It was a much more stylish, clean, and swanky Sammi that started her saunter down to Meadow Lane at 8:30 PM that evening. I’d never been one for fashion, but I knew that no one out-styled Blair or Christopher. At least, not among their peers. They’d been instrumental in helping me pick out my outfit.

Joni wasn’t impressed, but Joni was never impressed. She accused me of looking like the love child between a third-string football player who peaked in high school and a strung-out, washed-up, middle-aged rave queen. She said I looked trashy, but all my clothes were designer, so like, there wasn’t any way I could really look trashy. This shit was too expensive to be ugly.

I strode on back to my electric blue sports car, still filled to the gills with my gear. The car roared to life, almost impressive enough to detract from how it made me flinch. I guess it made sense, after the accident and all, but driving made me a little nervous. I kept telling myself that there was no one living in the car other than me, and I probably wouldn’t die in a car crash, but my hands were still a little sweaty as we rumbled on down to the river.

“Nice low profile,” Joni said, arms crossed over her chest as she floated in the passenger seat. In the rearview mirror, I could see Blair sticking her head in and out the window, enjoying how the wind would blow her ectoplasm around when most of her body was anchored in the car. It kinda looked like how you’d expect hair to blow around if stuck out a window, except her entire head. It was creepy, and every now and then she’d let out a ghostly wail, making me regret upgrading her.

“Low profiles are for mortals,” I said, dropping what was probably the coolest line of my life.

“Don’t— hey, wipe that grin off your face. Just cause you’re a God doesn’t make you a big deal.”

“Dude, it kinda does,” Christopher said, weighing in from the back seat.

I just kept grinning, fingers tight over the wheel as we bounced down the dirt road. Meadow Lane was a rarely used walking path, usually populated by high schoolers swapping spit or drug deals. Contraband, stuff like that. Like what we were doing.

I squealed to a stop just around the corner from the actual bridge and hopped out, my boots crunching loudly on the fallen leaves. My nose wrinkled reflexively, as if the noise had an associated smell. It kinda did, but it was a brisk, autumny smell. Normally one I was really cool with. Just, you know, today I was a lot less psyched about crunchy leaves given that every step I took would be megaphoned around the area.

“Be my eyes and ears,” I said, motioning the ghosts forward. “Blair, no spooky noises unless I say so. You’re the one that wants this to work, so we need to work together.” I wasn’t necessarily the biggest cell in the brain, but I knew who the smallest was.

Blair saluted.

Joni and Christopher hesitated, as if unsure whether I was gonna give more commands. I probably should but I just wasn't sure what else to say.

“Okay team, huddle,” Christopher said. “Sammi can’t, like, talk to us long range without the mortals hearing, so at least one of us should be out there, watching them full time, and one of us should be going back and forth to communicate, in case Sammi needs to convey a message. I think that should be me, since I’m fastest.”

Was he? He said it with confidence and none of the others rebutted him, so I didn’t question.

“Maybe I can stay with Sammi?” Joni suggested. “She’ll go crazy if she doesn’t have someone to ping her inane thoughts off, and I don’t want her charging in on this because she gets lonely.”

“Oi!”

Christopher nodded. “Good call. And if shit really goes bad while I’m relaying a message, Blair can always put the pause on the whole trade-off by making spooky noises.”

“No, not spooky noises,” Joni said. “That’ll just make them think someone’s fucking with them. Have her make, I don’t know, siren noises. Scare them off and we’ll just regroup tomorrow and try again.”

Blair saluted again, this time a maniacal grin on her face.

But grin notwithstanding, I felt good about this plan, so I nodded, giving it my seal of approval.

The moment Blair and Christopher left, I started getting fidgety. It would be a whole fifteen minutes until Cara and Henry showed up, and I just wanted this to be over with. Or under way. I wanted something to be happening. And Joni wasn’t great company cause she was kinda glum. Maybe I’d do her kick-the-bucket list next. Next time I could level up a ghost, I could give her powers. Perk up her mood a bit. She deserved it. She might be a grouch, but a lot of time it was just cause she didn’t want us fucking ourselves over. And maybe there was some merit to that.

