by Callie Hart
He steps on my foot again as he clumsily maneuvers me into a spin, and I nearly eat shit right in front of everyone. I would never have danced with Gareth in a million years, but the prom king and queen dance is a Raleigh tradition, and pretty much mandatory. Plus, Gareth looked so damn excited that I felt a little bad trying to worm my way out of it.
“Oh, and how about this!” he exclaims. “I heard you got into Dartmouth! Guess where I’m going next year?”
From his gaping, wide-eyed grin, it’s fairly obvious where he’s going. “Dartmouth?” I pretend to be remotely interested.
Nodding, he kicks my shin as he stumbles over his feet, nearly ending up in a heap on the floor. “We can tell everyone, Silver, we were king and queen. No one’ll believe us. I mean, what are the chances?”
“I know. Pretty surreal,” I agree, vacantly skipping from person to person in the crowd, still looking for Alex. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him since I got up on the damn stage and, more worryingly, I haven’t seen Jacob either. I should never have come up to claim the crown. For starters, I didn’t even want it. And now I’m beginning to feel like this entire thing is some sort of distraction…
For three long, tortuous minutes, I dance with Gareth, biting my tongue every time he steps on me. As soon as the music ends, I give him a quick high five instead of the kiss he was leaning in for, and I make my way back out into press of bodies that are packed into the gym.
I find Halliday pinned up against a wall with Zander’s hand up her skirt and his tongue down her throat. She blushes like crazy when I tap her on the shoulder, coughing to get their attention.
Zander’s hair is a messy halo around his head. His eyes are glazed over, pupils blown wide open as he smiles suggestively down at me from his six-foot-one vantage point. “Look who it is. Raleigh High’s very own Prom Queen. If you’re wondering how to get in on this action, it’s really simple actually. All you gotta do is ask.”
“Really?” I cross my arms over my chest, arching an eyebrow at him. “You’re hitting on me?”
“I don’t see the problem,” he quips. “We shared everything in juvie.”
“I’m Alex’s fiancé.”
At that, Zander goes extremely pale. “Actually yeah, now that you mention it, on second thoughts he’d probably be pretty pissed. Maybe you shouldn’t mention that I said that. What’s up? How can we be of totally non-sexual, completely unromantic service to you?”
“I can’t find Alex. Where is he? I’ve been looking all over for him.”
Zander looks confused. “Huh. Haven’t seen him in a while. I assumed he was watching you dance with that nerd, plotting out how he was gonna kill him.”
“Uh…oh,” Halliday mutters, tucking her hair behind her ears as she extricates herself from the cage of Zander’s arms. “Uh, shit. I saw him going outside before. Things got so tense with Jake and Kacey that I just figured he just needed to get some air or something. He hasn’t come back in?”
Sick to my stomach, I scream at myself for being polite and dancing with Gareth. I should have made sure I had eyes on Alex before I did anything. He seemed to cool down so quickly before. I’d thought he’d just put Jake out of his mind, but obviously I missed what really happened.
Shit.
Alex went after Jake the moment I turned my back and looked away.
“Come with me,” I command. “We need to find him. I have a horrible feeling about this.”
Halliday leads the way. Instead of guiding us toward the gym’s main entrance, she heads for the emergency exit I considered fleeing out of earlier. No one notices as she pushes the bar and the door opens a crack, just enough for the three of us to slip out one at a time into the cold. The moment I take my first step outside, my heel sinking right into the snow, a blood curdling cry pierces the night and my blood runs cold.
“What the hell was that?” Halliday asks. Zander and I trade glances; we know perfectly well what it was. Unlike Halliday, we’ve both heard the sound of a person in extreme pain before. We both know that a strangled cry like that, one that sounds so similar to a tortured animal, can easily come from a human being if they’re suffering enough.
I don’t stop and wait for them. I rip my shoes from my feet and I take off, flying in the direction that horrific cry came from with fear clawing at my insides. The snow and ice feels like it’s burning the soles of my feet, it’s so cold, but I don’t stop. A maze of pathways cut through the snowbanks the cover the basketball court behind the gymnasium. I pick the first pathway I come to and I run along it, as fast as my legs can carry me.
