“Where did you hear about my skull work?” I asked through my teeth.
“He came into Le Nektar bragging about your killer skull work.” Eve gestured to Chad. “Said his friend got one done by you earlier today. What’s his name?”
Chad the Eidolon revealed a set of yellow teeth with his sneer. He made no effort to disguise what was happening. I had been set up, and he was the mastermind. “Moose,” he said. “People like Moose come here to get one of her special skulls. Ain’t that right, Scrivie?”
“Scrivie?” Eve snickered. “What is a Scrivie?”
“What those in the know call tattooists, my dear,” Chad said.
I gave Gerard a look, hoping that perhaps he’d know what to do. He hung his head, visibly outranked. Then my heart broke.
I pressed the stencil against Eve’s goose-pimpled flesh. My hands were warm, edging toward hot as I felt Chad’s eyes cut through me. Three times now, I had to rush into the backroom and cool my hands under the faucet. I was positive that I would have to revisit the sink several more times to quench my heat, as well as to breathe. But my lungs were barely capable of taking a full breath. To cover up any semblance of grief, I pulled Eve over to sit in the tattoo chair and sank into my own swivel stool. As I peeled the stencil off, noting how senseless it was to put it on in the first place because I didn’t need one for a Deathmark, the view of Chad sitting with his arms crossed, his attention locked on me like a hawk’s on dinner, was nightmarish.
The room with its fluorescent lights gently spun. Gerard, who was observing his own artwork, was washed out behind a barrage of the same anguish that had been eating at me since returning to the studio. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. The Eidolon had set me up. I was convinced that if he hadn’t manipulated Eve, she wouldn’t be here now. But she was here, and there was nothing I could do to stop what happened next.
I tried nonetheless.
“I can’t.” The truth was better than any lie. “I’m not feeling right.”
“You’re fine,” said Chad. “Wouldn’t want to get Gerard in trouble, would ya? Big Boss doesn’t like quitters.”
I bit my tongue. The situation was plain—I could refuse to do Eve’s Deathmark, and the Eidolon would likely send Gerard and me off to Erebus without a trial, or I could do as I was told and save our hides and condemn Eve’s. I looked to Eve, hoping she would suggest a different tattoo or that I stop altogether. Perhaps she had picked up on my agitation and didn’t think I should continue. Her face was blank with tension, eyes glassy, and the muscles in her arm tight. She couldn’t speak because, like most clients getting first tattoos, she was too nervous to use her faculties.
Gerard offered sympathetic support from across the shop. He knew what this meant. And somehow I knew that this situation was not unfamiliar to him.
I gave Chad another glance. Chad watched on, acting as Marin’s eyes.
“Will it hurt?” Eve asked, when I revved the tattoo machine.
Eyes squeezed shut, I pressed my sweating forehead to the brick building, not caring if I was noticed by the two men smoking outside the front of the shop. A breeze kissed my hot cheeks as the two praised the pin-up girl Gerard had done on the one’s back piece earlier in the day. The cold temporarily chilled my guilt but didn’t ease the nausea.
Nothing would, after what I had done.
A hand cupped my shoulder, and I slapped it away.
“Don’t be hard on yourself,” Gerard whispered.
I dragged my fingertips down the brick, burning ten deep notches into the wall.
“You did a good job. You kept yourself under control. That’s all he wanted—to catch you firing up so he could send you to Marin. You could’ve been the next Violet Magby, Ollie.”
Somehow I had managed to keep my head together throughout Eve’s tattoo. Now the words that had been on my mind since I came in to find her and Chad in the tattoo parlor burst out of me. “Fuck Violet Magby and Erebus! I should’ve done more to stop it.”
“You couldn’t have stopped it with him there. You protected yourself. And me.”
“It’s just…if Chad hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have had to put a Deathmark on her. I could’ve avoided it somehow.”
Gerard never showed affection, but he pulled me into a hug I wasn’t willing to ask for but needed in the worst way. This was the first moment since arriving at the tattoo shop that I felt safe enough to cry.
