CHAPTER 20
“In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find someone who kills you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, homicidal, what have you.”
—Not Juno
Wes is furious.
“Where the fuck were you?”
It’s subtle, slow, but I notice the way he shifts so he’s standing between us—the women—and John. I notice the way he isn’t holding his knife flush against his thigh, either; his arm is slightly raised, preparatory, and it makes my palms sweat around the match cards still in my hands.
“I found another set of stairs,” John pants, having run up to the mezzanine level and joined us near the booths as soon as he dropped his hand.
Sweat beads against his forehead and glistens across the top of his chest. I always thought he was the “academia lean” that I’m usually drawn to in men, but the way the muscles in his forearms stick out while he’s clenching his fists, the tendons stark beneath his skin hinting at reserved strength… Now I’m not so sure.
“That side of the club wasn’t on the map, so when I saw the stairs I thought maybe it was an employee section, and it might lead to an exit.
” He turns to Laurie and me, but he can’t bring himself to meet our eyes.
“That’s why you wouldn’t have known about it.
But they just led downstairs, so I circled back, and I must’ve gone down a different hallway…
I got all turned around. I thought I was lost and I…
panicked.” Color rises in his cheeks, his hair flopping down into his eyes, and he looks so shamefaced admitting it that my first instinct is to feel sorry for him.
He rakes a hand through his hair, unable to lift his gaze to mine even when he says, “I’m so sorry, Jamie.
I heard you scream but I couldn’t find you. I tried—I tried to get to you.”
His voice cracks on the last word, and that’s when his blue eyes finally meet mine.
They are just as gorgeous as they were on our date, bright and appealing.
But I’ve seesawed between thinking he could be a killer and thinking he’s dead in a corner somewhere, so I can’t find it in myself to reach out and console him.
Casual touching feels a lot more dangerous when you’ve caught the interest of a serial killer.
Jennifer doesn’t have the same issue. Especially when he starts apologizing to the other women and saying that he should’ve been there.
She grips his shoulder with one hand, smooths her palm across his bicep, and he looks up at her with a grateful grimace.
The way John places his hand over Jennifer’s does work in his favor when it comes to discounting him as a suspect, though.
“Look, it’s fine. We’re all fine,” I say, looking around at the frazzled group and figuring it’s as true as it can be in these circumstances. Wes isn’t actively trying to block John from joining the group anymore, and Dani and Jennifer look perfectly comfortable standing on either side of him.
“We know what he wants now,” I say. Even though the discovery that I am what he wants is absolutely insane. “We can work with that to get out of here.”
John looks between us for the answer, but I just point over my shoulder and shift away from the railing, slipping the match cards into my bra for safekeeping.
He looks down at the dance floor—at the mess that as I suspected doesn’t have the same effect on ground level. It takes him a few seconds, but when he comprehends what the (literally) twisted message says, he turns around slowly, looking at me with new eyes. “You.”
“Me.” I pull my mouth into a grim interpretation of a smile and shrug. “Every girl’s dream, right?”
He allows one more glance back at the heart before he turns his back on it for good.
“This is probably the worst time to say this,” Laurie says from my side, her leg bouncing rapidly next to mine, and I know what’s she about to say.
It hits me suddenly, like the flick of a switch.
They never cover this in horror movies. No matter how long people are trapped or running or searching. It really is a glaring plot hole.
“I really need to pee.”
Bathrooms don’t have a great track record in horror.
While my thesis adviser, Jordan, would argue that zombie films are in a different class from slashers, there is some crossover when it comes to the danger inherently connected to restrooms. There’s a reason rule number three in Zombieland is Beware of Bathrooms. I think he’d agree with me that the risk is far greater when the killer isn’t a member of the undead, though.
The scenes are easy enough to conjure up: Scream 2, the 2018 Halloween reboot, Bloody Homecoming, Maniac!
… I could keep going. We’re just lucky there isn’t a shower involved.
As soon as Laurie mentions she needs to go to the bathroom, Dani almost cries again as she admits that she is moments away from peeing herself.
Avoiding that becomes our interim goal while an exit is still out of reach.
