Which lights had been on when I got here and which ones had I turned on? I hadn’t even thought to pay attention. The closet—on. The bathroom—on or off?
Finally, I flipped the switch off and raced back out, hoping I could make it through the living room before Tashi came inside. But the key was already turning in the lock.
I dashed back into the closet and shut the light off just as the front door opened with a squeak. I stood helplessly in the dark, trying to plot my next move. Could I sneak out while she took a shower or after she went to sleep? Could I slip into the garage, open the door, and run for cover before she made it outside?
There was a noise from the main room—a sudden, short, high-pitched, tumbling sound. My whole body went ice-cold, but seconds later, I heard a waterfall of notes.
She was playing the piano. She ran through the scales twice and then a few jaunty bars of a march.
I should chance it. I should make a break for it. I could probably even fit out the bedroom window. Any sane person would leave. And I almost did—
But then I heard the song.
It started with a series of high notes, twinkling apart from each other like stars on a cold night. Then they all rushed together and exploded, and the song rose and rose, growing louder and louder. It was like hearing a battle being fought from the other side of a wall, and I couldn’t tear myself away.
The melody came climbing up through the middle, surrounded by violent, dancing, pestering notes, buzzing birds trying to throw it off track. But it pushed through and came out free on the other side, strong and confident, like a soldier marching off of a smoking battlefield.
Then from the shadows came a winding approach, thin and sinister, like a murderous woman hiding in the darkness—and suddenly there was a mighty struggle, and when the chaos cleared, all that was left was a plaintive voice—she killed him but she’s sorry, she just realized she always loved him, and she’s spinning, spinning, driven mad by her loss, wishing she could bring him back…spinning, spinning…but she can’t undo what she’s done.
The notes spun out of existence.
The piano went silent.
I wasn’t even aware that I was standing in a dark closet—I wasn’t aware of anything but the music. I wanted to hear more. Another song, the same song—anything.
She didn’t play anything else. And I’d missed my chance to run.
I stood there for a moment, shivering, then slowly pushed the door open and looked to my left, at the window. I’d have to pop the screen out, but I could fit—
“Sort of a strange place to find you,” said Tashi. She was in the bedroom doorway, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed in front of her.
“Yes, definitely,” I said. “So…I should go, I guess.”
“No hurry,” she said. “You can stay for a little while.”
At that point, my courage failed me entirely. “I’m really sorry,” I said. “If you let me go, I won’t tell anyone anything about anything that you do—or have, or—don’t have—”
“Alexis, calm down,” she said. “You’re making me antsy.”
Antsy was never good. Especially in carnivorous supernatural beings.
“Come on out here,” she said, starting down the hall. “Are you hungry?”
As I followed, I thought of the fridge full of raw meat and my stomach turned. “I don’t think so.”
“Sorry there’s nowhere to sit,” she said. “But then, you knew that, didn’t you?”
I nodded quickly and without a trace of dignity. “Yes,” I said. “Sorry again.”
“Relax,” she said, starting to come around the counter. I slid to the floor and shrank back, until I noticed she wasn’t headed for me. She sat down on the piano bench and casually ran through a few scales.
“I heard you play,” I said, half out of a desire to butter her up, and half because I couldn’t help myself. “It was incredible.”
She smiled. “Serenada Schizophrana, first movement. Elfman. I have it almost where I want it.” She moved her hands over the keys. It was almost like the notes followed her fingers, charmed like a snake out of a basket.
I dared to speak. “How long have you been playing?”
“A hundred and sixty-seven years,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, like that was a totally normal answer.
Her fingers meandered through the beginning of a song.
“So…do you know Farrin?” I asked.
“Of course.”
Something occurred to me. “Was it a coincidence that I ended up entering the contest and meeting her?”
For that, Tashi gave me an approving smile. “Not exactly,” she said. “I sent the flyer to your principal and suggested she give it to you.”
“Suggested how?” As soon as I asked it, I knew the answer. The same way we suggested anything to anyone. “But…that was before we even met.”
Tashi gave me a veiled smile. “I’d heard about you.”
“Who…? I don’t understand.”
She looked at me again, and her fingers paused on the piano keys. Her eyes weren’t smiling anymore. “I’m glad you came, Alexis. I need to talk to you.”
As she spoke, she touched the keys absently, playing scraps of different songs and melodies, adding chords every once in a while for emphasis.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said. “But I feel I can trust you.”
I had no idea what I’d done to earn her trust, but I kept silent.
“I’m not like the rest of you, obviously. I came with the book. With Aralt.”
I stared at her. “Are you the gypsy? The one who was with him when he died?”
The one who took his heart?
Her lip quirked up. “You can call me that, if you like.”
“And you…made the book?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was seventeen and in love, so I formed the book and joined my energy with Aralt’s. I thought it was a way we could be together forever.”
“I guess you were right,” I said.
She shot me a look out of the corner of her eye.
