Page 42 of The Debutantes
“Well, if it isn’t Milly Wilcox!” He releases the girl and pulls Milford into a stiff hug, clapping him once on the back. “I didn’t think you’d make it, you son of a gun. Your dad still working?”
The man’s face is half-obscured by a deer mask, silver with sharp, menacing antlers, but I recognize him from Piper’s sunroom. I scan for other familiar faces, but it’s dark, and the men are all stock images of the same type: middle-aged, white, wealthy. It’s not until the glint of another man’s glasses makes my stomach drop that I realize I’m searching for Dad. But it’s not him. There’s no way he’s here. When I came downstairs to leave tonight, he and Mom were tucked together on the couch watchingColumbo.I told them I was going to hang out with some friends from the ball, and they were too elated—and mildly wine-drunk from dinner—to care that I was heading out at half past midnight.
“Yeah,” Milford says, his shoulders tightening. “I don’t think he’ll make it.”
“Well, good thing you brought friends.” Beneath the mask, the man’s hazy eyes dance between Vivian, Piper, and me. “Beautiful ones, at that.”
Disgust roils through me, and I grab for my camera strap to ground me before realizing I don’t have it. My gaze shifts to the woman on his arm. She’s watching us with a sort of detached pleasantness, eyes blank behind her masquerade mask. As I look more closely, a chill shudders down my spine. There’s no way she’s this man’s wife. She can’t be older than twenty-two.
“Don’t go too hard on him tonight, girls.” The man chuckles at us. “He’s a gentleman.” He points at Milford. “Now, I don’t see a drink in that hand. Let’s fix that.”
The man angles toward the bar, and the woman stumbles slightly. I want to do something, say something, but my tongue feels stuck to the roof of my mouth, my limbs frozen.
Because now, looking around, I see the pattern. Every womanhere is young, I’d guess no older than twenty-five. And every single one is with a man who could be her father.
Was Margot one of them? Did she come here?
As soon as the man is out of earshot, Vivian turns to Milford and hisses through gritted teeth, “Whatisthis? That girl could barely stand up on her own. And she’s, like,ourage.”
“If she’s here, it’s ’cause she wanted to be,” Milford hisses back. “Same as y’all.”
“Do my eyes deceive me, or is that Milly Wilcox?”
Milford’s head whips toward the voice, which came from a red-cheeked man sprawled across a chaise to the side of the room. His mask is off, dangling around his neck. Probably because, from the looks of it, he’s had enough liquor to knock out an elephant. He has a girl next to him, too, just as young as the others.
“Shit,” Milford mutters. He waves, putting on a smile, before turning around to whisper to us. “Y’all stay right there.”
He hurries away without giving us a chance to protest. Dread burrows deeper into my gut. Even when he was bossing us around just now, Milford didn’t sound authoritative. He sounded panicked.
Piper grabs our hands and tugs us forward. “Come on.”
“I don’t like this,” Vivian whispers. “I think we should leave.”
“This might be our only chance to look around,” Piper says. “We have to.”
Before I can protest, she loops her arms through mine and Vivian’s, putting on a bright smile.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s make the rounds, shall we?”
I want to argue that someone will stop us, demand to knowwhat we’re really doing here, but Piper’s already pulling us deeper into the Pierrot. She walks with perfect debutante posture, so assured that I can feel some of it rubbing off on me. And somehow, I don’t panic, even as suspicious gazes slide over us. We snake between pairs of laughing men and the masked women on their arms, past waiters with trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres, like some hellscape version of the Johnsons’ party, each of the staff members wearing the same birdlike mask as the man who was guarding the door. But no one stops us.
Once we’ve crossed to the other side of the large room, Piper lets go. We’re in front of a set of tall shuttered doors that open out to a balcony, where two men lean on the railing, one of them lighting a cigarette.
“Let’s do a loop around,” Piper murmurs.
And then I catch the flame flickering under the man’s chin, a silver flash in his palm.
The lighter.I don’t need to see it up close to know it’s the exact same one as Milford’s. As Margot’s.
Piper and Vivian drift in the other direction, but it’s like a string is tugging me away, pulling me toward the balcony before they notice I’m not following them.
As soon as the two men see me in the doorframe, I freeze, all of the bravery draining from my body. They’re both masked, their faces completely hidden. One is a raven, his mask dark and feathered, and the other, the one with the lighter, is a wolf, complete with a fanged snout.
Not a wolf, I think. A Rougarou.
“Looks like we’ve found ourselves a lost lamb,” he says. I can’t see it beneath the mask, but it’s like I can hear his mouth turning up into a grin. “Now who do you belong to?”
My teeth start to chatter. I clench them.
