My booted foot kicks out and hits him square in the face, but it doesn’t faze the man at all. Instead, he grabs onto my ankle, yanks, and uses his bodyweight to let us both fall. We crash into the old wood floors, and then through them, to the next level.
I’m choking and struggling for air, fingers grasping at my side as I feel this rush of white-hot heat and pain. Shit, shit, shit. Something stabbed me when I fell. Not Mason’s knife, but a piece of wood that’s speared me through the shoulder in a way that one might stake a fucking vampire.
“There we go, so you’re human after all,” Mason murmurs, kicking my gun from my hand. I’m not sure where my phone is anymore. Doesn’t matter. I just need to get up and move. I need to run. That’s not easy for me to admit, that I’m in over my head. I should not have chased Russ the way I did. Too cocky, Cal. Don’t get too cocky.
“I was once human,” I agree, and then I’m tearing the piece of wood from the wound and plunging it into Mason’s thigh. He barely lets out a hiss of pain before he’s hitting me across the face and knocking me on my back. I land in a pool of wet blood that splatters across the nearby walls like just another wave of graffiti. HAVOC is scrawled in black paint just above it. Marking our territory. Staking our claim.
“Still human, kid,” Mason tells me, and then he reaches inside his jacket for a pistol. The sound of another explosion outside buys me about a tenth of a second. But it’s enough for me to turn and retrieve my own gun, rolling onto my back and firing, not at Mason, but at Russ as he rounds the corner with an assault rifle at the ready.
I manage to peg him right between the eyes as Mason turns back to me, frowning so hard in the dark, damp space, I swear I can smell it on him. Surprise. He shoots me in the arm, and a gasp escapes my lips, one that reveals the lie I refuse to admit myself: you are not invulnerable, Callum Park.
And I’m not. But I wish so fucking desperately that I were that I almost believe it sometimes.
The floor beneath me shifts dangerously as Mason takes a few steps in my direction.
“I think I’ll take you home with me,” he says, his voice a total deadpan. But his mouth, what little of it I can see in the light that cuts through the boarded-up window, is vicious. Ruthless. Penetrating. Mason lifts the gun to shoot me in the leg, but I slam my boot down on the floor and it collapses.
So does the floor beneath it.
I end up gagging on dust and debris as I scramble out of the pile and down the staircase, stumbling and dripping blood everywhere. On my way toward the front door, I pick up a loose board, swing around the corner with it and hit one of the nameless lackeys in the face with it so hard that I’m wondering if I might’ve broken his neck.
Regardless, he drops to the floor and I keep going.
When the next man gets in my way, I drop low and throw myself into his belly, keeping him from shooting me as he lands on his back with a gasp. The end of the board in my hand is ragged, bits of splinters and jagged shards of wood at one end. This is what I ram into the soft, white skin of his throat. Once, twice, three times. He’s gurgling now, but I don’t have the time or leisure to make sure he’s dead.
Instead, I’m out the door and blinking into the weak morning sunlight, even as I notice the red and blue wash of police lights in the distance. The cops are at the school. The thought brings me some amount of relief. SWAT will come. The VGTF will be there. Reporters.
Bernadette will be safe.
I stumble a little, knowing that I haven’t got the energy to make it back to the school. So what do I do? Where do I go? First, I tear my hoodie over my head, ignoring the screaming pain in my arm and shoulder, utilizing the adrenaline. I press the fabric against the stab wound and keep my bloodied arm tucked against my belly, just to make sure that I don’t drip.
The last thing I need right now is to leave a trail that Mason can follow.
Using the brick wall of the building for leverage, I make it as far as I can before I’m forced to duck into the backyard of a foreclosed home.
The world spins around me as I fall to my knees. But I don’t stop crawling. Not until I’m falling through a ground-level window that leads into an empty basement. I hit the floor shoulder first and blood splatters everywhere.
Bernadette, I’m coming.
I make that promise, even as my eyes close, and I spiral into the endless black.
Bernadette Blackbird
I swear to fuck, I am channeling my lover Callum Park as I’m dragged from the building in cuffs, blood raining down my face as I laugh like a demon ripped straight from the gates of hell. You’re hysterical, Bernie, calm down. But all I want are my boys, just my boys.
“Bernadette,” Sara breathes as I’m escorted out the front doors and down the steps. I just bashed in James Barrasso’s head with a fucking doorstop. That’s how it was always supposed to end for that sister-fucker, I think. Killed with a trinket from a National Park. That’s how he deserved to go. Motherfucker gave me the creeps.
