Teen Hyde (High School Horror Story #2)(52)

“Wait,” she said before I could close the door. “I know what you did. What you’re doing now.” White-hot fury passed over my face. Don’t threaten me. Don’t back me into a corner like an animal. Because despite the desire to protect her, despite the kinship, I couldn’t quit.

“Oh?”

Lena glanced over her shoulder, toward the tattoo parlor behind us. She hugged her frail arms around her body. “You killed them. Both of them. The boys that hurt me…”

“It wasn’t just you. There were others. Me for one.” My lips curled over my teeth as I wrestled back the memory.

“I know you saved me. You’re the only one who’s ever done something like that for me. Everyone else would have thought I deserved it. But you stopped them. I’m not going to tell anyone. You can count on me.”

I tried to read her face for any hints of insincerity, but couldn’t find them.

“Get in,” I said. “Before anyone sees us.” She obeyed. We sat side by side, the radio turned to low. “Okay, then tell me what you know.”

While I stared out the dust-streaked windshield, Lena filled me in on the news reports and the theory that a killer had come back to Hollow Pines County.

“I suppose that gives me a little less room to work with, then, now that people are paying attention.”

“What are you going to do?”

I leaned back into the headrest and closed my eyes. “Work faster, I guess.”

I listened to the sound of her swallow. “And how are you going to do that?”

I hummed as I thought. What I needed was to process in bulk. Like an assembly line. Or a fast-food restaurant. But processing in bulk meant they needed to be in bulk. Which meant—“You know anything about editing video?” I opened one eye to ask.

*

BOTH OF OUR faces were cloaked in the shadows of the school building, which completely hid the moon from view. I held Mick’s camcorder tightly in my grip. “I don’t know about this,” I said. An uneasiness had settled in my belly at the thought of entering Cassidy’s territory where I didn’t feel at home as I normally did in the dark, abandoned places of the city.

Lena fiddled with a key ring and fitted it into the lock. “It’s fine.” She twisted it and wrenched the door open, propping it open for my entry with her elbow. “I’m here all the time.”

I peered into the high school auditorium, lit only by the glow of a few sparsely placed battery-operated emergency lights.

Inside, velvet curtains hung on either side of an abandoned stage. I kept my footsteps light. Rows of empty seat backs stretched upward on a steady incline. My teeth were set on edge. I peered up into the rafters where the sleeping spotlights hung, waiting. The school felt like her. Cassidy. It was as though I could feel her imprint now that I was inside, haunting me like a ghost.

Lena let the door fall shut behind her. Her eyes twinkled in the dark as if the stars had come inside with us.

My eyes began to adjust and I hopped up on the stage. I strode to the center and stared out at the imaginary audience, picturing what it’d be like to have a spotlight blinding me. “Look at you,” I said with a note of pride and trying to ignore the invisible presence of something other. “Breaking and entering already.”

The thought was attractive to me even in my discomfort, the idea that we were invading Cassidy’s space, taking over another piece of her life, or at least we could try.

She crawled up on stage after me, crossing toward the back where the set pieces of a play loomed like forgotten dolls. The mural behind her depicted waves of grain and an old windmill. Lena gleefully kicked back into a wheelbarrow, crossed her legs, and propped herself up to look at me.

“It’s, well, it’s a little bit sexy,” I admitted.

She laughed softly. “There has to be some perk to being a theater geek, I guess.”

“What play’s this for anyway?” I went over and lifted a sheet from a hanging clothesline. The laundry tag on it read Pottery Barn.

“Oklahoma!”

“Oklahoma?”

Lena quirked an eyebrow. “You’re not saying it with the exclamation mark. I can tell.”

Absently, I ran my finger over the fresh line tattooed into my wrist. The skin there still stung. “So you’re an actress? Do you sing?” I asked, exploring the set pieces. A wood facade stood on its own. Out of it was cut a window with tattered curtains that looked like old tablecloths.

“Hardly.” She crawled out of the wheelbarrow. “Lights and media specialist,” she said. “Fancy name for someone whose face nobody wants to see on camera.”

“I don’t know about that.” I grinned and flipped the viewer on the camcorder open and peered through the lens at her. Lena’s figure had a yellowish night vision tint to it. I hit the red button at the top and a caption on-screen popped up to read, “record.”

Lena ducked behind one of the hanging sheets and poked her head out. “What are you doing?” she squealed and disappeared under the prop. “Are you seriously recording this?”

“Say hello,” I said, moving around to the front of the stage to get a better angle.

She stepped out. A compressed smile pinched her cheeks. “You’re insane, you know that?” She cocked her head. “Hi there.” She waved and then suppressed a round of giggles with her fist.