Deadly

“Iris?” Emily cried out. “So she’s . . . okay?”

“She will be,” Fuji said. “But it was a close call.”

“Wait.” There was a gap in Aria’s brain. “What about . . . Ali? Did you find her?”

Byron and Ella glanced at each other. Fuji set her mouth in a line. “Ali wasn’t there, Aria.”

Aria struggled to prop herself up on the pillows. Her head throbbed. “Yes, she was. We all saw her. You said there were people watching us at the house. They must have heard her voice.”

“Honey,” Ella said gently. “You’re just confused.”

“No, it’s true,” Spencer croaked. “She tried to kill us alongside Nick. They did this together.”

“She shot me,” Emily said. Aria watched as she touched her head. There was no wound. “At least I thought she did,” Emily said, after a moment.

Fuji sighed. “Girls, Nick drugged you with a dangerous mixture of toxins. You saw Alison because that was who you feared you’d see—and because her picture was all over those walls. Nick built a shrine to her. He was obsessed over her death, and he was trying to get revenge.”

“Nick and Alison were boyfriend and girlfriend,” Melissa Hastings, who was sitting by Spencer’s side, piped up. “He came after you because his girlfriend was killed. He knew Tabitha Clark—they were friends from the hospital as well—and clearly got her to impersonate Alison to scare you girls. And that’s where it all started.”

“But Iris said she hadn’t seen Tripp—Nick—in years,” Emily protested. “She just led me on a wild-goose chase to find his house.”

“People lie,” Fuji said. “And Iris isn’t exactly a healthy girl.”

Aria stared at her, blinking hard. “So what about that video from Jamaica? The one of Tabitha?”

Fuji shifted her weight. “A second video came in the same night you girls snuck out, proving your innocence. It’s more footage from the night Tabitha was murdered, and it shows one person acting alone, beating the girl to death—Nick. Our forensic and digital experts are certain it’s the real one. The other is a fake.”

A shock wave went through Aria. “Who sent that video?”

Fuji shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Aria looked at the others, and they seemed just as stunned. “What if Ali sent it?” Emily cried. “Don’t you see? She had it in her back pocket all along. She sent it to frame Nick when she knew they were caught!”

“And what about your theory of two people tying Noel up?” Aria asked. “If it wasn’t Ali helping Nick, who was it?”

“It could have been anyone,” Fuji said. “Nick had other friends. It’s possible he lied and said Noel pissed him off, or that he was doing this as a prank.”

Aria shut her eyes and thought of the night she, Noel, and the others had tried to trap Ali at the library. A blond girl had served as a decoy, clearly Nick’s helper. What if whoever was aiding in his crazy rampage wasn’t Ali at all?

But no. They’d seen her. Talked to her. Aria was sure of it.

Fuji stuck her hands in her pockets. “Let it go, girls. I know you wanted closure, but you really didn’t see Alison in there. Our experts are combing the basement, making sure, but I’m positive we’ll find no trace of her. She’s dead—and has been for a long, long time. Honestly. It’s better to just accept it and move on.” She looked around at all of them. “Just get some rest, okay? You’re going to have to answer a lot of questions from reporters soon enough.”

And then she walked out of the room and shut the door. Aria glanced at her best friends. Everyone stared at her blankly. But it wasn’t like they could talk about any of this now—not with all their family around. Of course everyone would think they’d hallucinated Ali, too. Maybe they should let it go, Aria wondered. Maybe this really was the end.

The door swung open again, and Aria turned her head, worried it might be a nosy reporter wanting to ask questions. But Noel stepped through instead. As soon as he saw Aria, his face crumpled. He ran to her bedside. Byron and Ella moved apart to let him get close.

“H-hey,” he said, trembling.

“Hey,” Aria said. All at once, the dream rushed back to her. Sinking underwater and finding Noel nowhere. Never getting to touch him again. She reached out and squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back. And then he leaned forward so that his face was close to hers. At first, Aria thought he was going to kiss her—and she wanted him to.

He moved toward her ear instead. “You saw her, didn’t you?” he whispered.

Aria’s eyes widened. She nodded, then glanced toward the door, where Fuji had disappeared. “But no one believes us.”

“I believe you. I’ll always believe you.”

He drew back, and Aria stared at him, half in shock, half grateful.

Thank you, she mouthed, her eyes full of tears.

But she wanted to tell Noel to forget about Ali. She wanted everyone to forget about her. Her mind went to a dark, terrible place. We won’t find a trace of her, Fuji had said. All at once, Aria knew they wouldn’t. No fingerprints on the gun she was holding. No blood on the floor. No long, blond hairs on the carpet. Not because Ali hadn’t been there.

Because Ali was smarter than all of them.

A nurse poked her head into the room and frowned at all of the guests. “Okay, visitors, everyone out,” she demanded in a no-nonsense voice. “These girls need their rest.”

