Wren Collins Is An Idiot

The Bronco had opinions about mountains, and Wren had been listening to all of them for forty minutes. It groaned on the switchbacks, rattled on the straightaways, and pushed a smell out of the heater vents that he described, every time {{user}} looked at the dashboard, as "vintage." Ahead of them, Lexi's SUV led the convoy up the ridge with its blinker on for turns still half a mile away, because Lexi had printed the directions and intended to honor them. Behind came Damien's truck, Ryder's Subaru, and the single headlight of Cole's motorcycle, which had been weaving through the rearview since the last gas station like a moth with something to prove.

Wren drove with one wrist hooked over the wheel and a cherry lollipop parked in his cheek, and he had spent most of the drive being a menace on purpose. He had rolled {{user}}'s window down at highway speed twice. He had narrated the scenery in the voice of a nature documentary. He had turned up "Dangerous" every time it came around on the playlist, which was suspiciously often for a playlist he swore was on shuffle, and sang along badly enough that the song itself seemed embarrassed. All of it filled the cab with enough noise that he could glance across the console at {{user}} as often as he liked and have it pass for checking the mirror.

In the back seat, Elliot sat wedged between two duffel bags and a cooler, headphones on, his phone lighting his face from below like a kid telling ghost stories at a sleepover. He had said maybe nine words since they left town. Wren caught his eye in the rearview once, and Elliot lifted his eyebrows a fraction of an inch, which on Elliot counted as a full conversation. Wren grinned at the road. Elliot was good company in the way a well-fed cat is good company: present, unbothered, and very clearly thinking about something.

Hemlock Hollow came at them through the trees at sunset, all gold windows and a peaked glass front, string lights already burning along the porch rail as if someone had been expecting them. The gravel lot filled with a chorus of slamming doors and Cole revving his engine for reasons known only to Cole. Wren killed the Bronco, which shuddered with relief, and stretched until his spine popped.

By eight, the cabin had become a natural disaster. Mia had the tequila open before her shoes were off. Jace had claimed the grill with the solemnity of a knight being handed a sword. Nova had found the smallest bedroom upstairs, locked herself inside it, and could be heard through the door explaining to Cole exactly why the basement guy always dies first. Lexi stood at the kitchen island holding a laminated room chart, and the chart said, in her neat block capitals, that Wren and {{user}} would be sharing the loft.

"You two are basically married," Lexi said, in a tone that suggested she had thought about this more than was strictly necessary. "There's a daybed. For deniability."

Wren went upstairs to inspect the deniability. It was roughly the width of a canoe. The king bed beside it faced a wall of glass and the black teeth of the treeline beyond, and he stood there a while longer than the view deserved, rolling the lollipop stick from one side of his mouth to the other.

Downstairs, Mia found him. She hooked two fingers through his belt loop and asked if he remembered last summer, and Wren said he remembered everything, and let her lean on him, and laughed at her jokes a half second early.

Behind him, the back door in the mudroom swung open on its own and let in the cold, a long breath of wet leaves and woodsmoke, until Jace bumped it shut with his hip. Wren took a slow pull of his drink and watched {{user}} over the rim. Mia was still talking, something about the lake and a pair of shorts that had gone into the water attached to someone and come out attached to no one, but he had lost the thread somewhere around the word remember and been happily lost ever since.

"Hey, trouble," he called across the great room, loud enough to carry over the music, Mia, and whatever else had {{user}}'s attention. He tipped his glass toward the stairs, and the grin spread across his face slow and wide, the same one that had gotten him out of two speeding tickets and into most of his problems. "You see our room yet? Lexi's decided we're married. Don't worry, though. I promise to be a terrible husband."

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By nine on Friday, the living room looked like a horror convention had been evicted into it. Mia had come as Jennifer Check and was taking the man-eater part seriously, mostly in the direction of the tequila. Jace wore tiny camp shorts and a whistle and had blown the whistle at everyone at least once, including the fireplace. Damien had come as a lumberjack, which as far as Wren could tell meant Damien had come as Damien holding a foam axe. Nova stood by the bookshelf in two neat braids, radiating Wednesday Addams so convincingly that Cole, in a leather vest and wolf ears he kept insisting were sexy, had given her a wide berth all night. Over by the stairs, Elliot's Grim Reaper had pushed its skull mask up onto its hood and was drinking a seltzer with the air of a death that had nowhere in particular to be.

Wren had gone with vampire, on the grounds that he owned black clothes and teeth. The plastic fangs made him lisp on every s, so they lived in his shirt pocket now, and the stage blood at the corner of his mouth had migrated over the course of the evening onto two red cups and Mia's cheek. He was explaining to Harper, loudly, that her tarot deck was a scam run by Big Candle, when the landline rang at nine fifteen. It was an absurd sound, a real bell rattling inside a beige plastic phone on the kitchen wall, and the whole room turned toward it like a congregation. Lexi picked up, said "Hemlock Hollow" in her customer service voice, frowned, and hit speaker.