I must have gotten a little lost in my thoughts, dreaming up ways that I would stop Joni and Blair from making ruckuses once they could, because the next thing I knew, a car was rattling up to the bridge.

“Who is it?” I whispered.

Joni sighed and drifted off before returning. “Miller. He looks dazed as fuck though.”

“Probably because I gave him the order over phone.” I wriggled uncomfortably. “Do you think I should go and restate the lie? So he doesn’t, like, snap out of it mid-transaction?”

Her face froze. I could see where the two gears in her brain were jamming together. She was always supposed to be the one cautioning against action, so her gut was obviously gonna be to tell me no. But maybe I was right.

Maybe. I had no idea and neither did she. So we both kinda stared at the patch of trees where we heard the car door open and Henry climb out.

“I should,” I whispered.

“I don’t know…”

We waited. Another minute passed. Maybe it was my imagination but I could swear I heard the noise of another car approaching.

“I’m losing my window!” My whisper was more like a hoarse rasp, and definitely audible.

“Someone there?” Henry sounded discombobulated, and not at all like he should. At this rate, Cara wouldn’t trust him.

I had to act.

Without consulting with Joni again, I blitzed through the wood. It only took a few seconds for me to break through the bushes and trees, but my fancy designer clothes were looking a bit woodland chic by the time I finally cleared the foliage.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“Knox?” Henry stared at me, blinking several times in the fading light. “Samantha Knox? What the actual fuck are you–you know people are looking for you, right? What the fuck–”

I waved my hands. “That’s all a misunderstanding,” I said, thinking fast.

“Well no shit, but it’s not stopping literally all my socials from blowing up. Like, Jesus. Ricci and the others dead?”

“They’re not,” I said. “Like I said, misunderstanding and not important.”

He let out a half-exasperated sigh. “Right. Just try explaining that to literally anyone else.”

Joni was giving me bug eyes, but I was low on time. I couldn’t hear the sound I’d thought was a car pulling up anymore, and no one new had appeared on the bridge, so it must have been my imagination, but that didn’t mean Cara wasn’t gonna show up soon.

“You need to do this exchange with Cara,” I said, going back to the mission at hand, now that Henry wasn’t losing his shit at my appearance. “It’s important. You’ve been setting it up for months and it’s finally coming to fruition and you’re gonna give her a good chunk of money, like you discussed.”

He nodded. “Yeah, Knox, I get it. I’m not a fucking crook. I pay well.”

A long breath flooded out of my lungs. “Good. Right. Okay.”

“Fucking Cesair really throwing this at me like this,” he grumbled, eyes darting around. “Everything about him screams narc.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“This whole thing has just been getting sketchier.”

“Yeah.”

“And my gut is never wrong.”

“Never,” I agreed. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Joni motioning frantically at me. Was Cara arriving?

“I bet that punk sold me out– wait, where are you going?”

“Right, yeah, totally. I’m just dipping. I’m actually not here.”

And with that, his eyes glazed over and he turned back to the road as I scrambled into the bushes and well out of sight.

“Coulda been worse,” Joni said, generously grading me on her scale of ‘that was braindead’ to ‘I guess no one died.’ “He’s gonna have some pretty conspiracy-level tiers of rationale to try to explain why he thinks we’re not all dead.”

“That’s a problem for another time,” I whispered.

“You stayed out there a bit long, but no harm no foul.”

“Thanks Joni.”

“Shh,” she said. “Car coming.”

I shhed and waited for the show to start. For the most part, I could only hear it.

“Henry.”

“Cara.”

There wasn’t any warmth to their voices but I suppose this was the first time they were meeting, lies aside.

“You got the goods?” Henry asked.

“Uh, yeah, all in here.”

There was a rustling noise, like a bag being opened, and then silence.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I could swear I felt my own lie straining to make sense of whatever Cara had brought him.

A second later, Christopher floated back through the trees, a barely concealed laugh already fighting with his face. “She brought him CD drives.”

Joni’s lips went flat. “CD drives?”

