"S-Sera?" She can't quite believe it. She needed Rachel's blood and here, in front of her, is Rachel's blood inside of her biological mom. Later, she will wonder if Sera appeared magically because she needed it, or if the message in the dream was sent because whoever sent it knew Sera had returned to Arcadia Bay, but for now she asks, dumbfounded, "What the hell are you doing here?"
"I wanted to see you, Chloe," Sera says. "I… just found out."
"How? Where?"
"In LA. I saw her on a box of cereal."
"Are you cereal?" Max Caulfield asks her camera in Chloe's truck, rhetorically.
"So I got on the bus and came up," Sera continues. "Went to see James first, but that was a waste of… wait a minute, why do you have her bracelet?"
"Calm yourself," Frank Bowers says to Chloe Price in the junkyard. "It was a gift."
The flashbacks Sera is setting off alone would have been enough to make her dizzy. Throw in the manner of Sera's sudden reappearance after 3 years, the fact that the supposedly magical bracelet was given to Rachel by Sera at birth, the early hour and the lack of sleep, and Chloe finds it quite challenging to stay upright and process the data.
What did she ask?
"I… found it," she stammers. What does she tell her? Does she need to come up with a plausible lie? How much crazy can Sera handle? How much does she know?
"Found it where?"
"In the woods…"
"And you just kept it? You didn't take it to the police?"
"Fuck the police," Chloe says automatically.
"Fuck the police?" Sera echoes. "There could be… DNA on that! There could be scent! They could have brought dogs! When did you find it? Where? Chloe! What the hell were you thinking?"
Sera is getting progressively more agitated, while Chloe is getting progressively more uncomfortable and disoriented. Sera's tirade seems to answer the question about how much crazy she can handle, but is she right? What if it was as simple as calling the cops to the abandoned hut and bringing dogs to pick up Rachel's trail from the bracelet? And all the other shit and supernatural nonsense and running around all over the place was just psychotic garbage and waste of time? And Rachel is buried in the woods a hundred feet from where she found the bracelet? Murdered by Tommy Hill who's either a liar or a psycho, and who's in the wind now? And all of the dreams and flashbacks are just her losing her mind from drugs and guilt and have nothing to do with Rachel at all? Did she make shit up and forced it to fit the fairy tale narrative?
It all seems so devastatingly simple and rational that she can't even force a "No fucking way" out.
Cedar Street begins to shimmer at the edges.
But what about somebody trying to murder them? Somebody just drugged them and parked them on the train tracks like an hour ago, remember? That wasn't Tommy Hill.
OK, it wasn't Tommy. It was another psycho. Or a group of psychos. So what?
So Tommy is a psycho, and Chloe is a psycho, and there's another bunch of psychos drugging and murdering people for no reason and they're all running circles around each other in Arcadia Bay, huh?
I mean, it's a strange little town, what do you want me to say?
No.
She shakes her head, squeezes her eyes shut, opens them.
"It's not that simple," she says.
"What?" Sera asks. "What are you saying?"
Now that Chloe had a few seconds to examine her, she sees that the three years have not been kind to Sera. Her face is lined and sort of grayish in color, almost matching the hood of her sweatshirt. Her lips are cracked. There is a red… wound of some kind on her neck. The woman is not looking that hot. Which doesn't make the conversation any easier.
"DNA and dogs aren't going to find Rachel, Sera," Chloe says. "She's not… here. Look, it's hard to explain… Impossible… to explain, but Occam's razor doesn't cut it here. Things aren't… normal in Arcadia Bay."
A flicker of something - recognition? - passes over Sera's sickly features and is extinguished.
"Chloe Price, what are you talking about?"
Chloe starts to explain, groans, paces, starts again.
"I know it sounds crazy… But… here's the thing… You just got here. You weren't here with Steph and me, looking for Rachel for a week. You haven't seen what we've seen. Felt... what we felt. So it's going to be impossible for you to understand me when I say the shit we have to deal with here is… supernatural. But that's what it is."
