by Lynne Ewing
She smiled thinly. “You’re teasing, aren’t you?” But the tone of her voice said that she knew he wasn’t.
“Don’t you want to know what happened to all the tales about others like me?” He touched her lightly.
Her hands grasped the tombstone behind her. She stepped around it until the stone was a barrier between them. “All right, tell me your Halloween stories.”
He loved the way she tried to be so brave. “The church destroyed them as heresy. That’s why you haven’t read about me in any of the books you sneak home from the library and hide in your closet from your mother.”
She gasped. “How do you know about that?”
“I have my way of knowing.” He held the ribbon that tied her bodice. “You like to read about vampires but your mother thinks it’s unhealthy. Do you really want so desperately to become aligned with the night?”
She frantically shook her head.
“I can show you a more ancient evil,” he promised in a soothing voice. He tugged on the ribbon, untying the bow. “One that has existed since the beginning of time.”
“Right.” She tried to force the word out with a sarcastic tone, but failed.
“Not many people know about the Atrox and its Followers, but you will,” he assured her.
“You’re not being funny anymore,” she answered with more whimper than anger.
He let his finger trace up her body to her chin and lifted her face until she was forced to look in his eyes. “I was never trying to be. I was only trying to explain what I am.”
She looked quickly behind her as if searching for a way to escape.
He paused for a moment, hoping she would run. When she didn’t, he continued, “I can dissolve into shadow. Stay that way for days if I want. It’s one of my powers.”
“Stop teasing me,” she whined. “You’re scaring me now.”
He leaned closer. “I can also enter your mind and take you into mine. Do you want me to show you?”
“No,” she pleaded. It wasn’t the strange light in the graveyard that gave her face such an unnatural pallor now. The true beauty of fear shimmered in her eyes.
“Let me show you.” He seeped into her mind and brought her back into his. He could feel her struggle and then stop. He let her feel what he was, the emptiness and evil.
He released her again. He wanted her to run, but she only stumbled backward as if she had lost her balance.
He wrapped his hand around the back of her neck. The skin felt soft and warm. Her pulse fluttered rapidly beneath his fingers.
She tried to pull away but his hand held her firmly. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes, making them brighter. He held her face close to his own. He yearned for the momentary peace that turning her to the Atrox could give him.
He cupped his hands around her sad beautiful face and inhaled her sweet breath. Her eyes stared sightless, the pupils large but unseeing. She was lost in his memories now. Soon he would show her the face of evil and take all of her tomorrows for himself.
“Now you believe, don’t you?” he asked. “You see with other eyes than your own and know. Turn and see the Atrox.”
She nodded, but as she did, he caught his reflection in her pupils and was filled with self-loathing. He felt hatred for what he had become and the raw hate broke the trance he held over her. He felt her shudder in his hands, but was surprised that she seemed reluctant to let him go. Maybe what she had seen and felt had made her feel loved.
“It’s a lie,” he whispered harshly. “There’s no love there.”
He brushed the loose hair away from her face and eased her down beside the gravestone. She would awaken tomorrow, believing it had all been a dream. But he knew her kind. She would go to the library and search until she found the obscure piece written by Herodotus that most scholars thought was only an embellishment on the Pandora myth.
He slowly walked away from her and tried to calm the part of him that felt denied. It hovered impatiently near the surface, demanding release. He had failed the Atrox. It was a crime to let Maryann and the girl go free. Worst of all, he had broken a greater taboo in helping Malcolm. He clenched his hands and stared at the black shadows twisting around the headstones. The Atrox had its spies. He wondered how long it would be before he was discovered.
Then he tested the air to see if the omen he had felt hovering around him earlier that night had been Malcolm. Instead of being reassured, he felt a shudder of dread.
It had not been Malcolm. Whatever it was, it had not reached him yet.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BY THE SLANT OF sunlight across his blankets, Stanton knew it was late morning. He pushed aside the covers and strode barefoot to the small window looking over the alley. A piece of cardboard taped over one pane flapped softly as a cool breeze seeped into the room, bringing the smells of coffee and bacon from Gorky’s café.