My lungs are on fire, my heart surging like a piston as I come upon…fuck! A dead end.
“ALL RIGHT! ENOUGH!”
The yell comes from the right. It sounds so far away and so close at the same time, distorted by the huge swathes of snow that rise high above my head on either side of me. This is madness. I’m never going to find my way to Alex in time. Behind me, Zander yells my name. “Stop! Fuck, Silver, wait! If you get hurt, Alex is gonna put me down.” He almost barrels into my back when he rounds the corner, Halliday right on his heels.
“I need to get over this snow! Help me!”
Zander shakes his head. “No way. You can’t climb this shit. It’s rotten, you’ll fall straight through.”
He’s right. The snow is old and loose, clumped together in chunks. The moment I try to climb up the side of the snowbank in front of me, my bare foot pushes straight down, catching on a sharp branch that slices into my skin. This won’t work. We need another plan. There’s no other way to get across the basketball court, though.
“Ready, Moretti?”
The voice sounds closer this time. Way closer, even though it’s far quieter than the shout we just heard. Zander’s head whips around, his eyes narrowing into slits. “I’m not joking around, guys. You really gotta wait here.” He takes off, sprinting in the direction of the voice…and of course I am right behind him.
I’m not hanging back, waiting in the sidelines to see what happens, when Alex needs me. No fucking way. Zander skids as he comes to a fork in the pathways, chooses the left path, then changes his mind and goes reeling down the one on the right. The soles of my feet scream in pain—I’m not sure if it’s from the cold or if I’ve torn them open on the ice and the gravel compressed into the snow. All I know is that it hurts, and I have no choice but to keep on moving.
We turn a corner, and then another, and then there are no more corners. We stumble out into an unexpected clearing, and there, in its center, Alex is lying on his side, staring off into space as Jacob Weaving extends his arm and aims a black, sleek gun at his head.
NO!
The scream never makes it past my lips.
Fog clouds on my breath as my lungs empty. It feels as though I’ve been kicked right in the solar plexus and every single one of my ribs has just been shattered.
Alex…
Alex is going to die.
There’s no time to do anything. I’ll never reach him in time. It feels as though the very air itself is trying to hold me back as I take off across the clearing toward my boyfriend. Jake’s finger hovers on the trigger. He hasn’t even noticed me, racing as fast as I can toward him. It wouldn’t make a difference if he did. My only thought is to get to him before he can pull that trigger and end the life of the guy I love. I have no idea what I’m gonna do once I get there.
Jacob sneers.
“SILVER, NO!”
Behind me, Zander’s desperate yell echoes up and up, louder and louder each time it repeats itself. I witness the moment Jacob makes the decision. I see his index finger slowly begins to squeeze the trigger…
And there, behind him, a dark figure emerges from the shadows.
For a second, I can’t make sense of what’s happening. The figure’s a blur, nothing more than a dark smudge against a sea of white. Then the edges of the newcomer begin to sharpen, coming into focus, and I see the weapon he’s holding in his hands. He raises the gun
, aiming it directly at the side of Jacob’s head, and a bright flare of light erupts from the muzzle.
Jake’s head rocks violently to the side.
The sound comes after.
CRACK!
A fine red mist sprays into the air, debris shooting off in every direction.
Oh…my…god.
Whatjusthappenedwhatjusthappenedwhatjusthappened…
I screw my eyes shut, dizzy and nauseous.
Thum…
Thum…
Thum…
My pulse is so weak, like my heart is barely beating at all. When I open my eyes, Jacob’s on his knees, his eyes rolled back into his head…and then he topples over, limbs slack, falling sideways into the snow.
Half of his fucking head is missing.
It feels like it takes forever to happen, but in reality, Jacob drops to the ground like a stone. In the distance, a flock of birds explode from a dark stand of trees; they scatter in every direction, wheeling and zipping through the air, scared by the loud report of the gun as it echoes out over Raleigh.
