I press myself behind the door and take my knife from its sheath. I’m still listening for steps when a tall dark figure slips through the door, and I leap out with a cry, blade flashing.
“There she is!” He grins. “Nice knife!”
“Erik?!” And before I can stop myself, I’m hugging him as tight as I can. When I step back, he holds onto my arms and takes me in from head to toe as if to make sure I’m still in one piece. He looks pale, and there are dark circles under his eyes, like he hasn’t slept in a while.
“You don’t know how glad I am see you,” I splutter. “How are you here right now?”
He blinks at me, then quickly turns his head away, scanning the room over my shoulder.
“We finished our target early. I was going to try and meet up with you and Jav after checking this place out.” He turns back, eyes sharp and clear. “How are you here? How many miles are we from Ojai?”
“It’s surprisingly close,” I lie, not wanting to tell him about my kill switch yet, until I know if Dennis has freed us all. “You … finished … early?”
Erik shrugs, running a hand through his mop of stringy, dark gold hair. He looks like he hasn’t had a shower in a while.
“Yeah. Our girl ran this dive bar in Portland that hosts all these bands. We went to a show and stayed until everybody else left. The weird thing is … she didn’t like … fight us? We cornered her in this little backstage area, when she was unplugging all the tech. And then she pulled a gun on us. I thought that would be it. But then she just …” Erik puts two fingers in his mouth and lets his head fall back.
“What?”
“Yeah.” He bites quickly at his nails, then shoves his hand in his pocket. “The shot was so loud we were sure someone heard, so we cleared out. Drove as far as our switches would let us, called ‘MomandDad’ and told them we needed to get further away. So they disarmed our switches for a few days.”
A chill goes up my spine.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Erik. “That must have been really disturbing.”
“How are things going here?” he says quickly.
“I was only here for about five minutes before I heard the vertical blinds.”
“Vertical blinds!” He shakes his head. “My Achilles’ heel. And then that squeaky door!”
“We should start carrying WD-40 when we break and enter,” I say seriously, and Erik lets out a little laugh, then scans the walls with a palpable shudder. He nods to the computer.
“Password protected?”
“Yeah. I have one more guess before it locks me out.”
“Have you tried ‘Sailor Moon’?” The side of his mouth twitches. “It doesn’t matter, because he didn’t do it.” Erik taps the corner of one of the posters. “No one who puts Scotch tape on fresh paint has the foresight to stage a murder scene.”
“Yes, he did,” I insist. “Jaw got Rose into occultism. He has pentagrams on everything—” I hold up the e-vape triumphantly, then, in a flash of inspiration I try “pentagram” as the password. The error message comes up and I bang the keyboard. “It’s locked me out!”
“Forget the computer. Are you looking at this room?” Erik sounds frustrated. “There’s no …” he clutches at the air around him. “No drive. Nice Guys are driven to kill. It’s a drive strong enough to split them into two different people. What drive do you see in Jaw? Besides maybe one day managing a head shop?” He kicks at some marijuana leaf pajama pants. “Also, I looked up that altar thing from Armchair.org on the way down. It was a Wiccan altar, and Wicca is basically Recycling the Religion. It doesn’t require human sacrifice.” Disapprovingly, he watches me rifle through Jaw’s bedside table. “What exactly are you looking for?”
“Anything that links him to Rose.” I pull open the bedside table drawer: glass pipes, a razor blade with black tar on the edge, a silver skull ring. Erik picks it up and frowns.
“Aside from dressing like the President of Halloween, Jaw seems like a pretty chill guy. He’s fine with Rose dating Mike, he worships the Lord and the Lady, and keeps himself pretty sedated. What motive does he have to kill his hot secret girlfriend?”
“Who knows?” I take the ring and throw it back into the drawer. “Couples are weird that way. No one can really tell what goes on in a relationship except the two people in it.”
“As a single person, I’d say everyone can tell what’s going on in a relationship except the two people in it,” he says meaningfully. “Different perspectives.”
