The Grims grumbled, mostly ignoring him, but Violet wanted to take him up on his offer. “You’re on,” she said.
Harris laughed. “Not with you, Cuddle Bug. I want a real challenge.”
Violet stepped close to him. “Don’t call me, Cuddle Bug and I am a real challenge.” Even though Harris towered over her easily, she didn’t seem afraid at all.
The Zombie laughed again, but not so heartily that time. It was more of a mocking laugh. “That’s real cute, Cuddle Bug.”
“My name is Violet!”
As soon as the words had left her mouth, the sky rumbled, releasing a huge boom of thunder. We all jumped at the noise, Violet included. Had she done that? Of course not. She could move clouds and change their shape, that was it. The crash of thunder had been a weird coincidence, but no more came after that.
Everyone froze, staring at Violet. She looked down at the ground as if suddenly ashamed of herself. “I just don’t like when you guys call me Cuddle Bug, that’s all,” she said in a tiny voice.
Harris frowned and backed away. “Just trying to spice things up a bit. Snapperwhip hunting can be very tedious. Anyway, carry on.” He disappeared into the darkness, probably to get back to the other zombies.
The rest of us went back to work. By the time everyone in my group had full buckets, mine was only a quarter full. I was proud of myself for collecting even that much. The others helped me fill my bucket and we went to meet up with Cadence. We ended up being ten minutes late which had totally been my fault because the others had had to help me.
From the look Cadence gave me, I could tell she knew the tardiness had been my fault. She looked into my bucket, at the dead snapperwhips, most of which I didn’t catch myself. “Cool, let’s go back. Dust and Cecrops, you’ll help me deliver the buckets to the Giants.”
I was about to ask her why I had to do it, but there was really no point. I kept my mouth shut until we got back to the lair.
The others placed their buckets on the ground against the wall of the lair’s entrance. Cadence and Cecrops grabbed a bunch at once. Although I was stronger than I usually was, the most I could do was carry two buckets in each hand.
“Are we really taking these to the Giants?” I asked. I had no desire to go near that sixth tunnel again.
“No,” Cecrops said. “We drop them down the chute and the Giants collect them that way.”
We went to the chute, poured the disgusting things down, and the Cecrops took the buckets back where they belonged.
“Follow me,” Cadence said, “I have to put you away for the night, but first I have to report to Mr. Mason that we’re back and that we reached our quota.”
We took the elevator down to the bottom level. As we stepped off the elevator, we heard voices. Mr. Mason speaking to someone. Cadence stepped forward but I placed my hand on her wrist and she stopped. I wanted to hear what he was saying.
“Think about what you’re doing because once you do it, it can’t be undone,” spoke an unfamiliar voice.
“They haven’t left me much of a choice,” Mr. Mason said to his unknown companion. “They want to impose this curse. They think it’s going to take us out. I have to show them that we have a much more powerful weapon in our arsenal. What happened at that carnival the other night was just the tip of the iceberg.”
Cadence and I locked eyes. She didn’t blink. What did Mr. Mason have to do with what had happened at the carnival? Had he let the creature out? Was he responsible for the death of those two people?
“What about us?” the other person asked. “We will be in danger ourselves.”
“No, we won’t. All Takers will be warned and given a safe haven down here. This place will be sealed like a vault.”
My heart thudded. A safe haven from what? What was going to happen that people needed to hide from?
“My mind is made up, Jeremiah. Take them my ultimatum. A week from today, unless they revoke this Gemini Curse, the sixth tunnel will be opened and our family will be set free.”
Chapter Twenty
Cadence and I kept our eyes glued to each other’s. She held one finger to her beak. Once Mr. Mason and the other person had gone she led me to my room and unlocked the door.
Before stepping inside, I turned to her. “Cadence, you heard what he said, right? He’s talking about opening the sixth tunnel.”
Cadence shook her head. “No. We heard wrong or misunderstood. There is no way he would do that. Get in.”
