#please someone draw boymode Gwen I need it

[forestwater87]

“Now,” Kevin began, appearing to have regained some of his disaffected swagger even as he kept glancing nervously at the dog in Gwen’s arms, “first thing you probably wanna know is —”

“Where’s David?”

“— where your . . .” He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, where he is. Christ, I was doing a thing.” She just stared at him, stone-faced despite the growing disquiet in her chest, and he sighed. “Obviously I can’t tell you yet, or you’d just go in and shoot up the place.”

She didn’t see any reason to deny it. “Isn’t that what you want?” Why else would he tell her, if he didn’t expect her to do something about it? Was this really all just a trap?

Had she just wandered from one stupid decision into another?

Well, either way, the only thing she could do at this point was grit her teeth and hope she hadn’t gotten David killed.

“Ehhh,” Kevin said, seesawing his hand back and forth, “not exactly. I know that’s what you people do, so I’m not saying I’m opposed to it, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure you and Campbell’s guys will raze the place and salt the earth and all that.” He gave her a big smile, revealing a single gold canine. “But my grandma taught me to always avoid gang violence.” He frowned. “And Mexicans, but I think that was just racism.”

He leaned closer, resting his elbows on his knees. The earnestness of his expression caught her off-guard, and she pulled Liza closer to her chest.

“I want you to shut this whole thing down,” he said, sharp olive-green eyes scanning her face. “You don’t have to believe that I want your boy-toy to get home safe, but you can trust that I don’t like what’s going on any more than you do, and that there are people inside I want out of this thing.”

Gwen couldn’t take sitting still anymore. Or maybe she just hated the feeling of his gaze on her, appraising and far too relaxed for this situation. She climbed to her feet and flicked with the safety of her gun — not fully switching it off, but making an ominous click that caused Kevin’s eyes to widen and fear to spark in his eyes.

It was something she wasn’t used to seeing in the past few months, and she wasn’t sure she’d missed it.

“And what the fuck is going on?” she snapped. “It’d be a hell of a lot easier to trust you if you stopped jerking me around!”

“Okay, okay,” he replied, holding his hands up even though he was obviously unarmed. “Chill, all right? We’re on the same side here, hand to God. I’m trying, it’s just — fuck, can you stop pointing that thing at her?”

She sighed and let the puppy leap from her arms. With both hands free, she aimed the gun at his heart, raising her eyebrows. “Tell me where he is,” she said, slowly to keep her voice from shaking.

“It’s not like I don’t want to!” He spoke hastily, gaze jumping from the gun to her face. “But we’ve gotta be smart about this, and from what I’ve heard you’re not really the ‘slow and steady’ type. I’m easing you in so you don’t get us killed doing something stupid.”

She had no reason to trust him. The most logical thing to do, what a proper member of Campbell’s crew would do, would be to shoot him now, wait for the other two to return, and threaten them into giving up David’s hiding place, maybe broker some kind of deal —

“It’s not gonna work,” Kevin said. His eyes were sharp and knowing again, though his fingers shook with nervous energy. “Whatever you’re planning. You’re not dealing with someone who can be reasoned with, I promise. You can’t predict how she’ll react — but there’s at least a chance that I can. So please, please stop thinking whatever you’re thinking.”

She had no reason to trust him. The problem was, she trusted herself even less. 

She was a broke, desperate half-decent mercenary, not some brilliant mastermind. And it didn’t matter what one of Campbell’s crew would do; she was on her own, probably with a bounty on her head. Her brain whirled, searching for other options that just didn’t exist . . . or she wasn’t smart enough to find them.

He seemed to read her panic on her face, and his expression softened. “Come on, sweetheart,” he said. “If you knew how to find him, you wouldn’t be wasting your time here.”

She had no reason to trust him.

But she had no other choice.

“Okay.” He took a deep breath, scrubbing his face with one hand. “The Flower  Scouts have him. Ah-ahpahpahpahpahpah,” he added quickly, holding up his hand as she moved toward the front door, “this is literally what I was trying to prevent. God, you’re like a goldfish,” he muttered under his breath. “A crazy murder-goldfish. Sit down and take like half a second to think.”

It took her exactly that long to realize he was right; storming the Flower Scouts’ headquarters was the most suicidal thing she could do right then that didn’t involve her former boss and his many explosives. Gwen sat back down, lowering her gun so it was pointed in the general direction of Dirty Kevin’s feet. “Why?” she asked begrudgingly. (She didn’t much care about the “why,” but she thought it’d show cooperation.) “What do they want with him?”

