by Dia Reeves
“I know you do,” Jimi said. “I figured if I waited long enough, the madness would pass on its own.” He hadn’t figured that at all, but they didn’t need to know everything.
“We don’t mind your wings. Not really.”
“They’re pretty.”
“Fairy wings, like Big Mike said.”
“So did the Mayor really invite you to the Revelry?”
“Can we see the masks?”
“What the hell?” Jimi said, deciding to be gracious. “I’ll need a helper though. I can’t be smearing soup all over those ‘exquisite details.’”
The freshman he’d ejected earlier from the stool did the honors and opened the parcels. Everyone crowding. Yelling. In a good way. The way it should be.
Rishi sitting by himself surrounded by abandoned soup bowls.
Also the way it should be.
Chapter 25
The Mayor sent a limo for them. First to Jimi’s house, then Carmin’s, where Lecy was waiting with him, and Ophelia last since she lived closest to the Gray Road. Jimi braved a trip past the poison tree to ring for her, but she joined him on the porch before he could press the bell.
She wore a white, backless gown made of feathers; short, because she knew her legs were too spectacular to cover up. White feathers were threaded through her hair and reminded Jimi of the girl from that brutally depressing ballet Dez had dragged him to once. The one with the swan princess, ethereal and doomed. He told her so, but edited out the doomed part.
“Good, since you look like a prince.” Ophelia toyed with his bowtie. “It’s strange not being the only one in white.”
Jimi felt just as strange and unnecessarily visible. “Should I come inside? Say hi to your uncle and aunt? Or Pallid Jon?”
“Part of the house isn’t there.” She kissed him and pulled him toward the limo. “Part of the family is missing too. It’s the end of the year,” she added, as though that explained anything.
Jimi thought of all the things he didn’t know about her, about her life, as they settled into the limo with Carmin, also in a white tuxedo, and Lecy in a white gauzy gown and matching begonias wreathed in her hair.
“I see that swank Rolls-Royce in the driveway,” Carmin said. “Why didn’t you pick us up in it?”
“Don’t be weird,” Jimi told him. “Only people she likes get to ride in the Rolls.”
“Don’t you like us?” Lecy said.
The silence spun out.
“You’re okay.”
“Oh my God, Lecy! Have you ever been blessed with such high praise?”
“I know right? I feel so special.”
The limo stopped beside the Gray Road, where a crowd of elegantly dressed Porterenes, all in white, were walking together.
Lecy said, “They’re already wearing their masks.”
The gray boxes were beside them on the seats, so they each removed a mask and donned it.
Alexis had been right. The masks were über luxurious—real fur and feathers and chiton, precious metals and jewels woven into masterpieces. Jimi could never have done such work on his own.
“Why do I have to be a weasel?” Carmin said.
“I ask myself that question every day.” Lecy adjusted her fox mask so that the ears were properly centered.
Ophelia’s barn owl mask matched her dress perfectly, and Jimi—
“Dude, what the hell is that?”
“It’s a dragonfly mask.” Iridescent compound eyes made up half the face and mouthparts finished off the rest.
Ophelia stroked Jimi’s antennae. “Put your wings out. It’ll make more sense then.”
“I will if you will.”
“You have wings too?” Carmin and Lecy exclaimed.
Jimi felt like a complete dumbass, outing Ophelia so thoughtlessly.
But Ophelia was still smiling. “Okay. If not at the Revelry, then where?”
Ophelia used Carmin’s pocket knife to cut slits through Jimi’s shirt and jacket, and then helped guide his wings out and into place. Ophelia waited until they left the limo to reveal her own wings, but no one made a fuss. The kind of people who got invited to Revelry didn’t freak out about things like wings. They handed their tickets to the man at the golden doors and were let inside a massive ballroom.
People spun counterclockwise on the dance floor in the center, or walked along the flower-draped gallery upstairs and stared down at the dancers, or sat along the walls where tables groaned under a prodigious amount of food.