“What’s next?” I asked. “What does Aralt want from us? How long does this go on?”
“Not much longer,” she said. “Usually he stays a month, six weeks. Then we have the graduation ceremony, and he moves on. I go with him.”
“Usually?” I asked. “Not this time?”
“Not this time,” she said. “Something has changed.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. But I…feel it.” She segued into a sweet, sad song. “I love Aralt, as much as I always have. But he tires of me. He grows restless. I can feel it. He is impatient.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you remember the night at Adrienne’s, with the dog? Aralt slipped out of my grasp for a few minutes. He’s never done that before.”
So that thing in the woods was Aralt. Which meant our golden hero, our ideal man, our benefactor—was a hideous monster?
“Can’t you stop it, though?”
“I’m his, Alexis. I want what he wants. Good or bad. If he wills it, it becomes my will too.” She glanced at me. “As with all of the girls in the Sunshine Club. All but one.”
All but one? All but me.
Because by the time I’d fully committed to Aralt, I’d already screwed things up too badly to have any time to enjoy it. The thought left me feeling dejected.
“I don’t have much time, you see,” she said.
What did that mean?
“Are you dying?”
Her expression was sad. “Not yet.”
I was leaning back, relieved, when the doorbell rang. We both shot to our feet, and Tashi held the flat of her hand out to me.
“Stay,” she said. I heard her at the front door, calling out a greeting to someone and saying she’d be right there. Then she hurried back to me.
With surprising speed and strength, she grabbed my arm and pulled me down the
hall toward the garage door.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, Alexis,” she said. “There’s less time than I thought.”
“Time for what?”
She shoved me against the wall and glanced back at the front door. “Forgive me,” she said. She grew more agitated by the moment, shaking her head like she was trying to shake an image out of her mind. “Forgive me. I would never do this, except—”
I would have screamed, but her hand was over my mouth. Her face contorted as if she was in physical pain, and then she looked up at me.
Her cheeks were covered in the black tracks of tears, all melted together like someone had colored her face gray.
“To abandon—try again,” she whispered. “I need to show you.”
“Try what? Wait—!”
She opened the garage door and shoved me down the single stair. The door closed behind me, and the dead bolt clicked with finality.
I STUMBLED BUT managed not to fall. Then I charged at the wall and flipped on the light switch, preparing to start banging my fists on the door and screaming my head off.
But in the moment that the fluorescent lights flickered on, I forgot about all that.
Because everything I’d expected to see when I went into the master bedroom—the symbols, the candles, the movie set?
I was standing in it.
The plain concrete floor had been drawn on with a dark, thick marker, or some kind of black paint—a web of symbols that radiated from the center outward, stars and moons and other stuff I didn’t understand. Instinctively, I raised my feet, trying to get clear of it the way you’d try to get clear of quicksand. But it was sticky. It pulled on the soles of my shoes.
Forced to be still, I finally took a long, slow look around me.
Then, like when you’re standing in the ocean and a giant wave hits you out of nowhere, I was knocked over. I fell to the floor and curled into a ball, my hands over my ears.
But what struck me wasn’t a physical force.
It was emotion. Raw, surging, torrents of emotion—ranging from tattered tendrils of fear and pain to huge pulses of anger, jealousy, paranoia—
They formed into a roar that filled my head, my soul, my entire being.
Suspicion, disgust, torment—
I was like a helpless bird caught in a thunderstorm, buffeted from every side by a venomous black wall of hatred, selfishness, hunger—most of all, hunger—and if it continued, it would wear me down like a layer of paint under a sandblaster. Already I was losing pieces of myself, my thoughts—I couldn’t recall who I was or where I was or why I was there.
With my mind wiped clean, the hatred began to take root, filling my head with a pulling, tar-like need to destroy, devour, hurt—and I expanded to meet the force, began to feel its desires as if they were my own.
How I wanted to hurt someone. How I wanted someone to cower before me, begging for mercy, so I could crush them between my fingers. The world swirled dark and terrible, and I was dark and terrible too. The shrieks of pain on the edge of my consciousness were delicious to me; they soothed me and gave me an outlet for my most horrible awarenesses—
That I was imprisoned. Trapped. I contained so much force, and yet I was being held inside this place, rendered powerless. My fury flared up like flames and burned everything inside me.
I wanted to raise my arms and watch the oceans rise with them. I wanted to beat down everything in my path like a meteor shower of death and annihilation. It was a feeling of tremendous power and tremendous frustration, and at the edges of it all was a hunger to escape and be cruel, sadistic, merciless. I wanted to explode. I wanted out.
And then it stopped.
I don’t know how long it took me to uncurl myself. To let my own thoughts trickle back into my consciousness. To separate myself from the black, all-consuming hatred that had filled me.
But when I opened my eyes, I saw that the room around me was blank. All of the symbols were gone. The burning candles were dead hunks of wax. The talismans had been swept to the floor and turned to dust.