“See, that’s the thing. The Flower Scouts don’t want him, not really. But there’s one person there that does. And she’s the one you need to worry about.”

She sighed, feeling the overstretched tether of her patience begin to fray. “Cryptic. So this is the woman who just left, right?”

“Her name is Jen Stonewater,” he said with an even heavier sigh than her own. “And she’s fucking crazy. But the Flower Scouts love her, especially Priss —” (Gwen vaguely remembered the name from her childhood; Penelope Priss had been the head of the Flower Scouts since Gwen had been a little girl.) “— and they’ll do practically whatever she says. Hence the kidnapping-David thing.” He paused for a moment, seeming expectant, and when she didn’t reply he added, “. . . Don’t you want to know why?”

“I don’t care why,” she snapped, even though part of her was a little curious. She could find that out after this was all over. “I just wanna know the parts that help me save David so I can get the fuck out of here.”

“Okay, let’s start there: you’re not doing anything tonight, so you might as well get comfy and chatty.” She opened her mouth to tell him to go fuck himself and moved to get up off the couch, but he stopped her before she could do more than twitch: “He’s safe — or safe-ish. Safer than he’d be with you burning the place down, anyway — and you’re . . . let’s be honest, girl, you’re a fucking mess. No way are you getting within a hundred feet of the Flower Scout headquarters looking like that. And they’re not gonna be back for a while, so we’ve got a nice evening to hang out, share exposition, maybe get you a shower and some sleep so that you look less like a war refugee, and come up with a plan. Sound good?” He was speaking with exaggerated gentleness, like she was a wild animal he was hoping to sweet-talk into not maiming him.

She hated that this guy, this motherfucker who was literally sleeping with the enemy (or at least sharing a house with them), made sense. And there was no reason to think this wasn’t a trap . . . but she was unarmed, uninformed, and alone. It wasn’t like she had a lot of options. “Fine. You have till midnight to talk me into your plan. If you don’t, I’m robbing an Ammunation and going in  on my own.”

“Great!” Kevin beamed, and for a moment Gwen could see the guy he could’ve been if he’d grown up anywhere but Sleepy Peak: handsome, almost like a movie star if he didn’t have the broken nose and missing teeth, warm and maybe even carefree. Then he let the smile drop from his face and the years of exhaustion and bad decisions washed back over him, eradicating the person she’d caught a glimpse of. “Love to see you almost being sensible. So. What do you wanna know?”

“How do I get to David?” was the obvious question, but she had a feeling he’d be more cooperative if she let him lead her to the point he was so obviously getting at. “Who was the other one?”

“Oh. Him. That’s Daniel . . . Whitewillow? I think that’s it, but I don’t really remember his last name. I just call him Dan. He’s Jen’s twin brother.”

“But —”

“I know, I know,” he interrupted quickly, “names don’t match, but they’re definitely siblings. They came from this weird culty commune thing, no real last names. Very flower-child, hippie-dippie thing, like Coachella but with ritual sacrifices and stuff. So . . . kind of just like Coachella.” Kevin chuckled at his own joke, but when Gwen didn’t he just continued, “I don’t know much about it — Dan doesn’t like to talk about it much, and Jen’s never said anything that made sense, ever — but I guess it was some holdover from the free love movement, which is probably why everyone’s name sounds like a white guy naming Native American characters in a bad ‘save the forest’ movie.” He paused, leaning forward to stand with exaggerated slowness, as though that would stop her from retraining her gun on him. (It didn’t.) “Can I get a drink? Since we’re such good pals and all.”

Gwen followed him into the kitchen without lowering her weapon. “So they’re hippies,” she continued, trying to prod him back on topic. “What does that have to do with — did you say ritual sacrifice?”

“Now you’re getting good and freaked out,” Kevin said approvingly, taking a can of beer from the fridge and gesturing to offer her one. She narrowed her eyes and tightened her grip on the gun, and with an exaggerated eyeroll he turned and meandered back toward the living room, looking way too comfortable with everything that was going on.

“Hold on,” she snapped before he could sit down. She jerked the gun in the direction of the back rooms. “Not in view of the street now that it’s dark.”

“Sure, whatever. I don’t wanna be gunned down by Campbell’s men, either.” And again, much too slowly for her nerves to handle, he switched gears toward one of the bedrooms she hadn’t been in yet. “Anyway, you’re starting to see what we’re dealing with. This isn’t a run-of-the-mill gang war, kid. We’re talking about certified nutjobs.”

