I snatch my hands away as tumbler after tumbler of memories release and fit into place in my head:
The previous campers were all kicked out of camp when they were in their thirties.
“We won’t go quiet.”
Dog Mask had help, a beautiful device made by someone else, someone who wanted to kill us. Someone like Dennis’s target, the paranoid genius hidden away in a compound?
Erik and Jada’s target knew they were coming for her.
Starbrite said Angel had insisted on new visitors having copilots in the last few months.
That knowing look in Angel’s eyes, his palm clamped over my kill switch scar: That’s not your name.
There was only one way our targets could have known we were coming. We’d been sent out to kill the previous campers. The generation who trained before us.
“You went to camp, didn’t you?” I fight to keep my voice calm. “You’re a Class A too.”
“We didn’t have fancy names for it back then.” Angel’s smile deepens. “They just called us psycho killers. Not very politically correct! But then, they didn’t have all that nasty technology either.” He pats the back of his neck. “We just have scannable microchips, same as you’d put in a dog. You guys get the fancy names but you also gotta deal with those neat-o kill switches. So I’d say you got the short end of the stick.”
“So all that ‘teaching’ about stars and angels is just …” I think of the girls downstairs, slavishly hanging on his every word. “Some act?”
“I needed an army.” He looks at me seriously. “We knew you little kiddies were coming because we killed the class ahead of us. New class kills old class. That’s the job interview. Back then, they seemed so old …” He laughs and shakes his head. “Some of us decided to prepare. Some of us had no intention of going quiet.”
“Like the guy in the Dog Mask?”
“Mutt. Yes. Came through about a month ago, asked me if I wanted to come help him take you all out. How’d he go? Did Dave do it?”
“We killed him.” I lift my chin.
“Well, good for you,” Angel says sarcastically. “Guess what that wins you? A full-time job killing and cuttin’ up some of the nastiest, dirtiest rats on this earth’s surface. Five, six of ’em a year. You survive fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of butcherin’, then you’ll wind up right in my shoes, with some little pissant showing up to take you out without even a first thought to why you should die.”
He shakes his head, then leans heavily on his knees. “Hey, it was an honest question before: how are Kate and Dave?” His tone is casual but his stance is not relaxed. I shift my weight to my back foot.
“They’re good.”
“They always were a pair of suck-ups,” he says flatly. “Worst campers in the place.”
I shake my head, stunned by the thought. “Dave and Kate were campers?”
“Little goody two-shoes, the pair of ’em. Just about broke their arms clappin’ themselves on the back when they got picked to stay behind and train the new recruits. Still. That’s rough that Kate had to see Mutt taken out, they had, uh …” He wiggles his eyebrows. “Had quite a thing going for a while. Lots of hookups at camp! It was some wild times, man …” Angel leans forward then, his grin faltering.
“Speaking of which … you sure look like that one … don’t tell me, Deer something … the one who killed Nene’s little girl?”
“… What?”
“Nene’s little girl, who got her head cut off?” Angel says impatiently.
I’m going to be sick.
I remember the sheet Dennis showed us. The one entry who had been pardoned. He means Nene like Janeane. Janeane who came from a powerful family, and had gotten pregnant when she was sixteen.
“Janeane got pregnant … at camp?”
“Oh yeah,” Angel says with a dark smile. “Nene’s fancy family got her out for the baby’s sake. When she and the kid popped up in the news, well, we were all following that case.”
The newspapers about Rose’s murder that I found in the pantry, I’d assumed they were saved because they were about me. But they were saved because they were about Janeane.
“’Specially Dave, I’m sure,” Angel says. “Seeing as how the little girl was his kid.”
Dave’s face, the first day he met me, the way he’d spilled out the crime scene photos and jeered that I didn’t feel remorse. The way he’d saved me the bleeder that looked like Rose, and pushed me harder than anyone else. Because Rose was his … daughter?
Impossible. But my head starts spinning. Rose’s grandparents had put aside a trust for her that couldn’t be touched until she turned eighteen. Why not just give it to Janeane? Or have her move back in? They wanted to keep their distance from Janeane. Because she was a teen killer.
Rose had said her mom was always snooping around her room. The message board had said Janeane had found the pentagram necklace that linked Rose to Jaw.
I had thought Erik was saying that Tom, Rose’s stepdad, had killed Rose. That Tom was obsessed with controlling Rose, and could have followed Jaw to the shed. But the killer had drugged the thermos, that was one of Erik’s three main points. How would Tom know about the thermos in the floor? That was a detail only someone close to Jaw would know. And if Jaw was taking Janeane to his hookup spot, then they were … hooking up?
That would explain why Mr. Moody was such a secret. Jaw couldn’t risk his ex, Janeane, finding out he was with her daughter, Rose. Maybe he sensed how disturbed she was. Rose had known a long time. I just hadn’t taken her seriously.
