About the Dark (5 page)

Rig’s fingers coiled into hard fists. “That’s
’cause she flirts with me. I come in, and that viper tempts me. She
stares at me with those creepy eyes of hers. Both are blue, but
d’you see it? One light blue, and the other darkest-dark. No good
girl, Doc, has eyes that different.”

Riled up and clearly not caring anymore what
Horgreth might think, the god loosed his fist at my face, but it
didn’t hit me because Fox, who’d been watching the god vigilantly,
had stepped in front of me. Rig’s fist landed on Fox’s chest, and
at once there was a flurry of movement and clicks as the guards
took their guns off the safety. Fox slowly raised his hands.

“Rig, her staring means nothing,” he said,
stressing every word. “She’s blind, and you know it.”

As one, Fox and I looked at the god. Much
taller than me, Fox was also standing not directly in front of me
but a little to the right, and his head was angled forward rather
than held straight like mine, and yet none of that bothered me.
After years together, I had grown so used to adjusting the images
that I borrowed for my height and point of view that I almost
forgot I wasn’t the one who did the seeing.

Rig stared back at us—at the spot where my
cheek was pressed to Fox’s arm—and his face twisted with rage.

“Mr. Rig,” the woman doctor called out, “Mr.
Rig, are you capable of focusing on my questions?”

The man exhaled heavily. “Yeah.”

“Mr. Rig, last year you beat this child so
violently you fractured her skull. She nearly died. Is it so
surprising that she gives you her full attention now?”

“But she deserved it, Doc,” Rig protested.
“’Cause she’s evil. Sure, she looks all nice and sweet, but she’s
the devil. When I’d come, she wouldn’t talk to me or touch me or
take the candy I’d bring. And she
can
see. I don’t know how,
but she sees.”

He glowered at me, his face ashen and tired,
his mouth dry and scabby, a smudge of dirt running across the
stubble on his chin, as though he’d been too busy to sleep, drink,
or wash up. I hastened to lower my eyes—anything to pacify the
crazy beast.

“Don’t you dare to look away from me!” Rig
snarled, lurching toward me.

The doctor’s voice stayed him. “Mr. Rig, do
you find yourself thinking about this girl when outside of the
store? Do you ever feel an urge to visit her instead of performing
your other duties? Do you ever dream of her?”

The god’s face reddened. “So what? You
wouldn’t understand. You aren’t a guy. She’s beyond—you can’t—” He
paused, and his next words came out in a barely-there whisper,
“What’s the point of looking at anything else when she exists?”

Dr. Liddell trailed her pointy chin at Bones.
“Do you find this child attractive?”

Bones, still shaky, gawked at me as if seeing
for the first time. “N-n-no, not really, Doc. I mean she’s not
ugly…now that I look at her. Yeah, you can call her pretty. Though
if you asked me about pretties, I’d tell you the other chick’s much
hotter.”

He ogled Demi.

The woman doctor glanced at the statuesque
Demi too, but only briefly, then turned to Horgreth. “Sir, as you
can observe, the heart child has made Mr. Rig completely obsessed
with her. If we wait any longer before executing your plan, she may
walk out of this cell tonight.”

Through one guard’s eyes, I watched how the
woman closed her folder, pressed it to her chest like a shield, and
carefully stepped backward again. By now she was nearly out of our
bookstore, and I wished I could ask Fox what he thought about the
woman’s odd behavior.

“Doctor,” Horgreth said. “I’m not convinced.
The age of the young lady in question makes her a fairly
inappropriate pick for Mr. Rig, yes, but otherwise she is a decent
looking girl, and Mr. Rig’s choices here are very limited.”

“But, sir—” Dr. Liddell began.

Horgreth held out his palm to silence her.
“Nor did she sense my aura or try to influence it when we came in.
I waited, but felt absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Except
perhaps more boredom than usual.”

“Of course, sir,” the woman said, “but—”

Once more Horgreth stopped her with a
gesture. “But you can go ahead with that scheme of mine. The one
you suggested. See if you can turn this girl into a full-fledged
heart as soon as possible, in a controlled environment. I have
waited long enough, haven’t I?” He curled his lips into what seemed
like a perfectly good-natured smile, but right away the corners of
his mouth hardened. “Oh, and another thing, Doctor. You do
understand that if anything goes even remotely wrong, I want you to
kill the heart girl. And the time boy. He’s too devoted to
her.”