The flicker is back, and there is a visible struggle on Sera's face, which stretches the silence into awkward territory. Chloe pulls out her pack of Rorschachs, opens it and offers it to Sera. Sera looks at her, looks down, and pulls out a cigarette. She lights it after several tries with a nearly empty, clear plastic lighter, which she then offers to Chloe. Chloe lights up with her own lighter. Sera puts hers in her pocket.
"I felt it, you know," Sera says, after a long drag. She's looking past Chloe at her house, grimacing. "Back then. Three years ago. Doesn't mean it's true or that you're not out of your mind, but I did. With that fire, and the dreams, and the whole thing with that psycho… There was this feeling... But I thought I was just jonesing. And now I felt it again, as soon as I got in, and again I thought it was the jonesing, and coming back here again, and fear for Rachel, but you're saying this is real, huh? You think it's all real?"
Chloe shrugs.
"Pretty much."
"And Rachel?"
"Rachel has been taken… We think... through a portal. And we've been trying to find a way to bring her back."
"Through a portal to where?"
"Another reality? A parallel universe? I don't know. But I know she didn't run away. And I know she's not dead. Not buried in the woods somewhere."
Sera looks at her, but instead of asking how does she know that, she asks, "Who was it that took her? Spirits?"
Chloe shrugs again, sighs.
"Yeah."
Sera laughs mirthlessly, smoke slithering out of her hood like curving white horns.
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Why would they take her?"
"Beats the hell out of me."
"What did you two do? Did you destroy an altar in the woods? Did you mess with an Ouija board? What?"
"Nothing that I know."
"Do you take drugs?"
"Huh?"
"Does… Rachel?"
"Just… weed… mostly." And an occasional bottle of Frank's experimental pills.
"Yeah," Sera exhales smoke. "That's how that starts."
Fuck, not the drug lecture, Chloe thinks with dread, but it never comes.
Instead, Sera says, "You know, I got the natives all over my mother's side of the family. Mount Shasta. You may have heard. That bracelet came from there, actually. Was supposed be a protective thing, for all the good that did. So I'm no stranger to these spirit stories and people disappearing stories, but just like the bracelet is just a bracelet, the stories are just stories, Chloe."
Chloe shakes her head, turns away, "They're not. Not here."
"And I'm pretty sure this bracelet protected me more than once. Maybe if Rachel didn't lose it, she wouldn't be gone right now…"
"Chloe, we need to take that bracelet to the police and tell them where you found it."
Of course, she wasn't listening. She can't accept this.
"No, Sera. It's a waste of time."
"No. What you're doing is wasting time on these crazy stories about spirits and portals!"
"They maybe crazy, but here, they are real."
"I wish I could drag you to the police station physically. Three years ago, maybe I could, but I know I can't now. So I'm going to go to them by myself and tell them about you and that bracelet."
Fuck.
"Look, let's make a deal."
"What deal?" Sera asks, frowning up at the sky.
"I need to take a blood oath for Rachel."
Sera's head snaps towards Chloe.
"What…"
"Don't ask me to explain it. You won't understand it anyway. Hell, I don't understand it. But to do it, I need Rachel's blood, which, since she's not here, your blood is the next best thing."
"Blood? You're joking."
"It's just a tiny cut on your finger. A drop of your blood. You help us with that, and give us a day, and if we don't find Rachel by then, I'll go with you to the cops and we do it your way. Deal?"
"Who's us?"
"Our friend Steph is here from California, helping me look for Rachel. She used to go to Blackwell with us."
"And she's in on this spirit craziness too?"
Well, not on the blood oath bit yet…
"She is, and she's a lot more rational than me, but even she came around, because of what we've seen here this week."
Sera crushes the cigarette with her boot, squints at Chloe, sighs.
"OK, why don't you give me another cigarette and tell me more about the spirits."
"Fine, but not here. Let's get Steph and get out, before I have to explain shit to mother or step Sergeant."
