I flip open the top box, snatch a slice of cheese pizza and fold it into my mouth.
“Let’s go,” I murmur around the slice, shoving up from the chair and heading straight for the pink leather Havoc jacket hanging near the front door. I’m in no shape to go anywhere, bruised up and bleeding between the thighs, but I’d crawl over a sea of broken glass to reach Cal. Cramps? Feds? White supremacist gangs? That shit is nothing.
“They’ll follow us over there,” Vic warns, gesturing with his chin toward the front of the house. “Those cops.”
“Better than the GMP,” I say, clenching my teeth. Who knows how many officers the GMP has in their pocket? And it’s no surprise to me that Neil was one of them. Bet ya Pamela knew all about it, too. “Let’s go find our boy.”
I pause near the front door as my cup quite literally runneth over and my new pj pants turn red with blood at the crotch. Cocksucking motherfucker. Irregular, heavy periods complete with cramps. Just what I need today. Tonight? I’m not even really sure what time is it anymore.
“Take care of that,” Vic tells me with a nod. “And we’ll gear up. I’ll let the crew know to redirect Aaron our way when he gets out.”
He lights up another cigarette as I head back up the stairs, heart racing.
What we’re all thinking, but what nobody is saying, is that it’s weird for Cal’s phone to be so close to the school yet there to be no sign of him.
I killed James Barrasso today.
If the GMP has Cal, there is no way in hell that they’re going to let him go.
If they have him … then he’s already dead.
The screen of Cal’s phone is cracked and covered in blood. As soon as I pick it up and see the last text message that he sent—mare’s nest—I almost lose my shit.
“Bernadette,” Victor says softly, prying the thing from my shaking hand. “Rein in that temper. Use it like a weapon. There is nobody here for you to use it on, so store that shit and save it for later.”
He looks at the phone for a minute, face grim, and then passes it over to Oscar.
“Mare’s nest?” Hael asks, reading over Oscar’s shoulder. “No fucking way.” There’s something strained in his voice that echoes the sick, hollow feeling inside of me. That’s our word, that’s our Havoc cry for help. And none of us got the message because we were either too busy fighting off active shooters or the feds had already taken our phones.
The thought really does fill me with a violent, irrational sort of rage.
Swallowing hard, I choke it down and try to ignore the worsening cramps. It’s bad. So bad that I can already feel my cup leaking again, blood soaking into the heavy overnight pad I put on for extra protection. Not good.
“There was clearly a fight here,” Oscar says, letting Hael take the phone from his hand. “Let’s see if we can’t keep following the scent.”
Finding Cal’s phone was easy, especially with a trail of blood that led right from the front door to the fourth floor. There are bodies in here, too. And only three blocks away from an investigation. Red and blue lights paint the exterior of Prescott High in horrid color, and there’s yellow police tape everywhere.
To get over here without an escort, we had to drop our cars at a local diner, slip inside, and then crawl out the bathroom window. I’m sure our copper friends know we’re gone already, but what can they do?
“He clearly fought his way out,” I say, pausing beside a dead man with a ruined throat. There’s a bloodied board nearby, jagged splinters of wood at one end. Kneeling down beside the body, I mimic what Cal did at the Snow Day after-party, pushing up the man’s shirt until I find that slash of red that makes up his gang tattoo.
I’ve never really had the time or opportunity to study it before, but now that I’m looking at it, the beam of a flashlight falling across the dead man’s waxy skin, I see that it’s the silhouette of a clown face. Bowler hat tilted to one side, round nose, a single X for the left eye, and its mouth a twisted rictus.
Well, now, that explains where the Charter Crew got their mask idea from.
I stand up and shake out my hands, following Hael outside to the sidewalk. There’s a bit of blood immediately in front of the door, but none leading in either direction.
If Cal really did get out of here on his own two feet, he was careful to cover his tracks.
“Let’s search every building in a five-block radius,” Vic grunts out, glancing in the direction of the high school. “If he’s here, we’ll find him.”
With my stomach clenching violently, and my head spinning from blood loss—yeah, you really can get dizzy and anemic from a heavy period—I start with the apartment complex at the end of the block. We stick together, just in case. It’s much more likely that a fed will stumble on us here than a member of the GMP, but you can’t be too careful.
I never thought they’d attack our school the way they did, so public, so blatant.
The GMP is not afraid. Not of the authorities, and not of us.