“Yeah. Well.” I refuse to take the bait. “I remembered Jaw being inside the shed.” I rummage through a low dresser, “And why Rose wanted me to meet him.”
Erik’s eyes are suddenly bright again. He looks so much like himself, I have to turn around and rifle through a bookcase to hide my relief.
“Well?” he presses.
“She wanted a picture of me and Jaw doing something. For the My Life thing.”
“When did you remember this?!”
“At camp. When I had that nightmare.” I run my hand along the tops of the stacked graphic novels, netting a few sticks of incense and a quarter.
“The nightmare that made you wake up screaming?” Erik’s tone demands I turn and face him. “A picture of you and Jaw doing what exactly?”
“Kissing.” I blush. But that’s not the right word. “Well, I mean, I don’t know how much kissing I was doing, I was mostly passed out.”
“So Jaw assaulted you. Oh, okay.” Erik tears his hand through his hair with a quick, suppressive gesture, then turns and kicks in an expensive-looking speaker near the door.
“Erik!”
“Whoops.” He shrugs as the cone clatters off. “You were saying?”
“Rose asked him to,” I say, and he starts excitedly biting his nails.
“It fits. It fits.” Erik’s voice comes out half-strangled with excitement. “Signal, it’s so obvious. Jaw was Mr. Moody. But Mr. Moody never killed Rose.”
“Not that again.” I heave the rat’s nest of dirty clothes from beside the bed and lower myself to the carpet. I push myself as far as I can under the low wood bed frame, Erik’s voice chasing after me.
“So what, you think Jaw met her at the shed, took her somewhere else, then brought her body back? The same Mr. Moody who won’t even call Rose is crisscrossing the woods with a corpse in the middle of a kegger?”
“Maybe he didn’t know about the party.”
“Your high school’s drug dealer didn’t know about a big party in the woods? You’re being purposefully obtuse, Signal.”
Below the bed is a clear plastic bin, disappointingly full of shoes. I wrestle open a long cardboard box crammed beside a set of turntables, scraping my knuckles viciously in the process. Inside is an old skate deck, empty aquarium, and rock tumbler. I tear open a trash bag to find a worn sleeping bag that stinks of weed.
“She was killed in the shed,” Erik insists. “They’re drunk and high and doing an occult ritual. They’re not going anywhere. But there’s no evidence of a third party. So what does that tell you, Signal?”
The back of my head cracks against the wood frame, hard, as I back out from under the bed. I swallow a string of expletives before staggering over to Jaw’s thin closet doors and throwing them open, Erik’s voice right behind me.
“If you know Mr. Moody was in the shed too, then what does that tell you, Signal?”
Craning my neck, I scan the boxes on the shelves above Jaw’s rack of dark clothes, the back of my head throbbing. There’s a black cardboard box with a pentagram sticker on it.
“The only way to see the truth here is to strip away what you want to be true and face the facts, unpleasant though they may be,” Erik continues. “But you won’t. You can’t. You keep turning away from the same key fact because it scares the hell out of you.”
I reach for the black box, straining my arms as far as I can, teeth clenched against the pain in my head. My fingertips just brush the sides with me standing on tiptoe. Erik reaches over me, his chest brushing against my back, and lifts it easily from the shelf, setting it down on the floor. I fall to my knees and pull off the lid: it’s just a bunch of old vinyl records.
“Signal. Look at me.” Erik sits on the corner of the bed, right across from me. A prickle creeps up the back of my neck.
“You’re seriously trying that again?” I glare at him. “Trying to get into my head by ‘proving’ I killed Rose?”
He’s about to retort something but swallows instead, hangs his head, then looks up at me with a wounded expression, eyes glistening like fresh scrapes. “Okay. Let’s just play into your paranoid fantasies about me for a minute. Let’s say I am trying to get into your head by proving you killed Rose. If you know you didn’t kill her there’s no way for that to work. I can’t prove what isn’t true.” His face has never been more intent or more beautiful. “Don’t you want the truth?”
Or am I afraid of it?
If everyone was somehow right, and I did kill Rose in some disassociated state, that guilt would destroy me. But walking around every day, half-believing it’s true, that will destroy me too. If there is some buried memory of that night, don’t I want him to find it?