From Janeane’s point of view, Rose was about to get her “rightful” inheritance in a month. Then she found the necklace, and realized Rose had taken Jaw as well. She drugged the thermos, intending to kill Rose and frame Jaw if they ever met in the shed. To punish them both. The burning smell from my dream. The skinny nightmare creature. That was my drugged memory of Janeane clearing the scene with bleach, just like they trained her to at camp.
“Good times, good times,” Angel says, shifting his weight forward. “So you and the guy you’re with, you’re together too, huh?”
“You can ask him,” I say coolly. “When he gets here.”
Angel’s eyebrows go up. “Is that what you’re waiting for? I wouldn’t hold my breath. He’s where Compass put him now.”
“And where’s that?”
“Root cellar,” Angel says, rising to his feet in one powerful gesture. “I call it the ‘guest house’ when I want someone shut up in there.”
No no no no.
“She either cut him or drugged him—probably she drugged him. Compass doesn’t like blood. That’s why she doesn’t come to Star-Makings.” He cracks his knuckles and then his neck. “She likes the Heavenly Weddings all right, but she has a hard time watching me, uh, ‘release an angel back into a star.’”
It’s important I do not flinch. I must not show fear. I must not show weakness. I force myself to grin.
“So that’s what you’ve been doing out here?”
He imitates my smile, a mocking gesture, and then drops it.
“You’re no good at bravado, little girl. I’d say you’re shaking in your shoes, but I always have them remove the shoes. In case I got a kicker on my hands.” We circle each other. His arm is angled so his hand hovers at his hip. He grows still. Too still. Like a bowstring pulled back before it’s let go. What is he waiting for? Why not just attack me?
“Alright. Show me what you got,” he snaps.
Of course: he’s waiting for me to make the first move. He wants to see what they’re teaching us at camp these days.
“Your girls took my knife.”
“So what, you want me to give you a weapon to kill me with?”
“Unless you’re afraid of a fair fight.”
He laughs again. “Nothing fair about this. You know how many targets I’ve taken out in the last fifteen years? I could break you with my bare hands.”
“So let me have a knife then.” I lift my chin. “Unless you’re afraid.”
“You’re the one backing away,” he says, and there’s a flash at his hip as he unsheathes the bowie knife.
Then he sets it on the floor and kicks it my way.
He holds out his arms. “Come and get it.”
I move to pick up the knife, but I am quick, or too relieved. Something betrays me, because as I snatch it up his tongue flashes out of his mouth and licks his lips in animal anticipation.
He knows I’m prey.
Run.
I feint right, and then as he lunges left toward the trap door I turn around and run in the other direction, toward the hay bales, racing up the tall stacks as he rages after me.
“What the hell is this?! You can’t even hold the thing right!”
I scrabble up the scratchy hay, slipping on the blankets and dirty sheets, clutching the knife in my hands with the blade stuck out to the side. If I can make it to the beam, I can climb up and out of reach. Get across the beam to the open window, climb down—
A hand closes on my ankle, and he swings me by my leg, throwing me sideways down the stack of hay bales. I go end over end and feel my skin crushed between my bones and the floor, my breath knocked out of me by the impact.
Before I can roll to my side he’s above me, the black sole of his bare foot across my throat. He stares down at me, not even winded. I hold the knife with both hands against my own chest, which rises and falls, rises and falls, faster and faster.
“I had a feeling Nene did it.” He bends down, peering into my eyes. “Not a lot of maternal instinct in that one.” He shakes his head. “So you didn’t even kill anyone, huh, little girl? Man, that’s tough.”
His foot is so hard against my neck I can’t answer. I can’t breathe, there’s only a thin thread of air getting through, it’s not enough. My heart is trying to punch through my straining chest.
“Man, that’s got to be the worst luck I ever heard.” My vision swims, I can only hear his voice. “A zero gets sent to camp for killing the counselor’s kid!” The floor feels strangely hot under my back, and the stars swirl above me, looping down and around and evaporating in front of my eyes.
“And then you get assigned to kill me?! To kill me. You! Oh man!!”
Angel releases his foot from my neck and air rushes back into my lungs. It tastes unmistakably of smoke. I sit up, gulping it anyway, my vision clearing as he sits down on the hay bale across from me, throws his head back, and laughs.
I hoist myself up to my feet, the knife still in my hand. The smell of smoke is getting stronger.
“Hey—” He stretches out his arms, grinning at me. “Come here. Come give me a stab.”
I stand there panting and cupping my sore throat, gritty from the sole of his foot.
“Come on!” He beckons with one hand. “Come on, little girl! Come stab me! Clear shot, right to the heart, have at it.”
I roll the handle of the bowie knife in my hands, holding it properly, and take a wary step toward him. His eyes are sparkling.
