Page 31 of Cuervo's Carnival
Attempting to ignore the off-putting feeling, I walk towards the small, round table centered in the wagon, which, like the outside, is made of rich mahogany. The supports of the table are curved in a baroque scroll that can only be seen from the very bottom. A rich, purple cloth with a design I can’t quite make out is draped over the tabletop, covering most of the legs.
Inching closer to get a better look at the design of the fabric, I feel the wagon shift.
A voice breaks through the silence, startling me more than the voice that has been sending shockwaves throughout my body for weeks because, this time, it isn’t coming from within me.
“It’s the goddess Athena,” a soothing feminine voice says.
I look up, past the table, to a small curtained-off area toward the back of the wagon so I can see who spoke. No one reveals themselves.
“I’m sorry, I let myself in,” I begin, but I stop myself when the curtain moves, revealing a woman not much taller than myself. Dressed in all black, with a long lace veil covering her face.
She lifts her hand and motions to the table. “Please, sit.”
I nod, approaching one of the wooden chairs. It is once I am seated that I notice the headpiece she is wearing above the lace veil. A crown of Penstemon flowers identical to the ones Cillian and Paxton painted on my Docs are all along the headpiece. Centered above her forehead are Hibiscus flowers, which grace either side of a raven’s skull.
“I’ve been expecting you, Lola,” she murmurs, causing every hair on my body to move upright.
14
Paxton
Lost in a sprint-induced trance,panic and reason war within my mind, just as a menacing blanket of gunmetal gray paints the sky.
Where the fuck is she?
I knew that even with Lola’s love for the macabre, these tainted grounds had the potential to push things too far. But in my desperate optimism—and seeing how our fleeing the Reapers has given us limited options—I thought this would be a good move. However, now, as Cillian and I are chasing after Lola in a dusk-covered field of overgrown weeds, my optimism has dwindled.
A forbidding glow casts down from the increasingly murky sky, making the rows of corn stalks surrounding us feel like they are closing in. Their frayed tips look bleached compared to the darkness rapidly taking over, stealing my vision and any remnants of logic I’m so desperately trying to cling onto.
“Lola!” I yell out into what feels like the bleak abyss. “Lola, get back here!” I shout, but all I hear is Cillian echoing my call. Our desperate cries only get lost in the silence hanging heavy around us.
I’ve never experienced a quiet quite like this. The air is so stagnant, devoid of any life but our own.
I swear I can feel the adrenaline work its way through my system as my heart pounds against my chest, graduating from a subtle thud to a deafening clank against my ribs. Blood pumps so ferociously throughout my body that my hearing is muffled by the way my crimson lifeline whooshes in my ears.
I sigh, exasperated, as I try to quicken my stride to catch up to her. “Where the fuck did she go?”
“It’s Lola. She goes where she wants, always,” Cillian mutters, sounding as exasperated as I feel.
“Yea, I know. Don’t remind me,” I grunt.
The wind picks up, and with it, a warm gust moves my ash-blond hair from where it was just tucked behind my ear. My shaking hands raise to settle the strand back in place, when Cillian’s inked arm invades my peripheral vision. It takes me a moment to register that his arm is extended, with outstretched digits pointing to something straight ahead.
“There!” he shouts.
My gaze ticks slowly, like the second hand of a clock, and apprehension mounts at what lies ahead. I move my neck, slow and steady, which contradicts the pace we have kept since Lola ran off.
I don’t know why I feel such dread nestled in my gut right now. My stomach twists and turns, making bile rise to the middle of my throat. I swallow hard, pushing it down. Something is wrong; I can fucking feel it.
With my neck now perpendicular to the direction of Cillian’s pointed fingers, I see what he has been trying to vigorously point out to me. Relief floods me, but only for a moment before it abandons me as humanity did from The Night’s Plutonian. There, on the other side of his ink-splashed hand, is a sliver of light nestled in-between stalks of corn, cutting through the smog that filters in around us.
In any other circumstances, I would welcome the gleam, which shines like a beacon compared to our dark surroundings. It’s not the light that scares me…it’s where it is coming from. And judging from the way it’s downcast through what appears to be a tunnel of towering stems, something brighter is beaming from the other side.
Neither of us moves, frozen in place as our brains catch up with what our eyes are witnessing. To both of our knowledge, nothing in this park is capable of electricity, aside from Amontadillo’s Mortuary, which we set up with the generator.
Even more troubling is that, in the time we have spent trying to fix this place up, we never noticed anything beyond the perimeter of the corn maze. Especially a portal-like passageway of hulking corn stalks, which—now that I am staring at them with the soft glow gathering in between—look like they are coated in soot.
“What the fuck is that?” Cillian asks, his tone as on edge as the hairs on my neck.
