Teen Killers Club Read online

  He clicks off the call and looks at me, his eyes flat.

  And just like that, I’m just another in the body count for the Teen Killers Club.

  * * *

  Is this a nightmare? My eyes open from a hazy half sleep. I could swear I hear Erik moving around under the bed. But it’s just a dream. I sit up, fighting to catch my breath, when I hear banging at the window. Nobody? No.

  My eyes open, I wake up again. That was the nightmare, this is real. But who is that standing at the end of the bed? Is it the Director? His hand is extended, my switch is back in my neck somehow, it’s about to go off—

  I wake up again, blankets pulled over my head. They’re so heavy, I can’t pull them off, they’re suffocating me.

  With a strangled, soundless scream I lurch out of the bed, awake at last, and throw myself out into the first light of dawn, gulping the open air of the parking lot. I stumble to the car, the same car where Erik kissed me not even a day before, curl up in the front seat, and sob, a pathetic wheezing sob, because my voice is gone.

  A tap on the glass beside my head. I turn on the engine and roll the window down.

  “Come on,” Javier says gruffly, face thick with sleep. “I’ll drive you to the bus station, get in the passenger seat.”

  “My stuff?” I croak.

  “I packed it all up.” Javier moves to the back of the car and throws open the trunk so he can toss my stuff inside. The driver’s side door dings in measured alarm as I get out, wobble around the back, and slide into the passenger seat.

  “Camp can’t track you anymore,” Javier says once we’ve pulled out of the parking lot, “But if someone sees you and recognizes you, and camp finds out you’re still alive—”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  “They’ll debrief me. I might slip up. So you need to go as far and as fast as you can. Mexico maybe.”

  “And you?” I ask dully. “And Jada? And Troy, and Nobody, and Dennis? What’s going to happen to you?”

  “We’ll see you in seventeen years or so.”

  “Javier,” I wheeze. “It’s a lie, you don’t get retired, Angel told me—”

  “Don’t,” he cuts me off, his voice so sharp it surprises me, and his bloodshot gaze cuts from the road to meet mine. “Please. Don’t.”

  “You don’t want the truth?!”

  “If the truth is I’m doomed, then no,” Javier says quietly.

  The drive to the bus depot is quiet. We spot a police car in the lot, so Javier parks on the street and carries my backpack and bedroll for me as I get a ticket on the first bus headed out of town, departing in twenty minutes.

  “You’re not doomed,” I promise. “I’m going to find a way to get you guys out of camp.”

  He looks so exasperated for a moment, then he says slowly and with great intention: “That’s not what Erik wanted. He did what he did because you deserve to be free.”

  My hands cover my face and his arms go around me, he holds me so tight. His head pulls back, and his mouth is so close. Just twenty-four hours ago it would have been natural to kiss him. Now it’s unthinkable. And then his arms slide away, a tide receding from a hostile shore.

  The bus’s lights go on, the doors sigh open, and I move toward them, when Javier’s hand catches my elbow.

  “See?” he says, and in a last moment of contact, his finger drags on the inside of my arm, the blank spot where the dandelion used to be. “It was fun while it lasted.” Javier smiles sadly. “Bye, gorgeous.”

  And he walks away without looking back.

  * * *

  I sit in the very back of the bus. The seats begin to fill, but it’s like everyone knows to leave me alone. Maybe it’s because my face is swollen from crying. Or because I smell like smoke. Or because I’m about to cry again, watching Javier’s car slip into the flow of traffic.

  When he gets to camp, will everyone be circled round the fire with s’mores, ready to embrace him? Or will they have all changed from the people I knew? Are they scarred from their encounters with the hardened assassins who graduated camp? And if they aren’t, how long will it take? Another target, another two targets? How long before everything human in them is chipped away, kill by kill, until they’re all just like Dog Mask?

  No. I won’t stand for it. I will go back to Ledmonton. I have the safety deposit box key Erik found. I will figure out where it fits. I will clear my name, and then expose camp for what it is. I will end the program, I will save my friends, and that is what all of this will have been for.

  But when I consider what has been lost: his mind, his voice, his smile. It’s not enough. Nothing will ever be enough again.

  I knit my hands over my mouth and curl over with a sob as someone sinks heavily into the seat next to me.

  “Well, well, well,” he croaks.

  I whip around as though I’ve been slapped.

  He’s singed, his eyes riddled with red veins making them the greenest they’ve ever been. His hair must have burnt because he never would have cut it that short otherwise.

  “Didn’t even need three weeks.” The slow, wolfish grin lights up his face as he leans, wincing a little, back in his seat. “All it took was one night thinking I was gone.”

  Erik. My Erik. Alive and well.

  “Admit it, Signal.” Erik smiles. “You love me.”

  I could kill him.

  Author Biography

  Lily Sparks grew up hiking, writing, and counseling summer camp in Norwalk, Connecticut. She went to UCLA for an art degree and ended up spending all her time writing. She’s developed TV projects for MTV, FX, and Amazon and written for the CW’s Reign and Paramount’s Heathers. She now lives in Southern California with her husband Ryan, baby daughter Lovey Jane, and terrier Wolsey.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Lily Sparks

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-229-4

  ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-230-0

  Cover illustration by Adams Carvalho

  Printed in the United States.

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

  34 West 27th St., 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10001

  First Edition: November 2020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1