The bassline from Alice in Chains' Again rattled the windows of the MacTavish house, a sprawling split-level that sat on three acres of overgrown lawn with the nearest neighbor a good quarter-mile down a winding gravel road. The Preserve loomed at the edge of the property, those towering pines swallowing the last of the June daylight, leaving the house awash in the orange glow of tiki torches someone had jabbed into the flowerbeds earlier that evening.

John MacTavish had been planning this blowout since finals ended. Two days of hauling kegs, stringing up cheap fairy lights his mum kept in the attic for Christmas, and stacking his parents' breakables in the garage had transformed the modest home into something resembling a proper rager. The kitchen island was a graveyard of half-empty bottles: Jack Daniel's, cheap vodka, a bottle of Glenfiddich Soap had specifically set aside for himself with a possessive scrawl of HANDS OFF YA BASTARDS on a piece of masking tape slapped across the glass.

"S'got half a bottle of Jaeger in there, watch yer teeth," Soap called over the music, leaning across the kitchen counter to nudge a red plastic cup toward Gaz. His Scottish brogue thickened as it always did when he was a few drinks in, "Dinnae come cryin' tae me when ye cannae feel yer face."

Gaz took the cup anyway, because he had never met a bad decision he wasn't willing to make at least once. "Your funeral," he said with a grin, tipping it back.

The living room had been converted into a makeshift dance floor, furniture shoved against walls, the coffee table relocated to serve as a beer pong arena currently dominated by Horangi, who had the sort of quiet, precise hand-eye coordination that made him absolutely lethal at throwing a ping pong ball and absolutely insufferable about it afterward.

Roland sat cross-legged on the floor nearby, nursing a beer and watching the game with the slightly bemused expression of someone who found competitive drinking sports both fascinating and deeply American. Beside him, König occupied an entire corner of the sectional couch by himself, all six-foot-six of him folded into a space meant for someone half his size, his knees jutting up like a grasshopper's. He wasn't drinking much but he'd positioned himself where he could see both the front and back doors, a habit none of them commented on anymore.

The sliding glass door to the back patio stood wide open, letting in the warm night air and the distant sound of crickets. Outside, the Walker brothers had claimed the lawn chairs around the fire pit. Logan was attempting to roast a hot dog over the flames using a straightened coat hanger, while David provided unhelpful commentary on his technique.

"Coat hanger's got chrome plating, genius," Hesh said, fishing a fresh beer from the cooler at his feet. "You're gonna give yourself metal poisoning."

"Chrome's nontoxic if you're not a pussy about it." Logan didn't look up from his hot dog.

Keegan Russ stood at the edge of the patio, leaning against the railing with his arms crossed, watching the tree line. He'd been quiet for the last half-hour, which wasn't unusual for Keegan, but there was something about the way his gray-blue eyes kept tracking back to the darkness beyond the torches that suggested he wasn't entirely at ease.

Inside, Simon had claimed the armchair closest to the hallway, a vantage point that put the front door on his right and the entrance to the kitchen on his left. The skull-print balaclava was pulled down around his neck for once—it was too bloody hot for full coverage—but he hadn't made any particular effort to join the festivities. He'd spent most of the party nursing the same bottle of beer, watching the room with those unnervingly still brown eyes, contributing the occasional dry comment in that low Manchester rumble.

"Your mate's gonna burn the deck down," he said, nodding toward the patio as Soap dropped onto the arm of the couch beside him.

"Aye, probably." Soap grinned, entirely unconcerned. "S'why I made Hesh supervise. He's the responsible one."

"You've got a jobby definition of 'responsible.'"

"Learned it frae you, Si."

Simon's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly—he hated when Soap called him that—but he let it slide. Summer break had softened some of his sharper edges, or maybe it was just the beer.

The party rolled on.

By half-past eleven, the noise had reached a comfortable roar. Someone had put on a Pearl Jam CD. A few people were crowded around the television in the den, where a beat-up Nintendo 64 was running a heated game of GoldenEye. Horangi had abandoned beer pong after Gaz finally managed to knock him off his winning streak, and was now sprawled on the floor with his back against König's leg, arguing with Roland in rapid-fire Korean and French respectively about something that neither of them seemed particularly angry about despite their volume.

Soap had produced a bottle of tequila from somewhere and was pouring shots with the aggressive hospitality of someone who firmly believed that everyone else should be at least as drunk as he was.

"Right, who's brave enough?" He lined up four glasses on the kitchen counter, the salt shaker from his mum's spice rack clutched in one hand, a wedge of lime in the other.

"I'll go." Logan had come back inside. He stepped up to the counter with the slightly overconfident swagger of an eighteen-year-old who'd had exactly enough beer to take the edge off but not enough to understand consequences.

"Atta boy, Walker."

Hesh appeared at his brother's shoulder, looking like he wanted to object but had long since accepted that trying to stop Logan from doing stupid things was a losing battle. "If you puke, I'm telling Dad."

"If I puke, I'll have earned it."

The tequila shots went down with varying degrees of success. Logan coughed, Hesh kept a straight face, Soap looked like he'd been doing this since birth, and Roland—who had been roped in at the last second—took his with the quiet dignity of someone who'd been drinking wine at family dinners since he was fourteen and found American college antics faintly amusing.

The clock struck midnight

The stereo clicked over to the next track. Soap was telling some long-winded story about a rugby match gone wrong, his hands gesturing broadly, his accent becoming increasingly impenetrable with each drink. Logan and Hesh were trying to teach Roland a card game that seemed to have rules made up on the spot. Gaz was arguing with Horangi—who had woken up enough to defend his music taste—about whether Pearl Jam or Soundgarden was the superior band.

It was, by all appearances, a perfectly ordinary summer party.

The kind of night where nothing bad was supposed to happen.

The sliding glass door had been left open again, the tiki torches outside burning low. The woods beyond the fence line were absolutely black now, the sort of darkness that swallowed light whole and gave nothing back. Inside the house, the music played on, the laughter echoed, and the beer continued to flow.