“Come on!” I tell Spencer, grabbing onto his hand. “Church!” I shout, and then I start to run toward the exit. I know he’ll follow us. He stands a better chance of breaking through the crowd and coming our way than we do going to him.

The door to the tunnels is closed again, locked from the inside, and there are people all around it. I swing the knife at them as I approach, and they scoot back, falling into the pools of deep, black water on either side.

Spencer throws a hard punch at one of the members who approaches us. Spence doesn’t have any formal training like Church or the twins, but he’s scrappy as hell. Just like me. Pretty sure Spencer and I are the most similar out of all the guys.

Church appears from behind us, using the force of his body to knock aside several of the cultists.

“The door,” he says, voice as sharp as the knife in my hand. I shove up the wooden bar that’s blocking the door and yank it wide, revealing the curved walls of the tunnels and a seemingly impenetrable darkness.

“Let’s bail,” Spencer says, snatching a torch from the wall before we take off running together, the knife held pointing down and at my side. Hey, I still remember those stupid safety videos my dad used to make me watch about kids who run with sharp objects. Never thought they’d be referencing a cultist’s knife, but hey, it works.

Footsteps and shouts sound behind us, but either nobody’s got a gun or else they know they can’t risk shooting without killing one of us. Spencer and I, they need for their ritual, and Church, well, Church is a Montague.

“Where are we going?” Spencer asks as our feet splash through the water and I feel my chest get tight with old memories. It better not be raining today. I mean, the sky was clear when we walked from the dorm to the main building, but you never know with my luck.

“I have no idea. This place wasn’t on any of the maps.” Church comes skidding to a stop, putting out a hand and just barely preventing me and Spencer from tumbling over the edge of a cement walkway and into deeper water. He reaches out and takes the torch from Spencer, lifting it high and looking around. Behind us, the tunnel looks much the same as the one we were trapped in before. But when he turns back around, I can see that the wall across from us is a solid, smooth cement with some sort of warning sign attached to it. “Because this isn’t a part of the tunnels,” he murmurs.

“We’re in the sewer,” Spencer adds, finishing Church’s thought. He takes the torch back and looks down one side first and then the other. The sound of approaching footsteps makes my heart pound as I look back into the darkness and find a sea of torches coming toward us. “This way.”

We head down the walkway together, the cement pathway just wide enough for the three of us to run abreast.

I’m panting, my feet screaming from the scrape of the pavement as I pound down the sewer tunnel barefoot. We’ve got a bit of distance on the others, but not a lot. And now that we’ve seen what we’ve seen, we’re not getting out of here as easily as we have in the past.

“Here!” Spencer calls out, skidding to a stop next to an automated door. He licks his lips as he touches the pin pad. “Eddie’s in charge of all this stuff, right?” He pauses, breathing ragged and uneven as Church takes the torch and glances over his shoulder. The other torches aren’t far behind us. “The twins and I have spent years breaking into every shed, every storage closet on campus.” He exhales and tries a combination, cursing when it doesn’t work. And then another.

“We may need to run,” Church says, watching the bobbing lights as they get closer.

“No, I’ve got this,” Spencer says, plugging in another pin code and then fist pumping hard when the door unlocks. “Did you see that, Chuck?” he asks, turning to me with sparkling eyes.

“Yep, yep, you were cool as fuck, now go.” I shove him through the door and Church follows, yanking it closed behind us. More than likely, the cultists already know the code, so they won’t have much trouble following us. This doesn’t buy us much time at all.

Just inside the door is a small command center, probably to do with the water and sewer systems, but we ignore it—none of us would know how to work anything anyway—and head for the ladder against the wall.

We climb out, into the woods behind the school. Where, exactly, we are, I’m not sure but that’s okay. We’ve been here before, and we survived right?

Spencer takes all of thirty seconds to look around.

“I know where we are,” he says, and Church gives him a look.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Spencer takes my hand and we move into the darkness of the trees. Just a few minutes later, we’re coming up on the fountain and the pond, the spot where the boys and I ended up falling after we escaped the tunnels.

We’ve just barely passed it, headed in the direction of the storage shed where we found Ranger beneath the grate, when several of the cultists appear from the trees. Their white fox masks smile at us in the darkness as Selena steps up between them, Gareth by her side.

“You’re ruining everything for me,” she says, holding another knife, the strange rune-like symbol carved into the hilt. “This is my destiny.”

“Sorry to be such a disappointment,” I say as she rushes me, along with several of the robed cultists. Gareth goes for Spencer, while Church is overwhelmed with a good half dozen attackers of his own. Selena swings her knife at me as the other cultists chant, still standing in the shadows near the trees, like ghosts, like specters.

The knife is aimed toward my chest. On reflex, I hold up my own knife and her blade glances off it, making sparks. She’s in a rage now, her yellow dress dirty from dragging down the tunnels. They must’ve taken an alternate route to cut us off like this.

We dance around in a circle, knife to knife. Neither of us are experts, so the playing field is fairly even, but it’s scary as hell. Sweat pours down my face as I swing my own knife in defensive arcs. I don’t want to cut her. I don’t want to see her skin bleed. But I’m running out of options, aren’t I?

Pink and yellow princesses, knife-fighting in the woods.

The east coast is so weird, you guys. What would my California friends say about all of this?!

Hella fucking lame, bro.

Selena’s dark eyes are focused on me, her mouth pursed in a thin line as she presses her height advantage against me, forcing my back against a tree. When she goes for it, putting her full bodyweight into the knife, I drop low and tackle her. Her blade wedges in the tree trunk, tearing out of her hand as we fall to the ground in a glittering sea of skirts and lace. My crown, which has miraculously stayed in my hair this whole time, is torn off and tossed as Selena claws at my face.

“Women are supposed to fix each other’s crowns, you bitch!” I hit her in the face, just the way the twins taught me, cracking her across the jaw. She pushes me up and rolls us over, the extra weight she has on me giving her an advantage. We struggle over the knife, nails raking one another’s skin and drawing blood. It hurts, oh it fucking hurts, but I push the emotion back.

I’m fighting for my life here. There’s no such thing as too much to bear.

“Hah!” Selena shouts, wrenching the knife from my fist and bringing it down hard. I buck, throwing her off-balance just enough that the blade hits the grass instead of my throat. As she struggles to right herself, I shove her back, giving myself just enough room to crawl free. My eyes are on that knife in the tree as I struggle to my feet, petals falling from the corsage on my wrist.