But The Rattler’s Tail was gross, and Lorelei was regretting trading her comfy pajamas for the layers needed to be outside at night in the dead of winter. Her only solace was the fact she knew Hana would have eventually plucked up the courage to go all on her own, and she’d rather be there with her.
The less-of-a-club-more-of-a-bar sat down a narrow and empty road, set into buildings that stood right up against one another. Easy enough to find with the directions on Hana’s phone, it otherwise would have been impossible. All of the signs were faded or missing key words, and it reminded her of the district she and Grier had followed Mr. Carr into in Moonlit Shores only vaster and more dangerous. The cold, at least, afforded fewer people on the street, though she didn’t like the look of anybody she saw.
While walking, they had heard a set of shouting voices and seen a blast of colorful light coming from around a corner. There was a scuffle happening somewhere, an errant spell shooting off into the night, exploding overhead, and then quiet. They stopped and waited, but no one stuck their head out a window and there were no sirens, as if that sort of thing was expected around there. When the commotion didn’t start up again, they continued on.
At the door, there was no list, the bouncer with eyes that blinked the wrong way and a forked tongue only looking them both up and down before gesturing vaguely with his head to go inside. The floor was sticky and the bar top was worse, and the only thing Lorelei was glad for was how dim the lights were so she couldn’t see what she’d just put her hand in.
There was a stage though, even if it only housed a stool and a microphone with an old jukebox against the wall, scratching out a song she didn’t recognize or think she would ever grow to like. The bartender, a man with a snout instead of a nose and tattoos on both sets of knuckles, one reading hand, the other some, asked her what she wanted. The spider monkey on his shoulder chirped, grinning pointed teeth at her, and then they both scowled when she ordered two waters. “Those are for her.” She pointed at Hana. “Give me a,”—she squinted at the smudged chalk menu behind the bar—“a frosted striker? Is that sweet?”
The bartender grunted, and the monkey jumped off his shoulder, fetching a bottle of something tinged blue off a high shelf. The snouted man poured the liquid, and though it hadn’t been refrigerated, it instantly iced up the glass. Then he cracked open a can of what smelled like beer and dumped it in, the yellow color of its contents swirling with the blue and turning it all a sallow green.
Lorelei passed him a few component coins plus a tip. The monkey collected them and excitedly showed the bartender. He grunted again, reached under the counter, and dropped a pink umbrella in the glass.
Hana was bouncing in place at her side. “I gotta pee,” she said suddenly, and ran off down the hall at the back of the bar.
Lorelei turned on her stool to look out over the room and took a sip of her frosted striker. Her eye twitched—it was not sweet. There were only a few other occupants, almost none of which were women, and definitely none of which were teenagers. Apparently, the word hadn’t spread far enough that an ex-member of Cardinal Direction, and the cutest one to boot, was playing that night. There was a winged woman in the corner that Lorelei could have sworn delivered the mail, but out of uniform Helena was hard to identify. Lorelei lifted her glass and waved. The woman only scrunched up her face and moved into the shadows.
Hana scurried back, smudged her lipstick as she chugged one of the waters, and slammed the glass back on the bar top.
“Excited?”
“Yes!”
Hana was many things, clumsy, forgetful, overwhelming, but she was also kind and thoughtful, and she deserved a little fun now and again, especially with how strict Ando was. Her uncle was rarely satisfied with the job she did, let alone complimentary despite Hana’s best efforts. From what Lorelei had seen of her abilities, Hana was a skilled elemancer, manipulating water with ease, but none of it impressed Ando in the least.
The only thing perhaps more impressive was her encyclopedic knowledge of every one of her special interests, and right now she was rattling off every fun fact about Cardinal Direction’s last album and what led to their breakup, including the time Reilly Raven took a picture with Collier’s ex-girlfriend and posted it on MemoSummons which was apparently a big no-no.
