Chapter Four
Maren
L J is no fucking fun , I think petulantly as I shoulder my way to the ladies’ room. At least he allowed me to take a bathroom break before we leave. Or, okay, no, he’s lots of fun. In a certain way. But not right this—
“Ow!”
Without meaning to, I swing the door into a cluster of girls, because the bathroom is about four square feet, yet somehow still manages to have two stalls.
“Sorry!” I gasp. “I’m sorry, this thing is—oh, hi!” I brighten, realizing it’s my friends—are they my friends?—from the dance floor, and they’re smiling at me.
“More the merrier!” calls a voice from in one of the stalls, which cracks them all up—and me, too.
“Girl.” Another of them—McKayla or Mackenzie or something like that?—grabs me by the shoulders, almost as firm as LJ. “I have to ask. Are you okay? Going home with those guys?”
I stifle a snort of laughter. It’s sweet of her, actually, the kind of drunk-girl bathroom solidarity I’d only ever seen in movies before, and for a minute I wonder what would happen if I told her no. Maybe she’d headbutt LJ. Scratch Rob’s eyes out with her acrylics.
I giggle again before I remember she’s asked me a question.
“Oh, um, no.” I shake my head. “I’m fine. They’re...” I pause. Probably better not to overexplain, right? “Friends.”
“You look...familiar,” adds the brunette—Taylor. The one who looked like she wanted to spread Will on toast and have him for breakfast. Sorry, girlfriend. He’s taken. She chews her thumbnail, sizes me up. “Are you at CCS Nottingham?”
It takes me a second to realize what she’s talking about. The community college. And where she might actually recognize me from—being that girl who was briefly missing before her alleged fiancé...died? Was murdered? I realize I still have no idea what the party line is about Guy Gisbourne’s death. The whole supposed reason we even went out tonight.
“No,” I say. “I’m, um...not in school.”
Meanwhile, McKayla/Mackenzie still has me by the shoulders. “You’re seriously okay?”
“I’m good,” I say. “I promise.”
One of the stalls flushes and an older woman, decked out in rhinestone denim, swings out and leaves without so much as glancing at the sink, drawing a soft ew from McKayla/Mackenzie before she swivels back to me.
“Okay, good.” She lets me go and bends towards the cracked mirror to reapply lipstick, staring at me in the glass. “You have to be so careful out there these days.”
“For real.” Taylor nods sagely.
“What do you mean?” I ask as I slip into the stall. It’s not... un clean, and the tequila-whatever cocktails are not going to let me wait for a less sticky option, so I shuck down my jeans and hope for the best.
A snort, presumably from Taylor. “You haven’t heard?”
“About?”
“The freaking cult murders at that guy’s mansion?”
I’m so startled I almost fall off the toilet. Or maybe that’s the tequila. I right myself, flush, and exit.
“The what ?”
“Okay, we don’t know it was a cult,” McKayla/Mackenzie butts in. “You listen to too much true crime, Tay.”
I halfheartedly spritz my hands under the weak faucet and reach for a paper towel. There are none, of course. I wipe my hands on my jeans, pulse hammering as I wait for the answer.
“If it walks like a duck and shits like a duck, Mackenzie .” Taylor swipes at the air dismissively with one hand. “This rich guy, a lawyer or something?” She sucks on the vape pen she’d successfully found in her purse. “Had this huge party at his mansion outside of town—like, tuxedoes and shit—and just killed everyone. Total bloodbath.”
For a second, my heart forgets to beat.
Maybe it’s the tequila, maybe it’s the nauseating smell of the bathroom, maybe it’s just an emotional flashback I can’t control.
“No kidding,” I manage to say at last. Neither of them seems to have noticed my distress.
“Yeah, it was pretty crazy,” adds Mackenzie. “They gave us a whole safety presentation on campus and everything. Just to, like, go out in pairs, keep tabs on each other, cover our drinks.”
I nod, as if this all makes sense—and it does make sense, just not in the way they think it does.
“Do they have any idea why he did it?” I probe, trying to sound like an ordinary, interested, tipsy girl in a bathroom and not someone who witnessed the total bloodbath and dragon claws and...matricide for herself.
“Seems like he was just crazy,” Taylor says, sucking her vape again. “Like one of those weird, polished control freak types who then just loses his shit and goes postal.”