“Yes,” I tell him. “I do.”
When he leans toward me, the corner of his mouth twisting, I flinch back a little. But it’s the last twitch of prey in the shadow of its predator. Then I meet his eyes and all the noise in the world narrows down to Erik’s deep voice.
“Signal, it’s time to face some facts. Rose never left the shed. She died in front of you.”
I start to object, but Erik goes on firmly:
“You remembered her drugging you. You remembered Jaw in the shed. You remembered her taking a picture of the two of you. If we had longer, you would remember her dying, too.”
Rose’s scream rings through my head, as it did in my nightmare. And part of me already knows that was a memory.
“But the next morning there was no evidence of anyone but the two of you in the shed. No picture of Jaw. No thermos. No drugs. So what does that tell you, Signal?”
Rose’s scream, her kneeling before me. The red stripe across her neck and the burning smell. These were not dreams but memories.
“What does that tell you, Signal?”
I bow my head as it comes out:
“I’m a Class A, aren’t I? Team Take.” My voice breaks. “I would never consciously hurt Rose. But not all of me was conscious … Part of me was awake. And angry at her. And sick of being used. So when she had Jaw kiss me … that’s what ‘fits,’ isn’t it? After he left, that part of me took control. That’s what you’re saying, right?”
“No!” Erik reaches out and takes my hand: “Signal, I’ve known you didn’t kill Rose from the moment I met you.”
“How?” I say, tears streaming.
“Call it instinct. Or attention to detail. But I know it the same way I know you never had brothers or a serious boyfriend.” Erik’s jibe breaks me out of my daze. “Because you clearly have no idea how to search a guy’s room.”
And then he stands and flings the mattress off the bed, covers and all. In the corner, right under where he’d just been sitting, stuck between the slats and the frame, is a box wrapped in beige vinyl packing tape.
“Always start by looking under the mattress,” he says, snapping it up, and then sits down cross-legged in the middle of the room across from me.
“The fact you keep avoiding, the fact there’s no evidence of anyone but you and Rose at the murder scene, is actually what clears you, Signal. If you were to consider it objectively.” Erik scrapes at the packaging tape with his stubby, nonexistent fingernails. “This shed is the hookup spot of a vaping warlock. There should be too much evidence—of him and every girl who’s ever been in there. Hair, nails, fibers, fingerprints, unspeakable forms of DNA—the backwash in that thermos alone, I shudder to think—”
The tape crunches into a wad and I hear the clink of a metal handle. Erik turns around the box to face me. It’s a Transformers lunchbox.
“Erik.”
He carefully opens the lid, and smiles. Then he pulls out a plastic Elvis and a plastic Marilyn. I reach out and take them with shaking hands.
“This proves it, don’t you see?!” I whisper. “Jaw cleaned up the murder scene!”
“Whoa whoa whoa. We still haven’t seen any evidence this kid knows how to clean. And whoever cleared that shed truly knew what they were doing. They fooled the cops, the defense, and a jury. If the crime scene had been an evidence drill? Absolute A+.”
And then he takes out the Transformers thermos, and I can barely breathe.
Erik carefully unscrews the lid and turns it upside down. A small silver key and a steel-colored necklace slip onto the carpet. He picks up the necklace and holds it between us, a pentagram charm hanging from its ball chain.
“There it is,” he says, as if he’d been wondering when it would turn up. “Jaw’s necklace.”
He takes my hand, then slowly lets the chain pool in the center of my palm, cold and surprisingly heavy. I look down at our hands holding it. My whole world was blown apart by a charm the size of a nickel.
“Let me just talk you through some thoughts. And if I don’t convince you, hey, you still have the lunchbox. You can go see about making a case against Jaw.”
“I’m listening.”
“Since we started talking about your case, there’s a contradiction that’s always stood out to me.” He leans forward, pulling his hair back from his face. “The crime scene is meticulously staged to frame you.” He raises one trembling finger, nail bitten down to the quick. “But you weren’t supposed to be there. Rose told you in the shed Mr. Moody didn’t know you were coming. You were a surprise. How could Mr. Moody so perfectly set up someone who was never supposed to be there in the first place?”
