This time, I won’t look at Aaron. I hate how right he was about all of this.

“Bernadette, I tried to warn you. We’re messed-up. Havoc is fucking messed-up. You just—”

He never finished what he was going to say, and I never got the chance to clarify, but I’m pretty sure it was you just never saw it. And I didn’t, because they didn’t let me. Even when they were metaphorically kicking the shit out of me during sophomore year.

These are my boys.

Mine.

I have to protect them. Even if I hate them a little bit. Even if they’re fucked-up and twisted and their spirits are darker than pitch. This is it for me, my endgame.

Yanking on a pair of gloves, I help the guys wrap Ivy up and bind the tarps with rope.

Cal says it’s the cheapest goddamn rope you can buy at Wal-Mart. Their guys pick it up on the regular, usually in a large load of groceries, and they always pay cash. It’s pretty hard to trace.

When they lift her into the Camaro, I stand back. It only takes Cal and Hael—the clear ‘muscle’ of the group—to do it. There’s no time to steal a car now, not with the shit that’s following us around.

“You think this was Mitch?” Aaron asks Vic as Hael slams the trunk closed.

“Doubt it,” Vic replies, lighting a cigarette. He moves over to the side of the garage where Aaron’s left his lawncare shit. There’s a backpack attached to a bottle of Roundup—I’d tell him that shit is cancer-causing, bee-killing garbage, but that would imply I had enough room in my brain to care about issues outside my own life—that he picks up. “He’d be too freaked out by his dead bestie to pull a stunt this elaborate. There’s no way he left the house to work on this without at least noticing the god-awful stench of his car. Go check the boys.” Vic is spraying the grass with the Roundup, holding his phone with the other hand, and smoking, all at the same time.

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.

“It’s no big deal, Bernie. I know what a period is; I’ll throw the stuff in the wash.”

I narrow my eyes on him, but now that I’ve asked for help, I decide I don’t want it. I’m going to have to run for that stupid toilet, blood running down my legs, dripping across the floor … The last thing I’d ever want is for any of the Havoc Boys—Aaron included—to see me in that state.

I’m Bernadette Blackbird, leather-wearing, face-smashing bitch from hell.

That’s the persona I want. This is too real for me. Honestly, it’s freaking me the fuck out. I’m pretty sure I have intimacy problems that I need to work through.

“Aaron, screw off,” I say, trying to keep my cool as much as possible. Anyone that tells you that women are irrational freaks on their period is probably a misogynistic douche, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy having blood all over me and cramps that hurt like a punch to the gut.

“Stop that crap. I’m here to help. Where did you put the tampons and shit you bought?” He crosses his arms over his chest, like he intends on standing there until I tell him.

“Downstairs,” I grind out and he nods, disappearing out the door while I scramble to get to the toilet. Unfortunately for me, Oscar is in the bathroom when I get there, and I groan. He’s brushing his teeth at the sink and pauses to look my direction with a face painted in abject boredom. When he sees the blood all over my crotch, his expression shifts slightly.

“I can see you need this more than I do,” he says calmly, spitting into the sink one last time before he quickly rinses it and puts his toothbrush in a case. I try not to judge, but who the hell takes the time to put their toothbrush in a snapping plastic case twice a day? It just isn’t worth the effort.

Oscar goes to skirt past me, but as he does, a strange thrill passes over me, and he pauses right beside me, our bodies jammed together in the doorframe.

He’s tall, much skinnier than Hael or Aaron or Vic, but with long, lean muscles that move viper-quick in an altercation. I’ve seen him fight before, when he curb stomped that kid outside the school. I’ve also used a stun gun on him and watched as he grabbed my arm and electrocuted me, too. I ended up on my back on the ground, twitching, as Oscar stood stoically over me.

He’s inhuman.

I move into the room and slam the door behind me. Seeing as the lock is broken, I don’t bother with it, climbing into the bathtub with all my clothes on and shivering as I wait for the water to warm up. Blood swirls down my thighs and stains the floor red. I can’t stop staring at it for some reason, my mind on Ivy Hightower’s perfect dead body.

Just like Pen’s.

Too perfect to really be dead, too perfect for any of that morbidity to be real. Because dead people—people like Danny Ensbrook—look ugly when they die. They smell, and they bloat, and they crawl.

Penelope just looked … asleep. Like Ivy.

“You stupid fucker,” I growl, closing my eyes under the spray of the water. I strip my clothes off and then stand there with my arms wrapped over my chest, thinking about the Thing. About my sister. About the note on her phone, and the pills on her bed.