She wanted to ask him how much older he actually was than her, because it couldn’t even be a decade, but there were more important things to worry about. “What are they doing here, then?”

Kevin pulled open a door that was practically falling off its hinges and gestured for her to step inside. She used her gun to usher him in first, and he complied after another eyeroll and a long-suffering sigh. “That’s the thing. It turns out this little cult was started in the seventies by none other than a Mister Cameron Campbell.”

Shock made her muscles weak, and for a second the gun wavered. “What?”

He nodded, crossing the cramped and cluttered room to its sole piece of furniture, a dingy, sagging bed, and plopping down onto it. Kicking off his shoes and lying back to stare up at the stained ceiling, he gestured toward the floor with the hand not holding his beer. “Sit anywhere, by the way.”

Like she was going to shove aside piles of dirty clothes and what looked like enough drug paraphernalia to stock the entire state just to crouch awkwardly on the floor. “Campbell?”

“I don’t know the guy’s history,” he said with the shrug, not even bothering to glance her way while he sat up just enough to take another long drink without spilling it all over himself, “but that’s what Dan and Jen say. They never met him, but apparently their mom says he lived there for a couple years, set up a campground full of devoted apostles, sacrificed a few random strangers —” 

Gwen very much doubted they were random. She suspected that her former employer had found a convenient method for disposing of his rivals without questions.

“— and had a few dozen kids before mysteriously vanishing a few days before the FBI came knocking.”

Okay, things were starting to piece together in her mind. It didn’t exactly surprise her to think that Campbell had been fathering children across the country, or even that he’d do something as Manson-esque as start a murder cult; she was mostly just impressed he hadn’t gotten caught yet. “Including your new friends.”

He nodded, then sat up and finally met her eyes. “Including David Greenwood.”

---

“Hey, don’t fucking faint on me!” Suddenly Kevin was standing right in front of her — when had he crossed the room? — his hands on her shoulders like he was trying to hold her upright. “Come on, aren’t you supposed to be some kind of killer?”

Gwen shoved him away, shakily keeping the gun pointing in his general direction, and pressed her free hand to her forehead. “I’m fine,” she muttered, “get away.” A few deep breaths kept the encroaching blackness from overtaking her vision, and she steadied herself with a slow shake of her head. “David is Campbell’s kid?”

“Jesus, if that freaked you out, you’re really not gonna be able to handle what’s coming, kiddo. Sure you don’t want a beer?”

“It’s been a long day!” she snapped, trying to remember the last time she’d eaten. Or slept. Had it really only been that morning that she and David had left for the “party” in the park? It felt like years had passed since then. “Just — just gimme a second.”

For a few seconds she could feel the druggie’s eyes on her, but she tried to block it out and focus. Now was definitely not the time to let the shock and exhaustion of the day hit all at once, not when she still didn’t know how to rescue David. “Okay, killer. Listen, you probably inhaled a lot of smoke, and it’s not like this place smells all that good . . . and you seriously look like shit. How about you go wash some of that gunk off of ya and I’ll get something to eat?”

She glared at him incredulously. “You seriously think I’m gonna use your shower or eat anything you give me?”

“I think if you want to save David you will.” When she didn’t have an immediate response to that (though she did consider just shooting him to simplify things), he took her elbow with the gentleness of a man escorting his great-great-great-grandmother and led her toward the door. “Listen, this has been hell on you, and it’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. Your boy isn’t going anywhere. Come on, I’m on your side here.”

“The more you say you’re on my side, the less I think you are,” she muttered, allowing herself to be dragged down the hall.

He stopped, pinching the bridge of his nose with a sigh. “Okay. Uh, I didn’t really wanna throw this out there, but since you’re so damn fussy about trust, might as well go for full disclosure: Dan and I are dating. Have been for a little while now.” He grimaced and scuffed his foot along the dingy carpet. “Sounds like such high-school bullshit when you put it like that, but . . .”

She stared at him, frowning. “You know I’m going to kill him, right?”

“I’m kinda hoping I can talk you outta that part, actually. But yeah, I get that’s where you’re at right about now.” He shook his head with another sigh, and once again she noticed how run-down he seemed, how desperate.

Because he had to be desperate to be asking for her help, right?

“What is it?” She managed to keep from snapping at him, but only barely.

