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Ryan held his arm up. I couldn’t see what was happening through the shadows, but Ryan was still standing. Crouched now. The other shadow, Billie, holding the knife out.
I didn’t think twice. My legs exploded into action, carrying me like a gold-medalist track star straight toward the studio door. I crashed through it, throwing it open just in time to see Billie cut the cord to his gaudy chandelier.
I fucking hated that thing.
My momentum carried me, and I used every ounce of it, pushing forward and smacking into Ryan’s back. We flew a couple of feet forward, directly out of the way of the falling chandelier. It hit the ground with a loud boom, sending shards of plastic and metal flying all around the room.
“I knew that shit wasn’t even real crystal,” I said, breathless, looking up at the monster who had made me scared of the dark all over again.
“Elijah?” they both said, shocked.
“Halleloo,” I said with a surprisingly solid grin. Adrenaline really was one hell of a drug.
Ryan and I got onto our feet. The knife in Billie’s hand glowed as if a spotlight were shining directly on it. I looked at Ryan’s arm, covered in blood, some of it dripping down from his elbow onto the floor.
“Jesus, baby, are you okay?”
He seemed shell-shocked. He shook his head, clicking back on, sharp blue eyes honing in on Billie. “I’m fine. You shouldn’t be here.”
“And if I weren’t, then you’d be dead,” I said, standing side by side with Ryan, the two of us staring down a shrinking Billie. He had a chance against one person, but two was pushing his luck, and he knew it. I knew we couldn’t underestimate the crafty queen, though. That bitch always had a surprise or two up her sleeve.
“Well, guess you pulled the lipstick with my name on it,” Billie said. “You’ve figured it out, Blue Divine. You did it.”
“Why?” I asked. “You were my friend. Billie, you were closer to me than my own biological family. Why?”
“Do you remember asking me about this?” Billie cut his sleeve with the knife, showing the bee tattoo he had gotten without telling me. “This embodies it all, Elijah. This tattoo right here. A bumblebee—the queen bee. Bumblebees worship their queens, living and dying by them. If one is born before the others, it will sting its unhatched rivals. Quite literally stabbing their own in the back, over and over again. Killing their competition.
“I admired that about them. And I found myself wanting to do the same with you. I created you, and I regretted it the moment I saw you onstage. I wasn’t the star anymore, the one who’d draw all the out-of-town crowds. I could barely fill a show.”
“So you stalked me out of jealousy?”
“No, that wasn’t it at all. At first, sure, I felt envious of you. But then I started to respect you, to see something else. Something no one else saw. You reminded me of my sister—a star of the family. She shone brighter than all the suns in the galaxy combined. My father killed her. Drunk out of his mind, he beat her, forever silencing her light.
“My mom was there. She ran right upstairs, pulled the gun out from the closet, and ended my father. The grief and shock made her turn the gun around on herself.
“In the span of fifteen minutes, everything I knew and loved in this world was gone. Taken. Just like that.” Billie snapped his fingers in the air, the sharp sound similar to a gunshot. I’d never heard this story before. He had told me that his family had been broken up by a tragedy but never elaborated past that, and the haunted look that always entered his eyes whenever he talked about it kept me from digging deeper.
…Holy fucking shit.
“And you reminded me so much of her, Elijah. In drag and out of drag. She was this grumpy little thing that never realized how easy it was for her to light up a room. She started realizing, in her last few days, she was even running for prom queen. Could have won it, if it weren’t—” A red kind of fury flashed across his face. “Anyways, at first, I made DollWorshipper6 as a little prank. Like an initiation kind of thing. But it sort of spiraled. I was having fun, and at the same time, your star was rising. I’d been bumped from my shows, my tips were drying up, you were blowing up on social media. I took DollWorshipper as a chance to get you to stop, maybe fix the mistake of creating you.
“And then you did stop… and I realized I wasn’t done.”
Ryan stepped forward. He didn’t seem to care at all about the massive slash across his arm. It made me light-headed even looking at it.