“Eve wouldn’t have come to you for a skull if it wasn’t her time,” he said.
“I was set up. Chad persuaded her to get a Deathmark.”
“No,” he argued. “Do not allow yourself to believe that.”
“I have to. It’s too coincidental.”
“Good souls die. We’re Stygians. Death is our trade. We pull humans from this world. We do it because that’s what keeps things balanced. We’re not bad guys. It’s her time. Accept it.” His words were not new lessons, but they stung far worse than ever before. Eve was an important anchor in my life, alleviating the yearning for companionship, and she would be gone before her time.
Because of me.
Chapter Four
“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Balanchine: It is with regret that I must expel your foster daughter, Olivia. Avers cannot afford to replace every desk and textbook she sets fire to. I suggest she be examined for impulse control disorder and possibly spontaneous combustion.”
—Henry Atkinson, Principal of Avers Middle School, New Orleans, Louisiana
Pub Saint-Alexandre was a dark and cozy watering hole with mahogany wood and barrel-backed stools, and a beer list long enough to momentarily take my mind off of what I had done to Eve. Beer and conversation—that was what Brent Hume had promised, and I desperately needed both.
When Brent poured the fourth stamp-sized packet of sugar into his Belgian ale, I pointed to the petty crime between us and said, “That much sugar consumption is a Level One Offense.”
He scanned for any spies inside Pub Saint-Alexandre who might snatch his sugar stash.
“Don’t worry. I’m no snitch,” I said to ease his worry.
He poured the rest of the sugar into his drink. “I don’t need to draw unnecessary attention.”
“You on the run?”
“I’ve got a target on my back if I cause trouble again.” He produced his tattered Stygian ID from his inside coat pocket—the customary offering of peace among Stygians—and slapped it down on the table with little reverence. Kind of an I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours type of agreement between new allies.
At least, that’s what Mama and Papa once said.
Our axiom—The Sun Shall Never Shine on Styx—was embossed on the ID’s cover. The saying is a reminder that while our human clientele bask in sunshine, getting vitamin D and a golden tan, enjoying the cosmos’s greatest pleasures, all Stygians see in the sky are gray wisps of moaning human souls racing toward their Afterlife.
Our existence between life and death is forever in shadow. No big happy ball of light for us.
I reached for the document. “May I?” Manners, manners.
“By all means.” He sipped his sugar-beer, and I peeked inside the ID folder.
Red stickers stacked upon red stickers covered every inch of his ID. Brent’s had three times as many as my own. The stickers indicated we had done something illegal, though they didn’t detail the crime or its level. And he had done enough to get eternity in Erebus. That might’ve explained his off-kilter personality and sense of style.
My eye snagged on a red mark with a black dot. Any other day, I would have shot out of my chair. Thank Hades beer makes me as lazy as sugar makes Reapers.
“You’ve got a rebel’s sticker?” I whispered, eyes darting back and forth.
Brent Hume was a dissident? A bona fide fuck-the-big-man guy? He must have tried to overthrow Head Reaper Marin, or possibly another Eidolon, to have earned such a mark. Or maybe, just maybe, Brent was part of a rebel cell that had been captured. Whatever he had d
one was treasonous, and a far greater crime than befriending humans or getting too hot and burning through a cup of coffee or Moose’s life. That red and black sticker of Brent’s meant he was a threat to Head Reaper. A serious threat.
“How did you get a sticker without going to Erebus?” I asked.
He plucked the ID from my hand and stuffed it back in his pocket.
“It’s just that I thought Marin sent every rebel to Erebus for—”
“I’m not easy to banish. Enough about me. Tell me about yourself, Scrivener Dormier.” He eyed me like I was a favorite cut of meat that he was too broke to order. “Where were you born? How long have you been tattooing? Why do you look like you’ve been crying all day?”
I focused on my beer bottle when my eyes started to well again with tears. “Just tired.”
