Some people, when they were very, very sad, wanted to die. Lorraine didn’t understand that.
Because at this moment, she was sadder than she had ever been—a great, roaring sorrow, a horrible heat melting away the future, a ringing in her ears, a physical pain like a stitch in her side, an acid pill unwinding in her stomach—
And what Lorraine wanted was to kill someone.
#
Stephanie suggested that, since the guys were gone, they should watch a chick flick. As if the boys were off bowling or getting steak or something, as if this were an appropriate occasion for a Girl’s Night.
So Stephanie and Priya and Jessica lounged on leather couches watching two pretty people hate each other and then gradually not hate each other and then misunderstand each other and then kiss. And then they did it again, with a different movie, because the boys still weren’t back and Stephanie decided to turn the night into a marathon. Priya drifted into sleep about the time the pretty boy was trying to keep himself from staring at the pretty girl when she wasn’t looking.
Priya floated through dreams without storylines, drifts and drips of images, bonfires and lightning storms and the occasional music-swell-end-of-the-movie kiss. She woke to the sound of muffled male voices from the other room. The boys were back.
She got up, blinking away the after effects of her nap. The doorway to the next room was a bright shape in the darkness. Priya made her way over to it and stood in the opening.
The other Reds were clumped on the far side of the room. The boys looked dirty and rumpled, the girls anxious. Rod’s back was turned to her, but she could see Connor’s deeply exhausted face. He noticed her watching him and looked away as if he were ashamed. And he should be ashamed, shouldn’t he? The way he’d run away from her.
Rod turned around. His face and shirt were streaked reddish-brown. When he saw Priya he gave her an ironic soldier-salute.
She could swear she’d seen it before—Rod, swaggering and bloody. It was like something she’d dreamed of every night for months and then forgotten every morning.
She had to cross her arms to keep her hands from trembling as she approached them.
“What happened?” she asked.
“What was going to happen eventually,” said Rod.
Priya felt cold, felt hollow. She felt it in her body and her head. It was the same sensation she remembered feeling when that guy Stone had held her at gunpoint all those weeks ago. Apparently this was how she reacted to horrible things. “Someone died.”
“Yeah. Someone died.”
“Danny,” said Connor. He still wouldn’t look Priya in the face. “It was Danny.”
“Rod had to do it,” said Stephanie. “Danny almost electrocuted him to death. He would have done it. Rod had to.”
“Are we all going to get arrested?” asked Priya, because it was the only thing she could think to say.
“No,” said Rod. “We took care of it.”
“How?”
Harry was standing by Stephanie. He shifted, uncomfortable on his feet. “Do you really want to know, Ya-Ya?” He was the first person besides Rod Priya had ever heard use the nickname, and it came out awkward, as if he were trying too hard to copy Rod’s characteristic nonchalance.
“I want to know whether we’re going to jail.”
“We buried him,” said Rod.
“How? With what?”
“I keep stuff in my car. Flashlight, shovel, useful stuff.”
“And what about his phone?”
Rod pulled a phone out of his pocket and wiggled it in the air. “We’ll get rid of it tomorrow. Throw it in the lake or something.”
“Can the police tell it was here?” asked Stephanie. “Can they tell it was in my house?”
“I don’t think so,” said Jessica. “I saw it on a murder show—it pings the tower when it’s turned on, so they can tell the general area. Not down to a house.”
“Can they read the texts off it if they don’t have it with them? Are the texts still in the cloud or whatever if we delete them?”
Nobody knew the answer to that one.
“Give it to me,” said Priya. “I want to see the texts, whether he’s talked about the powers and everything.”
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Rod hesitated, but not for long. He didn’t even comment as he handed the phone over to her.
A little while later, in the privacy of Stephanie’s guest bedroom, Priya called Lorraine.
#
The negotiations went smoothly. It helped that they took place over the phone. Whatever strange force made Lorraine Priya’s natural enemy didn’t seem to work as well when they couldn’t see each other’s faces. The worst moment was when Priya had to explain that she’d gotten Lorraine’s number from Danny’s phone.
After hanging up, Priya got down on her knees and pulled the package from n0questionsasked.us out from under the bed. It was tough opening it without scissors and she ended up tearing the cardboard flaps at ragged angles. Once it was open, she dug through crunching green packing peanuts to bring out the object she’d ordered back when she first realized she might need to take down another Red—a tranquilizer gun. The gun was heavy, but fit in her hand. It had a wooden handle and a slim barrel of dark metal, and it came with a pack of thin silver darts.
Looking at the tranq gun, Priya realized what a bad idea it would be to try to shoot Rod. She hadn’t practiced with it, had never shot any kind of gun before. What if she missed or he dodged or he saw it before she had a chance to shoot at all?
She took two of the darts—each had a cap you were supposed to pop off before you loaded it into the gun—and slipped them into the pocket of her jeans. Now she had to figure out a way to get Rod alone.