Before Chloe has a chance to dial her number, Steph's sleepy face appears in the window. She has a note in her hand.
"Chloe! Are you running off by yourself again?" She hisses.
"No, no. I'm through with that life. I was just about to call you. Climb down."
Steph gives her a skeptical look, yawns and climbs down.
"Does it have to be this early?"
She notices Sera and eyes her as though not sure if she's supposed to be someone Chloe knows or just a passerby who stopped when she saw a young woman climb out of a house second floor window.
"Steph Gingrich," Chloe announces with a flourish. "Sera Gearhardt. Rachel's… uh biological mom."
Steph goggles.
"Rachel's who… what?"
Even Sera winces.
"Chloe, what the hell?"
"I don't know. Get it over with now so I don't have to explain things ten times later. Sera's like you. In from California to help find Rachel. Now lets get the hell out of here before the Price-Madsen monster rises."
"Where are we going?" Steph asks, still goggle-eyed, as they pile into the cabin. "Wait, so Rachel's mom..."
"To the lighthouse for now."
As Chloe makes a U-turn in the street she glances at the house and sees David in a tank top in the second floor window. Her heart skips a beat.
A random flashback comes and goes: Max Caulfield reading a graffiti on the wall of the Blackwell swimming pool:
I knew you would fucking do this.
"Why the lighthouse?" Steph asks, dispelling it.
"So you believe in all this supernatural nonsense, too?" Sera asks at the same time.
"It's safe," Chloe says.
"Which… nonsense?" Steph asks.
"Spirits kidnapping Rachel."
"Well, we… don't know that… but I have seen some things I can't explain."
"Yeah? Like what?"
"Like… the lighthouse beam stopping right on us and then pointing at something as if to guide us there."
Sera scoffs.
"The operator decided to mess around with you."
"Yeah," Chloe says, "except we were in the middle of nowhere 5 miles away. Not to mention, there hasn't been an operator there in like 50 years. It just automatically spins."
"A glitch then."
"Right on us. In the dark. On top of a random hill. Yeah, OK."
"What then? A spirit stopped the beam?"
"Yes. To help us. Also, Steph got possessed in the middle of those woods."
"Also to help you?"
"No. That was… the other guys."
"We know it sounds… strange," Steph says.
"It doesn't sound strange. It sounds insane. Or like you're on drugs…"
"Well… You had to be there," says Steph.
Well... you're not wrong, thinks Chloe.
They drive on, telling Sera about the hut and the dreams and the train and the cave and the backpack in the junkyard, and all the other weird shit, none of which sounds to Chloe that impressive as they list it, and she sees that Sera is not impressed. If anything, she seems to be making a mental notes to mention the backpack to the cops as well, when she inevitably goes to them.
In the middle of this, a phone rings.
They fall silent and stare at each other in the gap between the first and second rings, not sure whose phone it is. It rings again. It's Steph's. She pulls it out, looks at the screen with a confused expression, then lifts it to her ear.
"Hello?"
"Yeah, the screen said… Long time, Dana."
"Mrrow! Looking good, Rache," Dana Ward purrs three years earlier in the Drama Lab.
There is a literal flash, and now Dana is in her room at the dorms, talking to Max Caulfield.
"Just because they're in the Vortex Club, doesn't mean they're BFFs," she says.
Two separate flashbacks, Chloe thinks, confused, as she phases back in. One from the past, the other from the psycho future. That's weird.
"No, you didn't," Steph says meanwhile. "Although it is barely seven o'clock."
"Oh yeah? Who told you?"
"Yeah, I'm here to help Chloe look for Rachel."
"Where we are?" Steph repeats, looking at Chloe. Instinctively, Chloe shakes her head.
"We're in the car," Steph says. "Why? Where are you?"
"Oh yeah? I was wondering why you sounded like that."
"OK, see you there in ten or so."
She hangs up.
"What was that?" Chloe asks.
