Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys Book 5) Read online

  “This the blond kid we’re talking about?”

  That voice … One of our girls said that when she heard Maxwell’s second, Mason Miller, speak for the first time, that she felt like she’d already lost. She said that when she got home, she took a scalding shower and cried as if she’d been assaulted.

  And Prescott girls … they don’t say that sort of shit lightly.

  This just has to be Mason Miller.

  I aim for his head. Even if I were to die here today—I won’t—then killing Mason might just make it all worth it. He’s one of Maxwell’s secret weapons. To remove the threat of the GMP from Springfield, we’ll need both Maxwell and Mason.

  Just as my finger tenses on the trigger, Mason’s eyes flick to me. I can’t really see his face. Shit, it’s bathed in shadow and obscured by dust motes that dance through the early morning air the way I used to, effortless, weightless …

  He drops down just before I pull the trigger, so I don’t bother taking the shot. I need this bullet. It’s my very last.

  Mason rises to his feet in a movement so fluid that I wonder if he, too, was ever a dancer. He moves across the dirty ground, littered with used condoms and needles, and kicks the door in. Bits of wood splinter and dig into my skin, but I barely notice the pain, blue-painted fingers curling around the edges of the opening as I drag myself out and throw my body into Mason.

  Maintaining close contact with any one of the men will help reduce my chances of being shot. But grappling with Mason is not the same as grappling with Russ. He manages to get a hand free, hitting up against the bottom of my chin and causing me to bite my tongue. Fresh, hot blood fills my mouth as he throws a punch that likely would’ve burst my eyeball if it’d made contact. Instead, I manage to avoid it and his fist flies into the wall.

  Four against one. Odds that normally wouldn’t scare me. But Mason is different. Russ is dangerous. The other two men are just add-ons at this point, but even they’re a step-up from the Charter Crew’s best and brightest.

  An elbow hits me in the chest before I register that Mason’s changed his tactics. He’s trying to drive me toward a broken window this time, likely in the direction of additional GMP members. I turn and grapple the edge of the staircase, hauling my body up through a break in the spindles and finding my feet even as Russ fires several times in my direction.

  Drywall dust fills the air, clouding the few lit spots in the unending darkness of the building. There are so many like this in Prescott. Havoc knows them all. Even before I trip over the first body, I know we lost a few members of our crew in here today.

  There’s nothing I can do to help the dead, so I don’t stop. Instead I continue up the stairs until I hit the metal door that leads to the roof, shoving through it with both palms and surveying the space around me.

  About ten years ago, the city started changing its zoning laws to allow buildings to be built closer and closer together. The apartment next door is practically within touching distance. Neither of them is particularly tall—about five stories—but a fall from here would kill me.

  I tilt my head to one side, trying to calculate the odds.

  The sound of pursuit behind me makes the decision relatively easy. I’d rather risk falling to my death than end up in Mason’s grasp. I’d be lucky to simply die at his hands. Chances are, if he can, he’ll take me alive and try to torture Havoc’s secrets out of me.

  Closing my eyes for a moment, I pull in a deep breath, remembering that day in the studio when I danced for Bernadette like a beast performing some sort of primal mating ritual. I open my eyes again, lips twisting up in a smile. That’s what I did, didn’t I? Danced. Begged. Pleaded for her to let me touch her the way I’ve always dreamed of.

  That’s what drives me when I take a few steps back, brace myself for the jump, and take off for the edge of the roof. Even though it kills my knees and makes me wish I were hopped up on painkillers, I flex my muscles and leap, landing on the gravel surface of the neighboring roof.

  Agony screams through me, rippling from the carefully rebuilt knobs of my knees, but I ignore it. I’m used to pain. So used to it, in fact, that when I see it in others—Bernadette’s face, for example—I find it beautiful.

  Breathtaking, really.

  I don’t bother rising to my feet, crawling over to a nearby hole and lowering myself into the ruined space until I’m standing on a nest of pine needles and wet drywall. It smells like must and piss in here—typical Prescott—but there’s something else, a strange clove and smoke smell that gives me just enough warning to avoid getting my head blown off.