A girl in a polar bear mask and a purple dress danced with a crocodile-masked boy, whose green tux had to be seen to be believed. The green and purple made Jimi feel better about his fairy blue wings.
Jimi and Ophelia ate rapaciously of things like dragontooth soup and satyr pâté and roast gryphon and ice pixie brûlée. and drank glass after glass of sparkling lotus wine.
Jimi argued philosophy with a bat and smoked hashish with a family of killer whales and, using the juice of the purple fruit hanging from the gallery, drew a naked woman on the torso of a king cobra. But mostly he danced with Ophelia.
In between waltzes, Jimi led Ophelia to a small alcove beneath the staircase and gave her a silver box. On the lid, he’d painted her in her feathery coat. If held just so, her wings became visible. “I know you like silver,” he said, “and places to store things.”
“It’s beautiful. Like an ad. Like the Morton Salt girl. But my legs are not that long.”
“They’re longer.”
“Why am I on the box? I’d rather have a picture of you.”
“If you get mad at me, I don’t want you to hate the box or hate to look at it because I’m on it. I want you to like it, even when you don’t like me.”
Ophelia carefully slipped the box into her pocket—the only girl in the world whose evening gown had pockets—and then kissed him. She had to work around his mandibles, but Ophelia was full of tricks. Her mouth like a bottomless well, this sensation of falling into her endlessly. They might have stayed in the little alcove kissing the night away, but the band struck a thrilling fanfare that caught everyone’s attention.
The Revelers gathered on the dance floor, waiters twining among them with champagne flutes on silver trays full of a white fluid.
The Mayor took the stage, the only one without a mask, and stood before the now silent band.
“It’s nearly midnight. Drink now, and when the final bell tolls, your blood will be as hot as the night is cold.”
Everyone did as she said, and the Mayor’s Milk was as good as Jimi had imagined: sunshine and cinnamon and heat.
“Is that sphinx?” Carmin smacked his lips. “Amazing.”
When everyone had drunk and the glasses were removed, the Mayor said, “I’m so used to seeing you in your black clothes.” She looked at the girl in the purple dress. “Some of you.”
Everyone laughed.
“Wearing shadows, blending in so that the beasts can’t see you. But I see you. There will be no hiding tonight. The town is yours. The beasts are yours. You’re my children and need hide from no one. Run free and do as you will. You’ve shown me the white. Now show me the red!”
The clock struck midnight and everyone removed the masks. The predatory expressions, however, remained, as the crowd flooded out of the ballroom, through the golden doors; Jimi and Ophelia flowed with it. Cut across the Gray Road. Entered the dark park.
Lights had been strung through the treetops, but the brightest light seemed to come from the Revelers. From their clothes, from their skin.
Ophelia had gotten ahead so Jimi chased her down, laughing. Caught and kissed her as the night erupted in violence.
Beasts were flushed out of the bushes, out of the trees, out of burrows and dens, and torn apart. None of the Revelers had brought any weapons, so they used their feet and hands and teeth. They worked in packs. They were unstoppable.
But every time Jimi and Ophelia tried to join in, there was never anything left for them.
After
the third time, Jimi said, “Stop killing all the things, and let us have a turn!”
Two sisters he knew from school, laughed at his frustration. They could afford to. From the blood covering the older sister, they’d had more than their fair share of carnage. The older was slicing a cackler throat with a gold switchblade, while the younger stood by watching, a white parasol open to shield her from the blood spray.
Jimi had seen the two of them at the rite, isolated on a blanket with a couple of boys they’d started running around with. The sisters didn’t like to socialize, so Jimi was surprised when the older sister waved him over.
“What’s up, Jimi. Isn’t this wild?”
“That’s one word for it.” He brought Ophelia forward and introduced her to Kit and her younger sister Fancy.
“We can help you find something to kill,” Kit said, and then guzzled from a purloined champagne bottle.
“Really?”
“Helping people is what we love to do,” she said and then shared a laugh with her sister, like it was the greatest joke ever.
