She’s seen all three of us now. No one who sees all three of us when we’re on a hunt lives to tell the tale.
I stand to face my sisters. “What is this?”
“A test,” Moody says. There’s a .22-caliber revolver in her hand, black with a silver barrel. “More like a gift, really.” She takes my hand and lays the gun flat in my palm. I’ve never seen it before, but I know that it must have belonged to Montana, collector that he was.
“We weren’t supposed to take trophies,” I say. “Your rule, remember?”
“New rule,” she says. “To call it even, you can have something that belongs to the girl. Her earrings, maybe.”
Sadie has gone deathly silent, her teary eyes fixed on me.
I keep my finger away from the trigger and aim the barrel at the ground. I’ve always hated guns. They’re too easy to trace. Serial numbers, bullet types, fingerprints. A body will decompose, but a gun will survive being submerged at sea or buried in the deepest grave. “I’m not going to kill her, Moody.”
Iris is eerily quiet now. She fixes me with her unreadable gaze, letting Moody take the lead for once.
“There’s one bullet in the chamber,” Moody says, in that same soothing whisper she used when she was lulling me to sleep in our group home. “Kill her. And then bury her, and go back to your boyfriend and take him to the candlelight vigil.”
Sadie is hearing all this, and I know that something has just happened that can’t be undone. I always thought that the price for betraying my sisters would be that they would lock me out of our little trio and leave me behind. But instead, they’ve come up with a test so brilliant that I didn’t see it coming. If I let Sadie go, my sisters and I will all go to prison for the rest of our lives. Sadie will tell the police what we’ve done and what she overheard just now. Our identities willbe discovered. Our photos plastered all over the news until the families of the victims we’ve left behind see and recognize us. Life sentence upon life sentence, or death penalty. The three of us will fall together.
Or I can kill her. An innocent child who was never meant to be more than a tool to help me get what I want. Her life will be the price for the rest of my days with Edison. As he sobs in my arms, as he hangs missing person photos, I’ll hold him with the hands I used to kill her.
“Jade?” Sadie murmurs. She’s stopped crying now, her fear too overwhelming for her body to know what to do with it. I don’t look at her. I look at the gun.
Only now that I feel the weight of it in my hands do I realize what my sisters already know. I was never going to kill Edison. I can wait in the car while Iris strangles her lover with a bra. I can clean the blood Moody smears all over the tiles. But it’s not because I want to. It’s because I love my sisters.
“We talked about it after you left, and we decided this approach was best,” Moody says. She means that she wants us to take the serial killer angle. Sadie, Edison, and the man in the truck all found dead on a hiking trail.
“Sissy. It’s time to kill for us.” She talks in a soft voice even as she says these awful things. That’s the way it’s always been. Moody showering me with love so that I’ll scour the blood and bury the bodies she makes. Moody soothing Iris, kissing her cheek, working her up when it’s Iris’s turn to kill. It’s Moody who keeps us together. It’s Moody who keeps me from being free.
“No,” I say. A word I realize has been trapped inside me for years.
“You were right,” Moody tells Iris. “She is just like you.”
I stare back at them, confused. It wasn’t long ago that Iris told methat very thing, and I still haven’t been able to work out what she meant. Even now, my sisters don’t let me in on their secret.
There’s heartbreak in Moody’s eyes, and she reaches for the gun but I step back, keeping it away from her. I fire the shot into the wilderness, and then I pull the trigger again, but Moody was telling the truth; there was only one bullet. There was only one opportunity for me to redeem myself to my sisters, and I’ve thrown it away.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Moody says, sadness in her voice. Not for Sadie, but for me, and for what she knows this is doing to my heart. “A bullet would have been more humane than what we’ll have to do to her now.”
I grab Moody by the shoulders and throw her down the shallow embankment off the trail. She stumbles through five feet of brush, screaming with outrage.
I don’t realize I’m going to speak until suddenly I’m howling. “Tell me what you did to her!” I don’t mean Sadie, and she knows it.
Moody tries to claw her way up the embankment and I kick at her. She grabs my ankle and pulls me down with her, both of us tumbling through the weeds and grasping at each other, growling like tigers in the wild. I get her on her back and she stares up at me, panting, her eyes gone dark.
“Tell me.” Spit flies out from between my bared teeth. “Tell me the truth.”
“She was weak,” Moody says. “You were too blind to see it, but I followed her one night when she went on one of her drives. Do you know where she went? To the police station, Sissy. She got out of the car and paced up and down the sidewalk.”
“She wouldn’t have gone in.” My own words feel far away. There’s a hairline fracture in my heart threatening to spread and shatter all of me to pieces.
Some of Moody’s edge fades away, and she says, “She was going to do it eventually.”
“You...” I can’t find the rest of the words, though I’m sure that they would be ugly. Violent. Hateful. Some part of me has always known, the way that my sisters knew about my doubts with Edison and the baby growing inside me. There’s a sameness to us, even in times like this when I hate it, when I hate my sisters so much that I wish I could drain all the blood I have in common with them and become someone new.
I read the coroner’s report. Dara died of a fentanyl overdose. There were no suspicious bruises, no signs of foul play.
“How?” My voice is cracked, hoarse. With everything laid bare, I know Moody will tell me the truth. When it comes to her kills, at least, she does.
