by Gabi Moore
The darkness was nearly full by the time they walked into the lobby of the building; it was a condo complex, from the look of the inside. Mr. Cheng didn’t stop at the desk—or at all. Pushing through the crowd (almost rudely, which Aurora thought strange) he made a beeline straight for the elevators and jammed the ‘up’ button. The others were just behind him. Milo, Lester, and Lucien were watching the lobby, eyeing everyone nearby, scanning faces. Aurora, still watching in her second sight, had her eyes on Mr. Cheng.
“Mr. Cheng?” she asked softly as they waited. “Are… are you okay?”
“Fine,” he replied curtly, not quite a snap. Like someone who is afraid their voice will crack if they try to speak. Aurora didn’t try to press. He was obviously still upset, she reasoned. There would be time later.
The elevator dinged, and the doors sighed open, smooth as grease. That’s what money bought you, Aurora could only guess. The building she’d lived in with her mother hadn’t even had an elevator, just a whole lot of stairs. New York had a wide price range, but the Potiers had always been close to the bottom.
Aurora hid her admiration at the beautiful elevator interior as the doors closed them all in. Mercifully, there was no one else with them. No one had bothered to step into the same lift as their strange group.
Mr. Cheng started to reach for the floor buttons, but his hand shook so badly. Lucien and Milo exchanged a glance; they seemed to silently ask each other whether they should help, or let it be. Finally, Cheng hit the access request for the penthouse.
Silence fell in the elevator. Shocked, Aurora saw the dark particles had converged on Cheng’s arm. His arm—the same one he’d used to press the button—was black with them. Like… they were forcing him along.
Meanwhile, in the penthouse, someone had approved their request.
Chapter 11
Mr. Cheng fell in a heap on the elevator floor, motionless. Lucien cursed and dived to catch him; Milo punched every other button on the panel, but the elevator moved relentlessly upward. Lester’s brown eyes were wide.
For her part, Aurora was trying to remain calm. If she understood right, the person after her was the same who’d made her mother disappear. The same who had been hunting her for years. The same who had gouged out Amy and Katrina’s eyes and tongues, thinking they might be her.
Fear closed her throat. Aurora backed into the corner of the elevator like a bird in a cage, feeling them all hurtle upwards to none knew where. Furiously, like a bullet under pressure, it seemed the elevator was shooting through the shaft, falling upwards impossibly fast.
“Stop this thing!” Lucien hissed, trying to shake Cheng awake.
“The panel’s off!” Milo snapped, still slapping buttons. He even tried the emergency stop—nothing, nothing but relentless ascension. “Can you—I don’t know, can’t we crawl out through the ceiling or something?”
“While the elevator is moving?”
“Lester, can you stop this thing?”
Wide-eyed, Lester shook his head. “If I even try, I could snap the cable. I don’t have the skill to do anything about it safely, not when we’re moving like this.”
Milo punched the elevator panel again and cursed through his grit teeth.
“Mr. Cheng!” Lucien called, smacking his face carefully, gingerly, as if afraid to hurt him. Indeed, Cheng looked frailer than ever, more fragile than when he’d staggered in the Lucien’s door a few hours past. What was going on? What was happening? Aurora had no answers. Her mind was blank, with no thought except the numbers ticking up… up… up…
“Dammit, Ian,” Milo muttered. “He must have done something to Cheng. Some kind of—shit, it was that trippy mind-magic he can do. Since when is he so good at that?”
“Aurora,” Lucian turned to her at once. “Look at Cheng—can you see anything strange about him?”
Why now, when the elevator was reaching the penthouse? Aurora knew what Lucien meant, and slipped into her magical sight immediately. The black ashes were gone from Cheng’s body, replaced by golden particles of life, although they were fewer now. It pieced together in her head as her eyes flipped back into normal vision.
“Not now, but earlier there… there was like… ashes, in him. I don’t see them in you or Milo or Lester, or anybody else.”
“Not in you?”
