CHAPTER 33
“You don’t murder someone you can live with, you murder the person you cannot live without.”
—Not P.S. I Love You
I should’ve known this was going to happen. It’s when you think you’re safe that the twist comes.
And what a twist.
Billie. Billie. “The night is still young,” “It’s always the quiet ones” Billie.
Wes shifts in front of me, the hand on his hip reaching back to keep me at bay, but I lean out around his shoulder. I don’t want to take my eyes off her. Not after that kind of reveal, not after the skill she’s shown severing someone’s carotid artery without flinching. Without blinking.
“Billie—”
“Well, if it isn’t our resident policeman.
” There’s an unnerving smirk on her face as she discards the mask onto the ground.
It soaks up Jennifer’s blood, but the dark chuckle that emits from where Billie stands draws my attention away from the way the pink is turning maroon.
“Jennifer couldn’t wait to tell me. You really kept that on the down-low, didn’t you? ”
The amused expression on her face doesn’t shift as she bends down and pulls at her pants leg, revealing a handle sticking out the top of her boot.
She deftly pulls the stained kitchen knife from where it’s pressed against her calf and brings it to her side.
The switchblade is steady in her other hand, feet planted on the ground, and it’s a familiar stance.
All she needs is the oversized jacket and the coveralls, a machete instead of a switchblade, and it’d be a remake of what we saw downstairs at the end of the bathroom hallway.
The one John ran toward so Wes and I could get away.
“It’s not a great first impression to lie on a first date, Wes. How are you supposed to trust someone if they hide who they are right off the bat? Right, Jamie?”
The way she can still speak in a dry, unaffected tone is terrifying.
Emotions have been high all night. All of us have gone through a Technicolor spectrum of fear and shock and rage and—okay, maybe not all of us—horniness, but she hasn’t.
She never did. Even when she left, she was levelheaded in her retreat, but now I realize that kind of calm can only come from knowing you’re in control.
“Put the weapons down,” Wes says slowly, calmly, but I know it’s purely for show. I can hear it in the tightness of his voice and see it in the tension in his shoulders, the tick of the muscle at the back of his jaw.
Billie shakes her head, tiptoeing over Jennifer’s body and the pool spreading out around it like she’s sidestepping a puddle on the street.
The blood seeps out across the carpet and to the vinyl flooring that’s closer to the railing, sinking into the former and settling across the latter.
It looks like a perfect coat of nail polish.
“You know I’m not going to do that.”
The muscles of Wes’s back flinch underneath his shirt as she moves, but the knife stays steady in his hand.
“I have to apologize that I’m not dressed the part.
I left my little ensemble downstairs, and the coveralls were getting a bit…
messy after everything. Anyway, I figure we know each other so well by this point that we can do away with the mystery, right?
So! What comes next?” She directs that question at me, and not for the first time tonight I feel ill-equipped to be in this situation.
She and Wes are more evenly matched. Cop against criminal.
Hero against villain. But still, despite her goading, the fact remains: she made me the center of this.
I have top billing. So that’s why I move to Wes’s side before he can stop me, slipping in next to him so we’re shoulder to shoulder.
“If we follow your theory, Jamie, Wes is definitely going to die.” She winks as she shoots him a sarcastic pout and then points the still-dripping switchblade at me. “And then it’ll just be you. The Final Girl, right?”
The way she says it, like that isn’t the ending she has planned and it’s stupid to even think that, makes me study her.
She’s followed the formula almost to the letter.
All night she’s been trying to push me into the spotlight, but what I just can’t understand is why she’s the killer, what’s driven her to do this.
“You’re not in love with me.”
I don’t say it like a question. Even before this, she looked at me like I was something disgusting on the bottom of her shoe. Though that might not be the right descriptor, since she doesn’t seem to be concerned by the thick, congealed wine-colored substance lapping at the edges of her boots.
She scoffs. “Maybe you’re not a total idiot.”
“But this is still about me. That’s my name on the dance floor, isn’t it?”
