Page 99 of Chaos at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 2)
It’s impressive.
“They’re not answering,” Oscar confirms, looking down at his iPad. The light catches on the edges of his face and makes him look ghoulish. He glances up at me. “That’s not a good sign.”
“Definitely not. Especially after how bad they messed up on Halloween,” Victor murmurs, seemingly annoyed but not worried. Then again, his shoulders and arms are tight. He’s full of shit, isn’t he? Just too damn good at playing pretend.
It only takes Cal, Hael, and Aaron a few minutes to report back.
“They’re gone,” Hael says, nostrils flared. “Every guy in the immediate vicinity, and we had, what, six?”
“Eight,” Vic corrects, gritting his teeth. A bead of sweat rolls down the side of his face as Hael pulls his keys from his pocket. Guess I know where he’s going after this. “This isn’t good. This is bigger than Charter Crew shit. They didn’t kill anyone on Halloween. I mean, they might now, since we left that special delivery of ours. But not yet, not this quickly. Even if they did, they’d leave the bodies for us to find.”
My blood chills as something occurs to me, and the fine hairs on the back of my neck rankle.
“The Thing,” I say, licking my suddenly dry lips. My gaze meets Oscar’s, of all people’s, but there’s no emotion inside his gray irises, like he’s either really good at pretending he doesn’t have emotions … or else he truly is a sociopath.
“You think he’d go this far, this quick?” Vic asks, looking askance at me. “Because he knows we have one video?”
“Because one monster always recognizes another,” I whisper, my eyes on Victor but my focus elsewhere. Hael pauses, one leg inside the car, to watch me. I blink and the fog in my vision clears. “You might be a different breed than he is, but he knows. And now that he’s seen me with you, he knows about me, too.”
“How so?” Hael asks, and I let out a deep exhale.
“That I’m a monster, too,” I tell them, without a shred of shame in my words. “And he knows exactly what we’re going to do to him because, if given the chance, he’d do the same to us.”
“Why Ivy?” Aaron asks, but we don’t have time to talk about it. We need her body gone like, fucking yesterday.
“Because she was with Vaughn the night we found him,” I say, because I know how my stepdad works, the things he does, the way he retaliates.
“What about our boys?” Vic asks, nodding at Hael. The latter climbs in the Camaro with Aaron and Cal, killing my opportunity at having any alone time with Aaron tonight
“I don’t know,” I say, feeling a cold chill fall over me. And it’s not the dew, or the fact that it’s nearly four in the morning. It’s because I know that once Neil Pence latches on to something, he never lets it go.
It makes me wonder … if my sister’s suicide was really a suicide at all.The next morning starts out with me waking up in a puddle of blood.
The timing’s unfortunate because as I’m sitting up and throwing Aaron’s sheets aside, he walks in and sees me staring down at the violent mess of crimson I’ve made of his bed.
“What the fuck?” he blurts out, tattooed fingers curled around the doorjamb as he leans into the bedroom, like he needs the door to keep himself upright. In an instant, he’s moving toward me like I need saving, and I feel myself get seriously irritated.
Yep, it’s definitely that time of the goddamn month.
And right after I went to all that trouble to take the pregnancy tests.
“I’m on my period, Aaron,” I tell him dryly, watching as he comes to that realization on his own a split-second before the words leave my lips. “I get really heavy ones sometimes; it’s not that big of a deal. I mean, for your sheets it is. But not me.”
He hesitates about a foot away from the bed, still stuck in that strange limbo we’ve had between us for years. Are we something or not? Was it just a casual fuck … or not?
“Do you need help?” he asks, eyeing me with a morbid curiosity.
“I mean, you could shove this shit in the laundry?” I suggest, wondering if I’m taking whatever it is we’ve got going between us too far, too quick. Cute first-time boyfriend shit like shyly helping your girl with her period, we’re past that. I’m two years too far beyond getting a bouquet of tampons by a well-meaning high schooler. “This is weird, isn’t it? It’s freaking weird. Just … get out.”
Aaron surprises me by laughing. He buried a girl in the woods last night, has dark circles under his eyes … and he’s laughing. Guess he meant what he said about trying to find happiness wherever you can, whenever you can. I can see how and why he changed so quickly. The old Aaron probably vomited at the sight of his first body and fell into shock for days. That old Aaron would never survive this, would most definitely not be able to laugh.
