Rise at Twilight

by Kayla Krantz

  “That’s part of it.”

  Luna’s anger rose, breaking the surface of her mask as her nostrils flared. “What’s the rest?”

  “You seem conflicted,” he responded.

  “I-I didn’t think things would continue—after y-you killed me,” she admitted, picking up the bit of food off her plate though she had no intention of taking a bite.

  “Come on, Luna. You’re smarter than that. I talked to you after I died. What do you think? That you were losing your mind? You thought that after everything, you were simply crazy?”

  Luna bobbed her head, wishing the answer had been as simple as that. Crazy she could understand. This, she could not.

  “Well, you didn’t. You were sane, just overcome with grief,” he said and frowned. “What you went through is hard for anyone, and I don’t think anything you did would’ve changed that.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me? That I wouldn’t really die?” she asked in a whisper, wondering if she’d be able to get him to admit the truth or not.

  He shrugged. “I dropped clues. I just thought you knew.”

  “But I didn’t. You used me,” she said, throwing the sandwich back onto the plate before turning her deadpanned face toward him. “You twisted me to do your bidding, knowing that I was out of my mind. You saw my weakness and took advantage of it…like you always do.”

  Chance was silent, and the venom bubbled inside her. How could he not say anything, not even try to defend himself? She reached up to smack him across the face like she had done to her old roommate, Amanda, so long ago, but Chance caught her wrist before she could meet his cheek, holding her tight in his grip.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he warned, holding her a moment longer before he let go.

  Luna growled in her throat, rubbing the sore skin as she stared down at her hands. “I just don’t know what to think of you. What to think of any of this. What does it mean…being in this place? Are Violet and Max here?”

  Chance tensed at the mention of Max’s name. “Yeah. Why?”

  “I need to talk to them. I have so much to say. There’s so much they need to know.”

  Chance frowned, his body rigid beside hers. “Violet, I might be able to understand, but Max? Really? I thought you hated him after he lied to you.”

  “I’m not happy with him,” she admitted, setting the plate on the blanket beside her before she brought herself to look Chance in the eyes. “But he was my best friend for a long time. I know that’s worthless to you, but to me, it means something.”

  Chance breathed in deep through his nose and got off the bed to pace to the other side of the room, keeping his back to her as he stared into the hallway. She wondered if he was contemplating locking her in the room and watched him take another step closer to the hallway, movement as stiff as his words had been.

  “What’s wrong?” Luna dared herself to ask.

  Chance whipped on his heels to stare at her, stalking toward her with each word. Luna’s heart began to beat, erratic and fast, her mind swirling with panic and dizziness. He noticed none of it as he came to a rest beside her, finger jabbing at her shoulder as he said, “You know how I feel about Max, and five minutes after waking up, he’s all you can talk about?”

  “I talked about other things,” she replied, curling her hands into fists.

  “Not nearly enough other things.”

  “What is wrong with you?” she seethed, wanting to stand up off the bed but also not wanting to do anything that would make him think she was trying to physically fight him.

  “What’s wrong with me?” he asked and scoffed. “What’s wrong with you? After everything I helped you through, everything we did together…I-I thought we had something finally.”

  Luna’s eyes widened as he fanned out the fingers on his hand, like he wanted to strangle her but knew better than to try. His blue eyes bored into her green ones as they looked into each other’s minds, their souls. To Luna, his anger was expected—it was the emotion she had seen him express the most over the course of their lives—and yet, it still caught her off guard. “I-I…it’s just so…”

  “Don’t you dare say it wasn’t real,” he snarled, curling his lip. “Don’t you sit there and say I never brought you comfort, that I wasn’t there for you when you needed someone.”

  “You tricked me!” she cried out, standing up to face him. “And you knew what you were doing! We might’ve had something when I was so far gone that I didn’t know who I was, but that’s not the case anymore. I know everything now!”

  “I don’t believe that shit. I think you’re so used to saying the same things over and over that you don’t know how to say anything else because you think if you stick to your mantras then no one will know who you really are. You are not the golden girl that Max wanted. You are something else entirely, something made of the same threads as me. And you’re a fool if you don’t see that.”

  “Your magic interfered,” she said, lifting her knuckles to wipe away a tiny bubble of liquid as it dripped from her nose. “You forced a connection between us from that very first day in the cabin.”

  “The Rosebone has nothing to do with this, with you being here. It was a personal choice, Luna. You have to feel something for me, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You’d be somewhere else in the forest in the ‘No Chance Allowed Club.’ Let that fucking sink in for a moment before you go pointing the blame at everyone else.”

  Luna swallowed roughly from the fervor of his glare, feeling some of her anger get put out. She hadn’t considered the possibility that her place with him might be her own fault. She hated him, but not as much as she knew she should. Luna held herself and shivered at the thought. What kind of person does that make me?

  Peering up at him through her eyelashes, she asked, “I thought I was here because I was the only one you didn’t slaughter in a ritual killing w-with your dagger.”

  Chance scoffed, shaking his head slightly. “It was easy for you to believe that, too, right? That I did it, because I always do everything. Every time your life even slightly deviates from what you want to happen, you blame me.”