I point to it over her shoulder, but she’s not dumb enough to follow the gesture. Her little smirk does drop, though. Very quickly.
“You’re just a means to an end.”
She says it more to herself than to me, and it’s… it’s baffling.
“Then why? Why the flowers and the hearts and the rose petals?”
She puffs up when I mention all the little tokens she’s been leaving behind all night.
Flinches like it’s a sore spot. So I keep scratching at the wound.
See if I can get her to launch into a motive-reveal monologue that will kill some time and help me figure out if we have a Single White Female or a Scream 4 situation on our hands.
Maybe distract her enough so we can get the upper hand.
“Why go to all that effort? Why not just kill me?”
Her gaze sharpens when I ask the final question, her grip visibly tightening on her blades.
“Oh, I’m going to kill you.” The matter-of-fact statement is like a noose around my neck, my breathing restricted as quickly as Wes steps in front of me again.
“I just can’t kill you yet. Like I said, it’s not over.
Not until we see if you can make it to the end.
But I’m sure you’ll be a disappointment, just like the others, and then I’ll be the one. ”
“The one what?”
“The One. The one who h—”
Wes lunges forward before she can finish, the flashlight back in one hand and his knife brandished in the other, but even with his size and skills and reflexes, he’s no match for Billie, who’s been doing this all night.
She’s warmed up, and when she swipes the switchblade in front of her, I swear I can hear the slice of his skin and a grunt that hints to a kind of pain much harder to come back from than an accidental graze.
No. No, no, no.
Wes drops to his knees, and when Billie charges toward him with the kitchen knife aimed at his chest, the next part happens so quickly I can’t even be sure it’s real.
I’m already moving forward by the time he goes down, holding the stake with two hands, drawing it back over my shoulder, and I just…
swing. Front heel down, rear elbow in line with shoulder, eyes on point of contact, as if Wes has brought me to a batting cage for our first date and I want to show him how good I was when I played softball in high school.
And the thing is, I was really good. I had to be. How else would I convince my parents to let me watch wildly inappropriate horror as a teenager if I didn’t maintain a well-rounded lifestyle to prove said films didn’t have any impact on my mental health?
Billie looks up at just the right time and the rod makes contact with her nose. It folds beneath the wood, blood bursting from her face like a firework, so much that it coats her skin like a mask.
One that could rival the disguise she’s been wearing all night.
The force sends her backward into the puddle of Jennifer’s blood.
The blades fall out of her hands, both palms come up to clasp her nose, and a scream sounds from somewhere in the middle of the cherry juice stain that is her face.
She slips wildly across the puddle, the blood slick against the bottom of her shoes, and then she loses her footing completely, falling back into the guardrail and—I was right about that railing being too low.
She’s gone before I can gasp, and the sound of her hitting the floor below is just as foreign as anything I’ve heard tonight.
Heavy and unnatural and followed by a silence that sounds so conclusive, I don’t know if I want to check to see where she landed.
How she landed. I’ll have to, though. As soon as I can drag my eyes away from the rod in my hand.
It’s stained ruby red in contrast to the white of my knuckles, and embedded in the end of the wood is a—yeah, a tooth.
I must have caught her mouth on the upward swing.
“Jamie?”
The strain in Wes’s voice pulls my gaze from the stake in my hand, and when I turn he’s still on the ground. Slumped over. His knife is hanging from his wrist, flashlight on the floor, one hand on his ribs and the other pressed into his chest.
I can’t swallow away the tightness in my throat, I can’t stop my hands from shaking, but when he doesn’t move to get up I make myself rush toward him.
I fall to his side, dropping the stake and ignoring the way my knees make the blood seep out of the carpet.
My bare foot accidentally touches Jennifer’s elbow and I jerk it away.
“Wes—” When I get him to straighten, I see red.
She got him on the other side of his chest from where Dani cut him earlier in the night, slicing right through the material of his shirt and across his pec in a horizontal line that stops above his heart.
