Home > The Scapegracers(6)

The Scapegracers(6)
Author: Hannah Abigail Clarke

I cracked my knuckles, click-click-click, but my left ring finger was stuck un-cracked, and it took a substantial amount of willpower not to snap it trying. My mood rings smudged green. Thinking hurt. “Hey. Jing. Can I see that video you took? There’s gotta be something in there.”

“Yeah.” Jing pulled the latest iPhone out of nowhere and fluttered her fingertips across the screen. She gave me a tight little smirk and thrust it in my direction.

The quality, for a shitty phone recording, was remarkable. The bass was distorted, but the laughter and off-key singing sounded genuine. Glow-splotchy bodies writhed in on themselves. Then the chalk drawings rippled into existence, floating like bodies to the brick wall’s surface. The music cut out, then skidded back with an old vinyl crackle. A scream tore through the crowd, and dark shadows, only people-shaped where the neon splatters lit them up, threw themselves on top of each other as they scrambled toward the stairs. Jing’s voice, jagged as glass, carved through the crowd: Bet you losers thought we couldn’t scare you! The angle fell crooked and blacked out.

I watched it three times.

“I have no idea what I did,” I said. “But, holy hell, I did a damn good job of it.”

“I’d say.” Daisy yawned, stretched on relevé. She folded her arms behind her head. “You should come to our parties more often. Jing, I’m inviting Sideways to all our parties. Na-na na na-na. Nothing you can do about it. Sideways Pike at all our parties. Can you imagine?”

Yikes. Alright. My crooked, stupid smile fell right off, but I crossed my arms, made like I hadn’t heard her. I’d just materialized magic chicken scratch on Jing Gao’s walls without trying to. Daisy would have to rack up a lot more nasty to faze me at this point.

“Give my phone back.”

I uncrossed my arms long enough to hand it over and promptly resumed my stance.

“Right,” said Jing as she pocketed her phone and rocked back on her heels. “Whatever.”

“Look.” I wasn’t sure what point I was trying to make, but a nagging voice in my head said it was the wrong one. I cleared my throat. “I can try to revamp that spell, reverse engineer it or something. I can show you how I did it in the first place. Us plus Yates and Madeline pack quite the supernatural punch. No way we couldn’t re-create this. Hell, we could make it bigger. I wager we could do a lot more than party tricks. We could do something really cool.”

Something cool. A horrible, tantalizing fantasy swam up in my mind’s eye: the four of us in a clique, strutting meanly in lockstep in matching jackets, our nails sharp, our lips dark, our heels clacking in tandem with our heartbeats. The unholy trinity alchemizing into a quartet. I imagined us shocking people speechless. They’d look at us like we were teenage Erinyes. Like we were untouchable. I felt ill and giddy imagining it, imagining Yates and Jing and Daisy wanting to be near me, wanting to talk to me and be close to me. Best friends like the movies.

Jing’s phone exploded. Her phone was at its peak volume, and the ringing was so jarring that I jumped. She sighed, rolled her eyes, and declined the call. “It was just Yates,” she said to Daisy. She flickered her focus back to me. “So. If you think we can do that again, I’m in. Nothing is cool in this town, and that was cool. Bring it. We can—goddamn it,” she spat. Her phone lit up again. The ringer blasted. Jing scowled, swiped, and cradled it to her ear.

Daisy and I exchanged silent question marks.

“What the fuck. Slow down. Start over.”

Someone was sobbing on the other side.

“I can’t understand you, babe. What’s wrong?”

The sobbing grew louder.

“What do you mean, in the pool? You’re talking nonsense. Okay. Okay, I get it. I’ll come see the pool. Hush, I know.”

“The pool?” Daisy looked ravenous. “Like, as in your pool?”

Jing shot a seething glance in Daisy’s direction, but she nodded nonetheless.

Daisy looked lupine. She grabbed me by the wrist and bounced from foot to foot. “Come on, Sideways. If it’s gremlins, you can witch them to death.” She dragged me back toward the stairs.

Daisy held my hand differently than Madeline had. Tighter grip, almond nails poised to prick. Her hands were softer. Even so, the similarity made me roil. Cold sweat on the back of my neck. I let her pull me across the threshold. I heard Jing, still whispering into her phone, at our heels.

We trekked through the party ruins, through the black balloons, through the deck door, past the place where my skull had smacked, down the rickety stairs. We crossed the lawn and weaved between flamingos.

We stopped precariously close to the edge of the pool, toes on the rim, and peered over the edge at the cavernous turquoise hole below. It went down and down and down.

My stomach flipped.

There were bodies at the bottom.

Four slender bodies, two does and a fawn, lay dead in the deep end of the pool. Necks stretched. Eyes dull. Their legs stuck out at stiff angles. There were no bullet holes or cherry splatters. Their insides were not out. It was just the stillness, the inexplicable sickening stillness. Their bodies were arranged in neat rows. The bottom doe, the bigger of the two, had her head to the left and her tail to the right, and the middle doe was arranged in the opposite fashion. The fawn, still milky-speckled, was stretched like the first doe, left to right.

The fourth body, curled up right next to the fawn, was Yates, her phone cradled to her cheek.

 

 

TWO

 

 

WHO PUT BELLA IN THE WYCH ELM?


Yates whispered to herself. She shuddered, ghosted her fingertips across her sides and her arms. Her mascara was horror-flick thick under her eyes and her curls were still peppered with flowers from last night, but the petals were limper now, shrunken. Her feet were a shade bluer than the pool’s belly beneath her feet. Her left knee was bruised like a Jawbreaker.

“Yates. Baby girl. Talk to us.”

“What happened?”

“Are you hurt?”

“Are you okay?”

“Jesus fucking Christ, does she look like she’s okay?”

“If someone laid a single finger on you, I’ll chainsaw massacre them. I’ll carve their guts out. I’ll feed them to your dog.”

Daisy squeezed my hand so tight I could hardly stand it. My bones were threatening to crack. She’d cut off circulation at this rate, but I couldn’t bring myself to jerk my hand away, couldn’t pry my eyes off Yates for that long.

A sob tore out of her, a seam-splitting sob. It set my jaw on edge.

Jing’s expression flickered and her mouth opened, but the sound caught somewhere in her throat. She dropped, hoisted herself over the ledge of the pool, and jumped down into the cavern. Her feet hit the ground with a smack. Her mouth was pulled taut. Jing maneuvered around the deer in an arc, and she fell to a crouch when she reached Yates. She wrapped her arms around Yates’ shoulders and whispered something in her ear. I couldn’t make out the words, only the harsh, low raggedness of Jing’s voice. Yates hid her face in her knees.

“Hey, Sideways,” said Daisy. She sank her nails into my skin. “How’d the deer die?”

“No idea. I didn’t do it.” My tongue felt brittle. I shook my head, curled my lip, tried to make my heart beat slower, beat at a human pace, but it just got harder. I pulled my arm back, but Daisy’s grip was inescapable. “I don’t know how they died. I really don’t.”

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air #
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)