Chapter II
II
Alice wakes after dark to an empty suite and a group text telling her the girls are all headed out to Colin’s vigil, and she’s welcome to join them if she’s feeling up to it.
Which, of course, she’s not.
Instead, she’s sitting in a cocoon of sheets, staring at the laptop balanced on her knees, the Post-it tacked in the corner of the screen.
Goodbye, Alice.
xo Lottie
Her fingers hover over the keys like she’s waiting for them to take charge.
The cursor blinks in the search bar, willing her to use the word, the one she doesn’t want to type, or think, because it feels like taking a step out of the world of the sane and the grounded and the human, as if the taste of blood isn’t echoing behind her teeth.
Alice takes a breath—she knows she doesn’t need to, but it helps—and then she forces her fingers to the keys, spelling out the word.
She hits Search, and sure enough the first two pages of results are filled with costumes, notices for parties being hosted round the city, despite the fact that Halloween is still a month away.
Creatures of the night, rejoice, announces one site, featuring figures in high-collared capes, red contacts.
Another offers a variety, shrink-wrapped or slutty or sparkly.
A third, capsules of fake blood that break between fake teeth.
Alice runs her hands through her hair, and adds the word real, and for the next hour, her econ reading and her problem sets both sit neglected on her desk as her search history fills with the stuff of bad fiction, and she’s all too aware that she’s sitting in the dark with her screen’s light turned as low as it will go, searching for monsters.
Or more specifically, places they might meet.
Eventually she ends up on a subreddit that leads her to a forum that leads to some kind of off-brand Yelp page for clubs in the Boston area, and it’s pretty impressive, considering there was so little in the way of culture back in Hoxburn, let alone sub culture, just the rugby boys and a handful of punks who carpooled to the nearest concerts, which were usually in Glasgow, but a city this size seems to have something for everyone, from BDSM meetups to dungeons to goth clubs, every site rife with disclaimers that what happens is roleplay between consenting adults.
Only two of the places listed show a shred of promise.
Neither uses the word, but both talk about alternative fare, the language just cagey enough to make her think she may be onto something.
After all, she thinks, the real thing probably doesn’t announce itself. Hiding in plain sight and all of that.
One of the places doesn’t even have a website, only a handful of photos uploaded over the last few months. Moody shots taken in a darkened club.
The other is full of vague promises, declarations for the lost and the damned, which admittedly is a bit dramatic, but what else is she supposed to do?
She can’t just sit there, going to class and killing men in cars.
She needs to find answers.
Needs to find Lottie.
So Alice gets up, and gets dressed.
Which is harder than it sounds. She doesn’t know what look she should be going for, only knows she feels absurd aiming for true goth—she doesn’t own any leather or lace, and a quick look through Lizbeth’s drawers confirms that she doesn’t, either—so ends up opting for dark-wash jeans and a vintage black hoodie nicked from Catty’s closet and never returned, the front emblazoned with a crow, the graphic faded to a pair of ghostly wings by years of washing.
She notices as she heads for the door that the volume on the hunger is creeping up again, which feels mortally unfair, given what that last meal cost her.
The nearest of the two clubs is way over in the North End, and Alice doesn’t trust herself in the closed chambers of the T so she orders a ride, using the cash she swiped from the man in the sedan.
She slips through the nearest gate and into the back seat of the waiting car.
Which turns out to be a bad idea. The driver is blaring eighties shout rock, refuses to turn the radio down, and she can taste his cologne on the back of her tongue as if he bathed in it.
She digs her nails into her knees, ends up riding with the windows open, the sounds of the street surrounding her until it makes a kind of white noise in her head.
The car finally spits her out on a road she doesn’t know, and drives off before she even finds the entrance to The Dark Side (yes, that’s really what it’s called).
It turns out to be a black door studding a black wall, no sign, nothing but a hammered approximation of a handprint dented in the steel.
She fits her hand into the mark, as if the door might open like a secret, but it doesn’t, the door is locked, and there’s no bouncer, no crowd, no sounds of life within, and Alice pulls the place up on her phone again, and sees the vital detail that she missed the first time round.