Defying me with a cool stare over the rim of his glass, he chugged his syrupy drink and said nothing to further conversation. His discretion was appreciated. Even though it would be foolish to air my personal struggles to this new acquaintance—rebel sticker or no—the real reason I fell quiet was that I couldn’t bear to speak about what had happened.
If only Eve would make it to her reunion with her mother on Saturday at her birthday celebration. Maybe if I could gift her that time, I might be able to forgive myself.
“Since you’re a rebel, you wouldn’t happen to know who is running the Hermes Harbinger site, would you?” Some might call my question bold. I’d call it a chance to turn the conversation away from my swollen eyes and the reason for them.
Besides, Brent was the only Stygian I knew with a red and black sticker who wasn’t in Erebus. Surely not every rebel—however many there were—was responsible for contributing to or running the Hermes Harbinger blog, but it couldn’t hurt to probe. After all, the blog was growing in popularity. Multiple inflammatory posts speaking out against Head Reaper Marin went up hourly. Someone like Brent could easily be contributing to the seditious speech.
I waited another beat of silence, but the Reaper was stone-cold calm and silent.
“Of course you wouldn’t tell me even if you knew,” I added. “That’d break rebel code or whatever they call it, right?”
He sipped his drink. “There are better ways to speak out against Marin than a blog. An anonymous blogger is barely the start of the rebellion we need. The Head Reaper has Stygians scared witless that we’ll get charged and executed for farting under the bed covers. And you’re a Scrivener who exhibits signs of Masterhood. Who gives a shit about people complaining on the Internet? We should talk about the important stuff, like fixing Styx.”
I stared, eyes wide, suddenly ill at ease from his speech.
“What makes you think I am showing signs of becoming a Master?”
He broke into a playful smile and said, “Your hands melted your metal coffee mug this morning. Average Scriveners don’t do that. Masters do. Or they do before they know how to control it.”
“Well, I’m not a Master,” I said, hoping to end this silly conversation. Given that the only signs I showed—according to him, anyway—were my overheating hands, I decided to ignore the problem for now. “Bet you were that Reaper who ran for student council president and rallied for safer monkey bars on the playground as a kid.”
“There’s nothing wrong with standing up for what I believe in.”
“Is it worth eternal damnation?”
He shrugged like the rebel his Stygian ID said he was. “Some causes are worth the punishment. Some people are, too.”
Prickles of desire, like hot shower water on a cold morning, moved across my skin as his eyes, dark blue pools of interest, bored into me.
“Tell me more about yourself,” he said, aware of my interest in his interest.
“Well…” After crossing and then re-crossing my legs, I gulped some beer to refuel my buzz. “I was born in Québec, but lived in New Orleans until I was ten when I was kicked out of grade five. When I turned fifteen, Marin mandated that we move to Québec so I could start my apprenticeship with Gerard.”
“Why would a sweet thing like you get kicked out of school?”
“I burned through my desk in math class. The principal said I was a pyromaniac. I think I’m more of an arts girl than a sciences girl.” He laughed with me but said nothing more, which meant he was waiting for the rest of the story. Great. “Anyway, Mama and Papa, my foster parents, pulled me out of school and told me what I really was and what I was destined to do. My life went from normal to paranormal before my first kiss. It sucks to know what normal is and have it taken away.”
There. He wanted it? He got it.
I rolled the bottle between the palms of my hands, remembering how livid I had been with Styx for pilfering my innocence. Why couldn’t Marin and his cronies have forgotten about me? Let some of us Scriveners go under the radar instead of putting us to work.
“You’re something special.” Brent jarred me from my recriminations.
“Special is not how I see myself.”
“But you are. Before the Purge, some of my greatest allies were Scriveners. Only one was a Master.”
Before the Purge, huh?
Brent Hume was growing more and more intriguing as this conversation unfolded. I knew little of the Purge because no one cared to talk about it. Some things were better left forgotten, I supposed. What I did know was that nearly a hundred years ago, a group of Eidolons destroyed all of the Master Scriveners, and by destroyed, I mean killed and then sent to Erebus. Master Scriveners were powerful enough in their own right, nearly more so than Head Reaper Marin. They could Deathmark Stygians, and rumor had it that any Stygian with a Deathmark would die, even the Head Reaper. It wasn’t a stretch to assume Marin had ordered his legions of Eidolons like Chad to execute Master Scriveners, considering his predilection for running Styx like a merciless, power-loving overlord. But who had balls big enough to call him out? Not me.