Without waiting for any kind of response,
Horgreth turned to the door, and Fox slightly leaned on me, pushing
me in Rig’s direction. I felt my jaw go slack with surprise. What?
We were still going ahead with the Plan? With Horgreth and his
goons in the room? Pointedly, I shuffled from foot to foot, trying
to communicate that we should wait until tomorrow. Fox nudged me
again. Demi too cleared her throat, and even Sinna sighed. Oh,
fine, I’d do it.

Arranging my lips and eyebrows the way I’d
been taught, I turned toward Rig. Since it was noisy—Horgreth’s
guards were stomping after their boss—I decided to skip the
chatting-up part. Instead, I moved to Step Two of the Plan: mincing
ahead, I prepared to fake a stumble so I could grab onto the god as
if to stay upright and thus give Fox a chance to pick Rig’s left
pocket. Yes, the god kept the key to our door in there along with
the stinky, misshapen chocolate candies he was always trying to
feed me.

Rig watched my every move. The moron had
figured out that I could see, yet he seemed to forget all about it
now that I was approaching him. He wasn’t thinking, ‘Hey, the blind
chick, who isn’t really blind, is walking toward me. She must be
doing it on purpose. And what purpose can that be?’ Yes, I knew he
wasn’t thinking this because his forehead stayed as unclouded as a
blank page. Instead, when he realized I was just a few steps away
from a full-frontal collision with him, he smirked and thrust his
crotch forward.

At once I knew a much better way to distract
Rig. I stopped. My smile was very sincere now. I grabbed a ribbon
that used to be part of a frill on my dress and ripped it clean
off. Rig frowned. I grinned harder, crumpled the white shred into a
ball, and chucked it into his face. It hit him squarely between the
eyes.

For a moment the god just stood there,
blinking, reddening in the face, and breathing in my direction. The
chemical stench of his mint mouthwash burned my nose, and somebody
must have quickly informed Horgreth about this new development
because the king of traffickers popped back into the room. It
became very, very quiet. In this silence, Rig swore and lunged at
Fox. This he did at such a mind-boggling speed that at first I
thought he was simply mistaken. It was me he was trying to reach.
Yet the god paused just before hitting Fox, a miniscule pause
during which his face became a snapshot of vengeance: he was
getting at me through Fox. Then he struck Fox in the mouth.

“Rig, no!” I shouted.

His lips split and bleeding, Fox inhaled
sharply, but didn’t move to protect himself. Instead, he raised his
arms while Horgreth’s posse surrounded us once again.

Rig leveled his fist at Fox’s cheekbone, the
one with my name on it, but didn’t hit Fox, just watched me,
enjoying my suffering. “Happy now, bitch?”

“Rig, please don’t do it,” I begged, but I
knew it was useless. Distraught, I tore through everyone else’s
head, hoping they were looking at Rig, shaking their heads, maybe
even moving to stop this maniac, but no, they were all staring at
me. Some focused on my face, others on my hands, and at least two
on my entire frame, from my toes to the stray hairs on the crown of
my head, trying not to miss my tiniest move. It was as if they all
expected something grand and menacing from me. Before I could
decide what it was, my mouth felt full of ice, and I knew—not sure
how, but I did—that this ice was their fear incarnate, cold, sharp,
and paralyzing. And it was me they were scared of—yes, all of
them—and the gods, who had stopped advancing; and the woman doctor,
who by now was out of our bookstore; and Horgreth himself, who had
pulled out a gun and hid behind the guy in the fedora. They all
dreaded that to save Fox, I would overcome whatever was stopping me
from becoming a heart and channel the pain I had threatened them
with.

Emboldened by this reaction, I strained to
send out some anguish—I felt a lot of it right now—but my nerves
lay helpless. And Rig must have decided I wasn’t suffering enough
because he struck Fox in the face. Fox moaned, and I launched at
Rig, scratching his cheeks and socking him in the nose so hard I
split the skin on my knuckles…and for a second he just let me, I
wasn’t sure why. Then he hurled me away. As I slammed into the
wall, the view of the room I’d been getting from Fox went dark, but
I felt no pain. In a flash I got back to my feet. I could hear Rig
pummeling Fox while Fox—the darkness before my eyes dissipated—was
not defending himself. He was just standing there, his lower lip
caught between his teeth. I leaped in front of him.

