Vaughn sees us coming, but doesn’t change his course down the hallway, like he thinks this stalemate we’ve been at for the past few weeks is permanent. He thinks the Thing’s status protects him.

He’s wrong.

As we pass by, Callum slips away from our group and throws an arm around Vaughn’s neck, effortlessly dragging him into a chokehold. His eyes are wide as he struggles, silently pleading for Nurse Whitney to help him as she steps out of the nurse’s office … and turns away.

We surge into her office together, and Aaron locks the door behind us.

“What are you doing to me?” Vaughn asks, coughing and sputtering as Callum releases him and cracks his knuckles in a menacing sort of way. If the move’s intended to instill fear, it works. I can sense Vaughn’s terror the way a wolf might sniff out a rabbit by the pheromones of its pathetic cowering.

“Oh, Vaughn, come on,” Vic says, hopping up onto the sterile little table in the center of the room. He plants his elbows on his knees and puts his face in his palms. “Did you really think you could come to Aaron’s house on Halloween and walk away unscathed? We take our privacy very seriously.”

Aaron picks up a pair of bolt cutters that are lying on the stainless-steel countertop. They seem so out of place in a school nurse’s office. I’m certain they weren’t left there by accident.

Scott notices the bolt cutters right away, and all the color drains from his face.

“You can’t touch me,” he whispers, but he doesn’t look away as Aaron opens and closes the bolt cutters, as if he’s testing out the force. “Neil—”

Victor bursts out laughing. I’ll admit, even I jump a bit from the sound. Hael glances my way and winks, trying to lighten the mood. Bit difficult here considering the air is quite literally perfumed with violence. It smells like testosterone and long-awaited revenge.

“Oh, Scott, come on,” Vic says, shaking his head slightly. “You were punished for a reason. To be quite frank, we went easy on you. But you just had to come crawling back. Even a snake knows that when its burrow is kicked in, that it should slither away. You know what that makes you, Vaughn?” He continues as Callum and Hael step forward, shoving Vaughn into a plastic chair, each of them with a hand on the principal’s shoulders. As usual, Oscar stands to the side in his suit and tie, observing but keeping his hands relatively clean.

“Please,” Vaughn whispers, looking around the room and finally settling on me. “Please don’t do this.” He leans forward, teeth gritted, eyes wide. His glasses slip down his nose. He must think because I’m a girl, that I’ll be softer on him somehow, the most likely person in this room to grant him mercy.

Silly him.

“It makes you a rodent, Scott,” I finish, filling in the blanks in Vic’s metaphor. “I told you my stepfather was raping my sister, and you felt me up. You invited me to do pornography for you, at the age of fifteen. Don’t look at me like a savior. Vaughn, part of the reason you’re here is because you did me wrong.” I nod my chin at Aaron, and he steps forward, bolt cutters in hand.

“No, please!” Vaughn screams, his voice echoing around the small room. That’s when I hear the speakers in the hall begin to play music, disguising our wicked intent from the world. It’ll take Ms. Keating a while to figure out how to stop it, I’m sure.

Part of me is worried about that detective guy—Constantine or whatever the fuck his name was—but I know how thorough the boys are, so I figure he must not be on campus today.

“Quiet,” Vic snaps, going dark as he lowers his head, his dark brown eyes turning black, like a demon’s. “You’re going to take your punishment and your lover is going to patch you up. Afterwards, you’re going to consider doing what we say. A trained dog is fed treats, Vaughn. A rabid one is put down. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No, no, no, please,” Vaughn is sobbing as Aaron pushes the metal rolling table toward him. Callum takes the principal’s hand and puts it flat against the surface, splaying his fingers out. That’s when it clicks, for both me and Vaughn. He begins to keen like a cornered animal as I watch sweet, little Aaron Fadler slip one of the man’s digits between the end of the bolt cutters.

“Bite down on this,” Oscar offers up, passing over a leather whip that he removes from his bookbag. “You left it at the cabin; we thought you might want it.” Hael slips the item in Scott’s mouth as tears roll down his cheeks, staining his blue-striped button-down. “Now, bite down and taste the sweet metallic bite of vengeance.”

Aaron glances at me one last time, his green-gold gaze connecting with mine, and then squeezes the bolt cutters closed, severing the tip of Vaughn’s middle finger. His scream is muffled by the handle of the leather whip as blood floods the surface of the metal table. Not two seconds later, his eyes are rolling into his head and he’s passed out.