She and all the others there had a blind allegiance to Mr. Mason, so of course she didn’t want to believe it, but I knew she’d heard the exact same thing I had. She gave me a final look before sliding the door shut. She knew exactly what he was planning to do.
The sixth tunnel held the worst of the worst creatures. They had no conscience or self-control. Those things would destroy anything in their path. With them let loose, they would kill everyone, including my family and everyone I knew.
What was Mr. Mason thinking? He would risk everyone’s lives—Giver, Taker, and Human, just to get back at the Angels. I got that he was angry about the curse, but certainly there had to be another way. There was only one solution. I had to find a way to stop the curse and I had less than a week to do it.
The day after Mr. Mason released me from the lair, I told Fletcher and Imani everything. Fletcher’s parents were out and the three of us sat on Fletcher’s bed. I watched the two of them work on a half-gallon of rocky road ice cream.
Imani had a lot to say. “I was scared as hell. You said you were going to the lair and then you disappeared for two days. I didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like I could call the police without telling your secret.” She stabbed her spoon into the ice cream. “So anyway, let me get this straight. There’s some secret tunnel under the lair, under the school that holds terrible monsters—monsters worse than the ones I saw down there the other day?”
I nodded.
“And if they get out, we’re all done for,” Fletcher added.
I nodded. “They’ll destroy anything in their path and just keep going. Who knows how many people this could effect? We’re talking Ogres, Trolls, Wendigos, Chupacabras, Hellhounds . . .”
Imani’s eyes had glazed over so I stopped talking.
“It’ll be bad—like end of the world bad,” Fletcher added. “That Aswang is a complete idiot. What is he thinking?”
Although I didn’t care for Mr. Mason, I felt the need to defend him. He was a Taker and in his mind, he was doing what he had to do to protect his own. “Hey, he wouldn’t even be thinking about this if the Archs hadn’t enacted this curse. They’re going to cause all kinds of trouble if they don’t call it off.” Really, it was all their fault.
“It seems the first step would be getting the Givers to revoke the curse. That seems to be the root of this problem. How do we do that?” Imani asked.
Fletcher scowled at her. “What do you know about it? This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
Imani snatched the ice cream away from him. “But it does. If that tunnel gets unsealed, we’re all in danger.”
“Don’t blame this on Givers,” Fletcher said defensively. “The only reason the Gemini Curse was put back into place was because of the poor behavior of the Takers. For a while, everyone had been getting along and coexisting just fine then Bailey had to go killing off Givers and innocent people.”
Yes, Bailey had been a Taker, so in their eyes it made us all guilty even though it wasn’t right. Bailey had acted alone and none of us approved of her actions.
“Okay,” I said. “I get that, but Bailey’s gone and those murders have stopped—”
“Right,” Fletcher agreed, “and they might have called off the curse until what happened at the carnival. Every time we turn around, Takers are going against the truce so what do you guys expect us to do?” Fletcher snuggled underneath his covers. “I’m sorry, Arden, but with all you guys have done, the Givers will not call off the curse.”
Imani sighe
d and looked from me to Fletcher. “In the meanwhile you have to stop that thing—guy—whatever, from opening that tunnel or we’re all screwed.”
“Me? What am I supposed to do?”
Imani stood and stretched her long body. “What I saw you do the other day down there, I’m pretty sure you can find a way to reason with him. If not, do what you have to do.”
I knew exactly what she meant. “I can’t kill him.”
“Arden,” Fletcher said, “nobody wants that to happen, but Imani’s right. Mr. Mason is going to get us all killed. He has to be stopped somehow.”
That was easy for him to say, Fletcher wasn’t a Taker so what did he care about Mr. Mason? Still, he was probably right but Mason was Hollis’ father and I had made Hollis a promise. If I went back on mine, he just might go back on his.
