CHAPTER 17
“If you find somebody you can hunt, you can’t let that get away.”
—Not The Wedding Singer
“What the hell happened?”
I move toward him but stop short, glance down at the knife hanging from his weapon wristlet, then take two steps back.
It was too dark in the corridor to be sure, but the knife in Wes’s hand doesn’t look like the one that was used on the guy at the end of the corridor.
The one that was able to paint an already red wall a sticky coat of dark crimson.
It’s still a knife, though, and there’s still blood on it. There’s blood on him.
“Why do you have that?” I ask, trying and failing to keep my voice even as he shifts to take the final step up to the mezzanine.
He pauses before his foot hits the floor, a brief look of hurt crossing his face, but then he glances down at my arm again and moves back onto the previous step.
Billie presses herself up against the wall to accommodate him, her eyes darting between the corkscrews in our hands.
Wes’s gaze shifts behind me to the other women who look like they’ve been dragged through hell and back, and then he holds him arms up in surrender.
The handle of the knife becomes loose in his hand—though the bracelet I made him would make it impossible for any of us to get the weapon out of his grip anyway—and I see he’s holding the small first aid kit and a flashlight in his other hand.
Something moves behind them. Someone.
“Dani?”
She looks like hell, too—her Meg Ryan pixie cut is looking less nineties rom-com cute and more like an eighties slasher heroine who’s seen some shit.
She does not look like someone who’d accidentally get a chicken tattoo on a fun night out, and when she squeezes past Wes and Billie, I see her face is gaunt and pale.
I crane my neck to look over Wes’s shoulder, hoping to see that familiar pink dress. Because if they’ve found Dani, then—
“Where’s—”
The question dies on my tongue when Wes shakes his head almost imperceptibly, his eyes closing in a “don’t ask” blink, but the word alone is enough to bring Dani to tears.
There’s blood on her hands so she doesn’t try to wipe at them as they fall down her cheeks.
“You were right,” she sniffs. “We shouldn’t have split up. We thought we could check both corridors at the same time, but Colette didn’t come back. She didn’t come back.”
Fuck.
She climbs the final step and joins us on the landing; Billie, too.
But even though he’s been with them this whole time, and I’m sure Billie and Dani would tell us if he went AWOL at some point, Wes stays where he is.
I have a feeling he won’t take another step closer until we invite him to, like a polite yet cautious vampire.
And I appreciate it. He’s not a threat, but he knows we feel threatened.
So that’s why I hold my hands up to mirror his and make my voice soft when I ask again, “What happened?”
“Dani was hiding under the bar,” he says, using the hand holding the knife to gesture to the stains on his shirt. The way they cut across the white material in straight gashes, it’s like he was brushing against wet paint. “It was… messy.”
Not wet paint. Spilled blood.
“When Colette didn’t come back, I didn’t want to go back upstairs alone,” Dani says from behind me. “I thought I could just hide and wait it out.”
Considering I didn’t get to tell her about the rules, those are some good instincts.
“When we found her, she almost got me.” Wes points down to a spot of blood near his collarbone. His shirt is sliced open an inch or two, but the stain has stopped spreading close to the cut, so it’s only a superficial wound. “A broken bottle. Inspired by you, no doubt.”
How he still manages the smallest of smiles at me when he’s explaining how he got stabbed, I’ll never know.
“I’m sorry… again,” Dani says, and when I look back at her she’s wincing, apologetic, but the soft chuckle ahead of me draws my eyes back to Wes.
“It’s fine. You did the right thing.” He’s shaking his head like they’ve already had this conversation before his eyes laser in on my arm again and his amusement vanishes. “What happened to you?”
“I got cut by Laurie’s bottle.” I try to wave it away like it’s not a big deal, but the movement just makes me wince, and a thin, fresh line of blood trails down my arm.
I’m not trying to underplay it. It’s just that me getting accidentally sliced open by my best friend doesn’t feel like the key plot point of what played out on this level while Wes and Billie were down in the bar.
We came within slashing distance of the killer, and though it feels like I’m burying the lede right now and I want to tell him what happened, no one else has invited Wes up onto the landing.
