausting to have a camera crew asking for you to “move just a hair” or “give an opinion, for the doc.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Joyce said. “Why?”
“She’s going on vacation for a week. She’s worried we’ll catch him while she’s gone.”
Joyce pressed her lips together. “Well then, by all means, let’s plan to catch him next week.”
Vince laughed once and leaned his head back. “Tired of looking camera-ready all the time,” he said. “Been doing so many sit-ups and push-ups. Haven’t had soda to keep my complexion perfection.” The air freshener of the car was killing him on his diet. Smelling chocolate chip cookies half the day and trying to restrict oneself from sugar was not an easy combination.
“Did you come up with that rhyme just now, complexion perfection, or—”
“Nah, two days ago. First time I used it out loud, though. Kinda nice.” The tension in the car from Ivy’s absence slackened just a little.
Joyce handed him her orange soda. “Just drink a bunch of water after. You’ll be fine.”
Vince held the drink. “It smells so good,” he said.
“Just imagine how it tastes,” Joyce said.
“Evil,” he said. He slurped at the drink. He’d missed carbonation. Missed sweet, sweet processed sugar. And it’d only been two weeks. And he’d cheated on his diet at least five times. “I think it’s giving me superpowers,” he said.
“Great!” Joyce put the car in park. “So, you can question the senator then, right?”
“I didn’t say my superpowers were that strong!” Vince protested as Joyce led the way the front doors.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Saturday, March 18, 2017, 11:03 a.m.
Mason had forgotten his phone charger. He hadn’t gotten far after stopping for breakfast, so he’d decided it was worth turning around to get it. Back in his apartment, his footsteps echoed, every piece of his shoe sounded sticky against his freshly mopped floors. It was cleaner than he’d seen it in a long time. Without fur from his dog—Nilla, his chihuahua, and his goldfish, appropriately named Silver, had both been left with his parents as he went into hiding—it smelled only of lavender and lemon cleaning supplies, and no longer of chew toys and the leftover grass Nilla drug in with her.
He walked into his bedroom and unplugged the charger, which had blended into the white wall. Now he could finally start his new life.
“FreeMason,” a voice said. Mason turned. The lanky man in he remembered from the Kingsmen convention looked out of place in his tie-dye shirt against his bland, empty apartment.
“Stripes!” Mason said. “What are you—”
But he didn’t need to ask that, did he? How had they figured out so fast?
“What did you do, man?” Stripes asked, his forehead bunching in confusion. “You got assigned to me late last night.” It was then that Mason noticed the bulge of a gun in Stripes’ pocket.
Mason blinked. He hadn’t uploaded the article until this morning. “I—nothing.”
Stripes shook his head. “You don’t have to tell me. But we know how this ends.”
“I heard you leave stripes across your victims,” Mason said, shaking. “Long.” He gulped. “Knife slashes?”
Stripes nodded. “Yeah. Sort of my signature.”
Mason looked around the room for any sort of weapon.
“I—” Stripes cocked a gun. “I’ll shoot you first.”
Mason pointed the chest belt Stripes was wearing, a camera perched against just beneath his sternum like the buckle of a racecar. “Are you recording?”
Stripes nodded.
“Will you get in trouble for offering to give me a quick death?”
Stripes shrugged, looking down at the camera. “Don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. I think you just have to be eliminated. No one told me how to do it.”
Mason felt the panic rising, a horrible, otherworldly feeling that made everything brighter, the colors around him sharper and crisp. His body begged for him to run, and he finally complied. He bolted out his bedroom doorframe, overshooting his front door. Stripes, as he expected, had shot at the door handle.
Mason changed directions, slamming himself against the wall on the other side of the door. Stripes took another shot at the door handle. Mason dropped to the floor and lunged for the door handle as Mason fired where he had just been standing, and he managed to just open the door before pain spread across his spine.
He vaguely remembered stepping on a spider when he was a child. The way thousands of baby spiders fled from their dead mother’s back and all across his shoes and into the grass and onto his toy dump truck. The spread out so quickly, infected everything they touched.
He imagined the pain like that now. The bullet lodged in his back was the dead mother, the big strike, and the nerves of his body screamed one by one as if the pain that spread across his back and limbs were a million baby spiders.
Footsteps grew louder, and hands found their way beneath one of his shoulders. Stripes tugged at him as he begged him to call an ambulance. He told himself that the blood was just a swipe of bright red paint followed him across the floor to the center of his apartment.
“Stripes,
please. Please,” he said. He imagined what his body would look like in mere moments.
Stripes would cut his shirt off first, and then leave three, thick gashes across his abdomen, a Kingsmen card laid off to the side of his bleeding body.
“Sorry, FreeMason,” Stripes said. “It’s you or me.” Mason saw the bright light of the firing gun, but he didn’t hear the noise.
+++
Saturday, March 18, 2017, 11:19 a.m.
“The only one who goes into their room other than me is the senator and his wife,” the family’s cleaning lady, Lydia, said.
“And you’ve never rearranged their medications or anything like that?” Joyce asked.
Lydia’s eyebrows knitted together. “Only to clean the shelf and put them back up. But I keep a strict schedule. That’s a monthly thing for me,” she said. She fished a notebook from her bag. “Here,” she said, flipping back to nearly four weeks ago. Cabinet Deep Clean.
“Thank you. Stay around for a few minutes, if you don’t mind?” Joyce said. Joyce nodded, and Lydia mirrored her actions.
Joyce tugged Vince back toward the medicine cabinet as the woman walked back out into the hallway. “If it was her, she’d pin someone. She wouldn’t say it’s either her, the senator, or Chloe taking her own life.”
Vince nodded. “The new prescription bottle is from one week ago. So, if she really doesn’t open that cabinet every week, she wouldn’t have touched it until next week.”
“And you said you spoke with her therapist?” she asked
“He said she struggles with depression, but he said he had no reason to believe she was in any physical danger at all. He was shocked when he heard.”
“We should take Roy in for questioning. We’re going to want everything recorded.”
Vince pinched his lips together. “As long as he comes willingly, we don’t have to cuff or anything.”
“If he’s not guilty, we just ask Lindsey to leave him out of it entirely.”
Vince put his hand out, and Joyce put her hand on top. “No press conference on three! One, two, three …”