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I HER DEATH, HIS REBIRTH
SPENCER HATED THE SMELL of the diner. It smelt like paint thinner and canned peaches, a strange cocktail of smells that made his stomach stir with disgust. It was cheap and musky, like a grandmother's basement. Dale's Diner, a tiny dingy place, hadn't seemed like the place that boys like the Gentlemen's Club—rich, elite, white boys—would spend their Saturday nights.
They stood out like a sore thumb, Spencer thought, clashing against the cheap pretend-velvet fabric that covered the lumpy booths and the stained white marble tables. With their iron pressed cashmere coats and sleek silk ties wrapped around their throats—tight enough to choke on—they looked out of place.
He didn't like the way that people stared at them, as if they were an oddity. As if they didn't belong.
Spencer busied himself with counting; counting always made things easier.
He counted the number of lines on the girl's face from across the table: the lines around the corner of her pretty pink mouth when they stretched into a frown, the number of wrinkles that creased her forehead when she squinted at the menu in her dainty hands, and the dark lashes that curled upwards.
In total, he counted thirty-eight lines.
His eyes looked her up-and-down, admiring the soft and hard lines that filled her appearance. He admired the runs in her white nylons and the soft curls of her golden hair that almost glistened underneath the harsh diner light.
Spencer liked to admire her from afar.
He preferred the hard lines (the lines that demanded attention, that raised to the surface of her otherwise soft appearance) the deep, rigid, thick lines. He liked the way that her mouth curved into a sharp frown and the way that her thin brows furrowed together in distaste.
If he counted it made it easier.
It made it easier to deal with the fact that girl, Darcy Newman, was going to die tonight.
Spencer didn't know that in twenty-nine minutes she was going to die. He knew that she would die tonight, he knew that it would be soon, but he hadn't known that it would be that soon. He had no idea that it would be twenty-nine minutes soon.
She had no idea that in exactly twenty-nine minutes she would find herself face first in a rosebush, bleeding out, with three shaky silhouettes standing over her cadaver. Her last memory would be the burning of candle wax between her fingertips and the crisp scent of incense. Their faces are obscured and unfamiliar.
A fox. A lion. A wolf.
All Darcy Newman knew was in that moment was that her girlfriend was fifteen minutes late, her tea was getting cold, and she started to worry that she wouldn't be coming at all. Alice Hammond was many things—a spoiled princess, cruel, a bit snarky—but she was never late. It wasn't her style.
