“You’re the one with the gun.” Doubt needled me. Lonny’s warning rippled through my head. You can’t trust criminals or cops. You can never be sure whose side they’re on. I hadn’t called Oleksa. He wasn’t supposed to be here. I inched away from him on my elbows and heels.
“Where’s Reece?” he said.
“Where’s Lonny?” I fisted a handful of dry dirt like Mona and Butch had taught me, but Oleksa was too far and the wind wasn’t right. “He doesn’t know who you are, does he?”
Oleksa’s face screwed up with a confused expression I’d never seen him wear before. His spine straightened, his body stilled, and his eyes grew wide and alert. I heard the soft click as he flipped off the safety.
A gunshot pierced the silence and a jolt ripped through Oleksa.
I screamed and Oleksa dropped to his knees. His head connected with the stone bench as he collapsed facedown in the grass. I scrambled toward him, but a hand wrapped over my mouth and yanked me violently off my feet.
I choked on the bitter smell of latex, pungent and powdery, sticky against my lips. The rubber grabbed at my cheeks and I struggled to breathe, unable to hear my own screams.
I kicked out and thrashed wildly. Clawed at the arms around my neck, losing my footing as they dragged me out of the dirt. It shouldn’t have been so easy. He should have been stumbling. But he pulled me like a rag doll through the shadows, away from Oleksa and Jeremy, toward a gleaming stone mausoleum. Their still bodies grew smaller until they disappeared in the dark.
We stopped moving at a set of iron gates.
In the grass lay an empty leg brace. He turned my head with a painful jerk of my chin, drawing my attention past it. A fresh surge of terror shot through me.
I was too late.
Two bodies stretched across the ground before the gates of the stone crypt. Anh lay crumpled in the grass, her forearm marked in blue ink. Not with a number. There was no element on the table with the abbreviation L, so he’d used the letter instead. But Reece’s body lay beside her, the pale skin of his left forearm marked 74. Seventy-four, the atomic weight of Tungsten. The symbol for Tungsten was W.
Ne + Ar + Li + B + Os + W + L
Indelible ink fumes mixed with the smell of latex. I struggled, breath rushing in and out past the hand over my face. Twinkling lights sparkled around the edge of my consciousness.
“No one would hear you,” said TJ’s voice through the buzzing in my ears. “It won’t do you any good to scream.” His glove dropped from my mouth to my throat, and I sucked in a deep ragged breath.
The cool kiss of a gun’s muzzle pressed against my temple. I shut my eyes.
“Get inside,” he commanded.
I planted my feet. Once I stepped through the gate, it was all over. Butch’s lessons came back, a flash of a memory. Never let them take you without a fight. I made my body rigid, imagined my shoes anchored to the ground.
“Get the note,” he growled, not to me.
“I don’t want to,” came a tearful reply. “I can’t do this. Please don’t make me do this.”
The girl stepped toward me, until her face became clear. Emily Reinnert stood in front of me, fastening an envelope to my shirt with a safety pin. Her fingers trembled over my skin and I knew without a doubt I’d been right. She was terrified and remorseful. She didn’t want any part of this.
Her face was streaked with tears. “I’m sorry. No one was supposed to get hurt,” she said. “He said the joke under the bleachers was on Vince. That he only wanted to get back at Vince for kissing me. He said if I was sorry and I wanted him to take me back, I’d help. All I had to do was take a roofie and tell the police I didn’t know anything. It was supposed to be a prank. No one was supposed to get hurt. I’d get a few weeks off school and we’d get back together, it would be no big deal, right?” She choked on a hysterical laugh. “I didn’t know what he was really doing. I had no idea it had anything to do with you, or the scholarship, or anything. I swear. The police wouldn’t let me talk to anyone. My parents wouldn’t let me take calls or see anyone from school except TJ.” She shook her head. “No one told me about the others. When I read about them in the paper, I told him I didn’t want any part of this.”
“Shut up!”
Emily clutched her bruised arm to her side. “But then he told me I was already part of it. He said it was too late to change my mind, and if I didn’t keep quiet, he would kill me too.”
“Listen and do what I tell you!” he snapped. Emily cried into her sleeve and nodded tightly.
He held a blue lab marker in one hand, bit off the cap, and spit it onto the ground. He tossed the marker to Emily. “Mark her. Just like we talked about.” Emily’s hand was shaking as she drew up my sleeve. The point was wet and cold where she marked me with the letter L, upside down, as if I’d drawn it myself.
TJ jerked his chin toward Jeremy and Oleksa. “Now go get your car and bring it to the closest lot you can find. I’ve got to get those other two out of here. Leigh will take care of Whelan and Anh for us.”