Page 20 of Stay Scared

Red light spreads over the three masks.

The skull stands closest to the open panel, broad enough to make the exit feel narrower without actually blocking it. White paint forms an exaggerated jaw across the black shell, and one chipped tooth exposes gray material underneath. His right glove doesn’t match the left. The leather is worn soft, with a crooked repair near the thumb.

I recognize that stitch.

Cade used to mend everything instead of replacing it. Gloves, jackets, the torn pocket inside his work bag. He would sit at our kitchen table swearing at a needle while insisting buying another one was a waste. The memory arrives before the name does, and I look away.

The white mask waits beside the bolted chair. His hands hang loose at his sides, fingers long, nails cut square. I have seen those hands around a black coffee cup.

Halden Coffee serves hundreds of people, and plenty of them probably have neat hands and bad caffeine habits. Then he shifts his weight, and another memory surfaces: morning light in a front window, a dark reflection behind my laptop, a man who occupied the same table often enough that eventually I stopped noticing him.

The white mask tips toward the empty body-camera harness across my chest. My shirt has bunched beneath my jacket, and one strap presses uncomfortably across my bra. He can’t see any of it, but I resist the urge to straighten everything anyway.

The glowing mask stands directly ahead. “You already have a faster way out.”

Thin white light traces the black shell around his eyes and sealed mouth. His coat smells faintly of cold wool and the dust that clings to old buildings. He stays perfectly still while my muscles prepare for an instruction he hasn’t given.

“You gave me a phrase,” I say. “You haven’t proved it.”

“Then prove it.”

The light around his eyes holds steady.

The fourth mask disappeared through the service route after my camera feed died. One of these men owns the attraction, another apparently knows material I never published, and someone they didn’t plan for can interfere with their system.

I need to know which danger belongs to the show, so I walk toward the exit.

The skull moves into my path without grabbing me. He simply takes the route and waits.

“Open the door.”

The glowing mask answers. “Use the phrase.”

I shift left, and the skull follows. I feint right and reverse, but he gets there first. Leather flexes softly when his gloved hand opens near his thigh.

Winter gloves tossed beside an apartment door. Cold fingers sliding beneath my sweater after a graveyard shift. A hand catching my arm in a parking lot while I tried to leave an argument unfinished.

I step closer.

His glove closes around my forearm without squeezing. It doesn’t need to tighten. My body recognizes the pressure before my mind catches up, his thumb settling near the inside of my arm exactly where it used to when he wanted to stop me from walking away.

Gray eyes stare through the skull, and recognition finally catches up with my body. The name sits behind my teeth, but I use the phrase instead.

“Take off the masks.”

His hand opens immediately.

The white-masked man retreats from the chair and stops near the padded wall with both hands visible while the glowing mask reaches toward a hidden control. Red light disappears, replaced by hard white illumination that exposes seams in the padding and scuffs around the chair bolts. The lock retracts, and the wall panel opens onto the service corridor.

Nobody speaks while the skull raises both hands toward the fastenings behind his head. One clasp catches in his hair. He tears it loose and pulls the mask away.

Cade Mercer stands in front of me.

My foot shifts backward before I can stop it.

Two years have sharpened him. A pale scar cuts through one eyebrow, and his hair is shorter than it used to be. The softness I remember around his mouth is gone, but his eyes haven’t changed. Somehow, that hits harder than everything else.

My gaze drops to his mouth before I can stop it. I remember winter cracks in his lower lip, graveyard-shift stubble against my face, mornings when I could read his mood before he opened his eyes.