“That boy, Wesley”—her entire demeanor darkens—“what do you know about him?”
“What’s this?” I blink back surprise. “Has Chloe Bishop’s hormonal assault on Gage Oliver come to an end?”
“Shut up, Skyla. You and I both know he could never replace Gage. The question is, who out there thought he might?” She clips me with her evil stare before sauntering off to the other end of the lineup.
Chloe joins the girls as they kick and scream like inmates in an asylum, but I stand there stunned for a moment at what she’s just implied. Marshall has more than once driven home the point that there are no coincidences in life. Wesley and Gage look as if they could be identical twins, with the exception of the eyes. What are the odds that Wes would so closely resemble the boy I love? And just what the hell are the odds that he would cross dimensions, time, and space to gnaw off my neck—
me
—out of all the Celestra in those tunnels. Is my mother twisted enough to have orchestrated this? Or is this the masterwork of someone far more sinister than my mother?
The game drones on and on. One quarter melts into the next, and before I know it West is at the losing end of the scoreboard with less than a minute left to play.
The clock runs, and West just walks off the field with their helmets tucked between their legs.
“What are they doing?” Giselle looks grossly confused by the concept. “There are still a full twenty seconds left in the game!” She screams it out in the event the coach didn’t notice.
“Yes, but they’ve been defeated,” I say. “There’s no point in hanging on until the bitter end. It’s just over.”
Chloe walks up still out of breath. “They’re losers,” she quips. “Just like Skyla.” She gives a little wink over at me. “Come on, Emerson. I’ll give you a ride to my house. It’s uniforms on tonight, girls,” she says, dictating to all of us what we’re to wear to the after-party.
Giselle makes big eyes at me as if she’s afraid to accept the offer, but I give an approving nod to the situation.
“I’ll catch you guys later,” I say. “Is there anything—
anyone
I can bring?” I swallow a laugh as I chide Chloe.
“Bring your boyfriends, bring your sisters. I really don’t give a shit if you show up at all, Skyla.” Chloe seems to have reignited her hatred for me in this short time during the game.
That last conversation we had about Wes thumps through my mind as if it were trying to afford me a clue, but I can’t figure it out.
The team comes up, and a crowd blooms around us in every direction.
I glance around for those familiar faces that I long to see, but I don’t find Logan or Gage anywhere. Instead, I see Emily with her legs wrapped high around Drake’s midsection, and it makes me want to vomit. Seriously? I hope to God Brielle is in the gym, so she doesn’t have to see this bullshit. And if she already has, I bet the poor thing is probably trying to poke her eyes out with her keys just from witnessing the spectacle.
A friendly face waves from the stands. It’s Emma standing next to Barron.
My heart sings as I make my way in their direction. Honestly, I’ve never thought Emma liked me. Maybe she knows I’m no longer technically with Gage, and she’s conveniently wiped me from her shit list?
“Hi!” I shout up over the noise of the crowd.
“Oh, hi, Skyla.” Her face deflates as she continues to stare in the direction where I was standing. “I was hoping the boys would see me, but it looks as if they’ve gone into the gym.”
Of course, she wasn’t waving at me. I’m such a dunce. Emma couldn’t care less if an entire army of clown Fems swallowed me whole. I glance to Barron as he offers a simple smile.
“So, have you decided which one you’ll spend the rest of your life with?” Barron says it so banal and polite you’d think I was getting ready to order dinner off a menu—more like dessert. Gage would be liquid fudge, and Logan would be one of those exotic dishes that they set on fire before they serve it to you.
I shake the thought away.
Shit!
I can’t believe my mind just reduced a Celestra to flames, it’s so not right.
“Um…” I look to the crowd for an answer, an
out
, and sure enough I spot Mia and Melissa hanging off Holden like bookends. “I’ve got to go.” I make a mad dash through the maze of bodies until I yank the two of them back by the elbow.
“Hello, girls! Need a ride home? I’ll be happy to comply.” I glare over at Holden. He’s got a ginormous set of big hairy balls if he thinks he’s going to inaugurate my sisters as a part of his demonic band of bitches.
“We’re with Pierce!” Melissa squeals as if this were some lifetime achievement.
“What? He’s too old for you. Besides don’t you both have boy-toys your own age? Gabe and Nave?”
