Chapter 19
I sat alone in the living room long after Death’s departure, watching the sun pull clear of the Las Vegas skyline.
Gradually, the other girls woke up and stumbled into the kitchen.
None of them seemed to notice anything was wrong at first. They thanked me for the breakfast I hadn’t made, eating the cold eggs and chewing on strips of bacon, devouring the thick slices of brioche, their cheeks fat with it.
It was Shiloh who first noticed something was wrong. She was one of the last girls to emerge, rubbing raw eyes with her fist as she entered the kitchen. She took one look at me and just…knew, as if I’d told her everything. “Family meeting,” she said.
Confused, the other girls brought their plates from the kitchen to the living room, settled themselves on the couches.
Shiloh sat among them, and I wondered when Death had told her about his plan.
Was it the night I’d seen them together across the Walmart parking lot when everyone else was asleep?
Or had this been set in motion well before?
Had she always known and kept it secret, like the relationship with Adeline she’d kept hidden from me?
Skye bit a limp strip of bacon. “So? What’s up?”
Shiloh’s eyes remained on me. “Roslyn has something to say.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You tell them yourself.”
Shiloh’s expression remained even, her eyes dark and unblinking. And that was all the confirmation I needed, of a betrayal so great it staggered me.
Riley’s eyes narrowed. Her gaze carved toward Shiloh. “Tell us what?”
When Shiloh didn’t answer, and I couldn’t contain myself any longer—couldn’t justify holding the girls in suspense—I blurted out the truth: “Death says that one of us has to die.”
The girls remained remarkably, almost eerily calm. Skye put the rest of the bacon in her mouth and chewed in solemn silence. Chloe’s lips pressed into a thin and bloodless line. Naomi carefully set a slice of toast on the plate, wiped the butter off her fingers on a napkin, and crumpled it.
Riley was the only one who cracked. She kept shaking her head, muttering, “I fucking knew it. All this time, I fucking knew—”
“Why would he do that?” said Iona, her voice small and throttled, the question landing like a plea. “We’ve killed for him. We’ve been good. We’ve kept up our end of the bargain—”
“You’re a fucking traitor,” said Riley in a hoarse whisper, looking at Shiloh with utter disgust. “All this time, you’ve known this was coming. Haven’t you?”
“I tried to talk him out of it,” said Shiloh, and her expression reminded me of the salt plains surrounding the festival where we killed Jasmine Wu. Empty desolation. “I tried to do more than my part. I spent half my nights killing just to satisfy his bloodlust, but it’s not enough.”
So that was what she’d been doing on those long nights away. Trying to appease him, to stave off what I then knew was inevitable: One of us was going to die.
“How long do we have?” Naomi asked. She sounded calm. Clinical, almost.
“He’ll give us until midnight,” I said.
“We can’t go through with this,” said Skye, her hands clutched into tight fists, her cheeks flushed. She seemed more angry than afraid.
Chloe sucked her teeth. “If we don’t, we’re all goners. I mean, what choice do we really have?”
“We could run,” said Skye, hopeful even after everything, all the people she’d killed and the things she’d seen. Somehow she’d still managed to retain the innocence of a child, the earnest belief that everything would be okay. But I knew better, and so did the other girls.
“We need to choose someone.” Shiloh seemed almost despondent. “And I want to put forward my own name.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I whispered. “Death…doesn’t want it to be you.”
“You spoke to Death?” Iona asked.
I nodded. “This morning. He told me it has to be someone, but he’d prefer that I didn’t pick Shiloh. I mean, he said he’d respect my decision either way, but…I don’t know. It felt like a threat almost. Like something bad would happen if we chose her.”
“Of course,” said Riley, bitter and spiteful. “He always protects his favorite.”
“Riley—”
“What, Naomi? You know it’s true.” Riley shoved to her feet. “Shiloh here has been dealing with Death behind our backs. Sitting on this for fuck knows how long. We can’t trust her.” Riley then turned to me. “Or you.”
“What did I do?”
Riley pointed to Shiloh and me, waving her finger in the air. “You two were gone a long time last night. What were you talking about? Hm? Deciding which of us to offer up to Death?”
“We talked, we fought about my sister and the fact that she and Shiloh were together last summer. Something that not a single one of you bothered to tell me. Even when you knew that I was starting to—” I didn’t finish that. I couldn’t, for the shame of it. “You all should’ve told me.”
None of them denied it, but it hurt the way they wouldn’t look at me after I said it: Naomi dropping her gaze to the floor, Iona staring out the window with glazed eyes, Skye pushing eggs around on her plate.