"Dana Ward. You remember Dana."
"Yeah, I remember Dana. What does she want, and why did you say yes?"
"She wanted to meet."
"She called you at seven in the morning, out of the blue, because she wanted to meet?"
"Makes me think it's important."
"Makes me think it's some kind of a trap. You know Dana is in the club, right?"
"The Vortex Club?"
"No, the Young Christian Beavers, Steph. Yes, the Vortex Club. How did she know you were even in town?"
"She said Juliet mentioned seeing me."
"You can't get out now, Dana!" Juliet Watson tells Dana Ward through the door which she, apparently, locked from the outside and which somehow cannot be opened from inside the room. "So tell me the truth or rot in there!"
Chloe doesn't like any of it. The unsolicited phone call. The cryptic request to meet. Even these flashbacks. Especially since Dana is in the Vortex club and Rachel suspected the Vortex club of doing occult shit before she disappeared, and since Steph and Chloe got drugged at the dorm, full of members of the Vortex Club, and almost murdered the night before. Despite Chloe dismissing the idea of a bunch of elitist Blackwell birds being involved in something truly supernatural, it's too soon and too weird and too suspicious. It seems crazy still, but fuck maybe it was them. And maybe this is the move she's been looking for. Maybe this is how they show their hand and Chloe learns something about what was done to Rachel and how to undo it. As long as she manages to stay alive.
"Where is the meeting?" she asks.
"She said she's out jogging. She'll be at the beach in a few minutes."
The beach is public enough, but at 7 am? Might be a bit deserted. On the other hand, there's nowhere to hide for hundreds of yards, and Frank should be nearby, assuming he would help her and not them…
Circling through the lighthouse trail head parking lot they just entered, she exits at the other end and heads back towards town. On the left, above the tree line, the water tower is basking in the rays of the new sun. From this side, you can only see "City of Arcadia Bay" in rusty-ass letters. Chloe's graffiti is on the opposite side, facing the town.
She makes a right at the crossroads and drives across the tracks and into the beach parking lot. Frank's RV is missing. He's probably having his breakfast beans at the Two Whales. She's not sure if that's good or not. She wouldn't admit it, but she may have felt better with him being there. Still, with Sera, there are three of them. Strength in numbers.
They park and sit in the car, with sun on their faces. There is no one in sight. A single boat is bouncing on the waves way out by the docks.
"What are we doing?" Sera asks.
"We're meeting a… person," Chloe replies, almost saying "friend."
"At least that Frank guy is not here," Steph says.
"Frank?" Sera repeats. "Is he that drug dealer?"
"Oh yeah," Chloe remembers. "You know him."
"I don't know him. Last time I saw him, I was really high. Thought he turned into a giant dog man."
"Frank turned into a dog?"
She sees a Hawt Dawg man cartoon, on TV, in what seems like the room at the Three Seals Motel.
"No, see? He didn't," Sera says. "I was on drugs. Hallucinating."
"Was this that time at the mill?"
Sera nods, her face darkening.
"You never did tell me what happened while I was knocked out. And Frank would not talk about it either."
"I don't like to think back to that day. That fucker… in one instance he ruined my life. Completely destroyed me. And at the same time it was the most intense pleasure I've ever felt." She falls silent, looking at the sea. Chloe decides not to press. But then Sera goes on, with a sigh.
"Anyway, I couldn't tell you much about it. I was tied to a chair and high as hell. I do remember this Frank turning into some human dog thing and the other one, Damon, into something else… a goat, or… a bull… they went around for a few seconds and then one of them slammed the other into the wall, but the wall was shit and they both went through it into the yard. Then, I don't know how much later, maybe a second, maybe an hour, but I felt like I was starting to come down, Frank came back in. Could barely walk. He had Damon's knife. Cut the ropes, checked on you just to make sure you were breathing, I guess, and left. Last I ever saw of him. When I was leaving later, his RV was gone."