He’s still in exile on the last step.
His stare lifts from my arm to look over our heads, but whatever he does or doesn’t see just makes his expression get darker. “Where’s John?”
“We heard a noise, he went to go check, and then he…” I shake my head. I don’t want to say the same words as Dani and take him out of the equation just yet. He walked into the side of the club that Laurie and I couldn’t remember. Maybe he got lost. Maybe he found a phone or a way out, or maybe—
“Did you find anything downstairs?” Laurie appears at my shoulder.
Wes drops his hands but still stays where he is.
“No maps. No fire extinguishers. No phones on any of the bod—people down there. We found a flashlight?” He says it like he knows it isn’t enough to make up for all the things they didn’t find, then he directs the next statement to the landing.
“I—I took the knife from… from the host.” Jesus.
He means he took it out of her. Wes looks back up at us, worry written all over his face.
“I think… I think this was planned. I think they planned out everything.”
Hearing it feels like a punch to the gut, but I think so, too.
I thought so when I saw the rose, and it may have even crossed my mind earlier.
“I realized I haven’t seen an emergency exit light all night, so we checked the perimeter of the basement and found the remains of a mount on the ceiling.
” He blows out a frustrated breath. “It looked like it had been removed. Not to mention—” He nods above my head, and when I look up I see something that pulls my heart all the way up to the top of my throat.
The dome of a security camera. They’re designed to be subtle, a reminder that someone’s always watching, but if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about.
The shield over the camera doesn’t look like it should; it doesn’t have that smooth, glossy finish with a light glowing from within.
It doesn’t look like that because it’s covered in black spray paint, some of the dark flecks flicking across the deep scarlet ceiling.
The killer really wanted this to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“Each one we’ve come across looks like that,” Wes remarks, and everything he says just makes our situation sound more and more dire.
Because when you put all the pieces together—not just killing off the employees (the people who would know how to get out of here) first, or taking the phones, or locking the door and swiping the code, but also the roses and the mask and the never-ending supply of equipment he’s brought to play with—that kind of thing requires preparation. It requires forethought.
And that changes things.
It means we’ve fully ruled out that this is a crime of opportunity. It means the format is more Hostel than Halloween. He’s not the kind of killer who counts on his victims making dumb decisions like Ghostface, or who relies on brute strength like Michael Myers.
He’s planned this, set it up, and we are all just side characters in the romantic evening he’s orchestrated for some poor woman who’s captured his obsession.
“Can I…” Wes’s voice breaks me out of my thoughts.
Both his hands are back in the air when he turns the first aid kit toward me, the other hand holding the knife pointing to the wound in my arm.
It’s deeper than his, but I’ve gotten used to the pain.
I’m about to say we should concentrate on finding a way out.
That time is against us, and it’s dried over anyway, and it must be my lucky day since I wore a dress that hides the stains so well.
But Laurie answers for me.
“Yeah. Clean her up.”
I shoot her a dry look that just makes her say, “You’re a mess.”
I look back at Wes. He hasn’t moved from the last step, waiting for my go-ahead.
Even if he had gone down to the basement alone, he’s not the kind of guy who makes your figurative hackles stand up.
His presence doesn’t pull at the intuitive divining rod of danger in your gut because something is a little off.
Not to mention, I just don’t think I’d eye fuck a guy who would turn out to be a killer.
So I nod and watch him step up onto the mezzanine.
It’s a slow, stunned, exhausted expedition to the booths that line the side of the mezzanine across from the bar, and when Wes points to the middle one, I move toward it without argument.
Laurie, Jennifer, and Dani file into the one next to us within earshot.
Laurie offers to hold my hand while Wes works on my arm, but we both know it isn’t her strong suit, and if anyone needs emotional support it’s Dani.
She’s still crying. It’s one thing to be caught up in someone’s killing spree.
It’s another to lose your new bestie in the middle of it.
So Laurie sits with Jennifer while she tries to comfort Dani, offering practiced sounds of consolation and awkward back pats.
Billie situates herself against the railing.
She says it’s to be a lookout, but I think it’s more because she hates everyone’s guts.
“What exactly happened up here?” Wes asks.