I ran Imani and Fletcher’s words through my mind. I had to strike the problem at its root and the root was Mr. Mason. I had no intentions of killing him, I only needed to make him think that I was.
Making a wrap dress proved to be more complicated than I thought it would be. It was the hardest thing I had ever made, but once it was done, I was proud of it and named it Lady. I folded Lady carefully and placed it in a plain white box to give to Cadence.
Thankfully, I found her alone in the control room. She sat cross-legged on the bed, reading.
“Hey, Cadence.”
“Hey,” she muttered, not looking up from her book.
I held the box up. “I bought you a gift.”
Her head snapped in my direction. “A gift? For what?”
I shrugged. “Just because. I wanted to make you something nice.”
She eyed me suspiciously as I handed her the box, laughing nervously. “It’s okay. It’s not a bomb.”
Slowly she lifted the lid and pulled Lady from the box.
The look in her eye as she held Lady in front of her told me she liked it and I swelled with pride. Knowing Cadence, this gift could have gone either way.
“You made me a dress?”
“Yeah. Try it on.”
She hesitated for a moment but then headed for the bathroom to change. I sat on the bed and waited for her, hoping that it fit. When she emerged, I was relieved to see that the dress fit her perfectly.
I stood and helped her tie the belt around her waist a little tighter. “I knew you were about the same size as my dress form.”
Stepping back, I admired my work. I was also surprised to see that Cadence had a killer set of legs. I had only ever seen her wear jeans so I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting. Bird legs maybe?
“This is really pretty,” Cadence said, “but where am I supposed to wear this? You know I don’t go anywhere . . . except snapperwhip hunting.”
“I don’t know. You can put it on just to wear around here. Maybe Hollis would like it.”
She sighed and headed back toward the bathroom. “Doubt it. That boy doesn’t notice anything.”
“Sometimes a girl has to make the first move,” I told her, even though I had kissed Fletcher a couple of times and he’d looked at me as if I were crazy. A strange thought came to me. How does kissing work when you have a beak? I wanted to ask but I didn’t want to take the risk of offending her when everything was going so well. “Do whatever you want,” I told her. “Whatever feels right to you.”
She smoothed down the sides of her dress. “Thanks. This is really nice.”
I felt warm inside, but not in the bad way like when I was about to cause some damage—in the warm and fuzzy way.
She went to change back into her clothes and I left the control room to handle something else.
I took the elevator down to the middle level of the lair where Mr. Mason’s office was located. As I knocked on the door, I had no idea what to expect. I had never just shown up to his office without being summoned. Any time I had been called down to Mr. Mason, I had been in trouble so his office gave me bad vibes.
The door slid open. Mr. Mason was perched behind his desk scolding a kid who looked like some kind of elf sitting in a chair across from him.
Mason paused, focusing his attention on me. “Ms. Moss, what can I do for you?”
I wiped my sweaty palms on the side of my dress. “I was wondering if I could have a moment. It’s really important.”
He nodded and looked at the elf-boy. “I don’t want to have to call you down here for anything else, you understand?”
The boy nodded, looking relieved, and escaped the room.
“Have a seat,” Mr. Mason said as he shuffled some papers. His desk was always filled with papers. I wondered what they were.
I sat down and folded my hands in my lap. I was already doing everything wrong. I shouldn’t have been taking his orders. I needed to make this man take me seriously.
“I know what you’re planning to do,” I blurted out.
He raised one eyebrow at me. “Excuse me?”
“I heard you the other night when I was on my way to solitary. You plan on opening the sixth tunnel and you can’t do that.”
He sat back in his desk chair, smirking. “Really? And just who do you think you are to tell me what I can and can’t do?”
“Think about what you’re doing. Do you know how much damage that will cause? The beasts will kill everyone.”
He walked over to the wall behind him where there was a safe. “Not that I have to explain anything to you, but my one and only concern is our own. We will be safe. Humans and Givers are not our problem.”
“You won’t open that tunnel,” I said as forcefully as I could.