Lorelei took another burning sip, this one deeper to try and get more of it down. She had never asked about Hana’s parents or how she’d gotten through school or even if she had friends outside of the manor, but as she watched her tap away on her phone and simultaneously chatter, she was glad she had this outlet. And maybe Collier’s music wouldn’t be terrible. It wasn’t likely, but maybe.
Hana groaned. “I have to pee again.” And she ran off once more.
She left her phone on the bar, so Lorelei scooped it up, more easily taking another sip. She knew she shouldn’t look, but the girl had dragged her all the way out here, and she was bored.
The screen displayed the messages between her and a friend, presumably the one overseas that Grier had mentioned. The last message was just confirmation Hana was at the secret venue, waiting for Collier to come out. Hana, ever sweet and thoughtful, promised to send as many pictures as possible.
Lorelei continued to sip on the drink as her thumb thoughtlessly scrolled through the messages. They were mostly nonsense about favorite songs and new releases, but peppered in were more personal notes. Hana never appeared to have revealed her real name, she was smart enough there, her online pal always referring to her by her username, WolfChick. However, Hana might have given away a little too much information to this stranger accidentally via selfies and context clues. Sure was a good thing they were all the way on another continent.
Of course, Lorelei wasn’t exactly sure where she herself was right now—Bexley, yes, but where was that again?
Looking deeper into the messages, Hana had talked with this stranger about her job, how frustrated she was with her uncle, the weird dreams she often had about the ocean, and how disappointed she was in herself for her total lack of skill.
Hana had manipulated an entire pond to nearly drown a pack of lycans, rescuing Lorelei and Grier from what was almost certainly death if not painful dismemberment. She had passed out right after, and forgotten it, but that wasn’t a total lack of skill in Lorelei’s opinion.
Lorelei scrolled further back, stopping to chuckle at a very cute picture Hana had taken of herself with a flustered Grier. He was scrawnier in the photo, and they were sitting together and eating ice cream on the front porch at what looked like the tail end of summer. She realized she’d gone back all the way to the beginning of the conversation which happened to coincide with Lorelei’s arrival at Moonlit Shores Manor a few months prior. The online acquaintance had reached out to Hana first and was very amicable. Hana mentioned a new girl at her job and how much she liked her, and Lorelei was overcome by warm fuzzies that were quickly flushed out by guilt for invading so much of her privacy.
Then she realized she’d skimmed over three months of messages, and Hana still hadn’t come back from the bathroom.
The bartender was cleaning out a cup with a rag that looked like it might have been white at one time, the spider monkey mimicking him with a shot glass and a cocktail napkin that had almost certainly seen the floor first. “Um, sir? Can you tell me when the show’s supposed to start?”
His voice came out like a shovel being dragged over pavement. “Mmm…what show?”
Lorelei hopped off the stool, falling forward and catching onto the stranger beside her. She apologized, louder than she meant, garnering some glares from across the bar. She wished she hadn’t chosen a pink sweatshirt and light wash jeans, but no, why not add the sequined snow cap with a bobble on top Ziah had given her for Christmas to complete her very innocent and totally incapable of defending herself look? Thankfully, the scaly man she’d used for leverage seemed to decide it wasn’t worth the trouble of throwing her off and allowed her to walk unbothered to the bathrooms at t
he back of the bar.
At the hall’s head, she got her bearings. The frosted striker packed a stronger punch than she expected, but she was able to travel in a mostly straight line. She sniffed and focused on the walls, papered with posters that peeled up from their corners in an array of colors that would have been much more dizzying had the lights not been so dim. At the end was a metal door with a long bar across it and a blacked-out window. To the right was an open, empty office. The symbols on the two doors to the left weren’t any she recognized, but they had to be bathrooms. The smell of bleach trying to cover up piss was another nice, if not actually nice, indicator. She carefully pushed the first door inward.
A person stood inside, facing the back wall beside the single stall. “Hana?” The light was brighter than in the hall, but one of the bulbs over the sink was blinking like a strobe.
The form turned over its shoulder, decidedly not Hana. He grinned back.
