“I guess I just didn’t fit in,” she said. “I finished my degree online after that.”
“Online, huh.” I shook my head. “You seem like the type that would have fun at college, you know?”
“I guess not,” she said.
“What happened? I mean, I’m curious now.”
“Do you really care?” she asked, sounding annoyed.
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “I’m curious about you.”
She let out a breath through her nose then stared out the window. “I had this roommate,” she said. “Her name was Veronica. Everyone called her Ronnie, and it was the most obnoxious thing, but whatever. We lived in this old dorm together, and we got along fine at first, but then… things changed.”
“How?” I asked.
“I told her about my dad.”
I let out a slow whistle. “Damn, girl,” I said. “That was a bad call.”
“She was nice about it at first, mostly just interested, you know? Asked questions and stuff. But then she told other people, and I started getting some nasty comments, people started treating me different, and I just… I couldn’t handle it anymore. Eventually, one of my professors asked me if it was true, she actually asked if she could interview me for some fucking book she was writing.” Clair gave a bitter, angry laugh, shook her head. “I told her to go to hell and never went back to her class.”
“Fuck that bitch,” I said.
“Don’t call women bitches,” she said, rolling her eyes. “But yeah, pretty much. I failed her class, got a couple Cs in other classes, barely squeaked by that semester. And I sort of realized that I’d never fit in with the kids at Penn, you know? All those rich kids and their rich, comfortable families. I know you have this idea of me as spoiled and wealthy or whatever, but my dad didn’t leave us all that much money, and my mom was a single mother for most of my life. She worked a ton, and I got a job the second I was old enough. We never had extra, never had savings, always just got by. And I guess I decided I didn’t want to just skate by and be miserable in college, so I dropped out.”
I was quiet for a minute as I reached Twenty-Eighth Street. The lights of Temple were far behind us and we were deep into North Philly territory. The houses were broken down and the packs of college students were missing, replaced by men sitting out on stoops or working the corner.
I pulled down Twenty-Ninth and parked at the end of the block.
“I can see why you’d do that,” I said. “I mean, shit, I might’ve dropped out if that happened to me, too.”
“I don’t know,” she said with a little smile. “I feel like you might’ve just killed them all.”
I grinned at her. “Maybe not my first choice, but yeah, that would’ve been an option.”
She laughed but sounded angry as she belted it out. I killed the engine, turned off the lights. The street was mostly empty, just a few sporadic cars parked along the curb. There were no lights on, no streetlights, no lights outside of the houses. It was a totally different part of the city where darkness reigned supreme and the world had forgotten all about it.
“This is it?” she asked.
“They’re in a house down there,” I said, pointing ahead.
“Where are the others?”
“Parked along the block,” I said. “Steven and a few other guys are scattered around. We didn’t want to all come together, make it too obvious.”
“Right. Because if you’re going in to kill people, you need to be subtle about it.”
“More or less.” I leaned forward, squinting into the gloom. Our target house was midway down the block with a white door and windows with bars out front. It looked abandoned, but I knew it wasn’t empty, since there was a single light on upstairs in one of the front bedrooms.
“You don’t have to go in there, you know,” she said, her voice soft, almost a whisper. “You could stay in here with me. Let the others go in.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “And what would we do here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll tell you stories from back when I was a college girl.”
I smiled a little bit, tilted my head. “That’s tempting. But you know what really gets me?”
“What?” she asked.
“I’m going to go in, and I’m going to kill those men. And I’m doing it for you, because if I don’t then one of them might find you and do something so much worse than whatever you’re picturing.”
She stared at me, eyes narrow and hard, and I watched her bite her lip.
“Don’t say you’re doing this for me,” she said.
“I am doing it for you,” I said. “To keep you safe, little princess. You might not appreciate that, might not care, hell, maybe you hate me for it, maybe you hate killing so much that all you can see is some sick monster. But I’m going in there, and I’m killing for you.”