“Dem,” Fox ordered.

She seized my elbow and, with every show of
distaste, pulled me out of the fray. I clawed at her hands, but it
was like fighting a brick wall.

Rig scowled at me. “Wanna get back to your
lover boy? Not on my watch.”

He grabbed Fox’s shoulder in one fist while
hitting him in the stomach with the other. Again and again and
again.

“Mr. Horgreth!” I shrieked. “Please stop
him!”

But the king of traffickers—I glimpsed him
through Bones’s eyes—didn’t move. He only pouted at me, and this
time I had no idea what was behind this expression. In a moment,
Horgreth flicked his hand. “This is all too pathetic. She is not
going to turn. Take this moron away.”

But even before this command, Bones, perhaps
fearing that Fox would collapse and that Demi would get hurt,
seized Rig around the shoulders. Rig cursed. Suddenly, while he was
still fighting Bones, Rig began to shrink, return to his human
size, so that by the time two gods from Horgreth’s retinue
holstered their weapons and caught Rig’s arms to drag him away, the
god was not an inch over six feet. There was shock on his face, and
I knew that he’d shortened not of his own will, but I didn’t care
about him. All I wanted was to be with Fox, to help him, to hug
him, to tell him how sorry I was. For everything.

With a ferocious screech, the door crawled
closed after the gods, the lock clicked shut, and we were left
alone.

Fox leaned back against the wall—carefully,
but with no wincing or moaning. “Hey, why sour faces? Cheer up.
We’ve just survived a visit from the worst bunch of psychos ever.
Their
last
visit.” And, grinning, he held up the key he’d
stolen from Rig in the scuffle.

Chapter 3

For breakfast, each of us had a portion of brown mush
we’d scraped from the insides of the paper bag. I think it was
bread, cheese, and maybe dry cereal, but everything of course
tasted like the chicken soup whose container Bones had crushed
earlier. Then we set to making foot protection for tonight.

The first time we’d managed to pick the lock
on our door had been five years ago. The gods naturally caught us,
beat us, then took away our shoes. We picked the next lock. They
caught us and spread glass outside the bookstore. We ripped our
blankets into pieces, wrapped our feet, and tried to escape again.
The gods went berserk that time. They pummeled us till we blacked
out. Then they took away everything we had: blankets, towels, spare
clothes. They even talked about shaving our heads, fearing that
we’d pull out our thigh-long hair and wrap our feet with that, but
they quickly snapped out of it and let us keep our hair, the
clothes we wore, and the books. They saw nothing dangerous in the
books.

“Now your left leg,” Fox said, gently patting
my left ankle.

I nodded and placed my left foot on the
somber gray cover of
The Guide to Your
Child: How to
Raise an Obedient Kid from Day Zero to the Teen Years
. There
was a picture of a skinny, frightened girl under this heavy title,
and the book itself, a massive cloth-bound tome, had been Fox’s
pillow up till this morning. Today he insisted my soles be made out
of this book’s cover because, in his opinion, the cardboard there
was the thickest and strongest in the store.

“Don’t slouch,” Fox reminded me.

I sat up straighter on my bed of books and
magazines.

“Good,” Fox murmured, pushing my long skirt
up over my knees and repositioning my foot a quarter of an inch
closer to the book’s spine. Then, using the metal trip lever from
inside of our toilet tank—we’d sharpened one end of it against a
cement wall—he began to scratch an outline of my foot on the book’s
cover.

Since he absurdly feared that I would move my
foot while he was doing it, he held me down by the ankle. He also
kept on reassuring me that he was almost done. When he reached
behind my heel with his lever, his face came close to my knee, and
suddenly, Fox was pressing his swollen mouth to my skin. I sobbed.
Ever since the gods had left, I’d been fighting my tears, but I
could no longer. Large, scorching drops fell on my hands, my
thighs, and the shreds of the ruffles I’d been ripping off my dress
so we would have something to tie the cardboard soles to our feet
with tonight.

“Crying!” Demi scoffed. “That’ll work
miracles for us when we’re escaping and Fox can’t fight. No,
really, Ev, would it have friggin’ killed you to stick to the Plan
and feign a stumble and let Fox quietly lift the key from Rig? Five
months Fox was learning to pickpocket. Five months we starved
ourselves for tonight. Five months we—”