41. Tess
TESS
I’d never seen so much money in my account before. At most, I’d deposited a thousand at one point — taking my cash tips and putting them in my checking account to pay my credit card balance.
Leaning back in the metal cabin of the wooden roller coaster, I tried to get comfortable.
A few feet away, Blade was laying on her back with an electrical panel swung open. Her forearms tensed as she twisted the pliers inside the box, adjusting something I couldn’t see.
Cyrus had kept her word, depositing the money as soon as we got back to the house the night of her birthday. My bank had sent a notification warning me about scams.
They were just as surprised to see such a high balance as I was. Twenty grand was certainly more than I’d seen in my life. That kind of money only existed in movies and cartoon westerns.
I had no idea what to do with it, how to really turn it into something.
Blade grunted as she put another piece into place.
“Why do you bother fixing them?” I asked, trying to avoid the well of anxiety building in my stomach as I sat in the rollercoasters metal cabin cars.
“Someone has to.” Blade hardly looked away from her work.
Did they?
Through her grease-stained tshirt, I could see the pierced bars through her nipples. I’d gotten so used to seeing her piercings, the strange pollock-esque tattoos on her skin. So much so that on Fright Night, I hadn’t wanted to leave either.
I’d accepted the new deal without even considering it much.
It wasn’t like I could take my winnings and just go buy a house. In this economy, the interest rates were too high, and my credit score was too shit to get approved for anything. Even a trailer was out of the question.
Besides, even if I could afford a mobile home or something, I didn’t want to end up around the type of guys who’d chased me into Feverpoint to begin with.
I’d grown used to Blade’s hypermovements and Nash’s considered words. They were becoming a comfort. The best roommates I’d had so far.
And they weren’t bad to look at either.
At this point, my best bet was to stay — take the free housing for another month, hope I could make more on the next Fright Night. Then I could save up and come up with an actual plan.
But if I was going to be stuck here, I needed to learn more about my captors. I’d thought that Nash’s quiet disposition meant that she was the most secretive but Blade had quickly proven that wrong. She was eager to change the topic anytime I wanted to learn about her.
“What do you do for work?” I tried. Clearly she was good at fixing shit, but is it how she occupied her days? Or more obviously, her nights?
Her eyebrow lifted, her vertical piercing raising with it. “This. I fix shit. In more ways than one.”
“What does that mean?” I wanted to understand, to know where my blood money was coming from.
Between fixing up Feverpoint, trapping stray cats, and running weekly man-hunts, it was hard to imagine where Blade had time to make money.
Would anyone ever come knocking on my door, looking for stolen cash?
Blade wiped sweat from her forehead. “If you stick around, you might find out.”
Biting my lip, I sat up and gripped the edge of the coaster car. “Maybe I should ask the tarot cards about it.”
“Careful, Trinket. You might wake a ghost.” Blade smiled at me.
And I didn’t want to admit that it made my stomach do flips.
With a shrug, I pushed with a bat of my eyelashes. “What’s the deal with the cards?”
“Eh, we found them when we moved in. Someone left them behind.” Blade looked away, pulling out a long wire from the electric box. “We started fucking around with them.”
Digging her hand back into the circuit board, Blade grunted as she spoke. “Most of the meanings are made up. The box had this cheap little booklet in it to understand each card. Just a few words and basic descriptors of the visuals.”
She laughed as she remembered something. “After a while, we just started interpreting it however we wanted.”
But then my eyes caught on the three swords stabbing a heart on her forearm, a brand amongst webs of tattoos. “What about that symbol?”
Blade swallowed hard, looking away from me as she shook her head. “Nothing really. Just some bullshit prophecy Nash cooked up. I don’t believe in that shit, just like the way it looked.”
“Why a brand and not a tattoo?” She was shutting down, I could feel it.
“Nash learned metal working before any of us got tattoos. Felt more permanent. No fading, no muddy lines. Just scar tissue.” Blade smudged some grease over the symbol before going back to her work.
That was all I could manage for now. It would have to be enough to go on, something to take back to Nash. I needed to fact check their stories against each other, figure out what was hiding in the details.
Before I let Feverpoint go along with the Freaks who called it home, I needed to know how they’d gotten here.
And why they stayed.
After all, prophecies weren’t to be ignored.