I let out a piercing howl as the cops manhandle me into the back of an ambulance, one of them climbing in to ride with me and the fidgety looking paramedics. Victor howls right back, and a series of howls echoes around the school. I see my husband, but only briefly, as he’s violently shoved into the back of an ambulance in a way that I’m almost certain isn’t textbook.
We are not the bad guys here.
We are Havoc.
We defended our school. We fought for our city. We are not the ones who should be in handcuffs.
Vic’s eyes lock on mine, two obsidian pools that seem to hold the secrets of the universe. The crown is still perched on my bloody head, placed there by his inked hands, a symbol of the unbreakable bond we have. Victor and I, we are impossibly connected, an infinity sign with no beginning and no end.
The doors to his ambulance are slammed shut, and a gasp escapes me at the lack of eye contact. I feel like I’ve been backhanded. My stomach cramps, and I lick my lips to hold back a groan of pain. I won’t show it, not in front of fucking pigs, not in front of Sara Young or Detective Constantine.
Where are my other boys? I need to find my boys.
The adrenaline wears off like a shock of ice water to the face, and I begin to struggle.
“Get these fucking cuffs off of me!” I shout, twisting my body against the force of the metal. “Where are the rest of my boys?” I whip my head around to find Sara Young watching me. Constantine is beside her, but he just curses and scowls when I look their way. “I’m not under arrest here. I didn’t do anything wrong. Let me go.” I pause and wet my lips. I’m feeling saucy today. Actually, when I woke up this morning, I put on a shade of lipstick that reminds me of the brain matter I saw when I shot that GMP motherfucker in the head in the cafeteria.
It’s called Unhappy Goodbyes. Who names a lipstick color that? It’s psychotic.
“What happened, Bernadette?” Sara asks, touching the shoulder of the female officer in the ambulance with me. The woman leaves and lets Sara take her place. All I can do is look into her eyes and smile.
“They came for us,” I say as the crown shifts forward on my head. There’s blood all the fuck over me, but most of it isn’t mine. I adjust myself and the cuffs on my wrists clink. Just over Sara’s shoulder, I can see the front of Prescott High.
At times, it’s felt like a prison. During others, a sanctuary.
Maybe, like me, if the school were to have wings, one would be an angel wing, the other the leathery black of a demon. Duality. Life exists in duality.
People are swarming out the front door in droves now, like a flock of songbirds, chased from their home by a hawk. I see Ms. Keating halfway down the block with a gaggle of students. She’s bleeding from her already injured arm, but her chin is up. What do you want to bet that this bitch did something heroic today?
That’s just who she is, I guess, Ms. Breonna Keating.
“Where are my boys?” I repeat to Sara, my eyes briefly meeting the Vice Principal’s inky brown ones. The ambulance doors are slammed shut, and I let out a small snarl of frustration. Police Girl is staring at me like a riddle she’s determined to fucking decipher.
“Who are you?” she asks me after a moment, like she either doesn’t understand the depths of my rage or just doesn’t care. I turn to look at her, my body shaking as the pain really starts to set in. It’s everywhere. I had my ass handed to me today, didn’t I?
“The Queen of Havoc,” I tell her, and then I lean back against the wall and close my eyes. Where are you, boys? I wonder as the ambulance jostles down the road. Where the fuck are you?
If one of them is gone, so help this universe.
I will rend the fabric of reality to taste vengeance.
I hope Maxwell Barrasso likes his son delivered with a concave head and no eyes.
Because I am just getting motherfucking started.
“Tell me that they’re alive,” I repeat for what’s likely the hundredth fucking time, lifting a hand up and rubbing it across my mouth. I’m used to seeing the bright waxy smear of lipstick on my pale skin. Instead, I’m almost too clean. Scrubbed raw and smelling of powdery soap.
But I had to clean up, didn’t I? After all that blood …
Sara Young stares at me from across the surface of her countertop. After the cops took pictures of me dressed in copper-scented crimson, and collected my clothes for evidence, I was allowed to come back here to shower.
“You owe me that much, at least,” I say, my tongue scraping across the inside of my mouth like sandpaper. Sara is staring at me with a fresh set of eyes as if she, too, made a snap judgement. As if she, too, underestimated me.
She won’t make that mistake again, unfortunately.
“You know,” she begins, adjusting her position against the opposite counter and dropping her chin to her chest. Her eyes are closed, but I have no doubt that her ears are attuned to my every movement. “I thought I had you all figured out, Bernadette.” Sara looks up suddenly, and her doe-brown eyes don’t look so soft anymore. “You were sad, I could see it in your eyes. That much, I knew for sure.”