He stared up at the morning sky and remembered another time when he had lived in a castle and his father had been a great prince. That had been so long ago, and yet he still remembered it clearly. His father would feel ashamed if he could see his son now. He felt ashamed himself.
When he had been a boy, he had dreamed of becoming a greater prince than his father. He had already been a skilled rider by age six. His future was clear. Then the priests had come. Stanton remembered the haunted look on their faces when they placed the manuscript on the table. He had never seen such fear in the eyes of grown men before.
He turned from the memory and slipped into jeans and shirt, then stepped into shoes and left his room. He stood at the top of the stairs. A thin haze of cigarette smoke rose from the floor below. His eyes traveled over mattresses and blanket. Where was everyone? The room seemed strangely deserted and silent. Something was wrong. Usually, after a holiday like Halloween, there was an uproar of boasting about what had been done the night before.
Then he heard laughter. In a far corner, Tymmie, Kelly, and Murray sat on a worn green couch. The flickering lights from the television strobed over their faces as they watched a Sony TV, looted during the Los Angeles riots. Behind the TV, a thick orange cord snaked to an outside plug at the liquor store next door.
Stanton eased his way down the stairs.
Kelly waved. “Come see. This is just too hilarious.”
“Breaking news?” he asked.
“Better,” Tymmie answered. His white-blond hair was moussed into jagged spikes. Three hoops pierced his nose and one his lip. Even with so many piercings he looked like a student at La Brea High. Stanton trained his Followers to be secretive and to blend in. But now there were other newer Followers who flaunted their allegiance to evil. They liked guns, knives, and fists. Several had even been in jail.
“How’s tricks?” Murray shouted, then turned back to the TV. He drew a black comb from his pocket and brushed his blond hair into a ducktail. Murray had crossed over in the fifties and still tried to look the same as he had then. His appearance got him parts as an extra in period movies.
Stanton walked over to the couch. He liked these three. They understood his example and obeyed. Kelly could have been a cheerleader or class president, but instead of attending high school, she spent her days drifting up and down Hollywood Boulevard. She was cautious and Stanton liked that. He didn’t want to draw attention from the LAPD.
He glanced down at the screen. They were watching another vampire movie.
“Do you believe what he’s doing with his eyes?” Kelly screamed. “And can you imagine sleeping in dirt? Yuck. How uncool is that?”
Stanton glanced at the squalor around him.
Kelly caught his look and shrugged. “Well, at least it’s not dirt,” she muttered.
His Followers laughed at vampire movies, but what would they do if people armed with religious faith ceaselessly hunted them down?
Stanton slumped onto the couch. Murray stood up with a snap to make room for Stanton to sprawl.
“Where is everyone?” Stanton asked.
Kelly hushed him as the v
ampire on the TV screen stalked his victim, then caught herself. “Sorry,” she said.
Stanton frowned. He could feel Murray’s thoughts, the wordless accusation Where was Stanton last night? “You do not question me even in your thoughts,” he growled.
Murray nodded. “It’s just that—”
“It’s just that what?” Stanton snapped. He was stronger, more powerful. He felt Murray’s fear.
“We wanted you at the celebration.” Tymmie turned his head away from the TV screen.
“You don’t need me to show you how to party on Halloween,” Stanton answered abruptly.
“Not Halloween,” Murray said, nervously searching in a pocket for his comb.
“This one’s important.” Tymmie clicked off the TV. “Yvonne asked me to find you, but you told me to never wake you up.”
The urgency in Tymmie’s voice made Stanton wonder if something had occurred the night before while he was helping Malcolm.
“What happened?” Stanton asked at last.
“It’s the time of transition,” Tymmie continued.
“Evil’s going to dominate,” Kelly interrupted in her high voice.
Murray tried to give him a high five but Stanton didn’t raise his hand.
