Chapter 10
Everyone was silent and motionless for a moment.
The scene in front of us was too gruesome, too terrifying, too final to properly process. Then someone finally screamed, and the spell shattered.
More screams followed. Someone stumbled backward into the person behind them in their desperation to get away from the sight of Delia pinned to the wall, and somewhere to my left, somebody started retching.
I didn't move.
My mind had detached itself from the panic unfolding around me and slipped into something colder instead; a quiet, clinical part of me that couldn't stop observing.
The position of Delia's body. The trajectory of the harpoon. The angle of impact. The rope pooling on the ground nearby.
My brain catalogued every detail automatically, journalistic instincts kicking in like a strange protective mechanism. I knew the horror of it would catch up to me eventually, as the shock wore off and the reality of what I was looking at sank in. But for now, I kept observing. I just had to.
“Still think this is a fucking prank?”
The voice cut through the screaming with enough force to turn heads. It was Garrett, and he was looking directly at Rhys, eyes bright with fury.
“Huh?” he said, louder, stepping forward. “You want to tell us this is just corn syrup? Want to lick something and tell us it's fine?”
“Nobody said it was fine,” Rhys said in a stony voice.
Garrett made a sound of absolute disbelief and stepped back, dragging both hands through his hair. Meanwhile, Maren had reached a different register entirely.
“Who the fuck did this?” She was turning in a slow circle, phone flashlight swinging.
“Who left the fire earlier? Who wasn't there?” Her voice was climbing with every word, raw and increasingly unhinged. “Logan, you went to the bathroom fifteen minutes ago, didn’t you? And you—” Her light landed on Cole.
“You went to get more beers, and you were gone for like, twenty minutes. And Sloane, you left for a while too, didn’t you? Where the fuck were you? Huh?”
“Maren,” Rhys said.
“Don't!” She whipped toward him. “Don't you fucking dare tell me to calm down! Someone here slaughtered Delia, and it was obviously someone who was gone from the fire! And they—”
“Maren,” I cut in. “Look at the ground near her feet. Just look.”
Maren stopped abruptly, the beam from her phone dipping toward the ground.
Several other lights followed, converging on the same spot near Delia’s feet before tracing outward through the darkness. A thin wire glinted faintly in the glow, strung low across the forest floor and connected to a rope and pulley system rigged to the nearest tree.
The mechanism was crude but effective. Someone had built a trigger, set it in place, and left it there to wait.
Delia had walked straight into it. She’d probably heard the wire snap and turned instinctively toward the sound, just in time to see the harpoon hurtling at her.
“She triggered a trap that could’ve been set at any time,” Rhys said, for the benefit of anyone who hadn't yet processed what they were seeing.
He crouched down, examining the wire without touching it, then straightened.
“That means it wasn't one of the people Maren saw leaving the fire over the last twenty minutes. Wasn't one of us.”
Well… it still could’ve been one of us, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. It didn’t seem wise to stir up drama in a group full of people who were already terrified, hysterical, or both.
“See?” Logan snapped, throwing his hands up as he glared at Maren. “Get your fucking facts straight before you start hurling accusations at people!”
Maren was standing very still now, flashlight at her side. She barely seemed to have registered Logan’s angry words, and her own anger had gone out of her like a light switching off, replaced by stunned disbelief.
“We need to decide what to do now,” Caitlin said in a low voice. “We can't just stand here.”
Nobody disagreed, but nobody moved either.
Rhys spoke up again. “We can't leave Delia here like this,” he said. “We should get her down.”
“But it’s a crime scene,” Jasmine said, shaking her head. “We shouldn’t touch anything.”
“Are you serious?” Sutton said hotly. “We have no idea when the cops will arrive. It could be two days away. Do you honestly think we should just leave her hanging here until then? So birds can peck out her eyeballs and insects can bite off all her skin?”
Rhys raised a hand. “You’re both right,” he said.
“It’s a crime scene, so we should do whatever we can to preserve evidence.
But we also can’t leave her like this. She deserves some dignity.
” He paused, looking around the gathered group, before going on.
“So here’s what we’ll do. We’ll take photos of everything so it’s all documented for the cops when they finally show up.
And then we’ll get her down, put her somewhere safe, and cover her up. ”
Jasmine and Sutton both nodded, satisfied with the compromise.
Rhys glanced at a few of the guys. “Go and look for an empty storage shed,” he said. Then he looked back at the rest of us. “In the meantime, who’s good at taking photos?”
I weakly raised my hand. “I’ll do it.”
I pulled out my phone and took a steadying breath. Then I opened the camera app and turned on the flash.
I started wide.
The overall scene first. The exterior of the shed. Delia's body pinned against the wall. The surrounding ground. I moved in a slow semicircle, taking overlapping shots the way one of my journalism professors had taught us during a seminar on crime scene reporting and evidence documentation.
Overlap everything, he'd said. Courts reconstruct from photographs. Gaps are permanent.
After that, I moved closer than I wanted to, photographing the things that would matter to forensic investigators. The pattern of blood spread across Delia's shirt. The dark streaks running down the shed wall. The pool gathering at her feet, already beginning to dry around the edges.
Then I focused on the trap.
The tripwire was still intact, and I documented it section by section.
The wire itself, thin enough to disappear completely in the dark.
The anchor points at either end. The pulley mechanism attached to the nearest tree, completing the arrangement that had transformed a single misstep into something fatal.
I crouched beside it and leaned closer.