The Dark Side isn’t open on Mondays.
Alice groans, and knocks her head against the cold steel door.
She kicks the metal, not hard, or at least, not hard enough to hurt her foot, is shocked when it leaves a noticeable dent.
She kicks the door a second time, puts some real force behind it, and the metal actually bends.
Alice marvels at the damage before it occurs to her that there are probably security cameras, and then she backs away, and turns, hurrying down the block.
When she’s a safe distance from the dented door, she slows and pulls out her phone, glares at the out-of-focus picture of Lottie for a few seconds before swiping over to the map.
It’s a solid mile to the second club (which is definitely open) but Alice can’t bear the thought of calling another car, and besides, the night air feels good; not just good, but the exact opposite of the way she felt all day, the limb-shaking wooziness of the sun, and people talk about the way a place changes depending on the weather, but she’s always felt the same way about day and night.
Like they’re two entirely separate worlds.
A different smell, a different taste, a different energy.
Now, in the dark, her mind calms and her body uncoils.
Her head is clear and her legs feel strong, so she decides to walk.
Never walk alone at night, they tell you, if you’re a girl.
And it isn’t fair.
Because the night is when the world is quiet.
The night is when the air is clear. The night is wild and welcoming and Alice lets her head fall back, until all she sees is the sky, not black, as it should be, given the time, but a twisting tapestry of blue.
A color that will always make her think—
Of summer days—
And wedding bells—
The day Eloise Martin marries Dad, everything is blue.
From El in her azure sundress, to Dad in his twilight suit, Catty and Alice both in robin’s egg, and baby Finn, perched on Granddad’s lap, in a onesie the same shade as Catty’s eyes (minus the anger).
Outside the church, even Hoxburn is showing off one of those rare summer days where the rain comes and goes before noon, taking all the clouds with it.
“We are gathered here . . .” says the priest in the church beside the graveyard where Mum is buried, and here’s the thing, it’s a hard day, it was always going to be a hard day.
But maybe it will be a good one, too.
Or maybe Alice is a fool for ever hoping, because Catty’s been spinning for a fight since El first walked into their lives, and even though they waited years —till after Finn was born, till El has been around almost as long as Mum was, for Alice at least—to tie the knot, and Catty’s fifteen now to Alice’s twelve, it turns out there’s no expiration date on pain.
(And it breaks Alice’s heart that Dad’s happiness and her sister’s hurt go hand in hand, or worse, that they are angled at each other, like pistols, or blades, and all she can do is put herself between them.)
And Catty did make a scene, three months ago when Dad made the announcement.
She scoffed and said she didn’t see why they bothered with white dresses and rings, since they clearly hadn’t waited to do the deed, and Dad had raised his hand like he might lay it on her, but he’d never been that kind of man, so it had come back down again, and he’d chided her for being crass, said her mother would be ashamed, and that was enough to send Catty fleeing to Granddad’s for a week.
(And Alice knows why she goes, because Granddad never shouts back, doesn’t treat fights like a contest, or a challenge to see who can make the most noise, which probably comes with running a pub as long as he has, and dealing with his fair share of the drunk and the mad.)
But even after all of that, Alice keeps thinking, keeps hoping that maybe it will be okay, especially after they get through the Do you s and I do s and Catty glares at the ground but doesn’t object (though Alice sees her fingers tighten on the small bouquet they’ve each been given, and she’s just glad the rose stems had their thorns snipped off), and afterward her dad relaxes visibly, smiles and kisses his new wife, and even then Catty holds her tongue, and she might have kept on holding it, gotten through the rest of the day in stoic protest.
If not for the gift.
It’s after the vows and before the reception, and they’re in the little room at the back of the church, just Alice and Catty and El.
“A moment, just for the girls,” El said to Dad before closing the door gently in his face, and when he’s gone, she takes out a pair of small blue velvet boxes—this blue so deep it’s almost black—hands one to each of them.
Inside, Alice finds a gold bauble on a chain.
Not a charm or a locket, but a small cylinder.
And her first thought is that it looks like a gilded bullet.