by Frankie Rose
“You like the nineteen hundreds?” Aldan asked.
I knew I was staring but I couldn’t help it. He just looked so…smart. The disfigured scar at his throat was mostly covered by his starched, crisp collar. For all intents and purposes he appeared like any of the other gentleman that surrounded me: distinguished.
“I guess it’s all right,” I admitted. It was kind of fun wearing a huge dress and being treated like I was a fragile, breakable thing. I would still be glad when I could slip back into my own self, into my boots and jeans and tank top, and feel normal again, though. My hair was starting to fall loose from its elaborate twists and plaits, and I got the feeling I might not look the part anymore, anyway.
Aldan smiled down at me, shunting me mechanically around the dance floor. It didn’t feel right, not like it had with Daniel. That had been impossibly light, like I was floating. Now, I felt like I was dragging half-set cement bags around instead of legs.
“Aldan, do you mind if we, well, if we don’t dance? I know you probably don’t get the chance very often, but—”
“I knew there was a reason I liked you,” he interrupted. “Must be in the blood. I’m as stiff as a wooden post on the dance floor, always have been. That’s why I like rock music so much. It’s rather uncouth, but you can just throw yourself around a dance floor and not get into trouble. Plus you know it hasn’t been a good night if you aren’t dragged into some kind of a row. Now that’s what I call dancing.”
I laughed. This really did feel like dancing with my grandfather. I wouldn’t have minded standing on Aldan’s feet. He stopped, though, and we made our way towards the far end of the room to a group of blood-red velveteen chaise lounges. They were arranged around the statue of a woman with tumbling stone locks of hair down to her waist. In her arms she held a vase, out of which water splashed musically down into a sweeping circular pool at her feet. A couple stood at its edge, and the girl—she couldn’t be any older than me—squealed loudly every time the silver of gleaming scales flashed beneath the flat surface of the water.
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “You’d think it was the first time she’d seen a fish.”
“Probably is.” Aldan sat down on the edge of a secluded chaise longue, and I joined him, battling with my skirts until they lay as flat as they were ever going to. “People didn’t really keep fish tanks in these days. There are fish in the Thames, sure, but have you seen that river? The only things you’ll catch sight of in that water are dead bodies.”
“Sounds lovely.”
Aldan considered me for a moment and then gave me a warm smile. It really was weird seeing him with short hair. “You look lovely. I knew that color would suit you.”
“That’s funny. Daniel told me I looked stupid.”
“And since when have you started listening to anything that came out of that lad’s mouth? I thought you were smarter than that.”
I shrugged. “Some things are just obvious.”
“Have you considered the possibility that he doesn’t know how to tell you he thinks you’re beautiful?”
A strangled noise broke free from my chest, more a wheeze than actual laughter. “Now that is ridiculous.” Annoying, and potentially simple, I thought, but beautiful…
Falling into his arms had been hideous; I knew I’d looked flushed, and my cleavage had almost busted out of my ridiculously tight dress. That had been bad, but not the truly horrible part. The horrible part had been my inability to control my reaction to his arms around me, whilst he stood there with that impassive, blank look on his face. It had been humiliating, and Aldan had watched the whole embarrassing scene for himself. I shuddered out of the memory.
“You said you wanted to talk to me?” I hadn’t forgotten the whole point of our trip into Aldan’s mind. The prospect of any new information related to my hallucinations was welcome, especially if he could tell me how to stop them.
The old man scrubbed his hand over his bare head, apparently amused by his short hair, too, and nodded. “Yes. I believe I have made some headway. You might not like what I’ve discovered, though.”
Something hot and oppressive pushed down on me, a wave of dizziness made worse by my freakishly tight corset. What could he possibly tell me that was worse than having the hallucinations in the first place? “Just tell me.” There was no point beating around the bush. It would only draw out the panic, and panic was something I could do without.
“What you experience, Farley, I don’t think they’re hallucinations. I think they’re visions.”
“Visions?”
“Yes. I’ve studied the prophecies. There’s nothing in them to suggest you’d experience anything like this, but these things have their quirks, you know? Your mind is sound. There’s nothing wrong with you physically. That can only mean that you’re experiencing something supernatural.”