Fancy put aside her parasol and parked Jimi beneath one of the tree lanterns. She knelt and poured her sister’s champagne into his cupped hands and, as the four of them watched, an image formed in the liquid: a mob of helibirds in a tree.
“I know where that is,” said Fancy. “Near that stream where the frogmen attacked me.”
Fancy led them deeper into the dark park. “The last time I was in here I was terrified,” she said. “Now, it’s like it happened to someone else. Like a dream I forgot to write down.”
“It’s the Mayor’s Milk,” said Ophelia. “It’s changed us.”
“Not changed,” Kit swallowed the last of the champagne. “Clarified. Revealed our true selves. We are the knives on the face of the world.”
“That,” Jimi said, “or we’re all as high as the sky.”
They found the helibirds shortly thereafter. Knocked them out of the tree. Killed them. Laughed the whole time. Even when the birds fought back and clawed their skin, it was fun.
Jimi lost track of the beasts they killed, many he’d never seen before and could not name. He would carefully paralyze a beast and then the girls would finish it off. Ophelia liked flying way up and dropping them to see whether they would break or burst on impact. Kit used her switchblade like a surgeon, and Fancy’s parasol doubled as a spear, the tip deadly. Distant. “I don’t like to be bled on,” she explained.
“But that’s the dress code,” Kit said. “White and red.” She flicked her bloody knife at Fancy’s dress, decorating it while Fancy pouted.
Jimi found it fascinating how much more interesting beasts were internally. Like cakes with mystery cream centers. Some of the beasts were red inside or green or black. One was full of white mist everyone was careful not to inhale. At one point, Jimi plucked out an eye so like an amethyst that he knelt and presented it to Ophelia who laughed and kissed him.
They kissed for such a long time that when they stopped, Fancy and Kit had disappeared, replaced by a different, rowdier gang of revelers, reduced to overturning rocks in their search for prey.
Jimi considered joining this new group, but his bloodlust had cooled. “Do you want to go back?” he asked Ophelia. “Or go home? We could find Carmin and Lecy.”
Ophelia wasn’t listening. Too preoccupied with a tuxedoed man vomiting against a tree. With a bejeweled woman crawling on the ground like a beetle. With a boy sitting inside a ring of mushrooms who was screaming or laughing.
“Let’s vow never to vomit the milk,” Ophelia said. “Not after what we went through to get it.” Her wings were still out, the left partly invisible, and the right so heavy with blood it hung awkwardly.
“I promise,” Jimi felt fine. Just hungry. Dizzy. He sat beneath an oak, and Ophelia joined him. Wound her arm around his neck. Arms that weren’t as pinchable as Lecy’s, but were nice in their own way.
“I love you,” she said in his ear. “I’m not in love with you, but I love you. Like, if you died, I’d cry at your funeral. In front of everyone.”
The words swirled from her mouth and danced through the air, yellow and pink. “Cool.”
“Love. Isn’t that a great word?”
A big word, floating as slowly as a blimp into the shrubbery opposite them. It burst against the sharp twigs and turned the bush pink. But not the thing hiding in the bush.
“Let’s make love under the stars.”
“Maybe later.”
“You don’t want to?” The words didn’t leave her mouth like the others. Stayed inside and hid under her tongue and behind her uvula.
“Not particularly.”
“It’s because I’m not as good as Dez is, isn’t it? I bet if she was the one asking, you’d already be in the bushes by now.”
“Not those bushes,” Jimi said, as a cackler scrambled free, leaped at a reveler, and swallowed his head.
“Nathan!”
As more revelers converged, the cackler abandoned its prey and ran off.
Jimi and Ophelia crawled to Nathan who lay in a bloody sprawl, but even with half his head missing, he breathed.
Ophelia said, “Pain is a beast. We must kill all beasts. Put him out of his misery.” She swooned and lay motionless next to Nathan, his life’s blood soaking her.
“Kill all beasts,” Jimi agreed, and then filled Nathan with enough venom to do just that.
Ophelia put her hand on Nathan’s still chest, half dreaming beside him.
“Are you eating his soul?” Jimi shook her. “Ophelia?”