“It’s not a trick!” he sings out merrily. “I just know you’re too chicken to stab someone. I know that for a fact.”
I stumble toward him, gritting my teeth. Javier is in a cellar. Even if by some miracle he’s okay, and I don’t kill this guy, we’ll both be dead. This man is evil. He preys on girls. He brainwashes them. He’s built up a personal army of ruined lives.
Angel tips his head back, eyes closed, arms outstretched, a dopey smile on his face. It could be the drugs are making him act erratic. Or it could be complete contempt.
I grip the knife with both hands and raise it level with my face. I’m right over him. One down stroke and the knife goes into his heart. I stand there, trembling so hard my teeth chatter.
He peeks open one eye and starts hooting again.
“What stops you?” he asks, flabbergasted. “What in the world stops you?”
Nothing. Nothing will stop me. I have to do this. I have to do this. I have to do this.
I have to do this!
I bring the knife down through the air with all my strength, yelling out loud as the blade breaks his skin and buries itself in flesh, and then I spring away, unable to bear the sensations any longer.
I’ve buried the knife maybe three inches in his right shoulder. Because I couldn’t go for the heart.
Because I’m not a killer. I never was, I never will be. No matter what the Wylie-Stanton diagnosed me as. I am not the Girl From Hell. My fate is mine to choose. My knees buckle and I burst into tears of relief as the nightmare fears of a year release me at last.
And then Angel swings out and seizes me, his laughter echoing through the loft. His fingers tear at my flesh as he wrenches me toward him, the fabric of my sleeve ripping from the force.
“You poor little idiot.” He laughs, the knife still quivering in his shoulder.
He reaches up and takes the knife out of his shoulder with a swift jerk. Barely a flesh wound. He lays the blade flat against the fine hairs of my cheek, and slowly wipes his blood off on my skin. First one side, then the other, smearing stripes of blood across my face, his laughter in my ears as I try to twist my head away.
“Aww, are those tears? Were you crying at the thought of killing me?” he howls. “What could make anyone that stupid? That weak?”
My head falls back, and that’s when I see it. A dark shape silhouetted by the neon stars overhead. A shape like a shoulder, on a figure lying prone on the beam just above us.
Angel looks up, following my gaze, and as he does the figure drops, like a leopard leaping down on its prey from a tree.
I scramble back as they sprawl across the floor. Hot, orange light streams in through the space between the floorboards, and glowing curls of smoke drift around Erik’s face—Erik’s beautiful, focused face—as he knocks Angel to the floor, grabs Angel’s head with both hands and jerks hard to one side.
It takes both hands pressed to my mouth to keep from screaming as Angel rolls away, clearly shaken, his hands reaching for his neck.
Erik, all in black, waits for him to get up.
Standing but unsteady, Angel turns on Erik with a roar. Erik is ready for him, both arms out, his teen idol smile spreading across his face.
They circle each other the way we circled each other a moment before, but there’s no taunting or laughter from Angel now. An animal silence hangs between them, and Angel’s jerky feints forward, his quick, clumsy lunges, seem desperate across from Erik’s self-possessed calm. When he pretends to pounce, Erik doesn’t even flinch.
“Look, kid—” Angel starts in, and that’s when Erik strikes. He grabs Angel’s hand holding the knife and snaps Angel’s fingers backward while sinking his teeth—actually sinking his teeth—into the wound I made in Angel’s shoulder.
Angel lets out an agonized yell, and the knife clatters to the floor.
Everything happens very fast: Erik punches him, once, twice, three times hard in the gut, and while Angel struggles to get his breath back, Erik snatches up the knife and they grapple, Angel howling and snapping his teeth, Erik’s face utterly blank.
The smoke billows up from the first story, a gray veil rising between us just as Erik twists Angel on his back, and stray pieces of chaff light up as the hay behind me rips into flame. I spin around to see tongues of fire zipping up to the tall ceiling, then turn back to where they were fighting a moment before.
It’s just a wall of black smoke.
“Erik?!”
A figure all in black comes through the smoke, and I see his red, bloody mouth and, more horrible, the look in his eyes, and know he’s won.
“Signal!”
The flames roar behind us as more of the hay catches, and Erik reaches out his hand. The tendons stand out strangely in his wrist and neck, and down at his side he’s flicking the tightly held knife again and again on his pants, compulsively, and I understand that he is not yet done.
“Come here,” he says through gritted teeth.
The smoke from the fire sends my gauzy skirt rising in a white cloud around us as I step forward and take his hand. He spins me around, my back almost bouncing off his chest, and says something I can barely make out over the flames.
“I’m sorry—this is the only way—”
“Erik, what are you doing?!”
“Setting you free,” he answers, his mouth right against my ear, his arm crossing over my chest.
And with those words his knife slides into my neck.