“Sorry!” Lorelei jumped, bumping into the wall of the hallway and covering her face. The second door had to be right, she thought, and she pushed herself fully into the other bathroom. Here the light was full and bright, and there were two stalls on the back wall.
Taking a wide stance, she got low to the ground and peeked under the crack for feet. One was empty, and the other housed four tentacles, one of which was tapping, its suckers sticking to the tile every time it raised up to slap back down. Lorelei said a silent thank you to whoever invented shoes and stood back up, less wobbly on her feet now.
She turned to the mirror over the sink and rubbed her face, then gasped. Hana wasn’t there.
Lorelei burst back out through the door into the hall. She looked up and down it, but the fact there was really nowhere else to go made her heart quicken. Why would Hana take her there just to run off without her? She should have just sneaked off on her own if that was what she really wanted.
Lorelei’s panic made her brain sharpen—Hana had come this way, and there was nowhere else to go but out the metal door at the hall’s end. She threw herself at it and outside.
The alley was dark, but of course it was, they all were, and it smelled of rotting garbage because of course it did, they all did. A freezing breeze funneled through it, blowing her hair in front of her eyes. She shielded her face and went to call Hana’s name, but it caught in her throat.
Hana’s form stood just at the edge of the darkness. Her fuzzy, rabbit backpack caught the light coming from a window in the building across the narrow way, but she wasn’t moving, just staring up the alley, her hair whipping around her in the wind.
Lorelei tried to stand straighter in the cold, coming around the dumpster just beside the bar’s back door for a better look. There was a spark in the darkness from the alley’s far end, at least twenty yards down the cobbled stones, and it lit up two more figures. Collier Coyote was there, beside him a taller figure with a lithe build in a form-fitting swath of black fabric. Her hair fell in long, black sheets on either side of a pale face, and she extended spindly arms with fingers so thin they may not have had skin at all.
The spark illuminating them appeared attached to the thin woman’s fingertips by silky threads, and as she pulled her hands apart, the threads grew taut, and the light expanded. Hana still didn’t move though she should have—the thing was horrible—but it was as if she were paralyzed.
Lorelei dashed out into the alley, her heart thumping. Whatever this was, even if it were some kind of show opener, there was no way it was going to be good. She reached out for Hana to pull her back, but the light that had been created suddenly condensed again, and a voice filled the tunnel of the alley, high-pitched and scratchy, echoing off the backs of every building as more filled in to join it. Lorelei had heard a voice—or voices—like that before, one being with the voices of hundreds, and she was struck still.
Collier closed the space between where he had been and where Lorelei tried to end up faster than humanly possible, but of course he had, there was no way he was human. Lorelei’s fingers only grazed Hana’s backpack when arms folded around her middle and tackled her to the ground. She closed her fist as she went, jerking the bag as she slammed into the cobblestones, the wind knocked right out of her.
Lorelei tried to suck in a breath, her lungs refusing to fill. Collier’s face loomed over her, not like how it had been, now twisted into something animalistic, his eyes beady and angry, his mouth elongated with pointed teeth and bristles poking out of his cheeks and chin. It was terrifying, but whatever his face was turning into, Lorelei remembered at that moment that he’d tried to convince Hana to come to this thing alone. She wheezed out an expletive and hauled her fist into his jaw.
Collier reeled only for a second as Lorelei tried to scramble away, but he grabbed her again and yanked her to her feet, his formerly tattooed arm now completely obscured by ruddy fur. She was flung toward the dumpster, slamming into it with a metallic crash, but he had not released the front of her sweater, pinning her there.
Her vision spun, trapped against the stinking and freezing wall, but even through her hazy eyes she could see Collier Coyote’s face had completely changed. Narrower with a small, pointed nose, it was covered in fur now, his eyes black, and his jaws, long and full of fangs, curled into a smile. The pointed ears really did it, though. His name wasn’t subtle just slightly off.
Hana had apparently been shaken of her paralysis, if only a little. She rubbed her head, her backpack dangling by one arm. She didn’t seem to know where she was or what she was looking at.
