She stepped off the porch. She took three, four, five steps out onto the gravel.
I held my breath, but nothing happened. Just the crunch of gravel as she stepped further into the darkness, towards the cars presumably. Harper, behind me, was whispering *oh my god please please please*. Guy was perfectly still at my shoulder.
Sarika took two more steps. The hulking shape came out of the tree line.
It did not hurry. It came at an angle, across the driveway, from the left, and I could see him the way I had not been able to see him in the dim of the bedroom. His coat hung open to the waist. His pants hung open below that, unfastened, the belt dangling, and his cock was out and half-hard and bouncing against his thigh as he walked. He had not put himself away after Wes. He had been standing in the trees like that for who knows how long, waiting. Sarika saw him and froze. She did not run. I thought that in the moment. She had time to run, but she didn't. She had maybe three seconds and she used them all up by standing still.
The shape was on her in those three seconds. It took her by the throat and the hair at the same time. She was lifted off her feet and then it turned her, carefully, like it was arranging her to better catch the light, and then the knife came up under her jaw from below and went through her mouth and out the top of her head and her entire body went soft with one spastic jerk.
He held her up for another second after she was dead. Her feet twitched once. Twice. He looked up toward the porch, directly at us, standing in the open doorway. His eyes behind the mask were wet and dark the way they had been upstairs and he was looking at me specifically, at me, again.
Then he flipped her limp body over his shoulder, still holding her by the throat, and stepped back into the tree line and they both were gone.
The door banged shut. While Harper and I had been frozen in stunned silence, Guy had slammed the door shut. His hand was still on the handle. He had moved past me to shut it and I hadn't even heard him move. He turned the deadbolt.
Sarika had been on my list. She had held the phone in her lap at parties and laughed at the edited clip of my sister. She had cried to me in my car about Wes cheating and I had sat with my hands on the wheel thinking about the machete in the basement and the girl across from me who deserved it. Sarika had been the ugliest one on my list because of that private cruelty, the way she could cry about her own pain and laugh at someone else's in the same week.
And now Sarika was gone. The accusation was dead in her mouth at the tree line. The slasher had done three pieces of my plan in thirty seconds. He had taken a body off my list, removed the only person who had figured out a true thing about me, and killed the story the survivors were about to tell.
My shoulders came down. My mouth, without asking me, pulled up at one corner. A smile, small and tight. There and gone.
I felt it happen a half-second after it had landed, and by the time I was pulling it back my eyes had already found Guy.
He was looking at my mouth. He had seen it.
He had been watching my face the whole time. When Sarika accused me. When Sarika ran. When Sarika died at the tree line. When my shoulders dropped and my mouth made that small shape. He had watched all of it, and now his face had stopped trying to hide the distrust. The Guy I had been dealing with for three hours had been curious, competent, helpful. The Guy looking at me now had all of that turned down and something colder turned up.
He did not say anything. I did not say anything. Harper was sobbing into her hands with her back against the wall. She was not paying attention to us at all. She had not caught the smile.
Guy and I stood six feet apart in the great room with a dead woman outside and a mess upstairs and the night not over yet, and we looked at each other, and both of us knew, at the same moment, that something between us had changed and would not change back.
He turned his head, then he went to check the latch on the windows. That had been his move all night when he was uncomfortable. Check the doors, check the windows.
I stood in the middle of the great room with the relief and the smile both wearing off at once, with what was left of my dignity wearing off along with them, and I thought, clearly, *he saw. And he's still here. And I am going to have to be in this house with him until the sun comes up, and he is smarter than Sarika was, and he is not going to run.*
*from Sinmoore Springs: Final Girls Come First. Out now on KU. Killer POV. Horror erotica. Predator-prey. No redemption arc.*
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