Chapter 12
Shiloh’s hand tightened around mine. She led me through the crowds, closing in on Jasmine, even as my legs went weak beneath me.
I didn’t want to take another step closer to the girl I was supposed to kill, but I let Shiloh guide me anyway, as if I couldn’t stop this.
As if I were the victim in this scenario rather than the girl who I was about to kill.
We stopped just short of Jasmine, about a yard away.
Up close, she resembled the girls in the caravan more than I did, her head thrown back with laughter, a kind of carelessness in her manner, an invincibility.
She was dancing with a group of people who were her friends.
Friends who could potentially make this dispatch more difficult, or if not that, then all the more heartbreaking.
It hadn’t been too terrible to assist in Stewart’s death.
He’d known who we were as soon as we stepped into his house and had seemed ready to go.
He was old, after all, and he was alone, which was in itself a kind of comfort.
He hadn’t had to contend with anyone’s grief or sorrow.
His death had been fast and undramatic, and there was no real aftermath.
It had been the same with Iona’s dispatch back in the diner, that poor woman who’d slumped out of her stool.
But I saw now that Jasmine’s passing would be different. Worse.
Jasmine had friends—a boyfriend, maybe, in the man dancing close behind her, his hands at her hips.
He was older than everyone else, in his late twenties or early thirties.
He was the kind of man a girl would come to regret ever having dated once she had enough time and distance from her teenage years to see the situation for what it was.
Or at least that’s what I liked to think.
But the reality was that Jasmine was not going to live long enough to regret that relationship, or even this night.
These moments were her last, and unlike Stewart, she didn’t seem to know it.
How could she?
Gazing at her, I could barely believe it myself. She was just as full of life and verve as any of the girls in the caravan, like she’d also been promised a forever.
I felt tears building in my throat. A pressure, like panic, tamped down on my chest when Shiloh stepped near to me, so close I could hear her voice above the music. “Go on. Do it.”
I didn’t move. She was the same age as Adeline. I could see my sister in her eyes, like a specter behind glass. “I can’t.”
“You have to,” said Shiloh. “And I think you know that.”
“But she’s young,” I heard myself say, my voice breaking a little on the words.
“Everyone seems that way in the end. There’s never a right time or a good age to die.”
“But she’s really young. Adeline’s age.”
“That’s good,” said Shiloh. “It means she won’t have to live to suffer and learn how shitty the world really is. You’re sparing her.”
I kept my gaze on Jasmine. “Is that what you tell yourselves?”
“Only when it helps, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes…you have to just grit your teeth and get through it. Grieve them later.”
But I didn’t want to grieve anyone else, didn’t want to shoulder the guilt of another lost life—replaying all the ways I could’ve prevented the worst, blaming myself for what I didn’t do…
or what I did. I couldn’t bear it, and yet, if I didn’t do this, I feared I would never know what happened to Adeline the night of her death.
And the repercussions of my cowardice would extend well beyond just me. The girls would be in danger too.
Jasmine stepped back, turned on the heel of her boot, and all at once, we were face-to-face. She had friendship bracelets stacked up her forearms, all the way to the elbows. When she looked at me, she smiled and stripped off one of them, extended it to me.
“Go on,” said Shiloh. I could feel her breath, warm against my ear. “Do it.”
Jasmine stepped closer, toward her own undoing. She reached for my hand.
I wanted to scream at her—to run, to get away—but I didn’t, because I knew deep down that she was dead anyway. If I didn’t take her life, then Shiloh would.
So, when Jasmine slipped the bracelet onto my left hand, the one Death had touched just a few days prior, I wrapped my fingers around her wrist. Held on to her.
I slipped off one of my own friendship bracelets, pushed it over her knuckles. “I’m so sorry.”
Jasmine’s expression fractured, but she looked less upset than confused. She tried to pull free of my grasp, but it was too late. I felt myself dragged into her mind and memories.
Where Stewart’s mind had been like an old film reel—cycling through his most pivotal moments, pulling me deep into his psyche—Jasmine’s memories hit in flashes and spurts, like paint thrown across a canvas.
I saw myself in a run of mirrors, standing in a dance studio, in a body too small to be mine.
I wore a pink leotard, heavy tap shoes on my feet.
The mirrors slid away, revealing a roaring audience.
In the sea of faces, I spotted a woman—my mother—with tears in her eyes.
The curtains fell to the stage, and when they rose again, they revealed the same dance studio, only its mirrors had warped like the ones you’d find in a fun house, my reflection stretched and distorted.
I took a deep breath, suctioning my stomach flat behind my ribs.
The memories came faster, layering on top of each other—blurred and triple exposed. There was a screaming match over dinner, plates clattering when my mom struck the table with a closed fist. Dead pointe shoes with glue crusted in the shank. A needle threading through satin.
You have no idea what I do for you. How hard I work. How much it takes.
Bobby pins scattered across a hardwood floor.
I expected more from you.
I felt like I was choking. Could barely speak. “I don’t have more to give.”
I went dark. From somewhere in the void, I heard the sharp tones of plucked harp strings.
Then I was on the stage again, dancing barefoot in the empty theater, pressing up on relevé, my leg snapping through a series of fouetté turns.
When the curtains fell, I fell with them, sinking lifeless to the stage floor.