Chapter 13
I tore free of Jasmine’s memories with all the violence of a knife ripping from a wound. It took me a moment to realize I was back in my own body, because everything came in flashes.
Sound detached from visuals, like a video played out of sync.
I saw Jasmine lying motionless in the dust. People were screaming for help, but I couldn’t hear them over the ringing in my ears.
A boy dropped to Jasmine’s side, began to pump at her chest with clasped hands, the motion so violent I feared he’d crack her sternum, and I had the sudden urge to spring forward, shove him off her.
And then I realized—with a wave of nausea—that she was dead. I’d killed her.
“You’re okay,” said Shiloh, her hand on my arm, dragging me away from the scene. “It’s over now. I’ve got you.”
The walk back to the campsite was a blur of lights.
Halfway there, it started to rain, hard, and the dust congealed into a thick and grasping mud that sucked my boots right off my feet as I trudged along.
I took them off and walked barefoot through the muck, my feet sliding out from under me so that I had to keep catching myself on Shiloh to stay standing.
By the time we made it back to the campsite, both of us were covered in mud. The girls were waiting for us, huddled together under the RV’s awning, which bowed badly in the middle, heavy with rain.
“We thought it’d be best to circle back to camp because of the weather,” said Naomi. “We can try again in the morning—”
“No need. We’re done here,” said Shiloh, and the girls, who appeared to have been resting, scrambled to their feet, folding the lawn chairs left in the muck, packing up. “Let’s head out when the ground is firm.”
—
I sat in the RV, watching rain streak down the windows, as the rest of the girls took down our camp. Naomi draped a blanket over my shoulders, put a cup of tea in my hands that I didn’t drink, the steam blooming in my face for a while before it went cold.
I kept thinking about Jasmine dead on the ground.
The violence of the CPR, her sternum cracking beneath the pressure.
Then, in my warped memory, it was Adeline lying there in the dust, cut open, gloved hands sorting through the contents of her stomach—nudging aside her spleen and liver—opening the dark coils of her intestines with the pass of a scalpel to search for answers they would never find.
My memories dragged me into a dark and dreamless sleep.
When I woke again, the rain had stopped and there was sunlight bleeding in through the windows.
The rest of the girls were already up, eating breakfast outside.
I moved to join them, thinking briefly of Jasmine before I pushed her from my mind the way I knew I had to if I wanted to survive this.
I’d had the night to grieve, but I had to face a new day. Had to keep going if I wanted to know the truth of what happened to Adeline. I’d sacrificed too much—my morals, maybe even my sanity—to give up now.
“You okay?” Shiloh sat in the driver’s seat of the RV. She hadn’t left all night, keeping vigil over me as if she thought I’d disappear into the night like Adeline if she didn’t.
I stretched stiff limbs, stood up. “Honestly? I just want to get out of here.”
As soon as the ground firmed up enough for us to drive, we set out.
It took us two hours to drive through the salt flats and out onto the road.
We pulled off at the first town we saw to top up on gas and eat lunch at a hole-in-the-wall barbecue restaurant.
I hadn’t eaten since the night before, but I had no appetite, not after everything with Jasmine.
The girls claimed the largest table in the restaurant, a corner booth with cracked red cushions and paper spread over the tabletop.
As soon as we sat down, Shiloh pulled a pen from her back pocket and began to draw on the tabletop, sketching out what I thought was a map but then realized was a loose schedule of the days to come, etching names into different parts of the paper, people who needed to die.
It had been four days since I struck my bargain with Death, which meant we had just over two weeks before we’d meet him in Vegas. Two weeks for me to prove my worthiness, and the pressure of that impending deadline was crushing.
A waitress came to the table, young and freckled, with a septum piercing.
She smiled at us, her teeth a little blackened, and took down our orders.
I opted for a veggie burger, mostly because I couldn’t stomach the idea of eating meat.
I’d seen enough corpses during my time on the road that the idea of eating one made me feel queasy.
But the veggie burger didn’t go down easy, and I mostly just picked at my food.
The other girls didn’t seem to share in my squeamishness. They ordered a family barbecue meal—sticky ribs and a spatchcocked chicken blackened with grill marks, mustard greens cooked soft in bacon fat.
My stomach turned. But it wasn’t just the meat or the guilt over Jasmine.
I looked over my shoulder to the waitress who’d delivered our food. There was something rolling off her, a scent like decay, that mixed with the grease of the meat and made me feel like I was going to be sick. “Do you guys smell that?”
Chloe nodded. She was gnawing on a corncob, her lips slick with butter. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”
She picked some corn from between her teeth with her pinkie nail, which was long and blue and filed into the shape of a coffin. Somehow, amid the chaos of our trip, she’d procured a full gel set. “I had to guess, she’s got about three good weeks left in her. Poor thing.”
My stomach clenched at the thought of another death so soon after Jasmine. “So we’re supposed to kill her, then? Here?”
But Shiloh shook her head. “She’s not one of ours. Death tells me who we’re supposed to dispatch, and I tell you. If we were to step outside of that, we’d be no different than murderers. And we’d also open ourselves up to risk. Death doesn’t shield us from consequences if we’re not doing his work.”
The hairs at the back of my neck bristled at the implication. “But if she’s not our kill, then whose is she? Are there others like us?”
“A few,” said Shiloh, pushing around her mashed potatoes. “But we don’t encounter them very often. As you can probably imagine, we’re not the kind of people you’d want to bump into. And the others that carry the work of Death are a bit—”
Riley sucked her thumb clean of barbecue sauce. “Fucked-up?”
Iona rolled her eyes. “You say that like we’re not.”
“Do they travel in groups like you guys?” I asked, forgetting for a moment that I was a part of this too. “I mean like us?”
Skye shoved an entire square of cornbread into her mouth and then talked around it anyway. “Sometimes. But usually they’re men and they tend to act alone. They’re also…a bit more hands-on.”
“And by that you mean…?”
Shiloh tossed a bone onto her plate. “They like to get their hands dirty.”
“But we’re way more fun,” said Skye, as if to defend our honor.
“Everyone else gives off serial-killer vibes, which is so predictable. It’s either that, or they’re like state executioners or snipers or something, and to be honest, that’s just bureaucratic and boring.
I mean, some of them don’t even realize that they’re working for Death—”
Shiloh’s gaze shifted to me. “Speaking of Death, I’ve got an update from him.”
Naomi lowered her fork, looking alarmed. “When did you speak with him?”
“The night before Jasmine.”
The night I’d seen her talking to Death in the parking lot.
The vibe abruptly shifted. The whole table fell quiet and bristly.
And I saw so clearly then the uncomfortable conceit at the heart of the group.
Shiloh was the closest to Death, his convoy and go-between, forever caught at the crossroads.
She wasn’t just one of his girls. She was the girl.
The first that Death had chosen. The one, I suspected, that he loved the most. If a thing like him could love.
I wondered what it was about her that made her so different, what made Death choose her in the first place.
Something about her air, the way I felt around her, this bristling sense of foreboding.
A feeling like standing on the edge of a high drop-off, of looking through an open window at night, wondering what was looking back at you from the dark.
I was afraid of her; we all were. I could feel it for the first time as we sat there around the table.
Riley eyed Shiloh across the table, uneasy. “So? What did he say?”
Shiloh wiped her mouth on a napkin, crumpled it, and set it on her plate, which was still full of food.
“He wants us to centralize around this area. Well, a hundred-mile radius, servicing the communities in these parts. And when our two weeks are up, we’ll meet with Death in Vegas.
Whatever he has in store, we’ll be ready for it. I’ll make sure of it.”