“I’m tired of all these plans,” Stanton said. This wasn’t the first time some Follower had claimed to have a plan to make it evil’s turn to rule. Over the centuries he had heard too many schemes.
Tymmie stood as if energized. “It’s not just another excuse to party this time.”
“How can you be so sure?” Stanton sneered.
“It’s different.” Tymmie looked at him seriously. “I feel it. Everyone does.”
Stanton eyed him. He had known Tymmie long enough to know that he was able to pick things from the air, the same way Stanton could. Now Stanton wondered if the transition was what he had been sensing. It could mean trouble for him. He needed to find out who his rival was this time. There was intense competition and the victors always stripped the power from those who had previously been their opposition. He definitely didn’t want to go back to what his life had been before he had become a leader. He stared at the mattresses on the floor and shook his head.
Tymmie sensed what he was thinking. “That’s why I’m here.”
“We’re here,” Kelly corrected him.
“We’ll find out more at the celebration,” Tymmie suggested. “Yvonne won’t tell us anything until she talks to you.”
“Where?”
“The Dungeon.”
Stanton stood. “Let’s go.”
The Dungeon was an after-hours club on Sunset Boulevard. It opened early in the morning, serving kids who didn’t ever want the party to end. The black painted walls made day become night again.
When Stanton walked in, he found Kelly already perched on a bar stool, her arms around a guy Stanton had never seen before. Probably someone she was going to cross over. She let her soft, long hair brush tantalizingly against the guy’s face.
Murray leaned against a wall, combing his hair. He let the girls come to him. He called it the James Dean method.
Stanton walked around two girls dancing together, bumping hips. Under the changing lights, their faces turned pink, then blue, then back to pink again.
He searched through the dancers until he saw Yvonne. She was wearing a blue see-through dress over lacy underwear. She had a perfect body and loved to flaunt it. She turned as if she had felt his stare. Her eyes invited him to join her. He started walking slowly toward her. She had become lecta last year and now she had her own league of Followers at Venice Beach.
“Hey, Yvonne,” he whispered into her ear, drawing her away from the arms of the guy she had been dancing with. When the guy started to complain, Stanton shot him an insolent smile that made him back away.
He held Yvonne tightly against him, feeling the soft silk of her dress and breathing her flowery perfume. “What did you hear?” he asked at last.
“Where have you been that you don’t know?” Yvonne replied, as if he had stood her up for an important date. “Last night we were all called together and you never showed.”
“Halloween,” he whispered into her ear as if that were excuse enough. He left a kiss on her temple. “Did everyone miss me as much as you did?”
She leaned back and glared at him, then laughed.
“You wear your emotions on your sleeve,” he explained. “I don’t even need to go into your mind to see how much you like me.”
He glanced down at her body; she let his eyes linger. She loved to tease. She boldly moved her lips to his, begging for a kiss. He cautioned her lips away with the tip of one finger.
“What did you hear, Yvonne?”
It wasn’t unusual for leading Followers not to show up for important meetings and Yvonne had a responsibility to tell him what she knew. She was still subordinate to him.
She smiled coyly. “In only a matter of days the Atrox will have its key.”
“Key?” He felt as if blood had drained from his head. Serena was the key, the goddess who had the power to alter the balance between good and evil.
Yvonne misread his face. She saw confusion, not apprehension. “You don’t remember her? The goddess who stumbled into my cold fire ceremony down at the beach?”
The frigidus ignis ceremony was the ritual way the Atrox gave immortality to favored Followers who had proved themselves. That night Yvonne had stepped into the fire and the cold flames had burned away her mortality, bestowing eternal life upon her.
“Serena Killingsworth?” he asked. His chest tightened when he said Serena’s name.
Yvonne tilted her head. “Sorry.”
He looked at her carefully. “Why?”
“I know you were planning to take her to the Atrox.” She spread her fingers through her long blond hair in a seductive way, making her glittering bracelets rattle on her arms. “You tried. That’s good enough.”