We sweep the apartment building twice before doing another walkthrough of the one beside it, where we found Cal’s phone.
“Six dead crew members,” Vic murmurs unhappily, his mouth turned down in a dark frown. “Prescott royalty.” He bends down and closes the eyes of a dead boy that I feel I recognize from last year’s graduating class. For a moment, Victor stays right where he is, and even though he says nothing, does nothing, I can read his every emotion in the tense set of his shoulders.
He feels like he failed somehow.
And he’s furious about it.
Maxwell Barrasso is going to bleed.
I turn away, leaving Vic to have his moment. I do that because I understand how he works. And I understand him because I’m exactly the same. Deep down, we really are just two halves of the same person.
“Let’s keep going,” I suggest, leading the boys outside and down the street. We check several abandoned lots, scouting outbuildings and piles of debris, rusted cars on cinder blocks, dumpsters, anywhere that Callum could’ve crawled into in order to hide.
It’s not until we come on a foreclosed home with a sagging front porch and a roof covered in moss that I spot a broken basement window. It could be something, more than likely it’s nothing. We’ve seen dozens of broken windows already, most of them destroyed months or even years prior.
My heartrate picks up as I duck down and peer inside.
A pool of congealed blood sits in the middle of the floor, the only color in an otherwise gray and empty space.
“Over here!” I shout, my voice cracking as I climb in and stumble briefly, putting my hand on the wall and closing my eyes against a wave of dizziness. This is easily the worst period I’ve ever had in my fucking life. The universe really is throwing everything she’s got at me, isn’t she?
When I hear Hael climbing in behind me, I open my eyes and straighten up. The boys are going through that overprotective stage in our relationship. If they see how much I’m struggling, they’ll send me home. The thing is, I’m going through the queen stage of my own relationship with myself. I won’t be sent home or told what to do, not today.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Hael murmurs, dropping into a crouch and touching two fingers through the blood. Just the sight of it makes me sick. “This is cold, but it’s still wet.” He points out the dried edges around the pool. “Half a day in and it turns black, crusts over.” Hael stands back up and meets my gaze across the ruby red stain, brown eyes dark with concern. “This can’t be more than … mm, six hours old?”
Vic hops in the window next with Oscar following, iPad clutched under his arm as he drops down into a dignified crouch and rises up like a demon from a summoning circle. I turn back to the blood as Victor steps up beside it, analyzing it with crow-black eyes and nodding once.
“I bet this was Cal,” he says, pointing at the dried edges. “He came here not long after the shooting and he stayed until recently.” Victor looks up again, gaze sweeping the basement. “But he isn’t here now …”
“Let’s check the house,” I say, and I swear, it takes a supreme physical effort to pull my attention away from the blood so I can locate the steps to the first floor. Deep down in my heart, I want to cry. That little girl who sat sobbing over her dead daddy, the one that Callum reached out a hand for and invited to dance, she weeps for me. The rest of me remains a dark monarch.
I make my way carefully up the steps, avoiding rot and pest damage, and shoving my shoulder into the door. It doesn’t budge. When I step back and look at it, I can see that there’s no blood on it. Not on the stairs either.
“If Cal was here, he didn’t leave this way,” I say, turning back and finding all three boys at the bottom of the steps. My teeth grind in frustration, but I manage to keep it together, sweeping the basement with them as we look for clues.
So far as I can tell, there are none.
“He doesn’t want anyone to know where he’s going,” Victor says, exhaling sharply and putting his hands on his hips. “That’s a good sign. Despite … this.” He gestures at the blood again. “He still has his head.”
“Or he was taken by the GMP,” Hael inserts, and I flick my gaze to him. He holds up his palms in an apologetic gesture. “But likely not. I mean, they wouldn’t have tried to hide the fact that they were here, right? And I don’t see much disturbance in the debris.” He points down at the floor where our footsteps have kicked up years of dust and leaves and pine needles.
“He could be on his way back to the house,” I suggest as Oscar pulls up a map on his iPad and turns the screen so that we can all see it.
“Here are our closest rendezvous points. Let’s check these first.” He flips the cover closed and then pauses for a brief moment, his eyes on mine. I know that he and Cal have a bromance sort of thing going on. He does his best to hide it most days, but it’s there now, reflected back in a tentative sort of tenderness that he shares with me in a single sweeping glance.