Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,20

heavy overnight pad I put on for extra protection. Not good.

“There was clearly a fight here,” Oscar says, letting Hael take the phone from his hand. “Let’s see if we can’t keep following the scent.”

Finding Cal’s phone was easy, especially with a trail of blood that led right from the front door to the fourth floor. There are bodies in here, too. And only three blocks away from an investigation. Red and blue lights paint the exterior of Prescott High in horrid color, and there’s yellow police tape everywhere.

To get over here without an escort, we had to drop our cars at a local diner, slip inside, and then crawl out the bathroom window. I’m sure our copper friends know we’re gone already, but what can they do?

“He clearly fought his way out,” I say, pausing beside a dead man with a ruined throat. There’s a bloodied board nearby, jagged splinters of wood at one end. Kneeling down beside the body, I mimic what Cal did at the Snow Day after-party, pushing up the man’s shirt until I find that slash of red that makes up his gang tattoo.

I’ve never really had the time or opportunity to study it before, but now that I’m looking at it, the beam of a flashlight falling across the dead man’s waxy skin, I see that it’s the silhouette of a clown face. Bowler hat tilted to one side, round nose, a single X for the left eye, and its mouth a twisted rictus.

Well, now, that explains where the Charter Crew got their mask idea from.

I stand up and shake out my hands, following Hael outside to the sidewalk. There’s a bit of blood immediately in front of the door, but none leading in either direction.

If Cal really did get out of here on his own two feet, he was careful to cover his tracks.

“Let’s search every building in a five-block radius,” Vic grunts out, glancing in the direction of the high school. “If he’s here, we’ll find him.”

With my stomach clenching violently, and my head spinning from blood loss—yeah, you really can get dizzy and anemic from a heavy period—I start with the apartment complex at the end of the block. We stick together, just in case. It’s much more likely that a fed will stumble on us here than a member of the GMP, but you can’t be too careful.

I never thought they’d attack our school the way they did, so public, so blatant.

The GMP is not afraid. Not of the authorities, and not of us.

We sweep the apartment building twice before doing another walkthrough of the one beside it, where we found Cal’s phone.

“Six dead crew members,” Vic murmurs unhappily, his mouth turned down in a dark frown. “Prescott royalty.” He bends down and closes the eyes of a dead boy that I feel I recognize from last year’s graduating class. For a moment, Victor stays right where he is, and even though he says nothing, does nothing, I can read his every emotion in the tense set of his shoulders.

He feels like he failed somehow.

And he’s furious about it.

Maxwell Barrasso is going to bleed.

I turn away, leaving Vic to have his moment. I do that because I understand how he works. And I understand him because I’m exactly the same. Deep down, we really are just two halves of the same person.

“Let’s keep going,” I suggest, leading the boys outside and down the street. We check several abandoned lots, scouting outbuildings and piles of debris, rusted cars on cinder blocks, dumpsters, anywhere that Callum could’ve crawled into in order to hide.

It’s not until we come on a foreclosed home with a sagging front porch and a roof covered in moss that I spot a broken basement window. It could be something, more than likely it’s nothing. We’ve seen dozens of broken windows already, most of them destroyed months or even years prior.

My heartrate picks up as I duck down and peer inside.

A pool of congealed blood sits in the middle of the floor, the only color in an otherwise gray and empty space.

“Over here!” I shout, my voice cracking as I climb in and stumble briefly, putting my hand on the wall and closing my eyes against a wave of dizziness. This is easily the worst period I’ve ever had in my fucking life. The universe really is throwing everything she’s got at me, isn’t she?

When I hear Hael climbing in behind me, I open my eyes and straighten up.