Jacob’s utterly still. His body doesn’t twitch. No weird convulsing like in the movies. Because there’s nothing of his brain left, the logical part of me says. The shot took out the contents of his skull, spraying it onto the snow in front of me. There are no synapses left to fire. No nerve endings to shoot off random, confused messages as the life inside him sputters out and dies. Jacob was brain dead before he even hit the floor.
He's gone.
He’s fucking dead.
“Wha…?”
I can’t tell what’s real right now.
I’m too dazed. I look up, and it takes a long moment to understand that Detective James Lowell is moving toward me across the snow, stepping over Jacob’s mangled head, lowering a gleaming silver gun to his side.
“Silver? Ms. Parisi, are you okay?”
I blink at him.
“Silver? Look at me. Are you hurt?”
He has me by the shoulders. The gun’s still in his hand, and he presses it against my bare arm, the muzzle pointing up toward the sky as he ducks down, peering into my eyes, looking concerned. “You shouldn’t be out here, kid.”
“Hold on. Hold on! Wait!”
The sound of the panic in the cry behind me snaps me out of my shock. I’m falling. I come back into myself with a sharp, unpleasant jolt that feels like I just hit the sidewalk after slipping from the ledge of a ten-story building.
There are people everywhere.
Three of the Raleigh High football team are scrambling in the snow, whimpering, clinging to one another as they stare in horror at the pool of blood spreading in the snow around Jake’s ruined head.
Zander and Halliday are standing stock still, taking in the chaos to my right…
And, weirdly…
My doctor is prowling towards Alex’s old boss with a gun in her hands.
Monty shakes his head, his grey hair coming loose from his ponytail as he backs away from her. “Listen. There’s money. A lot of money. The bar, too. You can have the bar. I was thinking about retiring, anyway—”
As if by some weird trick of the light, Zeth coalesces out of nowhere, like the very shadows themselves merged together and gave him form and life. I’ve never seen anything like it before; one moment there’s only the ink-black darkness, and then there he is, all murder and death, with the biggest silver gun I’ve ever seen in his hands. He lovingly caresses Dr. Romera’s cheek, shaking his head. “There she is. My angry girl. Hate to make you break a promise, though. You save lives. You don’t take them.”
His hand whips up and he fires the gun. I brace for the sound. The gun’s so massive, I expect an earsplitting bang, but there’s nothing more than the dull thud of Montgomery Cohen the Third’s body hitting the snow. A rifle suppressor. A regular silencer wasn’t good enough for the weapon in Zeth’s hands. He literally needed a rifle suppressor to mute it.
A commotion breaks out as Zeth and Dr. Romera approach the three guys on the football team. I can’t even muster up a single fuck to give about them. All I care about is the dark, still form lying on a patch of ice ten feet away. Jacob didn’t shoot Alex, but he’s far too still.
Oh god. Oh god, no, why the hell isn’t he moving?
Detective Lowell says something to me, but I shake myself out of his grasp. I reach Alex, skidding toward him on my knees, and for a terrible heartbeat, I see the way he’s staring up at the sky and I think he’s fucking dead.
And then he blinks.
“Weird…night.” His voice breaks when he speaks. Wincing, he tries to roll onto his side, but it seems to take his breath away, so he slumps back into the snow. I quickly help him, lifting his head and placing it carefully into my lap.
“I’m hallucinating, right?” he says, his eyes searching for and finding mine. His face is a patchwork of bruises, forming rapidly underneath his skin. His lip’s split open, as is his left eyebrow, and there’s a gash on his temple, but he seems fairly alert. The vine tattoos around the base of this throat shift as he swallows. “Lowell shot Jake?”
A strangled laugh wells up and spills out of me, anxious and too loud. “Yeah. Yeah, I have no fucking clue what’s going on. Are you okay?”
He nods, slowly lifting his hand and taking hold of mine, squeezing it reassuringly. “Of course I am.”
“You don’t look okay.”
He smiles. Thankfully all of his teeth are still where they’re supposed to be. “Wow. Rude.”