“I think he had a girlfriend or something that left.” The third one—right, there were three...Grace, or something?—chimes in as she comes out of the other stall. “Right? Like a broken heart thing.”
“Ugh, that’s so tragic,” says Mackenzie.
Taylor grunts. “I love how men always claim that we’re the emotional ones, and then one little breakup happens to a man and suddenly it’s mass murder.”
I lick my lips, wishing I had mascara or powder or something else on me to occupy me in here a little longer.
“Crazy,” I say. “I can’t believe I didn’t see anything in the news about it, or anything.”
“Yeah, well, you know,” Taylor says, as if we’re all aware that there’s some vast conspiracy going on in the media. “They don’t want us to know these kinds of things.”
Mackenzie rolls her eyes. “Who’s they , Taylor? Come on.”
“I don’t fucking know, the deep state or whatever.” Taylor clicks off her vape and exhales a fruity cloud while looking me dead in the eye. “All I’m saying is I wish I had four strapping young men to get me home safely.”
I do a kind of guilty smile. “Yeah, they’re very...protective,” I say. “Speaking of which...”
“Be careful!” Mackenzie calls at my back as I swing out of the bathroom. “I love your top, by the way!”
“Finally,” Will says, shouting above the bar noise as I weave my way back to them near the door. “We were about to send in a search party.”
“Girls always take forever in the bathroom,” I say back.
“Not this one,” LJ says. He’s not wrong, but I stick out my tongue at him.
“I’m getting in touch with my feminine side, okay? Besides, they had some interesting intel to share with me.”
“Intel?” says Will.
“It’s—okay, they heard about it, I mean Guy, and everything, and they think it was a murder. I mean, no, obviously it was a murder, but they think it was some kind of crazy ritualistic—”
“Slow down,” says LJ, and my mind flicks back to our encounter just before the bathroom. It’s hard not to obey him when he talks like that.
“Yeah,” Tuck says, smiling. “What...are we talking about exactly?”
I sigh and rake a hand through my hair, which is a little bit sweaty from all the dancing. “The girls in the bathroom. Te...Kayla...Mailer...” I’m slurring my words, so I give up. “Whatever. Their names don’t matter, whatever. Anyway, they were telling me to be careful, you know, like girlfriend solidarity kind of thing, get home safe, whatever, whatever. And they mentioned there was this crazy murder-suicide thing that happened. It was Guy. It was...” I trail off, not finishing the sentence.
It was us , is what I was going to say.
“Well, I’ll be,” Rob says. “Who knew all it would take to turn Maren into a private eye was a couple of tequila shots and some line dancing.”
He laughs, and Will laughs, and Tuck chuckle. LJ doesn’t.
“I don’t like it here,” he says. “Let’s get out.”
“You’re nooooo fun,” I say, but a yawn makes its way to my lips anyway, and I subject myself to being led out into the fresh air.
When we’re outside, they all move to flank me—two on one side, two on the other. Automatic as if they’d trained for it.
Hell, maybe they did.
“I’ll drive,” I say, and claw the air for the keys.
Four pairs of eyes stare me down. No one moves.
Then they all start walking again.
“What?” I fold my arms. It’s cooler outside—still warm, but just enough to get a little chill on my sweaty skin—and when none of them stops and turns back, I kind of relish the sweep of the air as I rush to catch up.
“Absolutely not,” LJ barks.
I roll my eyes. “ Absolutely not, ” I mock. “And why n—”
I don’t finish, because I stumble forward and smack into Tuck.
“Um, that’s why,” he says. I scowl.
“My stupid high heel,” I grumble. “Caught a crack in the sidewalk, and—”
“Keep it down,” Will says, gentle but firm. He glances at the dark cluster of buildings around us, and I realize I have no idea what time it is beyond late.
Still, I resent his bossiness. I’ve never felt unsafe at night here , I want to say. But then again, I’ve never really been out in any meaningful way like this before, and now that I am, well, I have the four of them. We round the corner to where we parked, and I try another tack.
“I just don’t think any of you are good enough drivers,” I chatter on. “I know some of you can’t drive manual.” I take a long, meaningful look at LJ. “And the rest of you ride the clutch way too hard.”
“Sometimes a little hard riding is a good thing,” Will remarks.
