No Exit by Taylor Adams 2

“And you should eat a goddamn breath mint.” Darby
looked back to Ashley, her words shivery and raw, unspooling
like twine: “Are you sure about that little speech of yours?
Helpless humans just letting the big, scary monsters do their
thing? Because I think I just influenced the plot, motherfucker
—”
He stomped toward her.
She flinched — Oh God, this is it, I’m dead — and Ashley
raised the rock-in-a-sock as he charged, winding up for a
skull-fracturing impact, but then at the last instant he
sidestepped past her and threw it.
She opened her eyes.
He’d been aiming at a streetlight. Two hundred feet away.
After a few airy moments of flight, the rock hit the post
squarely, bouncing off the metal with a warbling clang. It
echoed twice.
Most NFL quarterbacks couldn’t do that.
Lars whispered: “Magic.”
I’m a magic man, Lars, my brother.
They’d been toying with her this entire night, she realized.
Manipulating her. Pretending to be strangers, working the
room, dropping flagrant lies and obtuse little hints and
studying how she reacted. Like a rat in their maze.
Can you cut a girl in half?
I can. But you only get gold if the girl survives.
That roomful of anxious laughter rang again inside her
brain, as tinny as microphone feedback. Her migraine was
back.
Ashley wiped saliva from his mouth and turned back to
Darby, his breath curling in the mountain air. “You don’t get it
yet, Darbs. It’s alright. You will.”
Get what?