Chapter 181: You Did Your Makeup for This?

The playing fields were black at midnight. The floodlights had gone off hours ago, and the frost on the grass crunched under Blair’s shoes loud enough to make her flinch.

She kept walking.

Past the last goalpost, the ground sloped down to the lake. She had never been out this far. In daylight it was probably pretty. At night it was a flat gray sheet with trees on three sides and a wooden jetty running out from a boathouse toward the middle.

Someone was standing at the end of the jetty with a lantern.

Blair stopped at the top of the bank.

Come alone, or I won’t be there. It was a very confident sentence for someone who hadn’t signed their name.

She went down the bank.

The jetty boards were slick with frost. The ice on either side was new; near the posts it thinned to black. She kept to the middle and walked slowly, arms a little out from her sides.

The lantern lifted.

"You came," Olive said.

She wore a long camel coat and heeled boots, and her hair was blown out into soft waves. Her makeup was perfect. The diamonds at her throat caught the lantern light every time she breathed.

Blair looked at her for a moment.

"You did your makeup," she said.

Olive’s mouth tightened. "Some of us make an effort."

"At midnight. At a lake."

"Did you come here to talk about my face?"

"No." Blair stopped a few steps short of her. The boards creaked. She took the folded paper out of her coat pocket. "Is it her?"

Olive looked at the paper. She didn’t take it. "Is what her?"

"The girl. You said you knew where they took her."

"I said I knew where they took the girl who slept in your room."

"Yes. Her." Blair held it out.

Olive stared at her.

"Heather," she said.

"What?"

"Heather Greene. Your roommate." Olive’s voice went flat. "Who are you talking about?"

Blair looked down at the paper in her hand.

Oh.

Olive plucked it out of her fingers before she could pull it back. She unfolded it, tilted it toward the lantern and read the name Blair had never let herself read.

"Never heard of her." She let it go. It landed on the boards beside the lantern. "How many girls go missing around you?"

Blair didn’t answer.

"Fine," she said. "Where’s Heather?"

"Everyone knows she left the party with a royal." Olive shrugged. "That’s all anyone knows."

"Then you don’t know anything." Blair’s voice came out steady, which surprised her. "Why am I here?"

Olive smiled. It was a pretty smile. It didn’t reach anywhere.

"He sends a car for me every Friday," she said. "Last Friday, it didn’t come." Her voice cracked. "The whole school was talking about the dress he sent you."

Blair’s stomach dropped when she realized who she was talking about.

"I didn’t ask him for..."

"I picked them. Did you know that? Seven girls named Blair, and I left you off, because I thought you were nothing." Olive’s voice was rising. "A frumpy little nobody who thought she was better than me. I left you off. And he found you anyway, and now he doesn’t look at me."

"Olive. Those girls are dead."

"I know they’re dead!"

The lantern swung. Shadows lurched across the ice.

"I know," Olive said again, quieter. Her eyes were wet and very bright. "And you know. And he doesn’t know I left you off. If he ever finds out..."

"I won’t tell him."

Blair meant it.

Olive laughed.

"You think I’m worried about what you’ll say?"

She set the lantern down on the boards. Then she stepped forward, put both hands flat on Blair’s chest and shoved.

Blair’s heel caught the edge of the jetty.

For half a second she was in the air, and she saw the lantern, and Olive’s face above it, calm.

Then the ice broke under her back.

The cold hit every inch of her at once. Black water closed over her face, and the old terror came with it, the one she’d had all her life, the one that locked her limbs and emptied her head. She kicked blindly, found the surface by luck, came up choking into the hole she’d made, and grabbed for the edge.

It snapped off in her hand. She grabbed again, further back, and this time it held.

A heeled boot came down on her fingers.

Blair cried out. Olive was kneeling at the end of the jetty, leaning out over the hole, her face lit from below by the lantern.

"He’ll get bored," Olive said. "He always gets bored."

She put her hand on top of Blair’s head and pushed.

Blair went under.

She came up again and hit something solid. Ice. She had come up in the wrong place. She spun, eyes open, and saw the hole a few feet away: a ragged pale circle with lantern light shining through it.

A shadow moved across the light. Two boots, set wide on the ice at the edge of the hole. Olive had stepped down off the jetty, and the ice held her.

She was standing over the hole. Waiting.

Blair clawed at the underside of the ice. Her nails skidded. She hit it with her fist and felt the blow go nowhere, and the panic took her completely. She thrashed, spun, lost the hole, found it, lost it again.

Her chest burned. She screamed, and the lake poured in.

It filled her mouth, her throat, her chest. It was so cold it felt like fire. I’m going to die here, she thought.

She waited for the dark.

It didn’t come.

The burning stopped. Not slowly. All at once, as if a hand had closed over it. Her heart slowed. Her lungs were full of water, and they were still, and nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

Blair hung under the ice with her mouth open and the lake inside her, and that frightened her more than drowning had.

She looked up at the pale circle and the boots beside it, and she started to count.

At three hundred, Olive crouched. Her face came close to the hole, peering into the black. Blair didn’t move. After a while the face went away.

At six hundred, one boot tapped the ice, impatient.

At seven hundred and twelve, the lantern lifted and the light went with it, bobbing back along the jetty toward the shore, smaller and smaller, until it was gone.

Blair was alone in the dark.

She kept counting, because it gave her mind something to do besides think.

Nine hundred.

She tried the ice again with both fists. It didn’t even creak.

A thousand.

Her coat had stopped dragging. Her hair floated around her face. She wondered how long she could do this, whether there was an end to it, and whether she would like the answer.

One thousand one hundred and fifty.

One thousand two hundred.

Twenty minutes.

Something hit the ice directly above her face, so hard the whole sheet rang like a bell.

Blair looked up.

A crack was spreading through the ice, white and branching, straight toward her.