The device looked homemade, pieced together from a mismatched collection of parts. Lengths of maintenance wire. A cleat normally used for securing rappelling rope. What looked like a fitting from the boatshed.
Someone had built this from materials found around camp.
Someone who knew the camp very well.
I photographed every inch of it. Then I stepped back and swept my light across the surrounding ground, searching for boot prints, disturbed earth, or anything else the killer might’ve left behind.
The dirt around the mechanism was scuffed, but nothing stood out.
The marks could’ve belonged to anyone who'd walked through the area at any point during the last few days.
I photographed them anyway, just in case.
When I finally lowered my phone, Rhys was standing right behind me. I hadn't even heard him approach.
“Done?” he asked.
“Yeah. Done,” I murmured.
What followed was the worst twenty minutes I’d ever experienced, and I suspected I wasn’t alone in that.
Removing Delia from the harpoon required four people working together. I didn't watch the actual moment they slid her off it. Instead, I turned to look at the woods, unable to shake the feeling that whoever had done this was still lurking out there somewhere.
Watching.
Waiting.
Someone eventually found a sheet in the nearest cabin. It was plain white, the same kind used on the kids' bunks. Ten minutes later, I watched it settle over Delia's body inside the old woodshed.
For a moment afterward, we all just stood there outside the shed. Thirty-one people in the dark, the camp silent in every direction except for the sounds of crying that several people had stopped trying to suppress.
“Brad. Olivia.” Rhys turned to find them in the group. “You're still leaving at first light.”
Brad nodded, jaw set. “I know. And believe me, we’ll be walking as fast as we possibly can.”
Beside him, Olivia nodded, arms wrapped around herself as she stared distantly into the woods.
“Everyone else.” Rhys looked around the assembled faces. “Lock your cabin doors. Don't go anywhere alone. Don't open your door for anyone you can't see and identify through a window first.” He paused. “If anything happens, scream your head off to alert the rest of us.”
“And then what?” Zach asked, brows furrowing.
Rhys looked at him. “We deal with it together. However we can.”
The walk back to the cabins was the quietest I'd ever heard such a large group of people be.
Jasmine walked beside me with her arms crossed tight over her chest, eyes moving between the path ahead and the dark spaces between the trees with a vigilance that was completely unlike her usual easy stride. Neither of us spoke.
We reached our cabin and slipped inside, and I locked the door behind us and stood there for a moment with my hand still on the bolt, listening.
"I keep thinking I'm going to wake up,” Jasmine said in a low voice. “And this will all turn out to be a bad dream.”
I turned. She was sitting on the edge of a bunk with her knees pulled up to her chest, staring at nothing in particular.
“Me too,” I said softly.
Neither of us moved toward our bags or changed into pajamas.
We just sat on opposite bunks in the stripped-down cabin that still smelled faintly of the girls who'd slept in it last night.
At some point Jasmine reached over and turned on a small bedside lamp.
Neither of us suggested turning it off, even after we finally decided to lie down and try to sleep.
I lay back and stared at the ceiling, thinking about Delia and the conversation I'd overheard in the hallway yesterday morning.
What if someone really knows? she’d asked. What if one of the others said something?
She was dead less than twelve hours after saying that. Coincidence, or something far more sinister?
My mind switched track, and I thought about Rhys’s total lack of surprise when the camp was shut down.
Next, I thought about Piper, who’d conveniently left before any of this started, as if she’d somehow known something dark was coming.
Then I thought about the note on the tree on the first night. I know what really happened last year.
Somewhere outside, a branch suddenly snapped. I sat up.
Nothing followed. No footsteps, no voices. Nothing but the ordinary sounds of a forest at night doing what forests always did. After a moment, I lay back down, heart still racing.
Jasmine suddenly spoke up again. “I feel like I'm in one of those old slasher movies,” she said. “You know what I mean?”
“Yeah. It feels like that for me too,” I murmured.
I’d always loved slasher movies. I was probably way too young when I started watching them, back when it was just about the adrenaline, the cheap scares, and the feeling of getting away with something I wasn’t supposed to be doing.
But somewhere along the way, it stopped being that simple. I’d noticed it gradually; the way certain scenes made my stomach twist in a way that wasn’t just fear anymore. The way I’d find myself fixating on the wrong parts.
Eventually, I’d gone looking for an explanation, the same way I always did when something didn’t sit right with me. That was how I’d come across the term ‘hybristophilia’. Attraction to people who’d committed terrible crimes.
I’d read that definition and just… known.
It was me.
The shame had hit immediately. Hard enough that I’d spent months trying to twist and reframe it in my head, telling myself it was just curiosity. Just an extension of my interest in true crime. That there was a line, and I was still on the right side of it.
That wasn’t true, though. Not really. At some point, I’d known that I had to face up to the fact that violent criminals turned me on like nothing else, and that was already stepping a toe over the line.
But the fantasy had always been distant. Safe. Something that existed on a screen or in my imagination.
What happened tonight wasn’t that. It was real.
Delia wasn’t a character in a Hollywood movie. She’d been alive a few hours ago. Eating. Walking. Talking. And now…
I swallowed hard, my stomach turning. Whichever part of me had stepped over that line, even a little, felt like it belonged to someone else entirely. Someone I didn’t recognize. Someone I didn’t even want to recognize.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to push the dark thoughts away.
“I still can’t believe this is happening,” Jasmine said. “Like… I actually can’t wrap my head around it. My mind just feels totally fucked.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly, staring up at the ceiling. “Mine too.”
In more ways than one.