“CD drives.” A small snort escaped his nose. “External, USB-connected drives. High enough functionality to give them a two hundred dollar price point. Capable of ripping and burning, but…”

“But what the fuck is the gamer club gonna do with them.” Joni groaned so long and loud that, were she leveled up, I’m sure the whole clearing would have heard it.

I, meanwhile, had yet to understand the problem. “Don’t video games come on CDs?”

They both stared at me, and suddenly I knew what it felt like to be a fifty-year-old trying to relate to a teenager.

“Ever heard of steam, Sammi?” Joni asked.

I had, but I also had the distinct impression that if I said ‘yes,’ they’d be even angrier. But I’d also feel stupid saying ‘no.’ So I split the difference.

“Uh…?”

Meanwhile, Henry and Cara were trying to figure out how this could be useful to them.

“Right, very, uh, very expensive.”

“Yup. Put my job at real risk to grab these.”

“Right. Right and I need these to sell to Bridgeport cause they… need these.”

“Yup.”

“We’ve worked on this score for a while now.”

“We have?”

And that’s when it started to go wrong.

“What do you mean, ‘we have’?” Henry asked. His voice took a sudden, sharp note. “It’s been months, Cara.”

But it hadn’t been. Henry thought that. Noah thought that. Cara did not.

“I’m literally just here to score some weed money and you needed some small, expensive things to offload.” Her voice started to spike now too. “Maybe there’s a third-party person coordinating with you, but we’ve never spoken.”

At what point was the lie going to break over Henry?

“I should go out,” I said, already half making my way through the bushes. I could still save this.

“Sammi, no,” Joni said.

“Who’s there?”

I’d just popped my head out of the bushes in time to see Henry pull something out of his back pocket. A cell phone? A flashlight? But he wasn’t pointing it at me, and in the dark, I couldn’t make it out.

“Cesair? Is that fucking you?”

At this point, I finally took the time to ask myself who the fuck Cesair was. Who it was Henry had been muttering all paranoid about earlier. Who it was he was so worried had sold him out.

And then I saw the scrawny form of the gamer’s club treasurer step out of the woods, hands up.

“Look, I can explain,” he said.

“The fuck are you doing here?” Henry asked.

“I have to be here,” Noah said.

"That's not a fucking explanation!”

"Well it's true!”

My eyes were the size of saucers at this point.

“What the fuck is he doing here,” I asked, hissing so quietly I wouldn’t be surprised if none of the ghosts could hear me.

"Oh shit." Christopher's laugh was gone now. "Shit, Sammi, I think you, like, told him to come. I'm rewinding it in my brain, but like, what if when you were on the phone with Henry, telling him to meet up here, Noah heard and thought he had to be here? Like, if you tell a lie in a room with just one other person present, maybe the spell just kinda latches on them." He grimaced. "We already kinda knew phone lies were weird."

“You sold me out!” Henry gestured harshly with his outstretched arm, and Cara threw herself on the ground. “You’ve always given me narc vibes and my gut is never wrong.”

That wasn't fair. How was I supposed to know Henry had been talking about Noah? I didn't know Noah's last name. Why didn't Henry just use first names like a normal fucking person? If he'd said 'Noah sold me out' I'd've said 'naw, Noah's chill' and none of this would be happening.

“We need to call this off,” Christopher said. “Like, seriously, this is about to go way south, way fast.”

“Yeah,” I said. "Just give me a minute. I can't fuck this up, I just need a second, I can't--"

But I wasn’t given a second. I wasn’t given a second because we technically had a plan for if things went south. So instead of waiting for literally any confirmation, Blair did the worst thing she could have done in this scenario.

I don’t know if she’d been practicing her police sirens or if, as a banshee, she just had the capability to mimic sounds, but the wailing sirens were enough to convince everyone. Even I looked around sharply, as if forgetting my familiar was responsible for the noise.

But the sirens weren’t the most concerning noises in the clearing. What was more concerning was the sound right after them, from Henry:

“I was fucking right, you fucking piece of shit!”

And what was really concerning was the sound right after that, from the device Henry had been holding outstretched.

It was a resounding crack. The sound, not the device. The device had been a gun.