I jerk awake. My eyes fly open, and it takes me a second to remember where I am. I am at Shane’s house, and he’s lying in bed beside me, still breathing deeply. But I heard something. A scream. I’m sure of it.

I look down at my watch. It’s three in the morning.

“Shane.” I shake his bare shoulder until his eyes crack open. “I heard something.”

“Huh?” He rubs his eyes with the back of his hand. “What’s wrong?” “There was a—”

And then we hear it again. A bloodcurdling scream, except this time I can clearly make out a word being screamed:

“Brooke!”

Shane sits up straight in bed, suddenly as wide awake as I feel. He throws his legs over the side of the bed, and he jumps into his pair of baggy blue jeans. He throws a T-shirt over his head, while I’m struggling with my skinny jeans. He is still in his socks when he reaches for the bedroom door.

“Where are you going?” I ask anxiously.

His gaze darts down to the doorknob. “Somebody was screaming downstairs. I need to check it out.”

“Not without me.”

There is no way he is leaving me alone in this room. I button up my jeans and toss on my sweater.

“You should stay up here,” Shane says. “It might not be safe.” “I want to come.”

Shane opens his mouth to protest again, but the words are drowned out by another scream:

“Brooke!”

We get out of the room and run into Kayla and Tim at the top of the stairs. They both look like they’ve thrown on their clothes as hastily as we

did. I wonder what they’ve been doing in there. Hopefully, mostly sleeping. “You heard that?” Tim asks. Kayla is clinging to his arm.

Shane nods solemnly. We all look downstairs, and even from the second floor, we can see that the front door is wide open. Droplets of rain are dampening the carpet right inside the door.

“Chelsea,” I murmur.

It had to have been Chelsea who screamed. Because it wasn’t Kayla and it wasn’t me, so Chelsea is the only one left. But why would she call my name? Why wouldn’t she call for Brandon if something was wrong? Unless…

If Brandon did anything to hurt her, I’m going to kill him.

Shane starts down the stairs first, taking them two at a time. Tim goes next, and I’m third. Kayla hangs behind, a distant fourth. I don’t blame her. She’s not great friends with any of us, and if there’s trouble, she probably doesn’t want to get involved.

Shane reaches the front door first. He hangs onto the door frame, leaning out onto the small porch. Then he sees something that makes his eyes go wide, and he takes a step back.

And then I hear sobbing.

Tim gets out onto the porch second. He reacts much the same way Shane did. By this point, I am frantic to find out what’s going on. I nearly trip over my feet getting to the front door. And then when I get outside…

Oh. Oh God…

Chelsea is on her knees next to Brandon, who is lying on the damp porch on his back, his chest a mess of dark red blood. The same dark red material is dripping out of his mouth, and his eyes are cracked open, staring at nothing. Chelsea is holding his hand, sobbing uncontrollably as the rain pours down on them.

“What happened?” I manage.

“Oh, Brooke!” Chelsea scrambles to her feet and throws her arms around me. She clings to me, even though she’s getting blood and water all over my clothes. “I came downstairs because Brandon wasn’t in bed. I saw the door was open so I looked outside and…”

“Is he dead?” Kayla squeaks. She looks like she’s about to throw up.

Tim kneels beside the body. He places his fingers against Brandon’s neck, searching for a pulse. He shakes his head. “He’s gone.”

Chelsea dissolves into louder sobs. She’s still holding on to me, and I feel like I’m mostly keeping her upright. In another few seconds, the both of us are going to be on the floor.

“Get her into the house,” Shane tells me. “We’ll deal with what’s out here.”

Kayla and I help Chelsea back into the house and get her onto the sofa. She buries her face in her hands, unable to stop crying. I rub her back while Kayla reaches for her phone that she had abandoned on a coffee table when she found out there was no service. She looks down at the screen.

“Still no service,” she grunts. She looks up at the door and calls out, “Shane, you said there’s a landline, right? Where is it? We have to call the police.”

“It’s next to the bookcase!” he calls back.

Quick as a flash, Kayla goes over to the bookcase. She picks up a cordless phone. She pushes a button on the phone and presses it against her ear. She frowns, pulls the phone away from her ear, and presses another button.

“Shane!” Her voice has taken on a hysterical edge. “The phone isn’t working!”

A crack of thunder shakes the house, although it is softer than earlier in the evening.

“Shane!” Kayla screams.

After a few seconds, Shane comes into the house, slamming the screen door behind him. His face is slightly pink and his hair and shirt are damp. He strides over to where Kayla is standing with the cordless phone and grabs it out of her hand. Kayla watches him, wringing her hands together.

“It’s dead,” he declares. “Storm must have damaged the phone lines.”

Kayla’s eyes fly around the room. “So there’s no way to call the police?”

“No.”

She shakes her head. “Then I’m getting out of here. Chelsea, where are the keys to your car?”

Shane presses his lips together. “Kayla, will you calm down for a minute?”

Lightning flashes, illuminating Kayla’s small face, making her look almost demonic. “No, I will not calm down. Someone was just murdered in

this house, and now the power and the phone are out. I’m getting the hell out of here right now. If you don’t want to come, I’ll send a police car when I get back to town.”