“Hana!” Lorelei coughed out, finally getting a full breath. “Run!”
CHAPTER 22
TRICKED
Light filled the alley, brighter than it had been before as it arced up into the sky. Lorelei’s eyes were burnt open as she watched it plummet back down and crash into Hana. The girl fell on her knees, long strands of silvery thread attaching themselves all over her chest and arms, and then they arced back to the spindly form. The high laughter of a hundred voices echoed off the alley’s walls and up into the night sky.
Lorelei grabbed Collier Coyote’s arm and flailed, trying to throw him off, but he held her firm up against the dumpster. She called out to Hana again, her voice cracking over the laughter of the woman. The voice was made up of others, young and old, male and female, but they cackled all in the same way as they died off.
Then there was a crash from around the dumpster as the door to the bar was flung open and rattled off the brick wall. Collier’s new canine face narrowed beady eyes past where Lorelei couldn’t see, annoyance there that quickly shifted to something like surprise. A figure stepped out just into Lorelei’s peripherals, and wings unfurled in the dim light. With a single flap, it took to the sky and then shot off down the alley toward the woman.
The brilliant light dulled, cradled up against the lithe figure just before the winged being would have crashed into her. The arcing light fell away, and instead the sinewy form was shielded with a glowing dome. There was a staticky snap as the air sizzled, and the winged form ricocheted off the dome, but the light illuminated her completely now, and Lorelei could see the determined and irate face of Helena, the Moonlit Shores mail carrier.
Hana’s tiny form crumpled to the ground, the threads that had been wrapping themselves around her broken and disintegrating into nothing. Collier was distracted by the attack, and Lorelei pulled down on his elbow, making him lose his balance and fall toward her. She lifted a knee and jabbed it into his crotch, and his canine jaws let out a pained yelp as he released her. She ran past him and dropped down next to Hana. She was still breathing, but her eyes were closed, and her skin had gone so pale it was almost blue.
There was screeching from the far end of the alley and a flash of light. Helena was back on her feet, and her wings blossomed out from behind her to their full span, at least twice as long as she was tall. The light hit them, and feathers scattered, but Helena did not move.
Lorelei shook Hana’s shoulders, and the girl roused, blinkin
g and befuddled. Then her arm shot up, gripping Lorelei’s shoulder like a vice. “He cannot remain. This life must be destroyed so he can be made new again.”
Lorelei stuttered back questioning noises, but Hana fell limp once more in her arms. She tried to gather her up, but hands on her own shoulders pulled her back and away from the girl. She screamed and flailed as Collier dragged her back, reaching out fruitlessly for Hana, clawing at the furry arm with her other hand. She cursed at the creature, its snout wet against her face. “Atax will collect for our master. You cannot stop this.”
Lorelei took a breath to scream back at him, but the air she inhaled was suddenly dry and constricted her throat. Still cold, their surroundings were lighter, if that were possible, and Collier’s grip around her loosened as the feeling in the alleyway shifted.
The dirty piles of snow that had been swept against the buildings melted like they’d had a torch put to them, but the water did not flood the road. Instead, it rose up into the air, rain but backwards. Lorelei’s throat and nose stung, and her eyes burned as she blinked down to the end of the alley that spilled onto the street. A new form was standing there, thin and short, and when he walked toward them, she counted four arms, one of which carried a staff with a bulbous end at its top.
The humidity in the alley converged in a swirling, black cloud above, hovering low between the walls of the buildings on either side. Lorelei and the canine creature stared up at it as Ando strode toward them. Helena turned from the thin woman, tucking in her wings and barreling toward Hana, scooping up her limp form. Their attacker cried out in that voice that was her own but hundreds more as well, and she flung out a boney arm that sent a flash of light after her. Helena flapped her wings and leapt out of the light’s path as it slammed down into the ground, spraying cobblestones into the buildings and leaving a smoking crater in its wake.
The Wayward Deed (Vacancy Book 2) Page 22