His shirt is already soaked. It’s deeper than the cut he had before, but once the noise in my brain dies down, I can see it’s similar to the one on my arm.
He could do with some stitches, but a bandage would hold him over until we can get out of here.
He’ll live. He’ll live, and that’s all that matters.
“She was going to stab me,” he breathes. I think he’s in shock. “She was aiming for my chest and… If you hadn’t—If you didn’t—”
“Hold on.” I push away from him, circle around Jennifer and the blood that’s settled back into an even untouched pool after Billie’s fall, and make myself look down to where she fell. It only takes half a glance for me to know I don’t have to follow rule ten—down doesn’t mean dead: double tap.
It’s a classic Disney villain death if I ever saw one. She landed on top of the bar at the edge of the dance floor, and the way her… the way she… She’s dead. Dead dead.
What I can’t figure out is how this is the end.
Wes is still bleeding out behind me, so I move over to where Jennifer dropped the first aid kit and rip it open, extracting the first roll of gauze my fingers land on. There’s no time for touchy-feely disinfectant.
“Open your shirt.”
Wes complies with difficulty, and when I tear my eyes away from the gash across his chest, I can tell why.
My eyes start to burn. There’s mottled bruising along his ribs, other bruises as well, and the bandage on his pec has bled through at some point.
He’s endured so much damage trying to keep us alive.
My fingers start to tremble as I work at winding the bandage around his chest. I try to solve the enigma of Billie being Heart Eyes in an effort not to focus on all his injuries.
This whole time I assumed it was a man. I may have momentarily played with the idea that Billie could be the killer earlier in the night, but that was before the brutality I’ve witnessed.
The strength required to pull the ax out of Stu, pin Campbell to the wall, gut the guy at the end of the hall…
How has she managed that all by herself?
“It doesn’t make sense,” I murmur before tying off the dressing in a crude knot.
“What doesn’t make sense?” Wes pants, buttoning up his shirt before I can figure out whether the black pointed lines of the tattoo creeping over his shoulder are connected to the similar-looking ones high on his ribs that peek out under the bottom of the bandage.
It’s an observation rather than any kind of appreciation at this point; there’s no time for being “afraid and horny.” Not when there’s a growing feeling, a telltale pull warning me this isn’t over yet.
“This. Her. It just doesn’t make sense.”
She made it very clear she hated me, so there goes my “anything for love” theory, but still: the roses, the messages, the pure theatricality of every kill.
All that effort requires a motivator. A driving force.
I’ve never done anything that would lead to the accidental death of one of Billie’s loved ones.
I’ve never so much as stolen a parking spot from someone let alone done anything that would warrant revenge.
Everything has been too meticulously planned for her to have been driven by mindless bloodlust. So what reason is left?
“Jamie, we still need to find a way out of he—” Wes tries to stand and immediately looks like he might throw up. “Okay…” His eyebrows shoot high up on his forehead as he huffs, “Fuck… Jamie, could you help m—”
“Sorry. Yeah.” I shift back on my heels, push them firmly into the damp carpet as we both work to pull him to his feet. It’s a struggle. Wes swears some more until he’s upright; then, after some recuperative breathing, he resituates the knife back into his hand.
We could very well be the last ones standing, and I need him armed if my gut feeling is right and this is a false ending. I always feel safe when he’s around, and when he’s not, that’s when—
The thought stops me.
I always feel safe when he’s around.
But what about the times when he wasn’t? Those times he left the group. When he was doing that hero shit I found so frustrating. That’s when Heart Eyes first appeared. Suddenly it clicks. Why Billie being the sole person responsible for tonight doesn’t add up.
Because the first time I saw Heart Eyes, when he showed me just what he was capable of by butchering a man at the end of a hallway somewhere deep in the labyrinth behind us, Billie was down in the basement with Wes. She couldn’t have done that kill if she was with him the whole time.
She couldn’t have done that unless…
It’s not over, not until we see if you can make it to the end.
“We.”
Because there’s always—
“Two,” I murmur.