Thunderbirds, whales, ravens, does, now dogs and bulls: Arcadia Bay is turning into a zoo. Are the bigfoots next? Of course, Sera was on drugs and Frank and Damon didn't really turn into beasts while fighting, but why does she remember drawing Damon as a man-bull? Minotaur. Duurgaron: the name floats to the surface like a dead whale. She looks at Steph, but just then Steph says, peering into the distance from under her palm, "There she is."
Forgetting the fauna, Chloe follows Steph's gaze. She sees a girl, in a pink tank top and tight black shorts, running towards them along the path. She is alone, and as Chloe checks the perimeter, there doesn't seem to be anyone creeping up. This doesn't make her any less uneasy. She checks the rear view mirror.
Steph, who's in the middle between Chloe and Sera, fidgets this way and that, finally turning to Sera. "Can I…?"
"Sure," Sera says, opening the door and climbing out. Steph follows her. Chloe stays in the cabin, watching Dana - she recognizes the hot cheerleader now - get closer. Now that she's alone in the car, she touches the handle of the gun, and checks the perimeter again.
"Hey, Dana!" Steph passes the front of the truck, waving with both hands. Sera walks off towards the lighthouse on the cliff.
Dana slows down smoothly and covers the last few yards at a runway strut without missing a beat. She still looks fresh after enough running to put Chloe Price in the ground with lung combustion. Chloe wants to smoke and maybe slap some sense into her. Steph and Dana come together and hug.
"Steph! It's been so long!"
"Like a year!"
"Hey, Chloe Price."
"Dana Ward."
"It's… uh good to see you."
"Yeah?" Her reply turns into a question on its own somehow, and for a few seconds none of them can decide if it was supposed to be one.
"So your call," Steph finally says. "That was unexpected."
"Yeah?" Dana says, as ambiguously as Chloe did a second ago. They spend a few long seconds in silence.
"It's not that I'm not glad to see you," Skip Matthews says to Chloe Price on the dormitory steps three years earlier.
"Yes, Dana," Chloe finally pushes through. "It's not that we're not glad to see you, but we're kind of in a rush, so what is this about?"
"Well, I… just wanted to see if you're alright."
"See if we're alright?"
"…After last night."
"Last night?" Steph takes a turn at the repeating game, but Chloe is talking over her, leaning out of the truck window.
"What do you know about that?" she asks.
"I… saw you."
"Saw us… where?" She says through clenched teeth. Her mind churns out flashes of polaroid shots: Dana creeping behind them in Rachel's room; Dana watching from behind the wheel of a dark car as the train approaches.
"In the quad," Dana says, like she's not sure if it's a trick question. The mental Polaroids burn and wither away.
Chloe scoffs, "The quad? When was this? Didn't you say Juliet told you Steph was in town? Were we going to the dorms?"
"Well, she did say, but then I also saw you. And no, you were coming from the dorms."
This makes Chloe perk up again.
"Last night? Late last night? With who?"
"It was just you two, but…"
"Just us? That's…"
"… you seemed completely out of it."
"There was nobody but us?" What the fuck is she talking about? "Walking?"
"You don't remember seeing me?"
Steph looks at the Chloe, shakes her head.
"Were we supposed to see you?" Chloe asks.
"I mean, I thought. You walked right by me. I saw you and said hi, but you just kept walking, staring straight ahead. It was really creepy. I went back to the dorm and went to bed, but I couldn't stay asleep, so finally, as soon as I saw the sun starting to come up, I got up and dug your phone number out and called you."
How the hell were they walking in that state? Something doesn't add up.
"We went to the dorms to see if we could find some clues about Rachel in her room," Chloe says, watching Dana's face. "And somebody must have drugged us there, because we both blacked out and neither of us remember anything until we woke up in the car later. Are you sure you saw us walking on our own? What kind of a drug does that?"
"Nothing I ever tried," Dana says. "Not that I'm an expert on drugs or tried everything. But yes, I did see you, and it was really weird."