His face was intent—he already knew. Aurora shook her head. “No, I see them in me, too. Am I…”
“In danger? Not from this.” Lucien looked up at the numbers on the dial. “But soon, we’re all going to be in a tight spot.”
“Will my father try to kill us?” she whispered.
“Not us. Just you.”
Just as she had feared. “What do we do?” Aurora was willing her voice to be calm, and was even succeeding a little. Considering the numbers on the elevator dial were beginning to make her hysterical, this was an accomplishment. Two out of three ain’t bad.
“You stay back,” Milo told her firmly. “Stay back, and let us handle it. Ian will want to get you alone—and who knows, maybe he wants to off us, too. But I doubt it,” Milo sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I can’t believe we walked into this… No, he won’t try to kill the rest of us. Being a part of the circle is what gives him immortality. You and he aren’t true vampires, after all, and he can’t live forever without us.”
“So you guys will be fine, at least,” she heard herself say. There were eighty-seven floors, and they had passed eighty-five. It seemed like they should have been at five hundred, by now, they had seemed to be going so fast. But knowing the others were not in danger, Aurora felt oddly… calm. For her, Katrina had been killed and Amy mutilated. For her, Ramona had vanished in the night. Cheng had been injured. Moreau had passed on.
This time, at least, no one was interested in hurting the others. Only if they got in the way.
Only if they try to stop me.
The voice sent ice into her very bones as the elevator came to a halt at the penthouse. It was the same one from before, the one she had heard in her head when she’d first entered the second sight. The one that had told her to take more energy from Milo.
Aurora shivered. Dad?
The elevator doors opened. Aurora and Lester watched from the back as Lucien and Milo exchanged a dark look and sighed. Not much choice. They could camp in the elevator, but that would only delay; eventually, someone would come looking for them. So with resignation, Lucien draped Mr. Cheng (who hung like a limp doll) over his shoulder and the four of them stepped cautiously into a fine, wood-paneled anteroom.
They’ve lied to you.
The voice seemed to echo into her ears, swirl around the room. Aurora thought for a moment that they could all hear it, but no. In her heart, it was plain that this voice was for her only.
Dad? Aurora asked again, frozen in place.
The voice grew softer, warmer, like a fleece blanket after an afternoon of snow. They kept me from you for twenty years. Do not trust them. They will betray you, too.
Carefully, Aurora watched the others, trying to gage if any of them might have caught even a hint of what she’d heard. They followed the door across from the elevators, which was cracked open, into a finely furnished den. A cheery fire roared in the hearth (probably gas-fed and hooked up to a switch somewhere), throwing crimson light and black shadows between the pools of lamplight scattered around the room.
“Who you gonna call?” Milo muttered.
“What?” Lester hissed.
“Shh,” Lucien shushed them, nostrils flaring. Aurora watched him warily; he was smelling for her father, or for anyone. Sniffing out danger.
They’ve come to kill me and put you in my place. The voice sounded just within her hearing, and nothing Aurora did could make it louder or softer. Wherever she moved, it went. Disembodied, attached to her ear, or perhaps truly inside her mind. Anxious though it made her, Aurora held her breath, hoping to hear again. This was the voice she’d wanted to hear all her life, finally come back to her. They’ve even tol
d you that you must do it, so that the blood need not be on their hands. I’m sure they have.
She followed the others slowly, and ear to the room, another to the words speaking inside her, either of wisdom or treachery. Who was to say? After all, he was correct. Killing her own father was exactly what this group wanted her to do. It wasn’t a secret. They’d told her as if it were the most natural thing.
“Which door?” Lucien asked. “This whole place reeks of him. I can’t pin down his scent from one place to the other in here.”
Milo was standing in the middle of the room. He closed his eyes, surely listening.
He cannot hear me, the voice whispered. There was no need to whisper; clearly, Milo truly could not hear. But he will tell you that he can.
“I can hear him this way,” Milo said, opening his eyes. He pointed to one of the two doors that waited, closed, at opposite ends of the room. “Through there.”
I am not there. I am here. Come this way.
Aurora looked at the other door.