  Ducking into an open door, I put myself behind a brick wall, my mind assessing what I just saw.

  Mason was there in the dark, in the opposite building. There’s a broken window on both my side and his. Likely, right now, he’s climbing between the two spaces. That’s what I’d be doing, after all. If he’s anticipated my movements to a T, then we clearly calculate our next moves in a similar matter.

  I heft the handgun from my hoodie pocket, eyes traveling the length of the room, sweeping across the ceiling. I won’t be caught unawares from above, not the way I surprised those men in the hallway. I reach up and adjust the skeleton mask on my face. Like everything else with Havoc, we create our own traditions. Skeleton faces and wolf howls and a girl that’s too wild for one boy to possess on his own.

  Crawling across the floor, I allow myself to peek around the corner.

  I don’t see Mason anywhere.

  Taking my phone from my pocket, I try to send a text but pause when I hear movement from the next room. Russ appears on the staircase and, from somewhere deeper in the building, I hear the movements of several people. Maybe even a dozen.

  I grind my teeth and decide to finish my text.

  Mare’s nest.

  A perfect complement to Bernie’s text from earlier. The rest of our group chat is filled with things like where are you? and two men in the gym, stay safe. I manage to send that off, but that’s it. Mason comes up out of a trapdoor about two feet from me. That’s when I realize that we’re in what amounts to an attic; he’s used the access point to surprise me.

  My booted foot kicks out and hits him square in the face, but it doesn’t faze the man at all. Instead, he grabs onto my ankle, yanks, and uses his bodyweight to let us both fall. We crash into the old wood floors, and then through them, to the next level.

  I’m choking and struggling for air, fingers grasping at my side as I feel this rush of white-hot heat and pain. Shit, shit, shit. Something stabbed me when I fell. Not Mason’s knife, but a piece of wood that’s speared me through the shoulder in a way that one might stake a fucking vampire.

  “There we go, so you’re human after all,” Mason murmurs, kicking my gun from my hand. I’m not sure where my phone is anymore. Doesn’t matter. I just need to get up and move. I need to run. That’s not easy for me to admit, that I’m in over my head. I should not have chased Russ the way I did. Too cocky, Cal. Don’t get too cocky.

  “I was once human,” I agree, and then I’m tearing the piece of wood from the wound and plunging it into Mason’s thigh. He barely lets out a hiss of pain before he’s hitting me across the face and knocking me on my back. I land in a pool of wet blood that splatters across the nearby walls like just another wave of graffiti. HAVOC is scrawled in black paint just above it. Marking our territory. Staking our claim.

  “Still human, kid,” Mason tells me, and then he reaches inside his jacket for a pistol. The sound of another explosion outside buys me about a tenth of a second. But it’s enough for me to turn and retrieve my own gun, rolling onto my back and firing, not at Mason, but at Russ as he rounds the corner with an assault rifle at the ready.

  I manage to peg him right between the eyes as Mason turns back to me, frowning so hard in the dark, damp space, I swear I can smell it on him. Surprise. He shoots me in the arm, and a gasp escapes my lips, one that reveals the lie I refuse to admit myself: you are not invulnerable, Callum Park
.

  And I’m not. But I wish so fucking desperately that I were that I almost believe it sometimes.

  The floor beneath me shifts dangerously as Mason takes a few steps in my direction.

  “I think I’ll take you home with me,” he says, his voice a total deadpan. But his mouth, what little of it I can see in the light that cuts through the boarded-up window, is vicious. Ruthless. Penetrating. Mason lifts the gun to shoot me in the leg, but I slam my boot down on the floor and it collapses.

  So does the floor beneath it.

  I end up gagging on dust and debris as I scramble out of the pile and down the staircase, stumbling and dripping blood everywhere. On my way toward the front door, I pick up a loose board, swing around the corner with it and hit one of the nameless lackeys in the face with it so hard that I’m wondering if I might’ve broken his neck.

  Regardless, he drops to the floor and I keep going.

