“Hazel, stop,” Greg yelled.
The hand left my mouth and my captor spun me around. I found myself face-to-face with Andre. A wild grin spread over his face.
I grabbed his collar and shook him. “You bastard! I might’ve cut you.”
Andre’s mouth opened in a silent laugh. Greg fell into my arms. The three of us clung to each other, our bodies covered in the marks of our ordeal. Their strength gave me hope.
Behind Andre’s head, a dark face watched us, the mouth set in a firm line.Loretta. I started at the sight of her – what initiation had she endured in order to become part of this secret club? Had Courtney left her in a cave in the dead of night, without a single friend to give her strength? How much of who she was had been obliterated when the god took her life?
Loretta caught my eye and stepped back behind Tillie, turning her face away as if she couldn’t bear to look at us.
Is she upset that she no longer identifies as one of us, or is she angry that we survived and infiltrated her new circle?
All thoughts of Loretta flew from my mind as the circle of students closed in around us. Trey and Courtney glared at each other. John cracked his knuckles. A palpable tension crackled in the air.
I stepped back, sliding away from Greg and Andre. If this got ugly, they’d be safer the further they were from me. I palmed my shard and rolled up my sleeve.
“I’m one of you now.” I flashed my wrist at Courtney. The Elder Sign shimmered in the moonlight. “We all are.”
“You’ll never be one of us,” Courtney glared. “You’ve ruinedeverything. The Club is supposed to be for only for the elite, the children of this country’s leaders. Now it means nothing. We won’t stand for it.”
“Oh, poor princess,” I cooed. “Have the big bad weirdos come to crash your little club?”
“Look at them,” Courtney smirked. “A fag, a dunce, and a whore strutting around like they’re the shit. No way are they the equals of anyone in this circle. So why are they being allowed to act as though they have power here? Why haven’t they been put back where they belong? It seems our noble leader—” she glared at Trey, who stared back with a detached arrogance that made it clear just why he was the leader “—has fallen from grace. One taste of a gutter whore’s pussy and he’s willing to throw away everything we’ve worked to create here.”
“Maybe this stuffy school needs a bit of shaking up,” I said sweetly. “This is your last warning. We beat your initiation. We’ve earned immunity. Turn your hatred to the people who actually deserve it – your parents.”
Courtney tossed her hair over her shoulder. “No onedeserves punishment more than a whore who won’t learn her place.” She tugged at one of her cat ears, as if she intended to throw it at me. Her eyes widened as the ear refused to come off in her hand.
“What’s wrong, Courts?” Tillie stared at her friend.
“My ears won’t come off.” Courtney tugged at both ears, her eyes widening. “Ow. It hurts!”
“Let me try.” Tillie grabbed one of the sparkly ears and pulled. Courtney’s shriek could have broken glass.
“You’re scalping me, you bitch!”
Tillie forced Courtney’s head down, parting her hair and peering at the ears. “It looks like they’re glued on.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. I just used that spirit gum from the drama department, the same stuff we always use. It can’t—” Courtney paused as she caught sight of the smirk spreading across my face.
“What did you do?” she screeched.
“Nothing,” I smiled sweetly. “I was just thinking how tragic it would be if someone accidentally swapped the spirit gum with superglue.”
“Superglue?” Tillie grabbed one of her devil horns and tugged. The horn stayed exactly where it was. She screamed. All around me, Courtney’s friends yanked and pulled at their slutty costumes, but everywhere they’d used gum to stick down a seam or hold on a prosthetic was now glued firmly to their skin.
“But… I put that on my pasties…” Courtney tried to dig her fingernails under the glittery red cups that covered her nipples, but they wouldn’t budge.
“Did you have something to do with this, Hazy?” Quinn gasped, his whole body shaking with laughter. Behind him, Ayaz and Trey exchanged a glance, but neither of them laughed. My body rumbled with glee, the laughter bubbling up inside me and spilling over with joyful hysterics. Beside me, Greg chuckled and Andre clutched his stomach and did his silent laugh.
“Happy Halloween,” I grinned at Courtney. I linked arms with Greg and Andre, and we headed off in the direction of the school. “We’ll see you bitches at the after party.”
Chapter Fourteen
The Halloween party was scheduled to rage all night. While part of me was desperate to return to school to shower, dress my wounds, crawl into bed, and think about everything I’d seen and heard tonight, I knew that leaving now would only be a sign of weakness. Courtney and her posse slunk back to the school in an attempt to find some way to remove their various appendages, which meant we could make a show of power to the rest of the school if we got there first.
Trey must have had the same idea, because he stalked off toward the forest without waiting for anyone else. The rest of us hurried after him. Nancy and Paul pressured Greg for details about his ordeal, and he launched into a dramatic retelling of how he escaped the cave, complete with a song he made up on the spot. Andre even passed a couple of notes to the others. I realized that neither Nancy, Paul, or any of the other monarchs and monarch-adjacents in our group had made any derogatory comments about his muteness or Greg’s flamboyance. They were all right.