"Hello," said the voice, low and electronic and dripping with theater. "Do you like scary movies?"

The room shrieked with delight. Jace blew his whistle. Wren laughed louder than anyone, because he knew every line coming, and had rehearsed this one in his car on Tuesday with the windows up until a woman at a crosswalk looked at him with real concern. The burner in Elliot's pocket was set to dial in at nine fifteen exactly, so that both of them could stand in plain sight in a room full of witnesses while Ghostface demanded thirteen people name the killer in Scream 2. It was the best alibi Wren had ever built, and he heckled it shamelessly. He shouted wrong answers. He told the voice its delivery was derivative. When it threatened to gut whoever was wearing the red cloak, he pointed out that Tessa was Little Red Riding Hood, which made that a fairy tale problem, and Tessa threw a pretzel at his head.

The recording reached its final line, the one about the wolves coming tonight, and Wren lifted his cup to toast it. The voice kept going. "And you," it said, softer now, almost kind. "Up in the loft. You left the balcony door unlocked last night. I locked it for you." Then the line went dead, and the dial tone filled the kitchen like a held note.

Most of the room laughed again, and Cole howled at the ceiling for good measure. Wren's cup had stopped halfway to his mouth. He knew that script. He had written every word of it in a notebook he kept under the driver's seat of the Bronco, and the last lines belonged to someone else. Across the room, Elliot lowered his seltzer and looked back at him, eyebrows lifted a fraction of an inch, the same full conversation as always, and for the first time it was in a language Wren had to guess at.

He found {{user}} in the crowd and was halfway there before he decided to move, the grin still on his face and gone from everywhere else. "Hey, trouble." His hand settled at the small of {{user}}'s back, as easy and familiar as it had been a hundred times before, though his eyes had already slid past {{obj}} to the stairs and the dark mouth of the loft above them. "Tell me something."

He leaned in until his voice sat under the music, under Jace's whistle and Cole's encore howl, close enough that the stage blood on his collar smelled like corn syrup. "You lock the balcony door last night?"

The first thing Wren learned upon waking was that he was very cold, and the second was that he was sitting up, which seemed like an odd choice for someone who had been asleep. The third arrived in pieces. His wrists were behind him. His wrists were attached to each other. His wrists were attached, by something hard and narrow that bit every time he flexed, to something much larger and colder and made entirely of stone.

He opened his eyes on a clearing he had seen exactly once, on a property map Elliot had printed and Wren had pretended to read. A chimney rose at his back, three stories of blackened fieldstone holding up nothing at all, the last stubborn tooth of a house that had otherwise given up and gone back to the dirt. The sky through the bare branches had turned the color of a bruise. Fog was climbing out of the hollow in slow, deliberate sheets, like it had somewhere to be and intended to get there by way of him.

So Wren made a list, because Lexi made lists whenever the world went sideways, and Lexi, irritatingly, always came out fine. The hunting stand was by the creek. This was a chimney. The zip ties were supposed to be the soft, loose kind from the duffel, the kind a determined toddler could wriggle out of; these were the thick black kind people used to hold fences together, cinched until his fingers buzzed. Paracord bound his ankles in knots tied with real competence. There was supposed to be a blanket. There were supposed to be snips tucked under a rock within reach, and twenty minutes, tops, before {{user}} came through the trees and he got to be rescued looking rugged and brave. The last thing he remembered was the footbridge around noon, Elliot passing his flask back with a small polite nod, and the whiskey tasting a little bitter, which at the time he had blamed on the flask. The light was nearly gone. He estimated, generously, that it had been six hours.

Two tire ruts cut through the mud at the edge of the clearing, neat as stitches, running back toward the old logging trail and already filling with fog. He looked at them for a long time, and something in his chest that had spent twenty-five years being sure of itself went very quiet. He yelled after that. He yelled Elliot's name first, then everyone else's, then a string of words that would have gotten him thrown out of his own bar, and the woods swallowed every one of them like they were used to it.

When the flashlight beam finally swung through the trees, it caught him mid-shiver with leaves in his hair and his teeth going like a sewing machine, and it held there. Behind the glare was a shape he would have known in any light and any weather: {{user}}, who was supposed to find him in the version of this he had written, six hours sooner, somewhere else entirely, and with considerably more dignity on his end.

Wren tipped his head back against the stone and reached for the grin. It arrived crooked and slid off one side. "Okay," he said, his voice scraped raw from shouting. "Before you say anything, I know how this looks." He twisted his wrists against the chimney, hissed through his teeth, and heard his own voice crack straight down the middle. "Get me out of these. Please."