  Luna pursed her lips but didn’t speak, waiting for him to finalize his rant.

  Chance smirked and reached up to swipe his thumb along his lips collecting the spit that had gathered there. “Look. You want to know why I killed you with a different blade? I wanted to prove to you that you were different from the rest of them. What I did for you? That was a mercy killing.”

  “A mercy killing? That’s what you call it?”

  “You were too far gone, Luna. If I hadn’t intervened, you’d be in jail right now—for the rest of your life instead of being here with me. You tell me, which is worse?”

  Luna pursed her lips. She didn’t know. “You convinced me to be that monster, if I remember correctly. I thought it would all end if I let you kill me. I didn’t realize I was making a choice! I blame this on you because at any point in time you could’ve sat me down and told me the situation, explained to me what would happen, but you made the choice not to.”

  Chance grabbed her jaw in his hand. “Well, regardless of what you thought, you did decide—me—and I’m not letting you go this time.”

  “I-I…” Luna paused to gather her words, and her shoulders slumped as her new emotions resurfaced to battle the old. Who was she anymore that this was even a problem for her? The version of herself that she had been in high school wouldn’t have stayed this long through the argument. She would’ve woken up, seen where she was, and promptly tried to leave. She wouldn’t have waited for him to explain a thing. “You helped me when I needed someone more than ever before. I’m not saying I want to leave. I just feel overwhelmed.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as she uttered the last sentence.

  Chance stared at her for a long moment, and like Luna, he was unable to decide if she meant it or not.

  Chapter Five

  WHEN AMY’S EYES fluttered open, her heart pounded in residual fear o
f her final moments. Amy never imagined a knife to be cold, but it had been. The chill coursing through her blood had been the last sensation before her world cut to black. Amy shuddered with every second of her murder flooding her mind and hopped to her feet, thinking Luna was nearby, knife at the ready, but she stilled when she realized she was alone. She was in the stretch of woods her and her partner had frequented before she had been locked in Brentwood, but he wasn’t here…not that she could tell anyway.

  “You failed your mission,” the booming Voice announced to her.

  Though this wasn’t exactly news, she winced anyway, and bowed her head, shame flooding through her. She hadn’t expected to be greeted with open arms. After all she had turned her back on the Voice for a long time, but she had hoped for some sort of compassion. She had just died after all.

  Perhaps that’s expecting too much.

  She thought of all the times the Voice had come to her, had pleaded with her to regain her position, and even after her partner had been killed, she had continued to move away from the responsibility, to choose herself over her duty to this place. Now, she would pay for that selfishness.

  “Keeper does not suit you,” the Voice continued. “And as such, you are officially relieved of the title from here on out.”

  “I understand,” she said, and if she had to be honest with no one but herself, she was relieved. If she could go so far to say—they both were. Amy had spent many years of her life hating her job, deliberately missing out on needed sleep to escape these responsibilities. This change was welcome for everyone included, and she wondered why she had ever been given the job to begin with. None of her family was special enough to navigate this place—not that she knew of anyway.

  “However, you have too much experience to be let go completely,” the Voice added.

  Amy’s shoulders slumped instantly. “But I let you down,” she protested.

  The Voice continued to speak as if it hadn’t heard or had chosen to ignore her. “While you will be relieved of your title as Keeper, you will be given a new job.”

  Amy frowned. Had the Voice sensed her relief, her eagerness to live her own life? Was that why it had made this decision? She had shown time and time again that she wasn’t cut out for this job, for any sort of job, yet the Voice was going out of its way to give her a new one. She had never known this to be a possibility. She thought if a Keeper was stripped of their powers then they would never be anything ever again.

  Live and learn, she mused, pulling her lips sideways.

  Images from her initiation pulled to the front of her mind—the toy handcuffs, the sword, the metronome, and the masquerade mask. She had picked the masquerade mask, the mark of the Keeper, and never given much of a thought to the other things she had left behind, but now, she wondered about them. What did they symbolize? Would she have to go through that test all over again?

  “You will be a Protector for now,” the Voice said in answer to her unspoken question, “until I get a chance to further evaluate you.”

  Amy bobbed her head, but she pictured the toy handcuffs, somehow knowing that was the initiation item linked to the role. Protector, she scoffed in her head. It was almost the same as a Keeper, just without the bells and whistles. She was an alarm system of sorts, alerting the others to anything wrong and cleaning up the tiny problems that didn’t require Keepers. Thinking of the other two options, she sighed—it could’ve been worse. She certainly hadn’t wanted to take on the role of an Executioner, but a Brainwasher might’ve been an interesting change of pace.

  She said none of this out loud as she stared at her bare feet pressing into the grass. Up until that second, she had assumed she was wearing shoes because she didn’t feel the soft blades beneath her feet. She felt nothing at all.

  “What else is there to evaluate?” she dared herself to ask. “You already know I’m a letdown. That’s why you’re demoting me to begin with.”

  “You have potential, but for some reason, you continue to play this game. I will evaluate your capacity to follow orders because if you fail me again, I can’t say that the next outcome will be very pleasant for you or your loved ones. Do you understand?” the Voice asked.

