“You’re kidding,” Grant scoffs. I open my eyes in a glare. “You’re afraid of blood?”
“I amnotafraid,” I snap. “I just … don’t do blood. It’s a very common aversion. It has nothing to do with fear.”
He scrapes a hand through his hair, leaning back against the beadboard paneling. “Well, this is going to be interesting.” After a minute, he takes a bracing breath and sits forward. “Okay. I’ll handle the cleanup if you go look for a tarp and supplies. But you have to help me carry him out of here.”
“Deal,” I say, eagerly turning for the stairs.
“And think about where we can put him,” Grant calls after me.
I stop and look over my shoulder, careful not to let Jack into my periphery.
“Did he strike you as the kind of guy who would like to be buried at sea?”
Grant pauses. “… No?”
A vengeful grin pulls at my mouth.
“Good.”
• • •
THE SCENE SCREAMSAnna Matthews: the rowboat on the lapping waves, the hush of the world just before daybreak, the last moonbeams dancing on the water. Except that the rowboat contains me, the man who tried to kill me, and the man who killed him. That just screamsAnna Matthews having a stroke.
When the house is a shadowy blip behind us, Grant pulls up the oars and I help him lift the tarped bundle that used to be Jack. We struggle to hoist it to the edge of the boat, weighed down as it is with all the biggest stones we could find from the beach. When we finally push it overboard, it sinks beneath the waves with an unsatisfying splash.
I center myself back on my seat, shivering in the predawn chill. The sky is a gradient of blues, with burnt orange bleeding in at the eastern edge. Grant is a frowning silhouette against it, staring at the water.
“Thank you, by the way,” I say quietly. He looks to me, his brows still knit, the beginnings of morning light softly illuminating his face. “For what you did.” I hasten to add, “Even though I didn’t need it.”
“Yeah,” he says curiously. “It sounded like you were putting up a pretty good fight.”
“Seven years of self-defense training finally paid off. I should get a trophy or something.”
The day I signed up for my first class feels like ancient history now. What started as a way to feel safer traveling alone quickly became my obsession. I felt like such a badass, obliterating opponents and honing my technique in the gym while repeating that refrain beloved by well-adjusted trainees everywhere:I hope I never have to use it.Little did I know that expression would be rendered null and void by one capricious British author and her stab-happy brainchild.
I roll my neck, trying to release some of the tension, but find it all pent up in my head. “I don’t get this,” I say. “The bad guy’s gone. Is this the world’s shortest novel? Did we break it somehow?” As a person who just barely survived the night, of course, I’m glad. But as a reader? Honestly? Not impressed.
Grant shifts uncomfortably, staring out across the bay. “Unless it’s a false victory,” he murmurs.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning—ifI believed this, and that is a very bigif”—he gives me a sharp look, though it’s undermined by a shiver—“he wasn’tthebad guy.”
My stomach turns.Thebad guy, worse than Jack? I don’t even want to imagine who that would be.
I deflate like a sad balloon, my head in my hands. “I’m so confused,” I groan. “I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. How could we kill Jack if he was just a character in a book? Didhe just dissolve like the fucking Wicked Witch of the East the second he hit the water? How does any of this work?”
I stare at Grant, desperate for answers I know he can’t give me, and he stares back.
“West,” he finally mumbles.
“What?”
“West. The Wicked Witch of the West is the one with the water. East is the one with the …” He shrinks back from the force of my glare. “… With the shoes.”
“You must be in hot demand for trivia night,” I snipe.
“My team is undefeated,” he says. “Not that it matters.”