Numbly, I went to the wall and hit the glowing button, then watched the garage door open with a quiet rumble. I stared out into the night, still feeling like I was walking six feet behind my own body.
He’s evil.
He manipulated us. Controlled us. And we spent every minute of every day trying to please him. But he was a monster who only wanted to feel blood on his hands and taste fear on his tongue.
I made it about halfway home before my legs began to swim underneath me. I sat down on the curb outside of #65 and wrapped my arms around myself. My body shook, rattling the breath in my lungs.
He was evil, and there was nothing we could do about it.
He was evil, and he was inside us. So deep inside us that I didn’t know where Alexis ended and Aralt began.
He was so evil that even the girl who had loved him for almost two hundred years was terrified of him.
I ambled home, waved a senseless hand at my parents, and lurched down the hallway to the first door, which I knocked on, quietly, slowly, steadily, until my sister pulled it open.
She took one look at me and her face turned as gray as death.
“I need your help,” I said, my parched throat crackling behind the words. “I just met Aralt.”
WE WAITED UNTIL our parents went to sleep and then sat on the sofa, wrapped in blankets we’d pulled off our beds. I was in my pajamas, a robe, thick socks, and slippers, and I made a cocoon for myself with my comforter. If I could have settled between the couch cushions, I would have. The rawness of Aralt’s emotions left me feeling vulnerable, exposed. My shoulders still quaked under all my layers.
“Try again,” Kasey said, for the eightieth time. We’d been sitting there trying to figure out what Tashi had meant. “It’s what Elspeth said, too.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. My voice still had the dusty rasp of a lifelong smoker. “Why apologize and then push me into that place?”
“She said she was dying?”
“No, not yet. But she said there was less time than she thought. And that Aralt was impatient. And she chose me because I was different from the other girls.”
Kasey wrinkled her nose. “I always knew your rebellious streak would come in handy someday.”
“But handy for what? What does she want me to do?”
Kasey shrugged and ran her finger along the length of her braid. “She wants you to try again.”
I sighed. “We could always…go ask her.” Even though my body went cold all over at the thought of being back in that house.
Kasey shook her head. “Not tonight.”
I settled back against the cushions, relieved. “One thing I don’t get.”
She looked up at me.
“Before Megan and I joined the club…why didn’t you just say you weren’t in danger?”
Not the question she was expecting. “I was trying to keep you from being too interested,” she said, pushing on her forehead with the side of her hand. “I really thought I could explain to them why we needed to stop.”
“But that wouldn’t have worked.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I still wonder—if I’d been able to really talk to them…to Tashi…”
“And then what?” I asked. “How would you have stopped it?”
“I don’t know.” She buried her face in her hands. “I’m sorry, Lexi. I’m so sorry.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not all your fault. I should have been there for you.”
“But I was being stubborn,” she said. “They were my friends. I knew you’d help me if I asked, but I wanted to show you I could do it alone.”
“We’re just a pair of idiots,” I said.
The moon shone its flat blue light on the wall bordering the backyard, making the view even more depressing.
“So what now?” I asked. “Do you trust me to help you?”
“I don’t know,” Kasey said. “
Do you trust yourself?”
I thought about it. Should I trust myself?
There were aspects of Aralt I’d begun to count on—always knowing the right thing to say. Believing in myself, in my future.
Yes, Aralt was a being of unspeakable evil. But was I really strong enough to forsake him, or would I wake up the next day and immediately sell my sister out?
“Maybe there’s a way around that,” I said. “If we can come up with some sort of—not blackmail, but…an insurance plan? So if I get tempted, you have something to hang over my head?”
I thought it was pretty inspired, actually.
But Kasey shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m tired of lies. I’m tired of bullying. I don’t want to have something hanging over your head. If you don’t want to help me, that’s your choice.”
“But I could get you in huge trouble, Kase,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, leaning back and staring up at the ceiling fan. “I guess so.”
“I wasn’t strong enough before,” I said.
“That’s not true,” Kasey said. “You just didn’t know what you wanted. Do you know what you want now?”
“I know what I don’t want,” I said. But…
It’s so much to give up. It would be like sacrificing a part of myself.
“Shut up,” I said out loud. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
Kasey watched me. She knew I wasn’t talking to her.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure. I know what I want.”
I pulled the gold ring off my finger, walked to the sliding door, and threw it over the wall into the hills. It was just an outward symbol, not part of the supernatural connection. I was still connected to Aralt, like you’d still be connected to your spouse if you threw your wedding band into the ocean. But it was a start.
I wanted my life back.
When I woke up the next morning, there was a dark circle around my finger where my ring had been, like a bruise. I pulled a random ring from my jewelry box and put it on to cover the black.
Before I left my bedroom, I sat and tested my thoughts. I thought about Kasey. And Carter. And Aralt. And the Sunshine Club.
From Bad to Cursed Page 20