Mr. Mason opened the safe, pulled a small black box from his pocket, and placed it inside. “You don’t seem to understand anything. You happen to be on the right side of the Gemini curse. You’re winning and your Gemini is losing. But most of the Takers won’t be as fortunate as you are. Most of them will lose, dragging our numbers down significantly. I know you don’t feel much loyalty to us, but you can’t expect us to just sit back and take a beating like that. I will do everything I can to protect this population.”
“Maybe you can stop this. You kind of egged it on by letting that Minotaur out.”
He locked the safe again and took his seat. “That was a warning.”
“That was a slap in the face and now they’re going to take it out on all of us. What you did is just making everything worse. Can’t you talk to them? Try to reason with them?”
He grimaced like he smelled something bad. “I would rather die than grovel to those self-important anarchists. It won’t happen.”
I leaned forward in my seat. “This is about your ego? Everyone is going to die if you do this. How can you not care at all? There’s no telling who will be affected—many innocent people. People who have nothing to do with this. People who don’t even know we exist.”
Mr. Mason looked amused, like I was some kind of joke to him. “You are under the incredibly wrong impression that I care about people. I will make sure we are safe and that is where my concern ends.”
I wanted to knock some sense into him but then I thought about Fletcher lying on that bed, dying because I was sucking the life out of him. I had to stop this curse and reasoning with Mr. Mason was the only way to do it.
I took a deep breath, summoning all the patience I had. “Please, think about this. There will never be any peace. What is the point of that? Turmoil where there doesn’t have to be.”
He studied me for a long time before speaking. “You don’t know this world. You weren’t raised in it like the rest of us so you don’t know any better. We will always take a backseat to them. They get to roam free, live like Humans, have possession of that curse, determine whether we live or die. They judge us as if we behave like filthy animals when we simply do what we were born to do. It’s time for that to end. Besides, I still believe they were responsible for the massacre that killed many of us years back.”
His voice was thick with bitterness which was understandable since his wife had been kill
ed during the massacre. “You don’t know that. No one knows who did it,” I told him.
“Are we done here? I do have work to do.”
I leaned forward in my chair and I narrowed my eyes at him. He didn’t see me as a threat. He was treating me like some kind of joke “I’ll kill you before I let you open that tunnel.”
He stood so abruptly his chair tipped back. “I’m about tired of your threats, girl. If you’re going to do something, do it. But I will give you fair warning; a young creature who has yet to gain her full abilities, is no match for an adult Aswang.”
Scaring him wasn’t enough. Mr. Mason needed to be stopped permanently, but I didn’t have it in me to do it and he knew it.
I glared at him, trying to think of ways I could kill him. Apparently, he wasn’t going to give me time to think. Before I knew it, he’d leapt over the desk and wrapped one of his wings tightly around my body. He pulled me close to him, so close I could feel his hot breath on my face. “I could kill you right now and there would be nothing you could do to stop me. It would take me half a second to snap your neck and a few minutes to devour your dead body. No one would even know what happened to you.”
I couldn’t breathe and I felt like he was crushing my bones. He squeezed me so tightly, I couldn’t even struggle against him. Gasping, I swallowed my pain.
His wings constricted again. “I am not my son. He is compassionate and merciful. Where he got those unfortunate traits from, I don’t know, but once you cross the point of no return with me there will be no mercy from me. Don’t think for a moment that you will get special treatment for being the pretend-daughter of an Angel.”
I tried to speak, but that proved to be even harder than breathing. I prayed I wouldn’t pass out.
Mr. Mason released me and I dropped to the ground, holding my throat, trying to suck up as much air as I could.
“Your threats are no longer effective. Now run along.”
I gathered myself and fled the room before he had the chance to get his wings on me again. I was done trying to reason with him. He was either going to keep that tunnel sealed, or I was going to kill him.
Dust and Roses: Book Two of the Dust Trilogy Page 14
