Total pages in book: 168
Estimated words: 160578 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 803(@200wpm)___ 642(@250wpm)___ 535(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 160578 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 803(@200wpm)___ 642(@250wpm)___ 535(@300wpm)
But the second she lay her head down, the perfume of her hair staining my pillow, the smooth touch of her skin grazing mine, and finally, her panted breath against the skin of my arm….
I felt something.
Motionless, locked in a cage of denial and avoidance, I remained still. I could barely move, because every damn breath I took burned my lungs. Minutes passed. Hours maybe. When I couldn’t keep the heaviness of my arm up, or my eyes open, I fell into a deep sleep.
I fell into a sleep so deep, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to come back from.
“What is it? Where’d you go just now?” Pop asks from the other side of the room.
“Luna, just something she said when we were kids.”
Pop’s hesitation has me looking up at him. “And what was that, exactly?” His steps draw close.
“That she could hear them. I figured it was the voices in her head or whatever it was that went on up there. Maybe I’m being paranoid.”
“Mmm. Maybe.” Pop leans down, his finger hooking into a metal loop. The scrape of concrete screams through the air. “It’s time.”
I’d thought about it the entire time flying here. Luna may be the first thing that I ever felt. Not Darling. Darling was crazy, she excited me, but as quickly as it was there, it was soon forgotten. Replaced by the hatred I felt for Luna. All along, I thought it had to do with my obsession with Darling, skipping right over the important detail of emotional reactions.
Hate was one. And to have it trump what I thought was love, an emotion that fueled even the coldest artists, only meant one thing.
I could love her with the same ferocity. A fucking weakness I could not hold. Since she was gone forever, this would be a hurdle I couldn’t jump every day.
Walls cave in around me the more time passes. The lack of activity means everything feels repetitive.
I hit the end of the path and swing the door open to the cart that takes you all the way to Perdita’s best-kept secret. Everyone assumes that the island itself is as simple as it is. Dark. Alluring. People who live a nocturnal life. If you look close enough, the hints have always been there. The truth of Perdita. Where streets are hidden among overgrown trees with pathways made of dirt, as if stepping into a mind trip of enchantment, and the township smiles to the end, where the leader sits in her castle, surrounded by Lost Boys who help maintain conformity and peace. Small businesses litter the main strip, lined by fairy lights and small cubby cars. Everyone is uniformed in strange attire, and from the outside, it probably seems as simple as that is their allocated style, but if you manage to shift the veil of the island even a smidge, you’ll notice that it has less to do with fashion, and more to do with what sanction each fell into or were born into.
Perdita means to be lost or as our ancestors named, purgatory. It’s neither here nor there. A prison with a lifestyle, and that’s the main wing of Perdita, not counting this side.
Which so happens…to be underneath.
River’s smirk is the first thing I see when the glass doors open onto the Beehive. The main area of Del Morts is an encasement of glass, allowing you to see the earth’s clay. At the very center, a projector with one hundred screens spreads out in tiles before twirling up to the ceiling, where a walkway circles from above, offering a direct view of the happenings down below.
There are three levels, and they’re all occupied for a particular field.
My feet stop when River carries herself down the steps, taking two at a time.
“How’s it feel?” I ask, knowing how much River had been counting down the days to the ritual so she could take over. It didn’t come as a surprise how our fathers decided to split tasks between us all, since we all came in twos.
River is simply the better choice for operating Del Morts, which is the first level of the Beehive in a twist of long hallways and tunnels, doors passage off into separate sanctions that she trains the Slayers in. They live by a code. One I know Luna would have taken with her to the grave, since I never did manage to get out of her what I already knew. A Slayer with disorders as serious as hers is how we landed in this mess in the first place, and now Darling has gone rogue and no one can find her, which brings me to here.
The honey pot. Even if they don’t know exactly the extremities of how deep we need to go.
Tapping on the keys near the maze of TV screens, one after the other, they all blur to life in a range of static.