Lester cupped his hands around his ears. “What’s that sound?”
It took a moment to distinguish precisely what sound he was talking about. The only thing Aurora could hear was he crackling fire and her own trotting pulse in her ears. But then, not a sound, but something washed over her skin. And Lester was right—it did leave a sort of ringing in her eardrums, but it was not a real noise. It was magic.
“More of the same old tricks,” Milo muttered. In her second sight, the door at the opposite end, the door the others were facing, was writhing with the specks of dark ash, just like Cheng had been.
And suddenly, she understood what the ash was. If the gold light drops were life and vitality, then the black ones were clearly the opposite. They were flakes of death, and they were in her when she looked down at herself. They had been in Cheng, controlling him. And they were foaming about that far door. Even if the others couldn’t see them like she could, Aurora knew they felt them, smelled them, sensed them.
Come this way. They will not see. Soon, they will not notice anything but what I send their way.
That didn’t sound good. The physical door bent outward under the weight of a sudden, sharp blow from within. And now, there was a sound. It was the low, gurgling growl of something that was definitely not any mortal animal. Aurora could feel her father’s power pressing through the door, now, as if the room beyond were filling with water and the door would soon burst open.
And she began backing towards the other door.
Milo noticed her moving, and for a moment she was terrified that he had seen her thoughts; then he turned back to the door that threatened to break and nodded. “Just stay behind us,” he told her. “You and Lester. Lucien and I will handle this.” He had his gun out, whatever good it was going to do him. Aurora didn’t know what was on the other side of the door, but she wasn’t so sure that bullets were going to harm it.
Lucien had put Mr. Cheng down on the couch near the fireplace. The old man was still semi-conscious, sleeping a fitful sleep and muttering in Chinese. His face was the only one turned her way as Aurora felt the wall behind her back, feeling that at any moment, Lucien or Milo would notice her.
The door had fallen open; Aurora hadn’t see it happen, but she saw the open black doorway to her right and scooted inside. Waiting for Milo or Lucien to notice, and dreading that they would.
But instead of them, Mr. Cheng opened his eyes suddenly, weakly, and saw her face as she disappeared into the doorway. His alarm—and his despair—was plain in the split second before the door swung itself closed.
The darkness was complete for a matter of seconds; soft lights began to burn, stronger and stronger until the room before her was perfectly lit, not a smidgen over-bright.
It was a… throne room.
There was no other way to describe it; on a dais at the far end was a great, carved-wood chair with resplendent burgundy cushions, almost the color of wine… perhaps a little too red for that. The floor and walls were paneled wood, just like the rest of the penthouse. An entire wall of windows looked out over New York, far below.
But that didn’t matter to Aurora at the moment. Because in the middle of the room, several paces in front of the chair, there was standing a man, a man she had only ever seen in the mirror when she tried to imagine her own face without the pieces that were her mother.
Ian was his name. Ramona had told her daughter that from time to time, and the new friends she had made called him that name. Somehow in her mind, Aurora’s father had always been a good for nothing, a slob of a man with half a head of hair and a beer gut. Small, stupid eyes, a white tank top, a bottle in one hand. Ramona’s many stories had only impressed her daughter for a little while. The older she had grown, the less flattering her expectations had become.
The creature before her could hardly have been more different. He was something European, that was for sure; his skin was pale but rosy, with hair as fine a gold as spring daffodils. He was dressed in a black suit, theatric and exactly what Aurora had expected a vampire to be wearing, but he was standing there, grinning mildly, as if he hadn’t unleashed some dark forces in the next room.
The eyes were what really struck Aurora. Even from ten paces away, she could see they were hers, slate green with chips of brown, like an agate stone.
The word stuck in her throat. Father.
Ian didn’t wait for her to speak. He took a long, admiring look at her. Admiring! There was pride shining in his eyes as he appraised her, took stock of the woman that had grown from the child he’d fathered. With a sigh he smiled again.
“I’ve waited so long for this day.”