“I love Dan, I really do. But what Jen’s doing to him . . . what he’s turning into . . . He’s a real sonuvabitch at the best of times, but he was slowly starting to become a person instead of just her hanger-on. And he doesn’t really want to be part of this whole thing. But . . . she’s his twin. They have a weird bond I just can’t figure out.” 

Kevin looked up at her, meeting her eyes for the first time since ushering her toward the bathroom. They were a stunning shade of green, dull but warm with little flecks of gold, and at that moment so open and guileless that they reminded her of David. 

“I think maybe if she’s gone, I can get him back.”

It took her a second to absorb what he was implying. “That’s a really stupid plan.”

His lips twitched into a ghost of a smirk. “Worse than any of yours?”

They were quiet for a few minutes, each mulling over the deal they were about to make. Finally Gwen nodded, clearing her throat and breaking the moment of almost-intimacy that’d descended on them.

“Prepackaged food only. Nothing already opened. And get me a plastic bag for my gun.”

“You’re seriously bringing it into the shower with you?”

She didn’t bother responding, already turning and ducking into the open bathroom door. “I’m not promising anything,” she said, turning to accept the Ziploc bag he’d grabbed from the kitchen, putting her gun inside and making sure she could still pull the trigger through the slippery material. “There’s a good chance your boyfriend dies.”

“There’s a good chance yours does, too. Is that gonna stop you?”

Gwen closed the door in his face and locked it.

They both already knew the answer.

---

“This looks like . . . ham.” Kevin lifted it to the dim, flickering overhead light and grinned. “Hasn’t even expired yet, either.”

She caught the package as he tossed it to her, tearing it open with her teeth and shoving half the slices of deli meat into her mouth at once. “So kee’ talkin’,” she managed around her mouthful of food, resisting the urge to moan; food really was better than sex sometimes, even shitty gas-station ham. “S’Cam’bell really Davi’s dad?”

He winced, presumably at her manners, but she didn’t have even the tiniest shit to give. “Kinda hard to piece together, but Jen spent the first couple months here doing a lot of research trying,” he said. “Near as we can tell, even after ditching the cult to the feds, Campbell kept coming back to what remained of it every once in a while. Not sure what for —”

“Place to hide bodies, probably. Or to take whatever stuff they had. Are those pickles?”

Kevin moved to hand her the jar. “Do you need me to open that?” When she just glared at him (as intimidatingly as she could manage while dressed in one of Jen’s nightgowns), he held up his hands and stepped away. “Sorry.

“Anyway, he spent most of the 80s in New York doing something for the mafia, but at some point he went back to — it’s called the Children of Cam, which is weird and kind of gross in a couple of different ways, considering  —”

“The point,” she snapped, popping the lid off the jar and immediately grabbing a handful of pickles. Cold green juice ran down her wrist and dripped onto the pink satin nightgown, and Gwen took a faint, petty pleasure in ruining Jen’s clothing. The first of a million terrible things I’m gonna do to you, she thought, childishly wiping the juice off onto her skirt. Not that you’ll be alive to care about the pickles. “So he knocked up their mom sometime in . . . what, the 80s? 90s?”

“They’re probably only a couple months older than David. This was right before he settled in Sleepy Peak, and he was running all over the place. But it seems like David’s mom, whoever that was, was one of the first people he met in town.”

Gwen wrinkled her nose, setting the pickles aside. She was finally starting to feel full enough to start thinking about next steps. “But there’s no way — David doesn’t even know Campbell’s his dad. If he even is. How do your cult friends know about it?”

He shrugged. “Public records, hospital paperwork . . . I think someone at the Flower Scouts knows the owner of the orphanage Campbell found David at, and Priss and Campbell go way back. That’s why Jen joined, to try and get access to stuff normal people couldn’t.”

“But why? What do either of them want with David?”

“All right, so . . . the ‘why’ is mostly that she’s fucking crazy. Definitely don’t forget that. But I know before I met them, they were trying to get an audience with Campbell and he wouldn’t have anything to do with them. I think he sent Hook to make them get lost. So they’re pissed about that. And then they see this kid — who looks a hell of a lot like Dan, I gotta say. Resemblance is uncanny —”

“The point, Kevin!”

“They think he stole their life. And they want it back.”

---

“Are you sure you don’t want to wait —”

“I’m done waiting,” Gwen snapped, following him to the room she’d first hidden in, staying close enough to breathe down his neck. “If we’re gonna keep talking, we’ll talk and plan.”

