Bloodlust by Alex Duval

your fault,” he told his friend, gently but firmly.
    Adam turned away from the water and faced Jason. “I want you to look at something with me.”
    “Sure. Now?” Jason asked.
    “No. The video editing suite is full of Tarantino wannabes during lunch. But meet me there after school. Oh, but I guess you have practice?”
    “I can get out of it if this is important,” Jason told him.
    “It is,” Adam said. His eyes glittered and his cheeks were flushed, almost like he had a fever. He turned his face away for a moment, and Jason saw his jaw clench. When he looked back, his expression was grim—and filled with pain. “That footage I shot at the party?” Adam muttered. “I think it might prove what really happened to Carrie.”
     
    Jason stepped into the dim video editing suite after his last class of the day. He spotted Adam at the station in the back corner, hunched close to a monitor. Had Adam really caught something revealing on film? he wondered. Or was this just a reaction to Carrie’s death?
    “Hey,” he said as he pulled up a chair next to his friend.
    Adam’s body jerked in surprise. “Didn’t hear you come in,” he muttered.
    “Got here as fast as I could,” Jason replied. “What you got for me?”
    “It could be dangerous for you to see,” Adam said, his voice so low, Jason almost couldn’t make out the words.
    “I don’t give a crap. Show me,” Jason told him. He was a lot more worried about Adam than about anything he might see on the film. His friend was acting pretty crazy.
    Adam brought his hands to the keyboard, then hesitated. “You know how I’ve been making this movie….”
    “Yeah?”
    “Well, for a while—since before you got here—it mostly hasn’t been a movie. It’s been…well, research, I guess you’d call it,” Adam went on. “Because while making the movie, I started noticing things….” He stared at the monitor. An image of Carrie and Scott Challon was frozen on the screen, Carrie and Scott on the bed in one of the Moulin Rouge ’s cabins. “Things somebody like me shouldn’t see,” Adam finally added.
    “What’s that supposed to mean? Somebody like you?” Jason asked. He wanted to cover the image of Carrie and Scott with his hands. Adam was in even worse shape than Jason had thought. He didn’t need to be looking at that right now.
    “There are two groups at DeVere. Everyone knows it,” Adam said. “I don’t know why it took me so long to see exactly what they were…I suspected, made lists, took notes, and kept filming. But I didn’t say anything. I should have told Carrie, warned her.”
    “Look, maybe it would be better if you just showed me what you want to show me,” Jason suggested gently. Once he had facts, maybe he could figure out how to help Adam. Right now, he had no idea what was going on in his friend’s head.
    “Okay.” Adam’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and a new image appeared on the screen: Brad and Lauren stretched out on one of the lounge chairs on the fore-deck of the yacht. Both dripping with water, clearly just out of the hot tub.
    “I saw the coming attractions for this. Didn’t make me want to see the movie,” Jason said uneasily. The joke was limp, and he knew it, but he had to say something to hide the wave of humiliation that crashed over him as he remembered what a fool he’d been scolding Brad like some wrinkled-up prude while Sienna was—
    Focus! Jason ordered himself. This isn’t about you. “What am I supposed to be seeing?” he asked Adam. Because it couldn’t be Brad hovering over the base of Lauren’s throat, which is all Jason saw on the monitor. The action crept forward, frame by frame, on super slo-mo.
    “Wait,” Adam said. “It’s coming up. Right…here.” On the screen, Brad raised his head. “Look at his mouth and her neck,” Adam instructed, hitting a button on the keyboard to freeze the scene.
    Jason leaned closer to the monitor. Something dripped from Brad’s