That part turned out to be easier than she expected. As she headed down the hall towards the stairs, she heard voices coming from Stephanie’s parents’ room, drifting through the barely-open door. Rod, she discovered, was sitting at the foot of the bed watching the television fixed to the opposite wall. It was showing a sit-com populated by people only slightly less pretty than the people in Stephanie’s movies, and whenever the tinny laugh track sounded Rod scowled at the screen.
He shut the TV off and tossed the remote to the side as if he didn’t care where it landed. “What do you want?” he asked.
He was a Red. He was one of her boys, and now that she could see his face the thought of betraying him was sickening. But that was just her loyalty talking. Priya was a person, not an animal, and she could betray when betrayal was needed. She came in to the room and shut the door behind her. “We should talk about what we’re going to tell the cops when Danny’s parents report him missing.”
“Well that’s obvious, isn’t it? ‘Sorry, officer, we haven’t seen Danny lately.’ What really matters is what the Blues say.”
“Do you think they’ll rat us out?”
“I don’t know. Maybe? They’d get caught up in it too, if they did. They’d get dissected by the government or whatever, just like us.” He frowned at her. “You want to talk to me about this? That’s, uh, not like you.”
The suspicion in his voice made her neck itch, and she felt the smooth shape of the tranquilizer darts against her leg, through the cloth of her pocket. She had to get him to relax, somehow, to feel as if it was perfectly natural that she had shut herself in alone with him. Her only hope of sedating him was to take him by surprise.
“It’s not just that,” she said. “I wanted… Was Danny really going to kill you?”
Rod stood up, a quick short movement, and she jumped a little. Not good. Not natural.
“You don’t believe me?” He smiled a hard, humorless little smile. “I don’t blame you. Doesn’t sound like Danny, does it?”
“No, it really doesn’t.”
“What if I have one of the other Blues pinned? What if it’s little Sammy Lecker? Let’s say I just mean to mess with him a bit, but Danny, he doesn’t know that. As far as Danny’s concerned I’m capable of anything. Would he try to kill me then?”
Priya took a deep breath. “Yes. He might try to kill you then.” She couldn’t lunge at him. She had to prick him with a dart before he even knew what was happening, which meant getting closer. She took a step towards him so that they were standing close—weirdly close, really, for two people who hated each other so much. He frowned again, this time looking more puzzled than anything. A reason. She needed a natural reason to come so close. “I just wanted… I just wanted you to know that, if he was really going to kill you, then… I understand, for once. I won’t blame you for any of the bad things that are going to happen to us now.” And she touched Rod’s arm just above his elbow.
He shifted even closer to her, and though that was what she wanted it freaked her out so much she stepped back and hit the wall.
He followed her, and his hand formed a fist at his side, and he was going to hit her, he’d guessed somehow, he was going to kill her like he killed Danny—
He pressed his right fist into the wall above her shoulder, moving slowly, deliberately. Then he leaned on it, angling over her.
“What are you doing?” he asked. And he didn’t seem angry after all.
Or rather, he seemed differently angry. It occurred to Priya that she had never, not even once, heard Rod speak without anger in his voice. But the anger changed forms and sometimes hid itself. Now, it sounded as if Rod was angry at someone who wasn’t in the room.
His face was close to hers, now. She could see the fine hairs of a patchy, end-of-the-day beard fuzzed across his chin. “What are you doing, Priya?”
She put her hand on his chest, because when you do that to a guy he doesn’t look away from your face. With her other hand she worked a dart out of her pocket and popped the cap off with her thumbnail. She kept her eyes on his eyes, and didn’t blink, and put the hand holding the dart on his waist. With three fingers she pushed his shirt up, just a little, just enough to expose the skin above his jeans. She tilted the dart, brought the thin sharp needle to his skin.
But suddenly she felt his hand on her hand, and he was pulling it, gently, away from his side. She panicked. She tried to jerk her hand out of his grip. That’s when he looked down and saw the dart.
In Rod’s brief moment of confusion, Priya kicked his shin. That made him let go of her hand, and she swung the dart at him, wildly, not aiming. He jumped back and slapped her arm. The dart tumbled out of her fingers.
Rod snarled and lunged at her. She jumped, soaring above his head, and grabbed the ceiling with Spiderman-sticky hands to swing herself. She landed on her knees on the bed but didn’t hesitate before rolling off onto the floor. She fumbled for the second dart in her pocket.
He was already standing over her, trying to stomp her to the floor. She wriggled out of his way and grabbed the wall. She scrambled along, pulling herself past Rod, then pushed herself off the wall and rolled onto her feet. She barely had the second dart in her hand with the cap off when Rod slammed into her, his shoulder to her chest. They crashed into the wall. (Would the others hear? They were all downstairs.)
Rod grabbed for her arms, trying to pin them back, but she was already driving the dart into his neck.
He growled. Actually growled, like a bear. He pushed her shoulders against the wall again, but there was no strength to the push. Then he staggered back a step, wavered, fell to his knees. He was kneeling in front of Priya, looking up at her, for what seemed like a long, long time. She didn’t know what to do or what sounds to make. Finally he toppled sideways, unconscious, to the floor.