Kevin sighed, ushering her once back into the bedroom and bending down to stroke the gray cat as it streaked out through the open door. “You’re not a shark, you know. You’re not gonna die if you stop moving.”

“I’m not worried about me dying.” Jen’s bedroom was just as run-down as the rest of the house, but oppressively pink walls and posters of boy bands attempted to add some cheer to the scene. Or so she thought . . . leaning forward, Gwen realized that the eyes of most of the people on the posters and photographs had been scribbled out, and pentagrams and other symbols dotted their faces and clothes. “Jesus.”

“I warned you.” He crossed over to the vanity and opened one of the drawers, revealing mountains of cheap makeup but also weapons, disturbing pamphlets with the same satanic symbols on them, and a pile of photographs that looked like they’d been taken by paparazzi.

Spotting her own face, Gwen snatched up the photos and flipped through them. Most were of her — at the daycare, walking down the street, even one of her rappelling out of a helicopter from one of Jasper's heists — but there were a lot of David, and a few professional-quality pictures of Cameron Campbell clearly taken from his TV and magazine appearances.

These last ones were soft from regular contact, with smudging around the edges like they’d been held hundreds of times. “She’s obsessed with us.”

“If it helps, mostly just Campbell and David. You’re just kind of part of the deal.” Kevin tapped her on the shoulder as he passed, drawing her attention to the closet and opening the door. “Any of these look familiar?”

She suddenly noticed a loose thread on one of the leather jackets. She had a jacket exactly like that, with a thread exactly right — “Holy shit, is this my stuff?”

“Not all of it . . . but yeah, most of it.”

Gwen pushed her way into the closet, more carefully inspecting the clothes. “I mean, obviously my shit was getting stolen from the laundromat, but I thought that was just because this town sucks.”

“It does suck. But with her around, it sucks about a hundred times more.” 

The bitterness in his voice drew her away from her stolen clothing, and she turned back to look at him. “You really want her dead.”

He shrugged, sitting down on the bed and not-so-gently shoving the Flower Scouts uniform out of the way. “Not specifically. ‘Gone forever’ would work, too. In prison. In a really deep well.” He sighed, running a hand through his floppy brown hair and completely failing to push it out of his eyes. “The problem is that there’s no such thing as ‘forever’ with her. If she’s alive, she’ll come back worse than ever.”

It sounded like maybe he’d tried to convince her to skip town once or twice before. “So . . . what? They want your boyfriend to impersonate David, and she’s going to try and be me? Is that why they tried to kill us earlier?” she asked, taking a seat at the vanity and inspecting the brushes and makeup left behind. This foundation was way too dark for the blonde woman in the pictures surrounding the mirror, and as she held a bottle up to her own wrist she wasn’t surprised at all to find it was a perfect match. Pushing aside the idle curiosity if this counted as blackface or not, she added, “But why would she wanna take my place? It’s not really a place anyone wants to be at the moment.” 

Including herself.

“That was the plan at first, yeah,” Kevin said. “But I think watching you guys . . . did something to her head. She got madder and more resentful. And crazier, which I didn’t think was possible. I don’t think she wants to replace either of you as much as she just wants to make you all suffer the way she and Daniel have. Make Campbell pay for abandoning them.”

Before she could let that chilling thought sink in, he pushed himself off the bed with a groan that sounded like it should’ve come from a much older man. “Anyway, she obviously can’t see you looking like you, or you’ll never get within a hundred yards of David. So we’ve gotta give you a little makeover.”

It made sense, but “makeover” felt like such a ludicrously inappropriate word for the situation that she couldn’t help but scoff. “How the hell am I supposed to turn into a completely different person?” Sure, she’d heard of some really talented imposters before who could make you believe they were anyone, but acting had never been her strong suit. In fact, if it was a suit it was the most worn, raggedy, threadbare suit in her proverbial closet, and her makeup skills weren’t much better.

“ She did.” Kevin rifled through the vanity drawers, moving Gwen aside like she was just another part of the furniture. “Right now she’s walking around looking exactly like you, in fact. And if you want to see why, we should probably get a move on.”

Oh now he wanted to pick up the pace? She was about to snap at him that she was more than ready when she saw the razor in his hands. Shoving her stool back so hard it nearly tipped her over and onto her back, she scrambled away from him, reaching for her still-bagged gun. “Fuck no,” she said, starting to regret the level of trust they’d built so far. “Get away from me with that thing or I’ll blow your head off.”

