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The plastic is cool and smooth against my face, making me twitch my nose every few minutes to feel it on my skin. I’m sure I look like a rabbit, but at eight pm on Halloween Night, who’s going to see me in the dark? Especially behind the mask.

I push the sleeves of my borrowed hoodie up my arms to my elbows, then pull them back down again as I watch the house. Across the yard, where the trees creep in on that side, I know Adrien sits and watches too. Ansel and Ronan are somewhere between us, though I haven’t seen movement from any of them in the last fifteen minutes.

My phone vibrates in the pocket of the zip-up hoodie, and I fish it out, careful to keep the brightness to a minimum and turning the screen up towards my mask with my hand cupped over the top of it.

They’ve really had too much to drink.

Adrien’s observation is plain, but I can feel the scorn in it. He’s not worried about this. And why should he be? There are three men inside, judging by what we’ve seen so far, and somehow they don’t know–or care–about the absence of their friends.

Not that they can exactly call the cops, but the fact that Ronan stealing the phones of the dead men and using them to text the group had actually worked, is pathetic. Especially since Elaine hasn’t said a word, even when someone had directed an invitation her way this morning.

It makes me wonder just how much these people actually care about each other. I’d thought they were some tight-knit group, sort of like Ansel, Ronan, and me.

And now, begrudgingly, Adrien. While I won’t admit it out loud, I would probably jump into the ocean to drag him out. Maybe.

Not happily, though.

Out of all of us, he’s the least likely to need it, if I’m being honest with myself. He’d probably be the one pulling up with some stolen yacht to take us all home in style, and then refuse to tell us where he got it, or who he killed for the privilege.

And I sort of like that, I’ve realized.

The front door opens and I stiffen, keeping completely still in the trees. The man staggers out, guffawing over something someone says, and as the light spills out onto the porch of the old farmhouse, I watch as he takes a bag of trash and lobs it towards the dumpster.

Only to promptly miss.

But if he notices, he doesn’t care. He stumbles back into the house, closing the door too hard behind him, and I wince at the way the screen trembles on its old hinges. The men are disrespectful of everything they touch, and somehow that upsets me just as much as the killing.

I shift restlessly in the dirt, and shoot off another text, trying to hide that particular fact.

Can we go now?

Short. Simple.

Yet Ansel is quick to call me on it.

So impatient. One might think you actually enjoy killing people lol.

I stare at his message and half-expect a surge of guilt to strike. But it doesn’t. I just mentally shrug and like his message before dropping my phone to my knee again. Maybe I do enjoy it, when it’s deserved.

But I wouldn’t have enjoyed killing Elaine. Not that I can really say why, though an unhappy feeling curls in my chest at the struggle of letting her go or killing her instead. She’d killed Ben. The stupid, headstrong man who’d run right into the fence and gotten stuck on it until she’d graciously separated him from his fingers.

She’d set him up like a living display in the roller rink and used him as a prop, before going on to watch while the men killed Miranda. Killed others.

But not me.

She’d offered me a way out, though I didn’t take it. But deep down, so deep that I have trouble admitting it to myself, I know that if I’d had no choice at all, I would’ve done it.

I would’ve killed Lily in order to stay alive.

That should horrify me.

But instead, I turn my attention back to the house on Farmer’s Road, with its shingled roof that’s seen better days and the overgrown yard. Grass sprouts up in raggedly clumps while other patches have succumbed to the October chill completely. No one has mowed this yard in at least a month, and the grass reflects the lack of care.

I wonder how they found this place. I wonder why they chose somewhere so derelict and half-forgotten, instead of something that suits their tax bracket a little better.

Shifting again, I turn the phone back towards my mask.

Is that a yes? I type, ignoring the sarcasm in Ansel’s words. I can go? I feel like a dog dragging at a leash, desperate to chase the squirrel waving its tail in my direction.