“
Nate
.” Mia shoots me a look. “Tonight is our inauguration into the Treasures, Skyla. A secret club, so secret, you know nothing about it.” Mia brings new meaning to stupid while wearing my face.
“You are not joining anymore Count covens, do you hear me? I demand you come home with me right this freaking minute, or I’m calling Mom and Tad and letting them know you’re pining after some nineteen-year-old low life.”
“Pierce picked us up at the house.” Melissa threads her arm through his. “My dad loves him because his last name is Kragger. He said so himself.”
Tad is such a dumbass.
Mia nods. “He said Pierce could have any choice of his daughters.”
Shit.
“Guess which one I’m choosing to go after, Skyla?” Holden comes through loud and clear with those unsettling eyes. It’s me he’s coming after, only love is definitely not on the agenda.
Natalie springs up and sweeps her arm around his waist. “Come on, let’s get these twits home, so we can get to the party.”
The four of them melt into the crowd, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
At least with Nat there I know my sisters will be reasonably safe.
But everything in me knows
reasonable
and the
Kraggers
have nothing in common.
Nothing ever makes sense on Paragon.
Brielle and I drive out to Chloe’s house together on the slick roads of Paragon. The clouds have sunk to earth leaving us in an ethereal haze. The moisture hugs the trees, the fields—every blade of grass is licked clean by the soft spray of precipitation.
I would have driven with Logan and Gage, but the showers in the boys’ gym were defunct, so they went home first. I volunteered to go out ahead since I knew Giselle was already on her way with the Queen Bee, herself. I’m not sure if I trust Giselle to keep up the Emerson routine. And who knows what Bumble Bitch would do to poor, sweet, innocent Giselle if she ever found out we were shitting her.
“So have you figured this all out yet?” Brielle gazes off at the dark tunnel of eucalyptus that converge over the road. You would never know a game just let out at West, the roadways are practically empty. Paragon in general has a cemetery-like appeal to it.
“Figured what out?” Host comes to mind, the neighboring college. I wonder when they start taking applications.
“You know,” she sings. “Logan, Gage, or Dudley? Who’s it going to be, Skyla? You can tell me. I swear I’ll keep your secret safe.”
“I don’t know.” And that’s the sad, honest truth.
“What do you mean you don’t know? Everyone knows. Deep down inside, you know, Skyla. Maybe you don’t want to admit it to anybody, not even yourself, but you know.”
Brielle hitches her long curls behind her ear. She added so many blonde highlights over the summer that there’s hardly a trace of her auburn hair left.
“I’m not shitting you.” I push back in my seat. Brielle’s jeep is way more comfy than my Mustang, but it is several decades newer, so there’s that. “I really don’t know. If I knew—if I even had an inclination, I would be thrilled. A part of me just wants to get this over with like plucking off a band aid.”
“You should pluck off your underwear instead.” She darts a quick glance my way.
A bolt of lightning crackles overhead, and the sky lights up, pale as paper, as if someone were flicking on and off the lights in a bedroom.
“I’m not plucking off my underwear,” I say. Brielle’s head is permanently in the gutter. So is mine lately, but that’s beside the point.
Thunder growls so aggressively loud the car trembles as we continue down the lonely stretch of highway.
“You already know you like them,” Brielle starts swerving into the oncoming lane for the hell of it. “I mean why not? Wouldn’t it be a tragedy to pick one, only to discover that you’re totally incompatible in bed?”
I click my tongue at her. “Would you stop? I’m not going to sleep with three different people just to see who makes me feel better.”
“Exactly.” She slams her palm over the dashboard. “You should give yourself some time—at least until graduation. That leaves you the entire senior year to figure out who’s got the moves down beneath the sheets.” She takes a swig out of an old soda sitting next to her. “Like I said, my money’s on Dudley.” She shrugs into the road.
“I’m not screwing my way through senior year. I’m pretty sure that’s not what my mother meant by,
make it memorable
.”
She chokes out a bubbling laugh.
“Speaking of, making it memorable,” she starts, “Chloe hasn’t said too much about the haircut I gifted her with. You think she’s moved past it?” Brielle chews on her thumbnail as if trying to quell her anxiety over the situation.