I wondered how much they knew, why they didn’t say anything.
I knew they were loyal to Shiloh, but I’d thought that I could trust them enough to have my back.
But Riley made no apologies. “What else did Death say to you? Did he tell you who to kill and how?”
I debated telling them the truth. I hadn’t yet confessed that Death had charged me alone with the task of choosing a girl to kill, and I knew that, if I did, I’d have an even bigger target on my back, just like Shiloh.
But so far, keeping secrets from each other had only brought about chaos. “He said it was my choice.”
“Your choice?” Riley laughed, looking to Shiloh. “Better watch out. Looks like Death has a new favorite.”
Shiloh turned to me then. “Did you tell him how you planned to choose?”
“Of course not,” I said, shocked that she’d even ask the question. “I—I told him I couldn’t. I’m not going to kill one of you guys. I can’t do that.”
“So it’s just up in the air, then?” Iona looked on the verge of panic, her hands shaking in her lap. “I mean, what are we even supposed to do with that?”
“I say we vote,” said Riley. “It’s only fair. So far, we’ve got two votes for Shiloh. Her vote and mine.”
“Just stop it,” said Naomi, looking to Riley. “We can’t afford to turn on each other. If there’s a way out of this, now’s our time to seize it. Skye is right; there has to be something else we can do.”
Skye reached for her hand across the coffee table and held on to her.
Riley sneered, visibly disgusted by the optimism, by all of us, really. “All right, if Skye’s got some brilliant plan to outwit Death, let’s fucking hear it.”
“We could go to my mom,” said Skye, and she popped to her feet, triumphant. “She’s a psychic. She can help us.”
“Here we go again.” Riley rolled her eyes. “Look, Skye, I hate to tell you this, but a D-list actress turned Hollywood psychic can’t and won’t spare us from Death incarnate.”
“You haven’t met my mom,” said Skye with a sudden fierceness. “She’s not just any psychic. She negotiated with Death and lived to tell the tale, which is more than you can say for yourself.”
“What do you mean she negotiated with Death?” I asked, stunned that she hadn’t mentioned this before. When Death said there were others who’d made pacts with him, I’d imagined them as far-off and shadowy figures. No one as immediate as someone’s mother.
Skye looked, for the first time since I had ever met her, a little shy.
“When my mom was young, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. Brain cancer, as you probably know, is bad to begin with, but this one was really bad. Inoperable, treatment-resistant, fast-growing. The worst kind, basically. She was in hospice when Death appeared at the foot of her bed. Somehow she cut a deal with him, talked her way out of her own death sentence.”
It was far-fetched, but it was better than drawing straws, deciding who should die at random. “How did she bargain with him?”
“I don’t know,” said Skye. “She never told me, but whatever it was, it worked.”
Riley seemed unconvinced. “You’d think, if she’d found an effective way to cheat Death, everyone would do it.”
“My mom isn’t everyone,” said Skye. “You’ll see when you meet her. She’s different, like us. I’m telling you, if anyone can help us, she can.”
There was a long pause as the girls considered this, deliberating silently.
“I think it’s worth a try,” said Shiloh, and just like that, it was decided. “Let’s go.”
We packed our things as quickly as possible, overcome with panic, stuffing clothes into bags without zipping them up, leaving what we couldn’t carry behind.
No one spoke of Death, or spoke at all, really, and I don’t think I’d ever felt so cut off from the other girls or seen them so cut off from each other, moving around the suite in silence like they were strangers.
We checked out of the hotel, the valet retrieving our vehicles with some difficulty.
It was just over a four-hour drive from Vegas to Palm Springs, but the traffic was thick that day, stretching the trip to the six-hour mark.
It was late afternoon by the time we reached Palm Springs proper.
The place looked a lot like the set of a movie.
Softly lit buildings, tall and skinny palms swaying gently in a weak breeze.
We pulled into an almost disturbingly well-manicured neighborhood. Skye’s childhood home was all sharp angles, with glass walls and a sloping tin roof. It looked aerodynamic, like if you put it on wheels and pushed it down the driveway, it might just catch the wind and fly.
There was a woman on the stoop, standing barefoot in a blue silk robe cinched tightly at the waist. Her hair was silver blond, long, and parted neatly down the middle.
She was older than I’d expected, by a good twenty years, and she looked like an elderly member of the Manson cult.
When the wind caught the sleeves of her robe, I saw that her forearms were stacked up to the elbows with carved wooden bangles.
Skye kicked open the door of the truck before we’d even slowed to a full stop and ran into the open arms of her mother.