“Only suicides,” she snapped, like he should have remembered. Jimi did, but his brain was not firing on all cylinders.
“Besides”—she opened her eyes, her focus a million miles away—“it’s long gone. Most souls can travel without our help. I told you that. I’m sure I did. If a cackler bit off my head would you miss me? Even half as much as you miss her?”
He knocked her hand off Nathan’s chest. “Ask me questions like that when you’re sober. Coward.”
Nathan’s sleeve had been ripped away at some point during the long night, exposing the pale, heavy flesh of his upper arm. So Jimi knelt and bit it. Choked on the wash of blood, tearing and gnashing until the flesh came free. Jimi didn’t like rare meat usually, but the venom had given it a bit of a kick.
“Nathan?”
The revelers that had chased off the cackler were back.
Staring at Jimi.
“What? There’s enough to go around.” He offered up Nathan’s bloody arm. “Want some?”
Strangely enough, they didn’t.
Chapter 26
Jimi left his dad’s house the day after Christmas and ran into Ophelia who was drenched in blood.
“Jesus.” He grabbed his head, not quite recovered from Revelry. Yesterday when he’d cut into his slice of Christmas roast, it had bled on his hands, which he’d immediately licked only to discover the blood was horseradish sauce.
Just like the blood covering Ophelia was only rain. She must not be fully recovered either if she couldn’t shield herself from such a weak afternoon drizzle.
“Didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to…” She looked around the street as if for inspiration. Looked everywhere but at Jimi. “You’re in a hurry?”
He checked the street. “Not yet.” He locked the door to his dad’s apartment, which had been painted the same rust color as the rest of the building, like camouflage. He took her hand, led her past the Darkroom entrance and sat with her on a nearby bench, moved Paul’s lunch bag out of the way so he could slide closer.
The sidewalk was empty. A strange silence had fallen, as if Ophelia had trapped them inside a bubble. She went straight into Jimi’s arms, but her kisses were sad. Bitter. He licked her tears from his mouth.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry I was so silly during the Revelry.”
“Silly how?”
They spoke in low voices, like in the ice cave, though not
hing above the bench threatened to crush them.
“All that stuff about sex. I can’t blame you for being turned off.”
“Not by you. It was more the dead bodies and people vomiting. Even if we’d been alone, we were high. It’s risky having sex when you’re high, especially between people who aren’t friends.”
“That’s sensible.” As though sense was the worst virtue of all time. “Is that why you’re still drinking? Because if you stay high, you’ll never have to go to bed with me again?”
“I haven’t been drinking.”
She kissed him, clinically this time. “You taste like alcohol.”
“I had a slice of black cake before I left. An old Christmas tradition. Dad soaks it in rum. Because you’re supposed to, not because he’s a drunk. We can have sex again. Most definitely.”
Ophelia relaxed against him. She had been a virgin, so it made sense she had no idea how guys worked.
“Where’re you going?”
“Somewhere.”
“So mysterious. You have to find more human flesh to eat, don’t you? You can tell me. Is it tasty? You seemed to really enjoy it at the Revelry. Or was Nathan uncommonly delicious?”
Wanting the roast to bleed the way Nathan had.
“So that wasn’t part of the Revelry hangover?” Even though he already knew the answer. “The psychotic afterglow?”
“Psychotic afterglow is right. I keep hearing voices. My mom telling me she loves me. That’s how I know it’s not real. But your thing with Nathan? That was real. You ate a guy. A whole bunch of us watched you do it.”
“Don’t be shouting it out like that.” The street was empty, but it felt like people were hanging out of the windows with their hands cupped to their ears.
“I just got back in everyone’s good books, but when they find out I’m a cannibal, it’s all over.”
“Who’s gonna find out? What happens at Revelry stays at Revelry.”
“What is my life right now?”
“Horrifying. Gross. Confusing. Like every other teen I know.”
“Who the hell do you know?”
“I know people. They’re dead now, but when they were alive, they had serious problems. Like you.”