  When the next man gets in my way, I drop low and throw myself into his belly, keeping him from shooting me as he lands on his back with a gasp. The end of the board in my hand is ragged, bits of splinters and jagged shards of wood at one end. This is what I ram into the soft, white skin of his throat. Once, twice, three times. He’s gurgling now, but I don’t have the time or leisure to make sure he’s dead.

  Instead, I’m out the door and blinking into the weak morning sunlight, even as I notice the red and blue wash of police lights in the distance. The cops are at the school. The thought brings me some amount of relief. SWAT will come. The VGTF will be there. Reporters.

  Bernadette will be safe.

  I stumble a little, knowing that I haven’t got the energy to make it back to the school. So what do I do? Where do I go? First, I tear my hoodie over my head, ignoring the screaming pain in my arm and shoulder, utilizing the adrenaline. I press the fabric against the stab wound and keep my bloodied arm tucked against my belly, just to make sure that I don’t drip.

  The last thing I need right now is to leave a trail that Mason can follow.

  Using the brick wall of the building for leverage, I make it as far as I can before I’m forced to duck into the backyard of a foreclosed home.

  The world spins around me as I fall to my knees. But I don’t stop crawling. Not until I’m falling through a ground-level window that leads into an empty basement. I hit the floor shoulder first and blood splatters everywhere.

  Bernadette, I’m coming.

  I make that promise, even as my eyes close, and I spiral into the endless black.

  Bernadette Blackbird

  I swear to fuck, I am channeling my lover Callum Park as I’m dragged from the building in cuffs, blood raining down my face as I laugh like a demon ripped straight from the gates of hell. You’re hysterical, Bernie, calm down. But all I want are my boys, just my boys.

  “Bernadette,” Sara breathes as I’m escorted out the front doors and down the steps. I just bashed in James Barrasso’s head with a fucking doorstop. That’s how it was always supposed to end for that sister-fucker, I think. Killed with a trinket from a National Park. That’s how he deserved to go. Motherfucker gave me the creeps.

  I let out a piercing howl as the cops manhandle me into the back of an ambulance, one of them climbing in to ride with me and the fidgety looking paramedics. Victor howls right back, and a series of howls echoes around the school. I see my husband, but only briefly, as he’s violently shoved into the back of an ambulance in a way that I’m almost certain isn’t textbook.

  We are not the bad guys here.

  We are Havoc.

  We defended our school. We fought for our city. We are not the ones who should be in handcuffs.

  Vic’s eyes lock on mine, two obsidian pools that seem to hold the secrets of the universe. The crown is still perched on my bloody head, placed there by his inked hands, a symbol of the unbreakable bond we have. Victor and I, we are impossibly connected, an infinity sign with no beginning and no end.

  The doors to his ambulance are slammed shut, and a gasp escapes me at the lack of eye contact. I feel like I’ve been backhanded. My stomach cramps, and I lick my lips to hold back a groan of pain. I won’t show it, not in front of fucking pigs, not in front of Sara Young or Detective Constantine.

  Where are my other boys? I need to find my boys.

  The adrenaline wears off like a shock of ice water to the face, and I begin to struggle.

  “Get these fucking cuffs off of me!” I shout, twisting my body against the force of the metal. “Where are the rest of my boys?” I whip my head around to find Sara Young watching me. Constantine is beside her, but he just curses and scowls when I look their way. “I’m not under arrest here. I didn’t do anything wrong. Let me go.” I pause and wet my lips. I’m feeling saucy today. Actually, when I woke up this morning, I put on a shade of lipstick that reminds me of the brain matter I saw when I shot that GMP motherfucker in the head in the cafeteria.

  It’s called Unhappy Goodbyes. Who names a lipstick color that? It’s psychotic.

  “What happened, Bernadette?” Sara asks, touching the shoulder of the female officer in the ambulance with me. The woman leaves and lets Sara take her place. All I can do is look into her eyes and smile.

  “They came for us,” I say as the crown shifts forward on my head. There’s blood all the fuck over me, but most of it isn’t mine. I adjust myself and the cuffs on my wrists clink. Just over Sara’s shoulder, I can see the front of Prescott High.