A remote, sinking feeling pulled at me. The sounds of the room—the music, the chatter, the laughter, the clink of glass—faded into a distant buzz. How could something supernatural be happening to me? Fair enough, my father was an Immortal, but I was a girl. It was only the males of the Reaver bloodline that had powers, or the potential to become immortal. Despite that, a tiny voice echoed in the back of my head even as I thought this. It was Agatha, the night at the fair, telling me I was special. They’ve always had male children. That’s just the way it’s always been.
How had I never thought about this? If there hadn’t ever been a girl before, then how could they know what I would be, what gifts or powers I might possess? That was precisely why the Reavers wanted me dead, after all. That, and the fact that they believed the stupid prophecy where I was supposedly destined to kill them all. I uncurled my clenched fists, which were still stinging like crazy from my fall earlier.
“It doesn’t really make much sense,” I said, “if they are visions. I mean, what are they telling me? I had my first one when I was eight. My mom was on fire. What does that signify?”
“Did you ever have a vision of your mother again?” Aldan asked.
I nodded, remembering a thousand different times when I’d seen my mom burn; in the supermarket; in the car driving to summer camp; on the beach; at Nana Jean’s funeral. “Yeah. It was the same every time.”
Aldan’s face fell, and he looked down at my hands. He tutted and took them into his lap, dabbing at the grazes with his handkerchief. It was spotted with bloody polka dots by the time he spoke again. “I can’t be sure what that means, Farley. But you must remember, everything in our world is tied in with the soul. I can only think that what you’re seeing is some representation of the soul.”
A wall went up in my head before he finished speaking. There was no way my mom’s soul looked like that. “The last time I saw you, you told me that heaven and hell existed. If I see visions of my mom and her soul is on fire, and you honestly believe that hell exists, then you’re essentially telling me that my mom is in hell, right? And she was destined to go there all along?”
It couldn’t be true. That was the only thing keeping the horror out of my voice. My mom, the woman who couldn’t bear to kill insects that found their way into the house, the woman who forced me to spend every Christmas day afternoon in living memory in a soup kitchen for the homeless, could not be in hell.
There was pain in Aldan’s eyes. “I really don’t know. I’m probably wrong. There could be some other explanation for what—” Aldan didn’t finish his sentence. The sound of shattering glass broke through our conversation, and he was on his feet in an instant. “Damn it!”
A flutter of alarm beat its wings inside my chest. I stood, still feeling sick and empty, only to find that Aldan had already charged off through the crowd. The people in the dance hall were still milling around, talking and dancing, completely unaware of the disruption to their enjoyable evening. I could hear it, though: more breaking glass, the sound of scuffling feet, and the undeniable sound of fists flying. Someone was yelling obscenities that would definitely upset a few of people i
n the hall, if only they could hear them.
Without Aldan at my side, I felt suddenly very alone, like a ghost trapped in a world where I’d never be seen or heard. I rushed after him, worried if I lost sight of him I actually would cease to exist. I shoved my way through the few remaining dancers, battling with my skirts until I finally lost patience. I gathered them in my arms and hitched them up the way that Daniel had expressly told me not to. My familiar, battered sneakers greeted me beneath the swamp of fabric. So that’s why my footwear felt so comfortable.
I was about to look up again and search for Aldan when I noticed something dark sliding across the floor towards me. The dancing couples stepped over the obstruction mid-waltz without ever acknowledging its presence, but I saw it. Daniel arrived at my sneakers, his arms and legs sprawled in a very unbecoming manner. He paused a beat before looking up at me. There was a dark fury on his face that he’d only ever hinted at before. The force of it stole my breath clean out of my lungs.
“Daniel!” Aldan yelled, pushing his way towards us. The crowd remained in motion, and he had to dodge and weave around countless, oblivious revelers before he reached us. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
I’d never seen Aldan annoyed before, and the tension in his voice was worrying. Daniel scrabbled to his feet, his eyes still locked on mine. The fury evaporated from him like smoke, and his eyes blazed with some inner torment I couldn’t understand. I took a step forward, but as I did so he buried both his hands in his hair and pulled. The action, pure frustration, was startling. I froze, staring at him with my mouth formed into a perfect O, wondering what could possibly have made him act that way.
“Daniel!”
It wasn’t Aldan calling him this time. It was another voice, one I didn’t recognize. Daniel pivoted on his heel, his necktie undone at his throat, his knuckles scuffed with blood, and scowled.