“Hey, hey,” he said, stepping back with both hands in the air like one of them wasn’t still holding an electric blade, “we’re still friends here. Shave your own head if you wanna, I don’t care.” He tossed her the razor and settled back down on the bed with exaggerated slowness.

She caught it by instinct, looking down at it for a moment and running her free hand over her damp ponytail. She wasn’t incredibly attached to her hair, but . . . “What good will it do? Sounds like she’s spent months memorizing my face.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got three advantages. One,” he said, sitting up as she took a seat in front of the vanity, “you’re really underestimating how different somebody looks without hair or eyebrows. Trust me, it’s freaky.”

Gwen grimaced and lifted the razor to her hairline. “Two?” she prompted, taking a deep breath before turning it on.

He raised his voice to be heard over the buzzing. “Two, she’s not expecting you to show up in disguise. No offense, but you’re obviously not patient enough and probably not smart enough, and she still thinks I’m on her and Danny’s side.” Hair fell in thick, matted clumps from her scalp, leaving behind dark follicle-dotted skin that she’d kind of expected to look paler, since it never saw the sun. “And three, you happen to be teamed up with one of the least-bad drag queens in Sleepy Peak, back when I could still afford to do it.” Returning to her side, he carefully sidestepped the piles of hair dropping to the rug and gathered a handful of brushes in one hand, peering with a doctor’s precision at each of the powders and bottles littered across the table before setting some aside. “Trust me, I’ve got this.”

Her hair and eyebrows gone, she rubbed a hand over her scalp, watching her reflection do the same. It was crazy how much such a small change had transformed her, but the person in the mirror didn’t only no longer look like Gwen Santos, but it was kind of hard to picture them having a gender at all. She couldn’t square her image with actual hairless people she’d seen before, like cancer patients or skinheads; those were people . But she just felt like a strange, smooth alien. “How long will it take?”

“We have time.” He turned her stool around and angled her face toward the light, his calloused fingers rough against her jaw and cheek. For a moment he just inspected her, tapping one of the brushes against his palm. “Need a glass of water? More exposition?”

Gwen resisted the urge to roll her eyes, worrying it’d mess with her face as he began carefully smearing something wet and gooey just below her cheekbones. “So Jen looks like me right now. What’s she doing?”

Hopefully she’d gone to talk to Campbell. That would clear up a couple of problems real fast.

“She's visiting David. To convince the Flower Scouts kidnapping Campbell’s kid was a good idea, Jen has them thinking they’ll frame the Woodscouts. Turns out when they hired you to kill David, they were gonna pin it on the Flower Scouts, so it’s a whole revenge thing.”

That was why they’d even been willing to hire a woman. And here she’d thought she was just that special. She blinked to try and convey that she was listening without messing up whatever he was doing to her jaw, which seemed to involve a lot of blotting and then wiping it away with a lot of swearing.

“Fuck,” he muttered, his eyes narrowing as he once again dotted a damp brush along her jawline. “Do you have any goddamn idea how hard it is to put makeup on someone that makes it look like they’re not wearing makeup? It’s fine, we’ll get there. Anyway, yeah, so they’ve got David in some sub-sub-basement where he’d never know it was the Flower Scout headquarters, told him he’s in the Woodscout’s base, and Priss is hoping that when David gets out, he’ll get Campbell to destroy their biggest competition.”

Gwen’s stomach sank as he spoke, and once he’d leaned back to grab more powder from Jen’s vanity she said, “So they’re planning on letting him live?” not believing her own words.

His gaze was still focused on the makeup, but she studied his profile as his jaw tightened. “That’s what the Flower Scouts think is gonna happen. But they don’t know the real Jen. They don’t know she’s Campbell’s kid, I’m pretty sure they don’t even know Dan exists, and they really don’t know how much the two of them hate David.”

“What do you think is gonna happen?” she asked as he tilted her face toward the mirror.

He was quiet for a long time before he answered. “I think we need to get your boyfriend out of there quick enough that we don’t have to find out.”

---

Kevin’s work wasn’t bad. Quicker than she’d expected; it was still before her midnight deadline when he sat back with an exhausted sigh and wiped his makeup-smeared hands on his jeans. “All right, that oughta do it. Lemme wash this shit off.”

