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“And Hannah?”
“She was your friend. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist investigating. The closer the victims were to you, the closer you got to finding me. Our little game, Bryce. That’s what it was, wasn’t it?”
Hannah had barely been an acquaintance, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Peter had struck where he wanted to, and it had all boiled down to the same outcome; here, now, in the end. He’d wanted Bryce to find him out, to play his sinister game of cat and mouse — had probably expected her to praise him for it.
“I was leading up to the main event,” he continued. “The grand finale. Your producer was supposed to be next. Mikey, is it? And then to finish, Thea, and Morris’ bastard daughter. Two birds with one stone.”
“Andthenwhat?” Bryce asked. “Is it my turn? Are you going to kill me, too?”
“Your turn?” Peter’s brows lifted in surprise. Shaw slumped to the ground as he loosened his hold and stumbled forward, until he stood mere inches away. The knife remained clutched at his side, its tip pointed to the ground. “I thought you were a horror fan, Bryce. You should know you’re thefinal girl— and the final girlalwayssurvives. I did this foryou.Because I know how much you love it. You said so on the podcasts.”
She scoffed, though it came out more of a sob.
Sudden movement distracted Bryce, then, a moving shadow just behind Peter. She jerked her gaze back to him when she realized it was Thea, gesturing with her finger and mouthing something.Keep him talking. She was hunched over, extracting a loose plank of wood from the debris among the tracks, and Bryce understood. The idiot had his back turned to an avid horror fan. Rookie mistake.
“I should thank you, then, should I?” Bryce inched backwards, fighting to keep her eyes on his, baiting him to follow. It pulled him further away from Thea and Shaw, who seemed to be clawing up into a sitting position now.
“Exactly.” Peter seemed to soften, his eyes slipping to Bryce’s lips. “It was all for you, Bryce. You’re my final girl.”
It made her stomach churn to hear it, but Bryce pasted as believable a smile as she could muster on her lips. “I understand now.”
“I knew you would. I’ve been waiting for you to.”
If Peter hadn’t been gazing at Bryce with the gleaming, unadulterated infatuation she’d always been too blind to notice before, he might’ve noticed Thea stand up with the wood in her hands. He might’ve noticed her step closer, the stones scraping beneath her feet. He might have noticed her struggling to raise it above her head. He certainly noticed as she brought it down, directly onto his skull, sending him sprawling to his knees. Bryce didn’t want to waste the opportunity to strike a blow for herself, so she threw all her trembling weight into a final, rough punch across his face, leaving an angry red bruise.
Peter fell, limp and bloody, where he jerked spasmodically on the gravel once, twice, then didn’t move again.
“This isn’t the Nineties, Peter,” Thea said, dropping the wood and slapping her filthy hands together. “There can be more than one final girl.”
Relief gusted through Bryce, and she gathered Thea into her arms desperately.
“Are you okay?” Bryce cradled Thea’s jaw, her neck, any part of her she could, examining the blood congealed in her hair and the welt on her chin.
“I’m okay,” Thea confirmed, brushing Bryce’s tears away with the pad of her grubby thumb.
“And I’m okay, too, thanks,” Shaw grumbled faintly from the underbrush, flinching as she reached for her radio. Bryce swore at the state of her, all bruised and broken, and dragged Thea towards her so they could help. The radio crackled as she held down the call button, her face an unpromising, waxy shade of green. “This is Officer Shaw. I need urgent police and medical assistance down by the railway overpass behind Dina’s. Over.”
Another, male, voice rattled back across the line, but she seemed not to be listening anymore. Her eyes were glassy as she eyed Peter’s still body across the tracks. “The secret’s out, huh?”
“We already knew about Morris,” Thea admitted meekly. “We sort of thought you were the killer until half an hour ago… sorry.”
Shaw seemed not to have it in her to even be surprised. “I can admit I’d make a decent suspect. I changed my name because I didn’t want to share anything with that monster, though. It must have taken some digging for him to find me out.”
Bryce didn’t know what to say. She kept waiting for the next trauma, the next tragedy, the next death, like the part in every slasher movie where the killer woke for one last hurrah. But Peter remained splayed out on the tracks until the red and blue lights dappled through the treeline, and paramedics and police emerged across the shrub-invested banks.
Thea’s hands brushed Bryce’s as though asking if she was all right. She wasn’t, but she was at least better when she intertwined her fingers with Thea’s. Thea’s head fell to Bryce’s shoulder with exhaustion, and Bryce could only press one kiss into her blood-spattered hair before they were sucked into the chaotic aftermath — police reports, paramedic checks, trying to explain something that didn’t yet make sense to Bryce.
But it was over, she knew as her eyes flickered up to the wispy night sky. It was over.
* * *
Thea was still numb from everything that had happened. They’d taken her to the hospital for an X-ray and stitched up the wound still throbbing on the back of her head. Mikey had joined her, furious that he’d been too mesmerized by Audrey Hepburn to notice Thea and Bryce trying awfully hard to not get killed. He paced now, from bed to the window and back again, as though not sure it was really over.
It felt over to Thea, more so when Bryce peeked her head around the blue curtain. She’d taken care of Liv before meeting them here. What that entailed, Thea didn’t know. As for Shaw, she’d been carted off with the ambulance engines blaring almost immediately, and Thea had no idea when she’d next see her. Peter, too. She hoped in his case, the answer would be never, though she wasn’t ready yet to live with his death on her hands, self-defence or not.
“Is that orange juice?” Bryce’s still shaking fingers found the juicebox on Thea’s table and sucked on the straw.
Thea raised her eyebrow. “It’smyorange juice.I’mthe sick patient.”