“Pathetic,” Oscar murmurs as he steps forward and cracks some smelling salts beneath the principal’s nose, reviving him. Scott’s eyes flick wildly around the room as Aaron moves onto his next finger, positioning the bolt cutters just below the first knuckle of his pointer finger. Reminds me of this one time when I broke the tip of my finger in the panels of our garage door. I was trying to close it manually from the outside, but my finger slipped in and was crushed. The pain was nearly unbearable, especially for a fourteen-year-old, but I survived.

So will Vaughn.

Lucky him.

“Wait,” I say, before Aaron can squeeze the ends of the cutters together. All five boys glance my way, and I see something like triumph flash in Oscar’s gray eyes. Asshole. He thinks I’m here to free Vaughn? What an idiot.

The way Aaron looks at me though, like I’m both more and less than he ever thought I would be, I can tell he knows what I want. Without a word, he hands the cutters to me, and I step up to the table.

It’s my list, after all.

When I asked Havoc to help me with it, I thought it was because I was too weak to take control of my own vengeance. Now, I know that’s not the case at all.

I’m here because I want to be.

Vaughn looks up at me the way I once looked up at him, with a sincere pleading in his gaze, a cry for help.

I put the bolt cutters against his finger, and squeeze until bone breaks and blood sprays.

Some of it gets on my face, but I don’t care.

Oscar is right: the sweet metallic bite of vengeance was the perfect way to describe it.

After we’re finished with Vaughn, we clean up in Nurse Whitney’s sink and scrub the room until it shines. Callum pockets the bolt cutters in his dance bag as Nurse Yes-Scott tends to the principal’s injuries as best she can.

We only removed five fingers; he still has full use of his left hand.

Consider that a kindness.

“Okay, Scott,” Vic says, after he’s all bandaged up and sipping orange juice from a straw. There’s a glazed look in Vaughn’s eyes that makes me wonder if he’s still all there. He passed out after each cut and had to be woken up. And after each cut, he seemed less and less coherent. “You’re going to take the rest of the day off. If you need to go to the hospital, you’ll tell them you had an accident with a circular saw. When I call your phone next, you’ll answer it, won’t you?”

Vaughn nods, and Vic smiles, patting him on the cheek in a patronizing sort of way.

“Off we go,” he says, letting Hael crack the door and check the hall. Once he decides it’s safe, we slip out together. “Get to class, you delinquents.”

Victor glances back at me, narrowing his eyes slightly, like he’s deciding if he should walk me to class or not. But he must see the way I’m gravitating toward Aaron, and decides to turn and stalk off, like he’s in a pissy mood. Let him be, that’s his problem.

“You don’t hate me, do you?” I ask Aaron, wondering if I’ve just shattered any leftover illusions he might’ve had about my being a good girl underneath all the leather and tattoos. Cal heads for the front doors and we follow him, in no hurry to actually get to class. The security guard looks up at us, nods his chin at Cal, and buzzes him out the front door. We follow, but Callum disappears down the sidewalk like a shadow.

I’m guessing he’s off to bury those bolt cutters.

“Are you kidding me?” Aaron asks, smiling to soften the blow as he lights up a cigarette on the front steps of Prescott High. The steps where he stood and watched as I was dragged and thrown into the back of a van, on my way to a week of darkness and granola bars. The start of my new, hellish life. “I love you, Bernadette. You know that, right? I would die for you.”

I smile, because even though I’m pretty sure I have Vaughn’s blood still stuck under my black-painted fingernails, I do know that Aaron loves me. I really do.

“You took a bullet for me, Fadler,” I say, because like I said, actions over words. He’s given me both, and I’m loving it.

We share a cigarette together before something strange happens. Aaron … hugs me. He just grabs me and squeezes me against him until I give in and fist my fingers in his shirt. He holds me there for a while, so long that the next bell rings before we pull apart.

“Remember to stay human,” he warns me, and then he reaches down to grab my hand, pulling me down the hall to my classroom.

After school, I step outside to find the Thing’s police cruiser waiting across the street from Prescott High.

My mouth goes dry and my palms fill with sweat. For a moment there, I’m eleven years old all over again, peering around the corner of the kitchen as Neil palms my older sister’s budding breasts and then laughs.

“What on earth is he doing here?” Oscar asks, and I blink, coming to like I’ve just woken from a coma. I glance his way to find him frowning, his iPad tucked under his arm, purple silk tie smooth and wrinkle free.

“You think Vaughn called him?” Callum asks, cocking his head to one side, hood up to hide his scars. The way he looks at that police cruiser, I can only imagine the violent slideshow that must be playing in his head. The weirdest part about it all, is that he smiles while he’s imagining it.