“Bernadette,” Sara says after I open the door wearing pajamas and a yawn. Today is Stacey’s funeral. There’s always the possibility of trouble there, too, but we have to attend. We owe that much to her girls, at the very least. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
She offers me up a Styrofoam coffee cup with a plastic lid. Since it has no logo and looks jank as shit, it’s likely from my favorite coffee shop two blocks over. The place doesn’t even have a name, just a neon sign that says Coffee. It used to be a bakery, but everything else they served was crap, so they scrapped that part of the business and now just sell cups of coffee for a dollar out an old drive-thru window.
I take it, eyeing Sara warily as she stands there with her blond hair in a bun, her face cool and composed as it usually is. I’m aware that I’m balancing on the fine edge of a knife, caught somewhere between victim and perpetrator in the black-and-white depths of her mind.
“Your nails look amazing,” she offers as I lift the cup to my lips, the little ring on the end of my pointer finger catching a stray shaft of early morning sunlight. It’s Friday now, February seventh. It should be a normal school day, but there’s nothing normal after a school shooting, is there? Just a shaken and altered reality that makes you question everything you know about the world at large.
“Can’t take credit,” I say with a shrug of one shoulder. “One of Stacey’s girl’s aunts did it for me. Also, we draw heavily on black culture here in Prescott, so I kind of need to acknowledge that, too.”
Sara just stares back at me and blinks her doe-like eyes. Constantine stands about ten steps behind her, scowling and flicking his eyes around like he’s preparing to be mugged or shot at any moment. To be fair, he’d probably deserve it. I’m not certain that anyone in this neighborhood has had a positive experience with a cop.
Victor appears behind me, a six-foot-five monster of a man that I’m happy to take on as a personal shadow. He frowns down at police girl, shirtless and clearly annoyed at her intrusion. We all slept in, gathered together in one room for protection. Or so the boys say. Personally, I’d keep them with me every night, all the time, if I were to have my way.
“QUEEN OF THE FREAKS” by AViVA is playing on my new phone, left on the coffee table and turned up as loud as it can go. It makes me smile at Police Girl as she looks between Vic and me. This is my motherfucking personal anthem.
“To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?” Vic says, letting the words roll off his tongue like a threat. Constantine moves a few steps forward but is at least intelligent enough not to provoke Victor. “Here to give us back our phones?”
Sara smiles. It’s a pleasant smile but no less dangerous than the wickedness etched into Victor’s face. It’s a threat, a challenge.
“We found the bodies in the apartment buildings, thanks to your boyfriend’s tip,” Sara says, and again, I have to give her credit for referring to Callum as my boyfriend when my husband is standing right behind. Vic just blinks at her as I glance up at him, returning my attention to Police Girl and smiling.
“And?” I query, wondering why she’s here when she could have easily called my new phone. I gave her the number when we left Aaron’s house. My chest tightens. Already, I miss our little refuge in the middle of suburbia. There was a certain sense of coziness in those walls that is most definitely missing from the safe house. Partially, I know I owe that coziness to Heather, Kara, and Ashley. My heart spasms slightly, and I exhale. Vic brought up the idea of Oak Valley again yesterday, but even though the thought of attending some snooty ass prep school makes me want to upchuck all over Sara Young’s sensible sneakers, I can’t shake the idea that he’s right.
We need a school and Prescott is shut indefinitely. They district has suggested online schooling for the rest of the year, the way they did back in the days of the ‘rona virus. Lord knows that if they manage to implement that, it’ll be a joke. Most of the kids that attend Prescott don’t have a safe place to study, a device to study on, or a reliable internet connection. In short, they’re about to get butt-rammed by the heavy hand of society. While Oak Valley Prep students enjoy university level education in their palace on the hill, the poor suffer and flail in the dregs.
“And one of the bodies we recovered was Russ Bauer, one of the enforcers for the Grand Murder Party. I’d love to pick Callum’s brain and figure out how a high school student managed to take down a man that we’ve been after for years.”
There’s something to that phrase that tells me ‘picking his brain’ is a really nice way of saying bring him in for questioning.
“Is he in some kind of trouble?” I ask as Sara does her best to maintain a placid and unthreatening facial expression. Underneath it all though, I can sense it: the intense focus of an animal on the hunt.
“Is he here?” she asks, tucking her hands into the front pockets of her wide-legged khaki slacks. “We really do need to speak to him personally.”