Gwen barely noticed him leave the room, too intently studying her reflection. He was right about the baldness; without her hair and eyebrows, she looked years younger and kind of sickly, her eyes bigger and rounder and the shadows underneath them more pronounced. He’d used just enough contour to make her nose and jaw more prominent, but she could only tell that it was makeup and not natural shadows by squinting; in anything besides daylight or the halogen glow of the vanity, she was pretty sure it’d be impossible to tell. Her upper lip and cheeks were dusted with faint, wispy black hairs, and she realized (with some distaste) that he’d used eyebrow powder to darken her existing facial hair, making it look like a middle-schooler’s first attempt at growing a mustache and beard. He’d even dotted over her faint natural freckles to bring them into prominence, and drawn on a few red spots that looked like healing acne across her cheeks and chin.

Kevin reentered the room with an armful of drab olive clothes. “Not bad, right? I would’ve done a King Molasses thing if I had anything we could’ve used as a beard, but all things considered . . .”

“I look like a thirteen-year-old boy.”

“Exactly! Perfect age for a Woodscout.” He elbowed past her to rifle through the vanity’s drawers, finding a box of multicolored contact lenses. “What’re you thinking? I remember Jen saying it’s easier to cover lighter eyes with a darker color, so brown or black are probably your best bet.”

She shrugged, letting him drop the dark brown circles into her palm. Suddenly everything was feeling a lot more real. “What if she doesn’t buy it?”

He shrugged, inspecting his fingernails with exaggerated nonchalance. “Then she probably kills you and David immediately, and if I’m lucky I’ll be locked in this shithole of a house forever and only allowed to leave with Jen or Dan chaperoning. If I’m less lucky, I’ll probably also join the pile of corpses.”

She tried to match his casual energy, turning her focus toward putting the contacts in. “Got anything for me to wear?”

“We stole some Woodscouts uniforms a couple months ago. Something should fit more or less.” As she blinked the world back into focus, she met his gaze in the mirror. Despite the attempt at easygoing optimism, his skin was the color of milk, turning the bags under his eyes a sickly purple-gray. “Sure you wanna do this, kid?”

Gwen sucked in a deep breath, shoving her stool away from the vanity and inspecting the uniforms he’d left strewn across the bed. “Of course not,” she said tightly. “But he’d do it for me.”

There was a moment of silence but she didn’t look up, telling herself the blurring of her vision was just her eyes tearing up from the contacts. “Yeah,” he finally replied, his voice surprisingly soft and almost sympathetic. “All right. Just meet me in the living room when you’re done. I’ll text them so they know we’re coming.”

“Don’t text anything without me seeing it first,” she snapped, remembering suddenly that she was in the house of her enemy. Kevin’s helpfulness and general sarcastic-but-friendly demeanor had brought her guard down despite herself, and she kept making the mistake of wanting to trust him.

“Aye-aye, cap’n,” he muttered, and she could hear the exasperation in his voice. “Hurry up, though. We’ve gotta clean up any sign of you being here, too.”

It seemed to take forever, but also like in no time at all she was standing in the living room once again, her gun carefully stowed in the oversized boots of the Woodscouts’ uniform and her original clothes buried in the mess of Kevin’s bedroom. She stared into the eyes of her wan reflection as he punched in the text message to Jen, resisting the urge to touch her sunken cheek and smudge the makeup. It was such an easy illusion to ruin, even with the setting spray he’d nearly blinded her with.

Could it ever actually work? 

“Here.” Kevin’s voice interrupted her thoughts, and she leaned over to read the message: Dropping off a cookie delivery and found something for the Campbell plan. Bring it by in 20?

She nodded, listening to the soft whoosh ing sound as the message was sent. She knew she was the “something,” and his vagueness made her anxious, but he promised that they never said anything too specific over text, and scrolling through his past messages with Jen made that clear enough.

Besides . . . she trusted him. Somehow. He’d stuck his neck out for her, in a way she wasn’t at all sure she’d be willing to do in his same situation, and she just didn’t get the feeling that this was all part of an elaborate trap laid by him and the crazy twins. His affection for Daniel seemed so real — as did his resentment and fear of Jen.

And there was just something about him that made her want to trust him. Not just that she was alone in the world, not just that he was her only real chance to save her boss and best friend, he was . . . disarming. Likable.

Like David.

The buzzing of Kevin’s phone made them both jump, and they glanced warily at one another before he opened the text. It was a simple message, somehow cold and dismissive even in writing, and made dread coil icy and leaden in the pit of her stomach.

Make it 10.