“If he’s smiling, then he’s definitely concussed as fuck,” Zander says. He drops down next to Alex, peering over him suspiciously.
Shock sets in all over again as Zander fusses over Alex. The weight of what’s just happened finally begins to hit me, and my calm starts to slip away from me.
I just watched two people get shot.
My boyfriend’s in pieces.
Again.
How the fuck are we getting out of this shit fight unscathed?
Zeth appears opposite me, crouching down, forearms on his thighs, his hands hanging loosely between his legs as dips his head, trying to make eye contact with me.
“Sometimes the job’s way bigger than you think. Sometimes you do need a demolitions expert after all,” he says.
“And…what about that?” I ask numbly, eyeing Jacob’s body. God, this is so weird. He was a monster. A creature made of nightmares, who posed such a threat to me and those I love not five minutes ago. And now he’s this fake-looking, mangled, empty vessel. Now, he’s nothing at all.
“Don’t worry about that,” Zeth rumbles. “I’ll get this cleared up. I know a guy.”
42
ALEX
“Where the hell is he? No, no, I’m not his father. Look, lady, I’m going into that hospital room whether you like it or—I need to see if he’s o—thank you. Yeah, well, you can report me to security. I don’t care.”
The door opens, and Cameron blazes into the room like a meteor, coming in hot. He’s panting and he looks like he’s ready to physically fight someone. Curled up in the armchair with her legs dangling over the arm rest, Silver doesn’t even stir from her slumber when he father bursts into the room. I smile, because he’s just so ridiculous sometimes. “And you’re normally so good with people,” I say, pouting. “Weird that she wouldn’t let you in.”
In fairness, the woman sitting at the nurse’s station outside my room is terrifying. Silver had to lie and tell her she was my sister in order to gain entrance to my room, which is kinda awkward now, since the nurse saw Silver kiss me on the mouth about half an hour ago. God knows what she thinks is going between us.
“Still alive, then. That’s nice,” Cam observes, planting his hands on his hips. “It’s all over Raleigh. Jacob Weaving’s dead? Wha—?” He shakes his head, as he looks up at the ceiling. I know exactly how he’s feeling, because I’m feeling the same way: confused, exasperated, lost for words. “What the fuck happened?” he asks. “You guys went to prom, for fuck’s sake. And s
omehow that motherfucker winds up with his brain splattered all over the basketball court? I swear to god…”
I’d laugh if I could, but it hurts too much. Besides, it’s not really funny. It is typical, though. Of course Silver and I weren’t going to be able to make it through a dance at Raleigh High without the world blowing up in our faces.
I explain what happened as best I can, shrugging through the parts when Agent Lowell showed up and shot Jake, and Cam listens without saying a word. When I’ve filled in the details I have to hand, he sighs, kneading the back of his neck with his fingers.
“Why did you go out there with him in the first place?” he asks quietly. “You had to know—”
“I figured I could take him. And I just wanted it to be over. Silver had been through enough,” I tell him. That’s the only real explanation I can give him. It was time for the situation to be dealt with properly, and I really had thought it would turn out differently.
“Aren’t you sick and tired already of looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing so many bruises? All of the time, Alex. You look like a goddamn punching bag,” Cam says morosely. “Dr. Romera said it’s a miracle they didn’t break your jaw.”
“Yeah, well, it kinda feels like they did, so…” I open my mouth as wide as I can, stretching out my jaw, and it hurts like a motherfucker. I should just leave it be, but I can’t help myself. Propped up against what feels like a cloud’s worth of pillows in a rather sexy hospital gown, I know that the body-wide numbness I’m feeling right now is a short reprieve. They gave me the good pain meds when they wheeled me in here, but it won’t be long before they wear off, and I won’t be taking any more. I’d rather be sharp in my head and suffering than fuzzy and fucked up like I am now. “As for the bruises, there won’t be any more. I promise. I’ll be healed up and out of here in a couple of days, and that’ll be it. No more fighting. No more conflict. No more drama. I’ve decided, I’m gonna bust my ass and get a spot at Dartmouth. It’s what she wants, and I’m gonna give it to her.”