“I’m here,” Cal says, standing on the lawn to the left of the front walk. Constantine actually jumps, putting his hand on his gun but stopping short of actually drawing it on the teenage boy in the hoodie hovering next to him. Callum smiles, his pink lips drawing my attention before I flick my gaze up to his blue eyes. He’s watching me, but he carefully turns his focus back on the pair of feds standing in our decrepit-ass Prescott style yard. That is, weeds and stray bits of trash, a plastic tricycle that belongs to some random kid from two doors down. “What can I help you with?”
“How did you …” Sara starts, glancing back up at the house. She takes a step back and spies an open window on the second floor. Her gaze moves back to Callum, thick with suspicion and twisted with confusion. She doesn’t understand us at all; we don’t fit into her good-versus-evil narrative of the world. Killers are bad guys, right? What about killers who kill killers? It doesn’t make any sense to her. “You came from the roof,” she deduces and Callum laughs, hands tucked into the front pocket of his hoodie. He—very carefully—removes them, palms out, nonthreatening.
“A magician never gives away his tricks,” he whispers huskily, his voice a dark, dangerous moving thing, something alive and twisted in a way that puts my entire body on edge. Thus far, the only boy brave enough to breach that tender barrier of my miscarriage is Oscar. How … ironic. “Let me put on some shoes and I’ll go with you.”
He pads across the wet lawn past Sara Young and then pauses beside me. With Vic’s huge body on one side, and Callum’s right in front of me … Shit, I’ve never felt safer or more turned-on. I look up at him as he reaches out and cups the side of my face in a pale, scarred hand. His thumb traces the curve of my lower lip.
“Save a seat for me at the funeral,” he says, leaning down to brush his hot mouth against mine. Goose bumps spring up across my skin as he skirts past and disappears into the shadows of the house. Apparently, this place is a rental. Vic is paying almost a thousand dollars a month to rent this shitbox. Fucking Christ, all this gentrifying is screwing us here in south Prescott. At the same time, I know better than to direct my anger at fleeing suburbanites: guilt always begins at the top. Those people move here because it’s cheap, because they’ve been pushed out of their own homes by the wealthy.
Not sure if you can tell, but … I fucking hate billionaires. Despise ‘em actually. Pretty sure it’s impossible to be a billionaire and a good person at the same time. Definitely mutually exclusive concepts.
“He won’t be back in time to attend the funeral, will he?” I ask and Sara Young just stares at me. “We haven’t done anything wrong. Callum defended himself.”
“He brawled with an enforcer for the Grand Murder Party and then shot him in the forehead,” Sara explains, as if I haven’t heard the story from somebody that was actually there. She turns around and starts down the sidewalk, but I follow after her.
“Careful, Havoc Girl,” Vic murmurs, his deep voice rumbling through me, like thunder on the night of a summer storm. I glance back to find him with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, sweats slung low, shirtless and perfect. “Keep your temper.”
I turn back to find Sara waiting at the end of the walk with Constantine.
“It isn’t against the law to defend yourself against a school shooter.” I cross my arms over the front of my pajama top, the one covered in coffins and crosses. It’s appropriately morbid. Bought it at the Hellhole almost a year ago with money I stole from Pam. Figured I should support a local business run by an ex-Prescott student—especially since I’ve stolen way too much from that fucking place. “So, what is this about? A scare tactic? Are you putting pressure on me because of your stupid plea deal?”
Sara laughs. The sound is a little dry, a bit tired. I’m blurring her lines and this woman, she’s someone who loves to color inside of them.
“You know, Bernadette,” she tells me, raking her gaze down my outfit while Constantine scowls at me. Seems to be the only thing he’s good at now, sneering and scowling. He tried, at first, when he was pretending to be a detective investigating Danny’s death. But now? He considers us all useless Prescott trash, and he isn’t afraid to show it. “I get the GMP’s motivations. And … I get the Charter Crew’s. Hell, I even understand your mother’s to a certain extent.” She points at me with a perfectly manicured French tipped nail. “But it’s you that I don’t understand, you that I don’t get.”
I stare her down, my mouth pursed into a thin line. If one of my boys goes to prison, I will lose my shit trying to plan a jailbreak and an escape into a foreign country. I don’t want that. I don’t want to abandon Prescott and Springfield to the shadows.
“Maybe if you got to know us a little better, you would.” I’m looking at Sara’s petite face, even while Constantine snorts rude laughter from behind her. “Maybe, if you came to Stacey’s funeral today, that would go a ways in helping repair the relationship between the authorities and Prescott. Hell, you might learn something.”