There must be bathrooms on the mezzanine level, but I can’t remember whether we go down one of the middle corridors or go back around near the VIP rooms to find them.
Laurie can’t remember, either, but she can vividly recall where they are on the first level, and John confirms that he located them on that first sweep he performed earlier in the night.
After a short discussion, it’s agreed that we’d all rather walk a known path than try to navigate the unknown parts of the building and come face-to-face with my admirer.
Wes takes the card from the VIP room and slides it into his back pocket, but we leave the rose where it lies on a table.
I don’t really feel like claiming it as my own now that Heart Eyes has decided I’m his girl, and I don’t give it a second look when we leave the mezzanine.
When we get to the bathrooms on the first level—without coming across any more bodies, messages fashioned by someone’s vital organs, or slow-walking, statuesque killers with a preference for pink masks—it makes sense to have half the group keep watch outside the narrow hallway while the other half does their business.
John, Dani, and Jennifer go in first after checking that the bathrooms are vacant (on Wes’s instruction) and ensuring nobody is hiding on top of the toilets inside the stalls (on my instruction).
Wes and Laurie stand on either side of me while we press our backs against the wall and keep watch in the main hallway, armed with one knife and a couple of corkscrews between the three of us.
I shift my corkscrew into my left hand to scratch at the residual glitter on my arm, ignoring how the pull of my skin makes my cut throb in warning.
Even Wes’s efforts with the antiseptic wipes haven’t been able to get rid of the red sparkles, and the layer of sweat on my skin acts like glue.
“Stop it,” Laurie whispers. “You’re not getting it off.”
“It itches.”
“You’re being a little bitch,” she says solemnly.
I mimic her tone when I reply, “Don’t call me a bitch, you’re a bitch… bitch.”
An amused exhale sounds above my head and Laurie lifts her gaze. Wes shifts next to me, and when I look back at him, I can tell he’s been watching the whole interaction keenly.
“Is this normal?” he asks, extending a finger from where he’s grasping the first aid kit and the flashlight, gesturing between us. For a moment I appreciate the skill and dexterity needed for him to hold everything in one hand. I wonder what else that dexterity extends to.
When I glance back at Laurie she nods her assent, allowing him a little insight into our lives, and I reply, “It’s pretty standard, yeah.”
“We’ve lived together for… five years?” Laurie asks, and I nod in confirmation.
“Almost. Since we were twenty-two.”
“Five years,” she repeats before adding, “I can tell you every disturbing, disgusting, dirty detail about this woman.”
It sounds like a promise, and even in the dim light of the hallway, I catch the way Wes’s eyes flash with mirth. “I’d like th—”
“But she won’t,” I say, whipping my head between them to find matching shit-eating grins on their faces.
I’m hit at once by the heart-pounding fear of Laurie divulging something that would make Wes balk like he did on our date and the equally heart-pounding encouragement that, if she’s threatening to release potentially embarrassing information about me, she really must like him after all.
“I don’t have any flaws in any way, shape, or form,” I finish soberly—the first time those words have ever left my mouth—and aim an elbow back into the ribs of my best friend when she responds with an exaggerated pfft.
Wes seems to enjoy the interaction, and it makes me wonder: Does he have his own Laurie? Does he have someone who would stay by his side and make him laugh or give him a brief moment of relief in this hellhole of a situation if they had come with him tonight?
It’s the kind of question that weighs on my mind and brings another, more prevalent thought to the forefront: I didn’t get to find out that kind of stuff about him during our date. I don’t know that much about Wes at al—
“Of course you don’t have flaws.” His gaze drops down to meet mine, and that grin turns soft when he says, “ ’Cause you’re a Leading Lady, right?”
That sinister thought is gone. Replaced by warmth in my chest and my cheeks and the feeling that my spine might melt right down this wall if he keeps smiling at me and looking at me with those deep, dark, hungry—
Quick footfalls pull our attention to the right, and when a shadow slices past, Wes’s finger on the flashlight is trigger quick.
The end of the hallway is bathed in light, catching the figure for a split second, but it’s too late to decipher who it is before they disappear down the corridor.