Erik’s eyes flash as he talks, his words crisp and sharp and a little too fast.
“So I thought, okay then, so what if Rose hadn’t brought Signal? She and Jaw would have met in the shed. They would have shared a thermos that was spiked with something that could escape a forensic drug test. And, I’m willing to bet, Jaw would have woken up with Rose’s head in his lap. So the killer had been to the shed and knew about the thermos. The killer had a reason to kill Rose and make Jaw suffer and planned to do both.
“I told you there were three questions we had to answer to solve this crime. Why was Rose so secretive about Mr. Moody? Why did she need to get you drunk? And who drugged the thermos? I have the answers, but I’m going to make a lot of leaps, so bear with me, it’s just how my mind works.”
“You see the angel in the marble and you need to set it free?”
“Exactly.” His eyes, ringed with dark circles, burn in his pale face. “So first off, Rose brings you to the shed. She gives you a thermos, you do your best impression of a party girl and immediately pass out. Rose barely drank at all, because she had a goal for the night. Up until a few minutes ago, I didn’t know what that was, but the picture fits. It fits perfectly.”
He smiles then, a smile of ecstatic satisfaction. “She needed you buzzed so she could get a picture of you and Jaw kissing. More on why later. The point is, when Jaw shows up, there’s nothing left in the thermos for him and you’re halfway to a coma. She gets the picture. Did you remember anything else after that in your dream?”
“I think they, um … made out after that.”
Erik’s eyes are focused on the wall behind me, as though he can see it playing out there in front of him like a silent movie. “The killer followed Jaw to the shed, where he was expected to split the thermos with Rose, and then both of them were supposed to pass out. But that’s not what happened. When the killer comes in to stage the murder of Rose by Jaw, they’re wide awake. And they’ve seen the killer’s face. Time to recalculate! So our ‘Nice Guy’ demands that Jaw leave—”
“Wait, what?” I shake my head. “Why would Jaw agree to just leave?”
“Exactly what I asked myself. Jaw, moody warlock that he is, would only obey the killer if they had a high level of authority over Rose. The kind of authority where you can totally invade someone’s privacy, tell them what to wear, forbid them from dating, and still take the moral high ground.”
I shake my head, my gorge rising, refusing to follow where he’s going. “Wait. Hold on. If Jaw saw the killer, why didn’t he say something during the investigation?”
“Why put himself on the scene? He’s the town drug dealer. Instead, he saw a chance to strike a deal with the killer: write me a check, and I’ll get out of town. California is not a cheap state to live, and this is a nice place. What does Jaw’s mom work as again?”
“Waitress.”
He lets out a low laugh. “Yeah. Blackmail bought this house.” He holds out the small key that slid out of the thermos. “This looks like the key to a safety deposit box. What do you bet that’s where he’s keeping his leverage? Evidence worth this kind of payoff might be enough to reopen your case.”
If he’s right, he’s holding my freedom.
“The damning thing about the necklace was not that it was a pentagram, but who it belonged to. It was proof Jaw and Rose were together. That’s why Rose needed a picture of Jaw kissing you—bad enough to get you drunk, bad enough to ask her secret boyfriend to kiss you right in front of her. She didn’t need that photo for a project. She needed it to prove to the killer that you were with Jaw, and not her.
“Because the killer allowed Rose to date the pastor’s closeted son, but sleeping with Jaw was a capital crime. The killer was locked into a sick dance of sexual suppression with Rose that had nothing to do with you. You got caught up in this mess, not because you’re evil or crazy, but because Rose knew she could count on you, because you’re the most stupidly selfless and kind person I’ve ever met.” He rattles this last part off quickly, but so sincerely, his face a mixture of such sadness and anger, it catches me off guard.
“W-what?”
And then we both hear the front door lock turning, the door opening downstairs.