I scoff. “Can it, rich boy. Just because your dad let you burn all the gears on his Mercedes doesn’t mean—”
“What the fuck are y’all doing?” interrupts Rob’s voice.
My vision spins and swivels back front to where we parked, and it takes me a minute to realize what I’m seeing: a pair of legs on the ground, behind the front wheel. A figure with a hood over his head. A mechanical buzz, and the burning sound of metal grinding on metal.
“Shit,” the hooded figure mutters.
Then all at once, like ice cubes slamming forward in a glass, reality hits me cold.
These guys are stealing the car.
Or, no, not the car.
“It’s the cattalick convurber,” I yell, my body way ahead of my brain and my common sense and my words all garbled. “The—you know. They’re trying to cut it out. Hey! You!”
I lurch forward, but Tuck’s arm catches me in the solar plexus.
“Get the fuck away from my car,” Rob barks.
The guy under the car slips out, his multi-tool still jittering. “I don’t want to hurt you, man,” he says. His own hood slips back from his head, revealing pale skin, buzzed hair, and a flinty gaze that darts around to all of us.
“Then back the fuck up from my car,” Rob says.
The guy shifts his weight, like maybe he’s going to. Then he ruffles around in his pocket, and—
I don’t even register that it’s a gun.
“Get down,” LJ barks, yanking me, and I’m slammed down to the concrete, only his forearm breaking my fall and preventing my skull from cracking open.
Adrenaline and alcohol surge through my body, and I don’t know what I’m feeling—surprise, desperation? I wait for the wave of dizziness, but it doesn’t come, at least not the kind that comes from my powers.
Beside us, Tuck crouches, putting his body between me and the thieves. Rob and Will stay standing, with Rob taking slow, measured steps toward the car. “What do you want?” Rob says. “Cash? Here.” He pulls his billfold from his back pocket, flicks out four, five, six $100 bills. “Take it. Thing’s not worth that much.”
The first guy looks to the second, then they both look back at us, at me. All too quickly, I see a look travel from Rob to Will to Tuck and LJ. It’s a question, an impulse, an instinct— should we shift?
You can’t unring that bell, I guess. And two meth-head car thieves aren’t exactly going to be reliable witnesses if they claim to have seen some kind of werewolf shapeshifter shit. But still, I...
“Give us her,” says the second one. He’s bigger, uglier, and leering at me in a way that churns my stomach.
“What the fuck did you say?” Will says, taking a step forward. But Rob grabs his biceps.
“No,” Rob says. A wave of emotions flicks over his face—realization and something like disappointment. “Cash, take it.”
“Oh, come on, man, we’ll bring her back in one piece,” says the first guy, parting his lips to reveal a straggle-tooth smile. “Besides, from the look of it, she can handle more than one.”
An explosion of sound and motion surges at my right. LJ, shifted, a hulking bear, charges them, swiping with a claw so fast that the guy doesn’t have a chance to react. His tool clangs to the street as LJ drops back, and crimson drops spatter around them.
“Holy fucking shit,” says the bigger guy. The smaller one hits the deck, clutching his face, which is soaked in blood and spurting, almost like his ear was torn clean off. But I don’t see any more because Tuck grabs me and buries my head in his shoulder. “Don’t look,” he says. “You don’t want to see.”
“It killed him!” comes the guy’s voice. “That thing fucking killed him!”
I press the bridge of my nose into Tuck’s shoulder, inhaling the soap and cotton smell of him.
“He’s not dead,” I hear Will bite out. “That’s not even deep enough to bleed out.”
“911.” That’s Rob’s voice. “Corner of Canal and Jefferson. Ambulance, some kind of animal attack. Hurry.” I hear a jingle of keys, the slam of a car door. “We’re going.”
I feel Tuck shift as he looks around, but he doesn’t let me go. The growl of the engine and the squeal of tires as Rob pulls us around.
“Get in,” he shouts, and we do, Tuck hustling me to the back. LJ, human again, in just pants, cramming in beside us, and Will riding shotgun.
I press my face to Tuck for the rest of the ride, and the next thing I know, I’m wrapped up in my bed, sheets soft around me. I wake up just enough to register the weight of a body, two bodies...I don’t know how many, just that they’re surrounding me, warm and sure and there, and I sink back into unconsciousness.