Damn. I’m on fire. I should have gotten into crime fiction a long time ago. Even Grant looks impressed for approximately half a second.
The Terror opens his mouth to speak. My pulse thrums like a drumroll for the imminent breakthrough. And then, as if he’s intentionally fraying my last nerve, he erupts into whinnying titters. “Could be anyone. Could be you. Could be me!”
“Yeah, I really don’t think it’s you,” Grant says.
“Quite right, String Bean.” He salutes Grant, then casts his moony gaze my way. “And so, so wrong. You see two options, and I see three.”
And then, without so much as a crack in his delirious grin,he moves—but not toward me, and not toward Grant. He darts to the right instead, straight toward the firepit, and plunges his gasoline-soaked arm into the embers. He goes up instantly.
“NO!”I lurch forward, and Grant moves into action at the same time—but he runs past the man on fire and all but tackles me before I even make it three steps.
“Don’t,” he says in my ear, holding me back with his arms banded firmly around me. “You’ll go up too.”
Adrenaline surges in my veins, urging me to fight him off, but I slowly realize he’s right. My clothes reek of gasoline. There’s nothing I can do about the man burning himself alive unless I want to join him en flambé.
My knees give out, and Grant stumbles down with me, both of us landing roughly on the cobbled stone. The air is thick with heat and the stink of singeing flesh.
And over the crackle of flames, screaming laughter.
“If at first you don’t succeed,” the Terror shrieks as he burns, “die, die again!”
It’s a paralyzing spectacle. I can’t even seem to blink. We sit where we fell, crumpled like paper, Grant’s arms still crushing around me because I’m not sure he can move them. When I remember how to breathe, it comes out as a long, exhaled “Fuuuuuuuck.”
If there was any remaining chance of this story resembling the old Anna Matthews fare, this scene just shot it in the back of the head.
I think about Anna now. How blissfully ignorant she must be. For all I know, she’s writing this on her couch in a ravioli-stained sweatshirt, shoveling M&M’s into her mouth by the handful, completely unaware that her fiction is our reality.
But that’s not how it feels. It feels like she’s swiveling in a high-backed leather chair, stroking a fluffy white cat and shrieking out cruel peals of laughter while she invents new horrors for us. Like she’s torturing us, and she knows it, and she loves it.
That’s the thought that stays with me as I watch the Terror burn, the thought that I suspect will haunt me for a long time:
Sometimes, the real villain of the story is the author.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
G R A N D P R I Z E.
The short, precise sound of Lesley’s marker dotting the period at the end of the word comes as a relief after the drawn-out squeaking that formed his dramatically large letters.
“Now,” he says, knocking a knuckle against the whiteboard. “Remind me what else the Terror spilled before he turned himself into a human tiki torch?”
I lean my head back against the sofa, grounding myself into the burgundy velvet as I try to remember.
“Something about money,” I say. “Something about, um—”
“Blood,” Grant says for me.
“And beingin it to win it. Being the best,” I finish, sitting up. “He said there can only be one.”
“Hmm.” Lesley taps the marker against his chin in thought. It’s uncapped. He realizes this too late, andtsks as he wipes away a smear of red ink. “He sounds like a reality show contestant.”
“Seriously,” says Lissa, who’s slicing up cake on the coffee table. “Did he also tell you he didn’t come here to make friends?”
“I think it was implied,” Grant says.
I thought Lesley and Lissa would be upset about missing theinterrogation, but they’ve been in high spirits since we caught them up. It turns out information of any kind, no matter the means of acquisition, is cause for celebration.
I myself am finding it slightly harder to look on the bright side, but I’m trying. “At least he and his classist bullshit won’t be terrorizing London anymore.”