Erik shoves the key and the necklace into my hands, throws everything back into the lunch box and smoothly slides it under the bed.
“Go go go go go,” he hisses in my ear.
There’s the rustle of grocery bags downstairs and heavy footsteps as I shut the drawers of Jaw’s desk, my hands trembling.
“C’mon,” Erik whispers, and as I hurry ahead he hisses “Door!” but I’ve already done it:
SKREEEEEEEEEEEE
“Mom?” I hear Jaw call from the front. “You home?”
Erik pulls me into the bedroom, whipping open the sliding door, the blinds rattling like the plastic bones of a Halloween skeleton.
“Mom? Hello?”
“Don’t go to the ground yet. Wait for him to get upstairs,” Erik whispers as we throw our legs over the thin railing, and I nod. We cling side by side, clutching the bottom of the balcony floor, hanging off the side of the house, twelve feet above the narrow side yard.
“Did you mess with my lock?!” Jaw’s voice echoes down the hall. Oh hell, I forgot to close the padlock. “What the hell happened to my speaker?!” he bellows.
“Now,” Erik says calmly. We turn and drop down to the top of the wood fence, spider down to the pavement and run through the still, sun-bleached neighborhood to the car, fast as we can go.
Erik directs me up the block where he stashed his backpack, and then we’re off with a screech in the green Volvo, all the windows down, the honey-colored afternoon sunlight so thick and warm it’s like an animal presence.
“How did you even get down here without a car?” I ask Erik.
“Hopped a train in Portland. Did some hitchhiking. There’s quite a network of voluntarily homeless youths in California. As your guy Angel Childs well knows.” He looks at me, a strange hunger flickering over his face. “When is that going down?”
“Tonight.”
“Fun stuff.” Erik shakes his head in the stiff wind rolling in the window. He kicks back his seat and yawns, his heavily muscled arms twisting in either direction, so close his hand nearly grazes my cheek. “So,” he says drowsily, “are you going back to help Javier, or just heading out into the sunset, now your kill switch is off?”
He’s lucky I don’t drive off the road.
“How did you know my kill switch was turned off?!”
“Dennis told me.”
“I can’t believe it!” I gasp, outraged. “When would he have even—”
“Before we left, he told me to visit the old Skullsex.com. It redirected to some weird proxy message board. We’ve been keeping up. So he did it? Turned off your switch?”
I nod, gripping the wheel.
“So now what?”
“Well, the plan was for Dennis to turn off everyone else’s kill switch too, which I’m hoping he has. Once I know that, I’ll tell Javier we don’t have to do the mission, and then—”
“Then you’ll both ride off into the sunset.” He stares at me. “After risking your neck for him with your little kill switch plan. I can’t believe he didn’t make any effort to stop you.”
“He didn’t know. I told Dennis not to tell him.”
“And why’s that?” Erik’s voice perks up.
“I was afraid he’d stop me.”
“So, he’s controlling? He doesn’t respect your autonomy?”
“No! No, that’s not it at all! He just cares about me too much.”
Erik laughs, and I know he’s rolling his eyes. “Oh right. Tender-hearted Javier. The man who feels too much. Did he ever get around to describing how he caved that one guy’s head in?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, he did,” I snap. “He told me all about it.”
“And?”
“It sounded like a one-off psychotic break brought on by overwhelming circumstances.”
“Whoa ho ho, are you excusing the murder of a fellow human being?” Erik tsk-tsks. “Someone’s been a bad influence on you, Signal.”
“Javier’s not a bad influence,” I say. “As a matter of fact, he’s bent over backwards to keep me from having to kill someone. He’s doing everything he can to protect my innocence.”
I regret my wording instantly. Erik lets out a whistle.
“Wow. Wait, hold on, so you’re like, proud he sees you as utterly useless?”
For a few moments I follow the twisting roads toward Ojai before collecting myself enough to answer him.
“I’m not useless just because I don’t want to kill people. There’s different ways to be useful.”
“Not in this situation,” Erik says savagely. “And if Sir Javier wants to be your perfect white knight so bad, why didn’t he just tell the Director he’d do it alone?”