But she didn't say "Oh, that's crazy! Who would drug you in the dorm!" Chloe thinks.
"Did you see anyone hanging around at all? Following us? Watching us?"
"No." Dana shakes her head, her triangular earrings swinging. "No one."
Chloe stares at those earrings as though hypnotized. Dana was wearing those same earrings in both of the flashbacks, a thought comes.
"What were you doing out?" she asks.
"I… uh… was with Logan."
"Deadbeat dad? You can catch him on the 40 yard line this Friday. And it's not Zachary," Dana Ward tells Max Caulfield with a roll of her eyes.
"Did he see us too?"
"He just went inside through the boys entrance at the same time you came out of the girls'."
Chloe runs out of questions. They don't speak for a minute or so. A train can be heard approaching from the south. It reminds her of waking up on the tracks, and of the fact that Dana's unsolicited testimony did not help them at all, and in fact removed a possible lead, as Chloe wondered whether anybody might have seen them being carried from the dorm to the car and by who. Did Dana really see them? And she didn't seem shocked enough by the idea that they were drugged in the dorm.
"Why did you want to meet?" Steph asks suddenly.
Dana looks at her in surprise.
"To see if…"
"You called to see if we were OK, but after you found out that we were, why did you still want to meet here?"
"Well, after seeing you like that yesterday, I wanted to actually see you instead of just talking on the phone. Yesterday was just really creepy."
"Are you sure nobody asked you to talk to us about yesterday?" Chloe asks bluntly.
Dana's eyes go big.
"What? No! What do you mean?"
"What I mean is, somebody drugged us last night, and as soon as we wake up and start wondering about how we ended up in the car and if anybody saw us dragged from the dorms to the parking lot, where we may have died, you show up to randomly tell us that we were actually somehow walking all by ourselves and there was no one around. Maybe we drugged ourselves all by ourselves too, huh?"
"Look, I don't know what you're getting at, Chloe. I saw you walking like zombies. You did not acknowledge me when I said hi. It was really weird and I couldn't get it out of my head, so I called this morning to see what you would say about that. I don't know what happened to you. I don't know if you were drugged or who drugged you. All I know is what I saw."
"You just don't seem very shocked to hear about us being drugged in the dorms while looking for clues about Rachel."
"When I saw you last night, that was pretty shocking. But I wasn't even sure if what I saw was real. Were you really out of it like that, or did you simply ignore me? Didn't recognize me? I mean, I don't know about Steph, but you've definitely ignored me before, so… And Steph has not been around for a year. I mean, I said hi, but I didn't exactly get in your face to stop you or anything, so who knows. But now that you say you were drugged and don't remember any of it, it makes sense! Not that it's not terrible, but it explains why you looked like that yesterday. Even though I have no idea what drug could have done that. And looking for Rachel explains why you were at the dorms in the first place. So you could say I'm less shocked now than I was yesterday."
When she falls silent, Chloe begins to clap.
"That's some great acting, Dana. Did you rehearse that?"
"What? I… that's not what… Steph?"
"Dana, you wanted to talk to us away from the dorm, right? Because you didn't want to be heard…" Steph says.
Dana looks at them both in turn, looks over her shoulder at the empty beach, shakes her head and shrugs all at once. If she's acting, she's gotten better since Miranda.
"Was it the Vortex Club?" Chloe asks.
Dana grimaces, shakes her head again. "I don't know for sure, but if something weird was done to you while you were at the dorms, then it probably had something to do with the club. Yesterday, when I saw you, my first thought was it had something to do with the Vortex Club, just because it was so spooky and weird. But I have no idea who or what they might have done."
"Why wouldn't you know? You're in the club, aren't you?"
"Yes, I'm in the club!" Dana snaps. "For the parties. I love the school spirit and the parties! That's what you do in school. This is the only time I'll get to do this. And that's how most of the members are. But there is a clique within a clique there, invitation only, and what they do in the meetings I don't know, but I have a feeling it's some weird shit."
