Evanescent - By Addison Moore Page 0,78
she shakes her head. “Everything imaginable is at your disposal.” It escapes her lips with breathless wonder. “And you have no pain.” She touches her chest just shy of her neck.
“Oh my, God.” I heave the words out as if I had just stumbled upon a map to the den of terror itself. “Do you know how to get back there? To the tower?”
“I won’t go. Please don’t let them take me.”
“Who are they?”
Her entire body seizes, her eyes widen as if she said too much already.
“I’m very tired, Laken.” She crawls under the covers and cocoons herself against the wall. “Please, turn off the light.”
“Sure,” it bleeds from me almost inaudible.
My heart beats erratic as my entire body breaks out in an ice cold sweat. I have a feeling whoever they are, is far more important than I think. After all, they went through the trouble of extracting a Celestra fresh from the tunnels and depositing her directly into my room.
But why in God’s name?
Why?
Whatever the answer is, I’m sure I won’t like it.
The morning of Halloween, Hattie and I stroll down to the dining hall together. I’ve taken her under my wing these past few days for many reasons but the first is to build a friendship, and it hasn’t been hard at all because she’s so darn sweet.
Jen is seated all by her lonesome, texting away as if her life depended on it, but I bypass her and head over to Carter and Fallon.
“If we went to a normal school”—Fallon takes a bite of her apple—“they’d let us wear whatever the hell we wanted today.”
“Ephemeral is anything but normal,” I say it low in the event someone gets slayed by a serious bout of school spirit and decides to rip me a new one. In fact, if you want to get technical, it’s all Halloween, all the time.” I blink a smile over at Hattie. We had a long talk about Halloween and how freaky it can, and undoubtedly will, be. She promised not to rat me out to her “elders” if I promised to show her a good time like Flynn was busy doing before he turned into a Spectator snack—God, I hope that’s not true.
“So”—I lean in—“what’s on tap for tonight? Freaky, slutty, or both?”
Carter sits up. “I’m going to be Cleopatra, and Fletch is going to be Marc Antony.” She leans in and laughs as though it were absurd.
It’s totally absurd considering the Fletch I know and love would rather jab his eye out with a kitchen knife than don any ridiculous costume—let alone a theme costume that might require a toga and sandals on his part.
“I’m a witch.” Fallon cuts me a dirty look like maybe she really is, so I don’t push her on the subject. I know for a fact she’s a “Treasure” which qualifies you as a Count by proxy, so all other spiritual misgivings are more or less unimportant to me at the moment.
“How about you guys?” Carter plucks at her long curls while trying to detangle a knot with her fingers.
“We’re going to be cheerleaders.” Hattie informs them. She’s got a bad habit of over annunciating her words, which I’m trying to break her of. It just doesn’t sound natural. Everything sounds forced as if she’s a robot, reading from a script.
“That’s lame.” Fallon nods casually as if it weren’t meant as a dig at all. “I mean Laken is a cheerleader, so it’s not that far a stretch.”
“They’re probably adding blood and shit,” Carter interjects with her gruesome defense. “You know, like a cheerleader who just got run over.” She nods into her grizzly line of thinking.
“No.” Hattie objects to Carter’s macabre rendition of our not so haunted couture. “We’re going to be pretty. I’m going to wear my hair in pigtails and wear red lipstick and everything. But I won’t wear a bra. I don’t like them. I don’t like underwear either.”
Crap. It’s spontaneous admissions like these that are going to land her a bed in the Flanders home for the undergarment challenged where I’m sure they have a “no bra, no underwear required” policy.
Fallon and Carter watch her in stunned silence before breaking out in a fit of hysterics.
“Did I say something funny?” Hattie asks, alarmed by their reaction.
Before I can answer, a dark presence—otherwise known as Kresley and Grayson appears. They choke us out with their thick scented perfumes, honey and spice and everything not nice. I swear they create their own brand of