Meemaw lived to be a hundred-and-two, and we celebrated her last birthday as if it were the Canadian Centennial. Although Brent didn’t appear a day over thirty-five, if what he was saying was true, he had to be over a hundred. This revelation might’ve explained his success with the Watchmen back at Le Nektar—age trumps a lot of things with Stygians. But still.
Aware he was one of those cool-cat enigmas who shared information on a need-to-know basis, just as I imagined true insurgents were, I cleared my throat and leaned over the little round table, practically tipping our drinks. “Since you were alive when it happened, do you know why Marin supported the Scrivener Purge?”
He took a swig of his ale, thick enough to chew. “The reason Marin offed so many Scriveners was to protect his own ass. If there are free agent Master Scriveners and Eidolons afoot, he is vulnerable to being overthrown.”
“What do you mean? The Eidolons helped him with the Purge.”
Brent raised an eyebrow. “Not all Eidolons were involved in the Purge. Just a select few who bow incessantly to Marin’s will.”
“Well, in my mind, they are all responsible,” I grumbled, feeling that my prejudice was entirely warranted.
“Olivia,” Brent said with tension, “not all Eidolons want to bring down Scriveners. A Master Scrivener and an Eidolon can dethrone Marin. And believe me, there are Eidolons out there who would love to have one half of that honor.”
Eidolons and Scriveners dethroning Marin together?
I had never heard this before. Not one hint. Nope.
Inside, I wanted to scream from this shocking and rather delightful idea. Outside, I shrugged as if I already knew all this obvious information, thankyouverymuch. “Of course that’s how Marin can be removed. I’ve known that for years. I’m not prejudiced against all Eidolons, you know.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Yep.” I took a massive gulp of beer.
“Yep.” He followed my lead and drank his sugar beer, too. Afterward, we sat in silence, staring at various items in the bar, humans, anything that wasn’t each other.
Somewhere I read that there is always a lull in conversation every ten minutes. This was one of those moments, coupled with a hefty slice of awkwardness.
“Anyway,” Brent went on when the silence became too much for us, “Stygians prefer not to face truth, no matter how heinous. It’s easier to chug our sugar beer and pretend like the Purge never happened.”
True. We weren’t that different from the humans we served. Without humans, we wouldn’t exist, so it stood to reason we would adopt human behaviors. Groupthink. Political Corruption. Murders. Wars.
Nice, happy things.
I slouched with the sophistication of a trucker. “Marin bitches on and on about the balance of life, yet he eliminated the Stygians who can help him achieve balance. It’s wrong.”
“Makes you want to stand up for what is right, doesn’t it? You could stop giving Deathmarks and see what happens to his precious balance,” said the rebel.
Rebellions were dangerous. I grew up in foster care with the Balanchines due to the results of a failed rebellion. Right after I was born, my parents, both Scriveners, were sent to Erebus because they fought for justice. I would not become another story for the ages. I would keep to myself, keep my head down, and watch the rebellion from afar. That’s how I would survive.
“I’m not about to tell the Big Guy that I won’t work.” Although with Eve’s long-term future cut short, it would be an excellent time to give Marin my middle finger salutation and resignation. In another life, maybe.
“Hear me out,” Brent went on, ignoring my disinterest in revolution. “The human population has almost tripled since the Purge. He’s scared someone will call him out on it, so he rules with an iron fist.” His heavy brow shaded his deep blue eyes. “He needs your kind now more than ever, Dormier.”
I snorted, nixing any spell my French-Canadian charm might have had over him.
“If you and your kind were to stop working, souls wouldn’t cross over, and Earth would erupt in anarchy. Scriveners hold a lot of power; you have to see it for what it is.”
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