“Just go!” he yelled. It took a moment before the subject of his anger walked into view. A boy, so blond his hair was hardly any color at all, strolled through the crowd towards them. He didn’t appear uncomfortable that he was wearing nothing but his boxer shorts, and in fact he seemed quite pleased with himself as he arrived in front of us. He was toned in the same way that Daniel was, with a flat, muscled stomach and corded, strong arms. His skin was tanned and glowed in an ethereal fashion. A kind of tattoo wreathed his shoulders, chaining his collarbone—characters in a language that I couldn’t read properly. It was almost as if my eyes couldn’t focus on the angular, sweeping forms, which continuously seemed to shift like wet ink.
A faint line of blood trickled down his forehead where a deep gash lay just below the boy’s hairline. He didn’t seem fazed, though. His eyes, the color of a wintry sky, the starkest of blues, were filled with laughter. In his right hand he held a balled-up wad of green and black material.
“You ever get sick of it, bro?” he said to Daniel. His voice bore no accent at all, or maybe it was that he spoke with a combination of many accents. It was hard to tell. He sounded different, but in a way I couldn’t put my finger on.
At some point during the time I’d been staring at the newcomer, Daniel had gotten to his feet and regained his composure. His eyes still shone a little too brightly. His smile was ruinous. “Not really. You?”
The other boy cracked a wide grin. “Nope.”
“Glad to know we’re on the same page.”
Aldan coughed and stepped between the two of them, hooking his hands on his hips. “Are you two quite done?”
“Quite.” Daniel’s voice was flat but I could see the strain in his face. He obviously wanted to rip this guy’s head off.
The stranger was still smirking. His gaze flickered to land on me. He held out his left hand, the one free of the scrunched up material, and smiled until he practically sparkled. “Hallo.”
I shot Aldan a confused glance, but he was still too busy staring at Daniel to give me any help. Daniel was no use, either. He was clenching his jaw so hard it looked like he might shatter his teeth. He glared at the other boy who, in turn, made a show of ignoring Daniel altogether.
“Don’t you people still shake hands when you greet someone?” the guy asked, a puzzled look creasing his brow.
“Uh… yeah. We do.” I put my hand in his and shook it, and a radiating warmth shot up my arm.
“I’m Kayden. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Hope.”
His formal address threw me off guard. “Yeah… um… pleased to meet you, too.”
“Sorry about our little ruck there. Daniel and I like to get into it when we see each other. Just a little tradition of ours.” It sounded like he was apologizing for tracking dirty footprints over an expensive rug, not for brawling in public.
“Oh? Are your little exchanges always about the same thing, or do you like to find new things to brutalize one another over?”
“We like to mix it up,” he said, giving me a wink. “For instance, this time I borrowed some of Daniel’s threads. Apparently he feels we’re not good enough friends for swapsies.”
“Oh.” There was nothing else to say.
“It was my mouth that really got me into trouble this time, though,” he continued. “I may have intimated that I might like to try on something else, too, and he didn’t like that at all. Although, I don’t seem to recall ever having heard that this particular something belonged to him.”
The words had barely left his mouth before Daniel exploded in a blur of black and white, and Kayden was no longer gripping my hand but sailing backwards through the air. Two whole seconds passed before he landed with a thud on his back five feet from where he’d been standing. Daniel’s fists were clenched at his sides and his shoulders hitched up and down. “You’ve delivered your message. It’s time for you to leave,” he hissed.
Kayden laid flat on his back, his laughter cutting above all the other noise in the room like a brightly ringing bell. He lazily propped himself up on his elbows and gave Daniel a regretful look. “I think you may be right.” He turned to me and shot me another reprobate wink. “I meant it. It really was a pleasure.”
And it was like he vanished, inexplicably disappeared in between heartbeats. There was no sign he’d ever been there, beyond a crumpled shirt and a pair of jeans, which were kicked aside as another dancing couple cantered by.
“You do realize he wasn’t really wearing your clothes?” Aldan said. His exasperation was all too clear in the timbre of his words.
“Of course,” Daniel replied.
“Then what the hell? Because he made some cheap remark about ‘something that doesn’t belong to you’?”
“No,” he answered, staring at the ground. “Because it does belong to me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Vitamin C
