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At least, I had thought that wasn’t me. Until tonight, when I cried for the death of many, many things. I cried for Julius and the monstrous way he had been taken, way too soon. I cried for my mom, another person torn away from this world before it could ever feel “fair.” I cried for myself, my happiness, my future and my past. I cried for so much, all while I felt so little. A tiny pebble in a raging rapid, unable to change the trajectory of anything or anyone around me.
And Ryan, he didn’t budge an inch. He stood there like a lighthouse shining through a torrential downpour, his hand rubbing reassuring circles on my back and his warmth working as a salve to the visceral pain that clawed at my chest with every tear-filled breath.
A human lighthouse. It wasn’t only Ryan’s smile that had an unnatural shine to it. His soul held a brightness that seemed to radiate through him and into me, lighting up the darkest corners of my psyche, fighting away the lingering ghosts that haunted me. It was enough to calm me down and to make me realize how I should have probably kept this in until I was alone.
“Thank you,” I said, sniffling and rubbing at my nose as I separated from him. There weren’t only tear stains on his chest but also an almost perfect imprint of my face, colored in with the cheap drugstore makeup I had used today.
“And sorry for messing up your shirt.”
“It’s fine,” Ryan answered, a hand still on my back. “It’s all going to be fine.” I believed him for some reason. Genuinely and truly believed him.
Before we could say anything else, a police officer came over and interrupted us. He wanted to question everyone who had been at the bar, and seeing how I was still wearing a dress with half a face of makeup still on and looking like I had fully escaped from a drag queen asylum, it wasn’t exactly something I could avoid without painting “suspect” across my forehead. He took me over to a secluded corner of the street and got my statement. He asked me what felt like an endless number of questions, without any of the kindness or compassion Ryan had shown me. I kept throwing glances around the crowd, but at some point, I had lost sight of the reassuring smile. I had been constantly surrounded by people the entire night, being onstage during the suspected time of the murder, so it didn’t take long to clear me as a suspect.
I didn’t get home that night until four and didn’t fall asleep until the sun had started rising and birds started singing. My thoughts had whirled between Julius, the Unicorn, my stalker, and my drag career and—most surprisingly—always settled back on that human lighthouse with the thousand-watt smile and high-tide blue eyes.
I went to sleep with Ryan’s smile ghosting my lips and filling my dreams.
5
Ryan Diaz
My morning jog through the misty streets of my tiny neighborhood did nothing to clear my head. It felt like every step through the fog made my thoughts swirl even further out of control. Between the Pegasus, the stalker, and Elijah—it was a trifecta to keep me running past my usual stop point. I cut down a side street and ran into a woodsy park that had a few trails winding up into the White Mountains. I took one of those, the quiet and dewy wetness of the morning pulling me along. The sun hadn’t even fully found its seat in the sky yet, casting the red spruce trees in warm rays of orange and red, beams of light penetrating the thinning fog.
The Pegasus likely wasn’t Elijah’s stalker—I had determined that after a glance at the handwriting on the mirror and the handwriting on the note left with the first Pegasus death. The message on the mirror had also been explicitly directed at Elijah and had been a series of messages over time, while this new Pegasus had been making it clear that they had no intention of leaving trails or playing with their victims. It was definitely odd and fucked-up that both of them had been at the Queen’s Throne last night, but it wasn’t entirely out of this realm of possibility. Blue Creek wasn’t like LA or New York; there wasn’t an endless sea of bars and clubs to spend a night at, and it seemed pretty clear as to why both of them were at the bar.
One for Elijah and the other for Julius.
Figuring out who these two were would be the difficult part. One of them had cut the cameras and deleted anything that had been stored on the memory, so there wasn’t any surveillance footage we could count on, but we did have plenty of cell phone footage from around the stage and bar. I had an entire day’s worth of shaky videos that likely represented the drunken blur the person behind the camera was seeing with. I hoped I could catch something useful but wasn’t counting on anything to crack either case.
