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“Who heeded the siren call?” Dante asked. “Don’t bother lying. Dante knows all. He knows you went to that party to celebrate every hit the Bedlam Boys took on the way down, only to find out why the kings have ruled for so long. Arsenio, Cairo, Jacques, Legend, and Roan won’t drop at the hundredth hit. They sure as hell won’t go down on the first one.
“Now we’ve all got a decision to make and I’m here as I always will be, to help you make it. How much of what we saw in that video is true? Are Micah Ellis’s doe eyes and brown curls so irresistible, even his brother wanted a taste? Is Jonah Hayes a rapist? Is Gael Stoll a drug dealer? Does Bentley Levine jump scrawny, sobbing guys during the day and fuck their moms for cash at night?”
I gazed at the gathering gray clouds, falling into Dante’s world. I couldn’t say I was a regular listener. His show was scandals about people I barely interacted with. The crowning of Kings of a party I wouldn’t go to. The occasional songs I didn’t listen to. The common trivia I didn’t care about.
That said, the rare times I turned him on, I listened to the end. A power Dante and all the Dantes before him possessed. He held on and didn’t let go until his signature sign-off music released you from the spell.
“I will find out,” he whispered in my ear. “Everything there is to know about Jeremy, Micah, Gael, Bentley, and Jonah. All the secrets in their head. All the skeletons under their beds. It’s the battle between two evils, and we will unmask the lesser.
“Have no fear that anyone—Crow or Bedlam Boy—will stop me or interfere. The torch has passed on. My location changed. My holes in security plugged. If you want me, you’re going to have to fucking find me.” He laughed. “And you can take that as a challenge.
“Goodbye, Bedlamites, and... good luck.”
My expression melted—and icy surprise spread down my face to seep into my bones. The laugh in his voice changed and morphed into a high-pitched sound that was not his sign-off music.
It was a call I wouldn’t forget for as long as I lived.
A kookaburra laughing.
ARSENIO
The harsh whew, whew, whew expelled with each contraction of my abs, bringing me up to my knees and dropping me back to the floor. The sound filled my ears and spread throughout the gym, and still wasn’t as loud as Rainey standing in the doorway, her silent stare speaking volumes.
“Something I can do for you, de Souza?”
She rubbed her temples out of the corner of my eye, wincing. “Maybe I’m just enjoying the show.”
I chuckled. Rainey de Souza was an interesting specimen. Hard to pin down. Impossible to categorize. She took orders but not without a side of defiance and a large cup of sass. None of us could deny she enjoyed her punishments a little more than anticipated. She wanted to be here more than anyone should.
I sat up, hanging my arms over my knees. Sweat ran down to chill in the frigid air-conditioning. It was as if she trailed each one. Following their path collecting as wetness soaking my wifebeater. Counting the hairs they touched on the way. Peeling the layers only they reached underneath.
Maybe that’s what’s wrong with this otherworldly beauty who emerged from nothing and plunged our lives in a fog we wouldn’t escape? It’s how she looks into your soul like she can see everything, while her eyes hold nothing.
That must be it, because it certainly wasn’t Cavendish or the new information I learned about her in the last seventy-two hours. That man asked her to choose, and she did not back down from the fight. It may have looked as though Rainey did not have a choice. She and I knew better. She could’ve left Jennifer to her fate. She could’ve put Cavendish’s in the hands of the police.
But instead, she set him on fire, pierced Verlice’s heart with an arrow, and went to that farm the other night prepared to do it again.
I advanced on her, peering deep in those unblinking brown pools. They reflected me as I stroked her cheek.
“Perfection.”
“I don’t feel so perfect today,” she whispered.
“Why is that?”
“I’m seeing serial killers everywhere I go. I looked twice at everyone who passed me today with a cigarette between their lips. I jumped when my professor called on Jake, thinking for a second that he said Blake. And Dante,” she said. “At the end of the show I thought... I thought I heard...”
“What?” I pressed when she trailed off.
“I thought the laugh track was a kookaburra’s call.” She tipped her chin, resting on my fingers. “Who is Dante? Or who was he? It’s another guy now, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I confirmed. “His predecessor was a guy named Lawrence Clark. He left town a few days after Ruckus Royale.”