Noel patted Aria’s hand. “I’ll be right outside,” he said. Aria nodded, then watched as everyone else trailed out, too. The nurse dimmed their lights, and for a moment, the room was silent. Then Hanna reached for her remote and turned on the TV that hung from the ceiling. Serial Killer Taken into Custody, blared a headline on CNN. Of course it was all over the news.

The camera showed the outside of the old farmhouse. A cop shoved Nick into the backseat, his hands pinned behind his back. Ambulances whirled in the background. Aria wondered if she’d been inside one of them, unconscious.

“I hate him,” Spencer said quietly, when a mug shot of Nick popped up.

Aria nodded, saying nothing. He totally deserved this. But he was only half the problem. If only the cops had caught Ali, too.

The police car rolled away on the screen, but the cameras remained on the police activity on the farmhouse for a moment. It was crawling with police officers, forensic teams, and dogs. Aria listened hard over the sounds of sirens for that telltale high-pitched giggle, anything that would prove Ali was still here. But there was nothing. Of course there wasn’t.

“What now?” she asked, when the news cut to commercial.

Spencer sighed. “It’s hard to know. We lost everything. But now maybe we can do anything.”

Anything. They stared at one another, absorbing the possibilities.

Hanna looked down at her phone, which was still tucked in her pocket. “I keep expecting this to go off any second.”

“With a text,” Spencer whispered.

Aria stared at her phone, too, but no texts came. They wouldn’t, of course. Ali wasn’t dumb enough to send one right then.

Aria looked at her friends nervously. “Do you think we’ll ever hear from her again?”

Hanna shook her head, a look of determination on her face. “No. It’s done.”

“Definitely,” Spencer agreed.

But Aria knew they didn’t quite believe it. They might not hear anything from Ali for a while—maybe a long while. But she wasn’t gone from their lives forever. She was still out there . . . and they were still alive . . . and that meant her job wasn’t done. Knowing her, she’d only stop when she got what she wanted. She’d only stop when they were dead.

It was just a question of when.

ALI, INTERRUPTED

Alison ran and ran until her muscles ached and her lungs burned. The more she ran, the less she thought, and the less she thought, the less she cared. And by the time she was where she needed to go, she was resolved in her decision. This was the only solution. She’d saved herself.

She walked up to the place she’d set up weeks before without Nick knowing, the place that was all her own. She pulled the keys out of a secret pocket sewn into her jeans and unlocked the door, striding down the dark hall and sinking into the freshly made bed without even glancing at the pile of mail she’d left there the last time she’d come in, all addressed to Maxine Preptwill, her new alias. It was always a name she’d found funny, sort of an anagram of Nick Maxwell and also the name she’d used with Noel for their secret communiqués. For a long time she’d thought about what sort of person Maxine would be. A quiet girl who kept to herself. A friendly face around the neighborhood, a standout at the community college she would eventually enroll in with the remaining cash from Nick’s trust—she’d tucked away small amounts every time she came here, building up a nest egg. She’d use it to get her teeth fixed, too. Her hair properly cut. Plastic surgery for the burns. She’d become beautiful and irresistible again. She needed to put someone new under her spell.

She lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, her mind working over the day’s events. She poked at the Nick wound, but she felt nothing. Well, good. It was better to feel nothing. No regrets. No entanglements. She was free.

She thought about turning on the television—she’d jerry-rigged the antenna with aluminum foil so she could at least get the news. But she wasn’t sure if she was ready to see the carnage yet. Man Arrested for Clark Murder. Pretty Little Liars Finally Tell the Truth. And there would be Nick’s mug shot, his hollowed eyes, his dazed expression. He was the smartest guy Ali knew, but he still wouldn’t know what had hit him.

Okay, okay, if she really thought about it, it wasn’t what she’d wanted. She hated that those bitches were free. And she hated that she had been the one to turn Nick in. But she knew what might have come next if she hadn’t. As soon as she heard those sirens, she’d started to panic. She’d imagined the cops finding him . . . and then her.

Well, she couldn’t have that.

And so she’d fled. The cops had found Nick, still unconscious on the ground, Ali long gone. He’d probably told them she’d put him up to everything—which was pretty much the truth. And if Ali didn’t have solid proof to stop them, the cops would come looking for her. Luckily, she had the very thing to seal his fate.

That video. Nick never knew she’d taken it. But that was what you needed to do to survive in this world. You needed tricks up your sleeve. You needed to keep secrets and release them at the perfect moment.

Still, when Ali shut her eyes, Nick swam into her thoughts. The first time they’d met at The Preserve during group, Nick throwing a wadded-up piece of paper to get Ali to talk. The first time he’d ever shown her that secret attic at The Preserve that only the cool patients knew about—she’d written the name everyone but Nick knew her as, Courtney, in big bubble letters on the wall. The way he’d listened to her when she’d explained the horrible story about the switch. How he’d vowed to help her get revenge.