Stanton had lied to his Followers, even Tymmie, and told them he was trying to seduce Serena and take her to the Atrox. He had to tell them something after she had interrupted their ceremony down at the beach.
“I wish you’d been the one.” Yvonne tried to cheer him, snaking her hands possessively up his back. “At least Zahi and his gang of goat-punkers didn’t get her. That would have meant some bad stuff for us.”
“Yeah.” Stanton closed his mind and looked away, afraid that his emotions were too strong. Yvonne might pick up something, even though, as Stanton’s subordinate, she would never violate his privacy.
Serena now filled his thoughts. He had saved her from Zahi, but in the end she hadn’t needed his help. She was stronger than most Followers imagined, but she was also vulnerable, especially now. Could this be why he had been filled with such foreboding on Halloween that he had risked seeing her?
“What’s the plan?” he asked at last.
Yvonne smirked. “If I knew that I’d be a member of the Inner Circle. They didn’t tell us. But I know this plan is different.”
“How so?”
“It’s a member of the Inner Circle who came up with it, not a Follower,” she explained.
Stanton stopped dancing. Malcolm’s warning came back to him. Could this be the person he had warned him about? “What’s his name?”
“Darius,” Yvonne answered.
“Darius,” Stanton repeated the name. He had never heard of Darius, and there was no way of confusing Darius with a name like Lamp.
Yvonne consoled him. “I know you’re upset you didn’t get her for your prize. So am I. We all are. We always thought that place in the Cincti would be yours.”
Stanton nodded, but his thoughts were on Serena. He had to warn her. Then a thought shivered through him. Maybe he was already too late.
CHAPTER EIGHT
STANTON PARKED HIS car at Union Station and hurried across the street to La Placita. A fanfare of plastic flags with cutout patterns of skeletons flapped noisily in the air and overhead a piñata swayed,
waiting for the hard blows of the breaking ceremony. He searched through the crowd lined up for the puppet show, then glanced down Olvera Street. The street had been closed to traffic for a long time now and looked like a Mexican marketplace, with stands selling boldly colored ceramics and paper flowers. He didn’t see Serena, but her brother, Collin, had said she had gone to the Día de los Muertos celebration with Jimena.
He turned to see candy skulls with green sequin eyes and frosting lips staring back at him from a stall. When the vendor looked away, he grabbed three and tossed one into his mouth. The sugar dissolved with tangy sweetness.
He spun around, sensing other eyes. An old woman shook her head at him as she placed a bowl of spicy-smelling sauce on her ofrenda. Orange flowers, white candles, and faded snapshots of her dead relatives covered the altar. Stanton liked the way some people waited for the spirits of their loved ones to come back and visit, while others were terrified at the thought.
The old woman placed a sign on the table: SINCE DEATH IS INEVITABLE, IT SHOULD NOT BE FEARED, BUT HONORED.
“Not for everyone,” he said softly.
She looked at him. “What’s not for everyone?”
“Death.” He smiled.
She waved him away. She didn’t have time for a thief and a liar. He wondered what she would do if she knew the other things he had done. Then her old eyes widened as if she had caught his thought in the air.
He left her and pushed inside La Luz del Día restaurant. He shoved his way to the front of the line.
A man glared at him. “It’s my turn,” he said.
Stanton entered the man’s head and changed his thought about who was next. The man stepped back with a confused look. Then Stanton pressed into the counterwoman’s thoughts and gave his order.
“One taco, right?” She handed him a paper plate. She had a beautiful smile and white teeth.
“Yes, I paid already,” Stanton lied and the lady at the register confirmed his lie with a grin.
He backed out, pleased with how easy it had been to manipulate them. Good people were too trusting and easy to control. He sat at a table on the outside patio and bit into the taco. Heat and spice exploded in his mouth as red sauce ran down his chin. He wiped at it with a napkin while his eyes searched the crowd for Serena.