Shane grimaces. “Kayla…”

Kayla gives him a look. “We need to leave, Shane. Why don’t you want us to leave?”

Kayla makes a good point. We don’t want to leave a crime scene, but we have to contact the police. And if the phone lines are down, we have to drive to the station. My parents are going to absolutely demolish me when they find out what I’ve been doing tonight, but I can’t think about that. Someone is dead.

And there’s a very real chance that somebody in this room is responsible.

Chelsea rises to her feet, her eyes still moist. “Kayla is right. We have to get out of here. I don’t know who did this…” She raises her eyes to look at Shane, and then at Tim, who is lingering in the doorway. “But we are obviously in some kind of danger. We need to get out of here.”

I concur.

Chelsea and Kayla put on their completely inadequate shoes and coats, and march out of the house, ignoring the rain still falling heavily. I slide into my own sneakers, but they are no match for what feels like an icy river forming outside the front door. My sneakers fill with mud and freezing cold water. I can’t wait to get home and away from this horror show.

But just before we can pile into Chelsea’s Beetle and get back home, she stops short. I hear the sharp inhale of her breath a second before I realize what she’s looking at.

All four of her tires have been slashed. “What the hell?” she gasps.

We go around the side of her car to Shane’s Chevy, and the situation is the same. Tires slashed to smithereens.

“What the hell?” Shane is furious now as he examines the damage to his tires. “Who would do this?”

Kayla is stepping backward, hugging her chest as she shakes her head. “Somebody doesn’t want us to be able to get out of here.”

“Kayla…” Tim reaches for her arm. “Look, we’ll figure this out—”

“No!” Kayla jerks away from him, her eyes suddenly wild. “One of you killed him. One of you did this, and now you don’t want the rest of us to get away.”

“Kayla, that’s crazy,” Chelsea says. “Is it?” Kayla blinks back tears.

“Yes!” Chelsea swipes a strand of her soaking wet black hair with bleached tips from her face. “Tim and Shane are not murderers. They’re not.”

“Maybe it was you,” Kayla shoots back. “Me?”

“Sure, why not? After all, everybody knows Brandon was cheating on you. Maybe the two of you had it out, and it didn’t end well for him.”

Chelsea’s lips form a startled O. “You bitch…”

A tear escapes Kayla’s right eye. She wipes it away with the back of her hand, smearing mascara across her cheek. Her eyes dart between the four of us, her breaths coming faster with each second. “I’m getting out of here—car or not.”

“Kayla, don’t—” Shane starts to say.

But it’s too late. Kayla has turned around, and she’s running in the other direction down the poorly paved path to the farmhouse, the rainwater reaching up above her ankles like she’s wading through a shallow stream. Presumably, she’d thought she wouldn’t be outdoors much during this sleepover, so she’s wearing a pair of chunky heels with what had once been a stylish leather trench coat before the rain destroyed it. My coat and sneakers aren’t much better, but I’m still tempted to follow her.

She makes it barely twenty feet. I don’t know if her foot catches on something, but she takes a quick nosedive into the muddy water on the ground. Tim swears loudly, then races out after her.

“Look at Prince Charming go,” Chelsea mutters under her breath. I shoot her a look. “What? You think he shouldn’t help her?”

Chelsea doesn’t answer—she just takes a ragged breath. Like Kayla, her makeup has run all over her face, making her appear almost maniacal. I’m glad I only wore lipstick tonight, which largely rubbed off when Shane and I were kissing.

Kayla looks like she’s not going to let Tim help her at first, but she finally accepts his hand and allows him to pull her back to her feet. She

casts a regretful glance at the road behind her, which is becoming more flooded with every passing second, and then follows Tim back to the farmhouse. It’s hard to tell if her face is damp from tears or the rain.

Shane is hovering at the front door and gives Kayla a once-over as she steps back onto the porch. “You okay?”

She glares at him but doesn’t say a word.

“Let’s go inside,” Tim says. “At least it’ll be dry.”

With that declaration, I can’t help but notice how soaked he got while rescuing Kayla. We’re all soaked, actually. We look like a bunch of drowned rats. Kayla got the worst of it though, when she slipped in the mud. Her dark hair is plastered to her skull and her trench coat looks like it will need to be peeled off her skin. There are flecks of mud on her face, intermingled with her ruined makeup.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Kayla hisses at him. “Trap me in the house with no way out…”

“Hey…” Tim raises his hands. “I’m just saying… we don’t want to get sick out here…”

“Sick!” She casts a horrified look at Brandon’s body, still lying on the porch. “Someone is dead! And one of you did it! You had to have…”

“Kayla…” Tim takes a careful step toward her. “You need to calm down…”

“I’m not going to calm down!” She takes a step back, almost stumbling over her own heels. “I don’t trust any of you. So until the power comes back on, leave me the hell alone.”

With those words, Kayla runs back into the house. Her footsteps disappear up the stairs and the sound of one of the bedroom doors slamming echoes through the house.