Those words resonated like a bell right down to Aurora’s soul. She’d never expected to see her father again, truth be told. As far as she knew, he’d disappeared and left an anxious young woman in an unforgiving city with a young child, a child that wouldn’t even remember what he looked like. Aurora had been angry of that for a long, long time. She’d grown cynical and distant, seeing her father in everyone, seeing the possibility of being left alone in the snow in every friendly invite and kind word.
And here he was. Against all odds, she had finally met him. And he was nothing like Aurora had pictured—no matter how many times Ramona swooned over his handsomeness, his grace, Aurora had stopped believing. She could never imagine his face because she had never been able to picture a face ugly or horrible enough to abandon them.
“Why?” Aurora asked finally.
This was obviously not what Ian was expecting. He crossed the floor, closer, closer. “Why, what?”
“Why did you kill her?” Aurora asked. Tears were glassing over her eyes. “Why did you have to kill my mother?”
Shock took up Ian’s perfect face, and he frowned. “Aurora, I didn’t kill her. I brought her here.”
They stood, looking at each other over the shined wood floor. Aurora didn’t speak, didn’t respond at all for almost a minute. She couldn’t make sense of what he’d just said. He brought her here? Where, here? As in, here, where they were right now?
“Where is she?” Aurora asked finally, confused.
“Ramona?” Ian called. “Come out! Aurora’s here!”
“Aurora?” At the sound of her name, Aurora’s heart lifted; that was her mother’s voice, or similar. It sounded younger, happier, than it had in far too long.
And then out of another door, from what looked like a spacious bedroom, out came a lovely stranger, a beautiful older black woman with her hair styled and her make-up perfect. Aurora stifled disappointment and nerves; she’d thought for sure it would be her mother who came walking out. The voice was so similar. This stranger was wearing a red evening dress, although it seemed to hang on her a little. She was terribly thin.
Aurora blinked in surprise and suddenly recognized her own mother. “Momma?”
“Aurora!” Ramona Potier swept across the room in matching red heels, a huge smile on her face. Aurora couldn’t move, couldn’t eve
n lift her own arms to hug her mother back as Ramona enveloped her warmly. In heels, she was as tall as Aurora, although she’d always seemed shorter. She was standing up straight, now, that was it. For as long as Aurora could remember, her mother had always stooped a little, as if under a great weight.
“Isn’t it wonderful, baby?” Ramona sighed, pulling back and looking at Aurora from arm’s length. “Your daddy’s back. He’s staying with us, this time. We’ll all live together again—oh, I can’t wait! I’ve been waiting so long to have our family together again!”
Aurora’s head spun like a planet in orbit, and she looked up at Ian. Ramona had looped a red-sleeved arm through his, and they stood together in delight, both smiling madly, like a prom picture come alive.
She couldn’t stop staring at her mother. When she’d seen her yesterday morning, Ramona Potier had been an old skeleton in worn pajamas, gazing like a dream out the small window, spending late nights recalling memories and pretending they were real. She hadn’t worn make-up in years. Hell, she hadn’t even put on shoes since last spring, much less heels. Ramona Potier looked like she’d been given an Oprah makeover, but in her gut, Aurora knew it was much simpler; her mother had simply gotten what she’d been holding her life in pause for all these years. Ian was back.
Had she been lied to? Aurora looked at them, happy as could be. They wanted her to be a part of that happiness, to take her place with them so they could all be a family. Why had Madame Moreau, Mr. Cheng, Milo and Lucien, too… why had they all tried to convince her that her father was evil? The way he looked at her mother was out of a fairy tale, and Ramona hadn’t looked so alive for as long as Aurora could recall. If this was what her father wanted, why had they tried so hard to stop him?
“What… what now?” Aurora asked eventually. What else could she say? Yesterday, she’d met some people and they’d told her many frightening things. She’d seen many frightening things. And today, her parents were together and life was what it always should have been. And yet, they were all standing around, as if waiting.
Ramona looked up at Ian, still grinning, and shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. You and I will have to get used to being taken care of, Aurora.”