“He did,” I shoot back. “He risked getting his kill switch set off! He has a kind of strength you don’t value, Erik. The kind of strength that doesn’t come from hurting people. It comes from helping them.”
Erik seethes in the seat beside me, his head turning completely to the window, and the minutes trickle by in tense silence.
How did this happen? How did we start fighting again, when we’d been so close back in Jaw’s room? How can Erik be so helpful and brilliant one minute, and then so insulting and horrible the next? Why can’t I control myself when he needles me like this? Why do I feel the need to justify myself to him?
I pull in beside the motel and cut the engine, but I don’t make any motion to get out of the car. Instead I turn to him, taking a deep breath.
“Erik. I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight with you, okay?”
He’s still turned away, staring out the window. I soldier on with my planned statement, knowing full well any minute he’ll burst out in his cutting laugh.
“What you did back there was brilliant. You’re brilliant.” I swallow hard. “And I … I’m glad I know you, okay? I’m grateful to have you as my friend. So if we’re all going to be free now, I hope … I hope you stay my friend.”
“We won’t be seeing each other again.” His voice is matter-of-fact.
“… No?”
“Your mystery is solved.” He doesn’t turn from the window. “What else do we even have to talk about?”
It takes me a moment to find an answer. “I’d talk to you about anything, Erik.” I take his hand, trying to get him to engage with me. His fingers are loose in mine. “I hope you know that.”
“Cool, thanks.” He leans his head back on the chair seat, exposing the muscular line of his throat. “But when all our kill switches go offline at once, I suspect our Director is going to get busy finding us. Keeping in touch would just help him do it faster.”
My eyes are going all hot and itchy, which means I’m about to cry.
“So yeah, this is the last time we’ll see each other.”
I turn my head away as tears blur my vision.
“Heartbreaking, I know,” he goes on sarcastically. “Seeing as we barely know each other anyway.” Embarrassed, I pull my hand away. But his fingers tighten, and he pulls it back, pulls it so my hand hovers just a hair from his heart. The gesture is so small, but it makes the air go still around us.
“At least we got to say goodbye this time.” He turns to me, all sarcasm gone.
“I miss you,” I confess, tears spilling over. “I miss you every day.”
Erik is momentarily at a loss for words, then he says, stunned: “Are you CRYING?! Signal, I’m kidding. I’m just kidding!”
And now I’m sloppy sobbing.
“Signal! Signal! Don’t cry! It was just a joke! I’m kidding! You think you could lose me that easy? We still have to make sure your name gets cleared, okay? I was just giving you a hard time, I didn’t think you’d CRY!” And then, delightedly: “Why are you crying, Signal?”
And he starts to laugh, an infuriating, surprised laugh, like he’s just won some impossible bet he thought he’d already lost. I’m not sure what I’m doing as I curl into him, twisting his collar and cursing passionately, but his green eyes are fixed on my mouth, and when they rise to mine I cannot look away.
Then Erik reaches up and tilts my face toward his, so carefully, so gently, as though I’m precious, as though he’s wanted to touch me for a very long time. And it’s the unexpected gentleness that does it, that makes me reach up and bury my fingers in his hair as he closes the space between us and covers my mouth with his.
At the moment of contact a physical rush seizes my entire body, an awareness so intense it’s almost panic. Most of my life I’ve been a head and a pair of hands, only remembering the other parts of myself when they hurt. But kissing Erik, I am the heart of an infinite universe of sensation: I’m the curved shoulder his hand has found, I am the soft skin inside my wrist as it drags against his back, I am the cheek his eyelash brushes, I am the thrashing heart and the repeating thought: I can’t believe this is happening, this cannot happen. And I have never, not even once, felt so completely alive.
Erik pulls away, his smile dizzily bobbing in my vision like I’m somehow drunk, lost in the landscape of his face this close, and says with certainty:
“We aren’t friends, Signal. Friends don’t make each other feel like that.”
I blink for a moment, speechless, and then I see Javier behind him, standing outside the car, phone to his ear, staring in at us.