"What kind of weird shit? Drugs?" Chloe asks. "Magic?"
Dana looks like she's not shocked by the word magic either. She shrugs.
"Maybe. I don't know."
"Well, what do you know, Dana? What did you hear? What did you want to tell us and not be heard? Did someone talk about last night? Did they talk about Rachel? Did they do something to Rachel?"
"Look. Like I said, I had a feeling it had to do with the club, so I didn't want anyone walking in on me while I'm talking to you on the phone about. It's not that I'm afraid of them, but if they really are capable of something like that... You don't suppose Rachel got drugged and wandered off into the woods or something, do you?"
When no one offered to either confirm or deny that, Dana continues:
"There was one thing I heard about Rachel... After the last party, the one in… at the end of March I think it was, Juliet was really worked up about something, and after I asked her about it a hundred times she finally told me, on condition of absolute secrecy that Rachel…"
She pauses.
"What? Rachel what?" Chloe asks.
"Now I don't know if this is true, first of all, or if it means anything, but Rachel was at the party too, as I'm sure you would know and…"
"Fucking spit it out already!"
"She said Rachel was the one who started that forest fire 3 years ago!"
Chloe stares at her, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Then she just groans and leans back in her seat.
Dana squints at her.
"What? It's true? And you knew?"
"Uh, Chloe?" Steph chimes in. "Did I miss something?"
"Alright, cool your deer. True, not true. It was three years ago. What does any of that have to do with Rachel disappearing two weeks ago?"
"Probably nothing, but Juliet was so worked up about it, I was beginning to worry they were planning to report Rachel or blackmail her or something. I mean, the way she went on about it, it sounded like they took it as a personal insult. Anyway, I did not hear anything else about that, but if she didn't get drugged, is it possible one or more of them threatened her and she ran away?"
Sure, except that doesn't explain her vanishing into thin air, or them getting drugged and nearly murdered the night before.
"So Juliet is in the club club then?" Steph asks.
"She is, but she's really in it only because it's prestigious and elite and secret. She's really not the brains of the operation, you know?"
"Who is the brain?" asks Chloe. "Who's running the shit? VC? Prescott?"
"They both kind of run the 'normal' club, but I don't know if they are running the weird VIP section. Personally, I have a feeling it's someone else."
"Who?"
She shrugs, shakes her head. "I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. It's just a feeling. They both act like they own the place, and Prescott may actually own the place, but then… sometimes it feels like… not the whole place. You know what I mean?"
"Who could be running them, though? Not another student, right? You're saying an adult? A teacher?"
"Maybe. Could be another student, but I definitely didn't notice those two stepping on eggshells around anyone in school."
"Can you ask Juliet more about Rachel?" asks Steph.
"I could, but I doubt she would say anything."
"Just try," Chloe says. "Actually, you know what? Tell her you saw us last night in the quad and that you talked to us today and we told you that we were drugged in the dorms by someone and see what she says. Tell her we were asking you weird questions about Rachel and the Vortex Club."
"OK, I'll probably see her later today."
"Thanks, Dana."
"Hey, I'm sorry about you getting drugged. That shit is sick. And dangerous."
"Yeah."
You can say that again.
"I'll text or call if I hear anything," Dana says.
Steph and Dana hug it out, then the cheerleader runs off back up the beach.
"That one's pretty," Sera says, appearing silently behind them. She removed her hood. Her hair doesn't look clean, and not just in a dirty blond way. Breeze off the sea is picking up. The surf is getting louder.
"She should really dump that douchebag Robertson," Chloe says. "Both, Trevor and Justin are like in love with her."
Sera and Steph climb back in the cabin.
"So what now?" Sera asks. "You think a bunch of high school kids summoned the spirit that took Rachel?"
"Hey Sera," Chloe ask, as she turns the car around. "You heard what happened to us yesterday. What drug could have done that?"