“I don’t think Chloe gets past anything—that’s actually a fact. Chloe can hold a grudge through all nine of her wicked lives. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about Chloe.” Lately every time I think of her, all of her evil deeds play out in slow motion through my mind.
“I get it. You’re stuck on this Logan, Gage, Dudley merry-go-round, and you want me to help you figure out how to get off. Get it? Get
off!
” She belts out a laugh and slams her hand over the steering wheel a few good times.
“Ha ha. Very funny. And stop beating up your car. You’re going to screw up your alignment or something equally goofy.”
“It’s not funny.” She pops a piece of gum in her mouth and tosses the package into my lap. “It’s sick is what it is, but I mean that in a good way. I’m pretty sure every girl on earth would pay to be in your shoes—solid gold stilettos to be exact. It’s like no one can touch you. What are the odds that three of the best looking guys on the planet are after you?”
“I know, right? Only I don’t agree with the first half of your theory. Nothing ever goes my way. I always feel like I’m sinking in a pile of shit.”
“Right.” She balks at the idea. “Anyway, if you’re not into weeding them out with your vagina, then who’s the better kisser? I’m pretty sure the answer lies somewhere in those kisses.”
I consider this a moment. Brielle might be onto something for once.
“Well, Marshall is amazing.” I bite down on my lower lip as an unholy fire consumes me from the inside. God, those visions, hell, that real life show and tell…
“You’re on a first name basis with Mr. Dudley?” She marvels at this as a car drives up the opposite side of the road and bleaches out her face with its headlights. “That’s pretty wild.”
I don’t dare tell her that before you sleep with someone you should probably be on a first name basis with them. Brielle slept with “Mr. Dudley” at least once or twice when he first arrived on Paragon, and was propagating his manwhore ways.
“Yes,
Marshall
is a great kisser. It’s sort of like he’s recharging my batteries at the same time. There’s definitely something magical about the way he does it. I think if I did end up with Marshall we’d be locked at the lips for like a year straight.” Or the hips.
“Knowing Dudley, you’ll be locked in much more interesting places. So now that we know Dudley is in a league of his own, which Oliver boy turns a mean tongue?”
“Must you be so graphic?” I riffle through an entire litany of kisses that I’ve shared with both Logan and Gage—scenes crop up from school, their bedrooms, the butterfly room, the bowling alley, those heady beach kisses. “In all fairness, I’ve kissed Gage at least twice as much as Logan if not more. Things were pretty intense between Gage and me last year because he was my boyfriend. But the war ended, and now Logan wants Gage the hell away from me.”
“What war?” She blinks into the road, and I shake my head into the blackened glass. “Oh, that Count crap? My mom wishes I would get serious about all that shit, but I think it’s ridiculous. She told me the Counts have formed an alliance. I think she called it the Steel Barricade. You know, it’s a part of that stuff your sisters are involved in.”
“Why the Steel Barricade?”
“Because you will never take them down, Skyla.” She offers me a pitiful look that spells out I’m sorry.
“Got it. It’s funny because that’s exactly what Logan and I set out to do—take down the Counts. And here we fought an entire war, and we’re still at square one.”
She shakes her head. “They’re stronger. Whatever you did to the Kraggers has everyone steaming. But they’re pretty confident they won the war. And if they didn’t, they’ll be coming after you hard.”
“What the hell did I ever do to the Kraggers? And, by the way, the verdict on the war isn’t in.” I writhe in my seat. “Why the hell my mother didn’t let me take the sword and secure a win for Celestra is beyond me. See? Nothing goes my way.”
“Pierce apparently told the Council some bullshit at a secret meeting. They’re watching you, Skyla. Every Count is to report for duty because this shit just got real. You better watch your back,” she says it quiet, as if she were simply relaying the threat, but I can tell deep down inside she feels an obligation to be a part of it.
“Every Count?”
She gives a solemn nod.
Logan is a Count. He swore his allegiance. Chloe’s a Count, too. Could that be what all the secret whispers in the hall have been about?
I wonder.
***
Chloe’s house is all decked out for the upcoming spooktacular otherwise known as Halloween. The entire front of the oversized bungalow is encased in miles of polyester cobwebs. Orange blinking lights line the periphery as if it Christmas itself were about to descend upon us.