I almost doubt I saw anything at all when the flashlight illuminates the smooth red surface of the wall, the tarnished metal of the lamps, and nothing else.
“Did you see that?” Wes turns back to us for confirmation.
Already my brain is trying to rationalize what we saw to counteract the fear that starts to simmer below my throat. I tell myself it could be one of the remaining daters, somebody to rescue us, or just a trick of the light caused by the convergence of the flashlight and the gas lamps.
Anything but the killer.
“I saw something,” I whisper back, turning to check over Laurie’s shoulder just in case it was a distraction meant to draw our attention away from the real threat coming up behind us. A real-life misdirection. An old-fashioned jump scare. But the other end of the hallway is quiet and empty.
“I think…” Laurie says. “I think it was Billie.”
It’d be hard to tell if it was.
Billie is the only one of us dressed head to toe in black aside from Laurie, whose shiny silk jumpsuit turns her into a night-light—albeit a gorgeous one.
Billie pulled off the all-black look. She looked chic as all hell, but she could have doubled as a cat burglar, and she is the only one of the daters who could camouflage herself into the dark corners of the hallways if she wanted to.
“Do you think she came back?” I ask, though that seems highly unlikely.
“She seemed pretty happy to be getting away from us,” Laurie points out, and then verbalizes what I was already thinking. “Well, from you.”
“I’ll go check,” Wes says, pushing away from the wall before I grab his shirt sleeve and almost wrench him back.
“The fuck you will,” I snap, and I don’t know why that makes him laugh.
He tilts his head down to look at me and his eyes have that warmth again.
The kind that makes me think they could use the dark cocoa color as a reference for every confection in Chocolat.
Even though he’s the same distance away as Laurie, it feels like it’s just the two of us. Me and Wes.
“We could lose her if I don’t catch up,” he says. “Billie may be—”
“A raging asshole?” Laurie offers.
“—difficult. But…”
“Wes,” I stress. “The rules.”
How are we supposed to survive when people keep breaking them?
It’s what’s kept me from falling apart so far.
It’s what’s kept us alive. I tested the theory myself when I split off from Jennifer and Laurie up on the mezzanine and the result was conclusive: bad things happen when the rules are broken.
“I know.” He shifts closer, and I look away to avoid meeting his eyes.
I don’t want him to know how the thought of him leaving scares the hell out of me.
I barely know him. But when I can’t resist the pull of his stare on the top of my head, I force myself to meet his eyes.
He smiles softly, ruefully, and says, “We might need to break some of those rules to make sure people don’t get hurt. ”
And that’s the kicker.
Our goal is to get as many people out of here as we can. Wes is right. Being a raging asshole is not a good enough reason to let Billie die at the hands of a monster.
“This hero-complex shit is getting old,” I say only half jokingly, but he’s already passing the first aid kit to me and adjusting the flashlight in his palm. He meets my exasperated look with a smile that is far too relaxed given our situation.
“Is it a turnoff?” he murmurs, and I’m very aware of the irony that arises by him saying those words in that tone and the resultant shiver I suppress from running down the full length of my spine.
“Yeah, it is,” I reply. “It’s a glaring red flag, to be honest.”
He aims a grin at me, tilting his head in acceptance. “Noted. Any tips for navigating these hallways?”
“The path makes a square back around to the entrance,” Laurie answers, gesturing out with her pointer and middle finger like a flight attendant. “But there may be some random corridors, if I’m remembering correctly, and the bar area where John must have found the first aid kit.”
“Those corridors were really short though, right?” I ask, remembering that that was one of the reasons we gravitated more toward the second level of the club. We didn’t like the dead ends so much down here.
Laurie nods. “Just keep in the main hallway and you’ll come back to us.”
I stop myself from adding: Please, just… come back.
“Right.” He nods once before pushing off the wall again and turning to face us, knife poised in one hand, flashlight gripped in the other, back straight and looking intimidating as all hell.
At first I think he’s going to say it, the taboo promise nobody has been able to uphold all night. But then he clamps his mouth shut and just holds up three fingers. It tempts an amused scoff from my lips. I hold up three of my own and curl them one by one.
Three.
Two.
One.
With another nod, he turns and strides down the hallway.