"Done what? Memory loss? A bunch of them. Any Benzos, GHB, or a mix of something. Who knows."
"Would any of them make us zombie walk from the dorm to the car in the parking lot, get inside and not remember it?"
"I don't know, maybe."
"Could I drive?"
"A blackout drunk can get behind the wheel and drive, and then not remember it, so I don't see why not. Where are you going with this?"
"Wait, we drove, too?" Steph asks.
"Until Dana told us her story, I didn't think so, but when I told you how I woke up in the car and couldn't wake you up, well, that didn't happen at Blackwell."
"Where was it?"
"Junkyard." Or, to be more precise, across the train tracks that run through the junkyard. Did she really drive there and parked on the train tracks all by herself? Is her subconscious mind still suicidal?
"Oh, no," Steph says.
"There's more," Chloe says when they pull into a parking spot at the Lighthouse trail head again. "When I woke up at the junkyard, we were parked on the train tracks."
"What?"
"And there was a train coming. If I woke up a second later, we would both be dead."
Steph says nothing. They get out.
"So last night you drove your car to the junkyard, parked it on the tracks and have no memory of it?"
"Last night I was in Rachel's room at the dorm, blacked out somehow, walked from there across the quad to the parking lot, ignoring Dana who said hi to us on the way, got in the truck, drove from there all the way to the junkyard, parked across the rails and went to sleep, then woke up a second before the train smashed into us and managed to clear the tracks at the last moment."
"OK, that is pretty strange," Sera says.
"Both of us," Steph says.
"Huh?"
"It happened to both of us, not just you, Chloe."
"Yeah, but I was the one who drove and parked us. Maybe you shouldn't hang around me anymore."
"Maybe… it wasn't the drugs," says Steph.
"What then? Magic?"
"Or both. Maybe we got possessed again like I did that time in the woods."
Chloe stops in her tracks, stares at her.
"Nah, but that time you said you saw Max and you were only out for like a second."
"Because you set the woods on fire, right?"
Right? And now that she thinks about it, there was some kind of a crazy dream she was seeing before waking up in the truck. Walking in the dark somewhere… Could it be?
"And you had a dream of some sort, too?"
"Yeah, although I don't remember much."
"Well, shit. If that's true, then how the fuck are we supposed to fight that? Tinfoil hats? Maybe it's time to burn everything down."
They finally make it out of the woods to the top of the cliff and the lighthouse. The sight of it lifts the mood somehow. Lifts a weight, it feels like. Chloe straightens and looks around. Even Sera looks healthier.
"Nice view," she says. "What are we doing up here again?"
"The blood oath," Chloe says, feeling ridiculous.
"OK, go for it," Sera says. "What do you need? Blood? You sure mine will work?"
Chloe looks around. Back towards the trail, near the tree line and the cliffs, there is a small cairn of stacked stones.
"Here," Chloe says. "Let's go over here."
She feels like maybe they should sit down cross-legged around it, but she doesn't know how to say that to Sera, so they just stand instead and she pulls out her knife. Sera actually smiles at it. Wanting to just get it over with already, Chloe hands the knife over, handle first.
"Just cut a little on the thumb."
Smiling, Sera checks the edge of the blade with her thumb, then gently pokes it, producing a perfectly red and round drop of blood. She hands the knife back, and Chloe would like to be as cool as Sera about it, but she of course fumbles and slices too deep and makes a mess and it hurts like a son of a bitch. But it's bleeding, at least. She puts the knife away and puts her thumb up over the stones and Sera, watching her, does the same. Their thumbs drift closer, until they're about to touch, and Chloe realizes that she has no idea what to do when they do touch, and she panics and almost stops, but also somehow keeps going, with Steph watching anxiously from the side, and she knows she's going to fuck it up somehow and how stupid it all is and how Sera is going to laugh and how she will have to go to the cops, which will be a waste of time and how she will never see Rachel again.
Then, the thumbs come together and the blood mixes, and she knows what she needs to say.