  At times, it’s felt like a prison. During others, a sanctuary.

  Maybe, like me, if the school were to have wings, one would be an angel wing, the other the leathery black of a demon. Duality. Life exists in duality.

  People are swarming out the front door in droves now, like a flock of songbirds, chased from their home by a hawk. I see Ms. Keating halfway down the block with a gaggle of students. She’s bleeding from her already injured arm, but her chin is up. What do you want to bet that this bitch did something heroic today?

  That’s just who she is, I guess, Ms. Breonna Keating.

  “Where are my boys?” I repeat to Sara, my eyes briefly meeting the Vice Principal’s inky brown ones. The ambulance doors are slammed shut, and I let out a small snarl of frustration. Police Girl is staring at me like a riddle she’s determined to fucking decipher.

  “Who are you?” she asks me after a moment, like she either doesn’t understand the depths of my rage or just doesn’t care. I turn to look at her, my body shaking as the pain really starts to set in. It’s everywhere. I had my ass handed to me today, didn’t I?

  “The Queen of Havoc,” I tell her, and then I lean back against the wall and close my eyes. Where are you, boys? I wonder as the ambulance jostles down the road. Where the fuck are you?

  If one of them is gone, so help this universe.

  I will rend the fabric of reality to taste vengeance.

  I hope Maxwell Barrasso likes his son delivered with a concave head and no eyes.

  Because I am just getting motherfucking started.

  “Tell me that they’re alive,” I repeat for what’s likely the hundredth fucking time, lifting a hand up and rubbing it across my mouth. I’m used to seeing the bright waxy smear of lipstick on my pale skin. Instead, I’m almost too clean. Scrubbed raw and smelling of powdery soap.

  But I had to clean up, didn’t I? After all that blood …

  Sara Young stares at me from across the surface of her countertop. After the cops took pictures of me dressed in copper-scented crimson, and collected my clothes for evidence, I was allowed to come back here to shower.

  “You owe me that much, at least,” I say, my tongue scraping across the inside of my mouth like sandpaper. Sara is staring at me with a fresh set of eyes as if she, too, made a snap judgement. As if she, too, underestimated me.

  She won’t make that mistake again, unfortunately.

  “You know,” she begins, adjusting her position against the opposite counter and dropping her chin to her chest. Her eyes are closed, bu
t I have no doubt that her ears are attuned to my every movement. “I thought I had you all figured out, Bernadette.” Sara looks up suddenly, and her doe-brown eyes don’t look so soft anymore. “You were sad, I could see it in your eyes. That much, I knew for sure.”

  “Just tell me if my fucking boys are still alive,” I snap back, wanting to dig my fingers into my scalp until my skin bleeds. But only so that I keep them away from her. I want to grab Sara and shake her right now; she knows the suspense is killing me.

  Six hours, four minutes, and thirty-two seconds ago, a man shot Stacey Langford in the head, and I ended up spilling more blood at Prescott High than I’ve ever spilled in my life. The police took my phone, and I haven’t been able to get access to a laptop. Shit, I’m so desperate right now that I’d march my ass down to the corner where all the hookers hang out and use the very last payphone in all the city of Springfield. It belongs to Prescott, of course, and it’s used more often for paid fucks than phone calls.

  Right now, I’d gladly press that filthy receiver to my ear if that’s what it’d take to hear the voices of my boys. Victor is okay, obviously, but I haven’t seen him since they put us in separate ambulances and drove us away from the school.

  The last thing I saw before the paramedics closed the doors was his face, drawn but determined.

  I pick the crown up that Victor gave me and hold it in two hands, staring down at it with a frown taking over my mouth. I don’t know why I’m here, at Sara Young’s house, instead of the station. Or Aaron’s place. Because I’m either under arrest or … I’m not.

  But of all the things they took from me, for some reason, they let me keep this goddamn crown.

  I look back up again, but Sara’s focus hasn’t wavered. She’s boring into me with eyes like swords, sharpened and ready for justice.