  Amy clenched her teeth, unable to keep back her anger. It seemed unfair that for everything she had suffered through, that there was always the possibility of her suffering more. “I only have one loved one, and I can’t find her.”

  “Michelle is around. I could help guide you to her.”

  Amy’s eyes went wide and glittered with tears as she looked at the sky, desperately scouring through the branches on the hopes of seeing the being she spoke to. It would be a cruel prank on his part to bring up Michelle just for the sake of doing so.

  “But you won’t do it,” Amy said, licking away a tear from the corner of her mouth. “Right?”

  “Not if you don’t give me a reason to. Do you understand?” the Voice asked again, slowly as if it thought maybe she hadn’t heard it.

  Amy was beyond angry. It didn’t seem right for the ethereal being to resort to blackmail, but that was where Amy’s life had taken her. All she wanted to do was yell back, to tell the Voice to take its job and shove it where the sun didn’t shine, but she kept her mouth shut. She knew from experience just how seemingly impossible it was to find Michelle, almost to the point where she wondered if she was really here or if the Voice was just using her only weakness against her.

  “Amy?” the Voice prompted at last, breaking her from her reverie.

  “Yes, I understand,” she spat through clenched teeth.

  Chapter Six

  HOURS AFTER LUNA had come to this place, Chance stifled a yawn as he passed through the main room of the cabin. After their argument, he hadn’t gone back in the room, and she hadn’t come out. Chance’s skin crawled with aggravation, and the nagging worry that she would find a way to escape, but despite the paranoid voice in the back of his head, he didn’t go in to check on her.

  Instead, he spent a majority of his evening pacing the length of his home with Luna’s words buzzing in his mind. It was never a happy occasion to be told you were dead, probably worse when you realized you were in Purgatory, but he hadn’t expected the reaction against him.

  I should have though, he thought to himself with a frown.

  Luna had always been one of the smartest people he knew. One of the only ones who could compete with him in intellect—of course she’d find out that he tricked her. He had guessed it would only be a matter of time, but it hurt that she suspected him so quickly and that she wanted to slip away like nothing between them had changed. It was as if death had cleared her brain, as if all his magic had been wasted just like that.

  Maybe it had, he didn’t know. He skirted around the edge of his table for what felt like the hundredth time and frowned as he caught sight of a skull perched on his windowsill from the corner of his eye. The grin was haunting through the flickering shadows of the candlelight, made more unnerving with the number of teeth that were missing from it. Letting out a hefty sigh, he approached it, and picked it up, gently rolling it in his hands as he stroked away the dust and cobwebs with his thumb.

  He had almost forgotten where he had left it just as he didn’t remember who the skull belonged to. It could’ve been anyone, but that didn’t matter to him. As long as he could remember, it had been his companion—his closest confidant…besides his dagger of course. After Chance’s death, he couldn’t exactly make new friends in a land where the only human contact he had come from people he had slaughtered. The skull brought him comfort, almost like a diary except no one could go behind him and learn the secrets he poured into it. At one time, the skull may have belonged to a living person, but now that the life was gone from it, Chance didn’t think it was any less valuable than it used to be.

  An aggravated spider made a bolt from its home in the depths of the eyehole, and Chance watched it go with a pleased smirk on his face, feeling an odd warmth of emotion in him that he could only gues
s normal people would call happiness. In just a few months, he had come a long way—he knew that now. It was all about perspective. Sure, things were rough now, but they were only temporary. He had to focus on his accomplishments, the highlights, and get himself back under control.

  “I’m not alone now,” he said, setting the skull back on the windowsill with an appreciative smirk.

  The skull grinned back at him from the shadows, and Chance turned his back on it. He blew out the tiny candle on the table as he passed and went down the hall, and into the bedroom. From the doorway, he could see Luna asleep in the bed and let out the smallest sigh of relief before he went inside and sat on the edge of the bed, studying her small form.

  She’s so peaceful, he thought, setting a hand to the side of her face. Too bad it doesn’t last when she’s awake.

  Chance was jealous of her then. He wanted to feel that blissful nothingness that sleep could bring, but he couldn’t turn his brain off. Today had been a rough one, and thoughts had always been vicious to him. With Luna’s presence in his cabin, that didn’t change. He had lied to her about what her death would mean for him and for her. Mostly, it had been out of selfishness for his own life, but part of it had involved her as well.

  The link to her he had created years ago meant that once she was dead, he would die too…or he was supposed to anyway. Yet, here she was, slumbering beside him as if they were an ordinary couple in some twisted reality show. He wasn’t sure where his complaints were stemming from—this place was bound to be better than where he would be sent after.

  Reese’s magic must’ve worked, he thought.

  Chance frowned at the thought and swiped a lock of raven hair from Luna’s eyes. She’d go to the same place if it failed, he was sure of that. It had been difficult to compose himself, to make it seem as if he didn’t know what was going on when he did. The part he hated was admitting that he wasn’t the one in control this time—he was depending on someone else to keep himself and Luna alive. He didn’t want her to think that he wasn’t in control...that he couldn’t figure things out.