7. BurnRun
7
BURN OR RUN
REMIEL
I’m staring at another calling card. Thick and expensive woven cardstock with a deep, vibrant ink. The skeletal torso splashed in purple with only five words written on the back made to taunt me once again.
See you tomorrow night, Remiel.
“What’s that?” Cain asks, coming from the back of the shop.
I shove it into my pocket. “Nothing. Done with that piano?”
He nods, sighing. “What’s wrong with you lately, Rem?”
Oh, nothing. I only sold my life and then almost died on top of a dead city girl by my owner’s very hands. I bargained myself in exchange for my brother because I have my own plan to stop our curse. I woke up in a muddy, wet forest where I know for a fact a woman was murdered last night, but can’t say shit about it to anyone without incriminating myself.
My mind is all messed up, unsure what the worst part of it all is. The sexual assault? The dying girl? My inability to do anything about it? The fact that I threw up his cum on the forest floor?
“I’m almost twenty-seven,” I say instead. “Three of my male cousins and a few of the uncles I’ve never met died at that age. I guess it’s just freaking me out. Like my clock is ticking down.”
Cain frowns, knowing all about the curse on my family. “But no suicidal thoughts yet, right?”
Yet. Like they’re inevitable. I guess they are. “Not yet. You staying in tomorrow night? You fucking better, Cain.”
“Yeah, wanna hang and ride out Initiation Night together?”
Probably best, so I nod.
Then the chimes on the front door ring, and I look up to see my brother and his best friend Keegan enter the shop. Through the front windows, the town is turning into a nightmare. In honour of Vile Initiation Night, everyone decorates their storefronts and yards with tributes to Vile House. I don’t. Ravens flock to my storefront every day, so it’s already decorated with them and their shit. Coloured Purge masks are everywhere, and skulls in all ten colours line the streets and hang from the lampposts. I think some of them are even real skulls, painted to match the ten.
But each colour of mask has a fan club. People place the Vile Boys on pedestals, and they’re basically celebrities around town, so each house and place of business becomes a vigil for their favourite Vile Boy. Cain likes the blue-masked one, but whenever I ask why, he shrugs.
“Boys,” Soren says with a nasty grin. “Taking care of my shop?”
“My shop. You gave it up when you joined The Misfits.” I’ve never outwardly called him out for joining the gang, but he doesn’t deny it. “What do you want?”
“He’s here for me,” Cain says. “Wanna see it? I’ve fixed all the strings, but you have to pick the tension for the last few.”
“Lead the way, handsome.”
Handsome? I glare at Soren and stop him from following my best friend. “Leave him the fuck alone, Soren.”
“Don’t think he wants to be left alone.” He smirks, heading to the back room. My brother and I look alike, but there’s nothing timid about him like there is me. He’s exceptional at reeling people in and then gaslighting them into whatever shell of a person he desires them to be, but I’ve long since learned to block his attempts to meld me into a husk. Sometimes, it’s exhausting.
Keegan comes to lean on the counter I’m sitting behind. I’ve known him for most of my life, but I’ve never been close to him. He’s an intense guy who has little to no social skills, always seems on edge, and doesn’t form attachments to anyone. Except my brother, somehow. Pretty sure he killed his own parents, but no one could ever prove it, so he walks around as a maybe-murderer, which seems to garner him even more respect.
“Do you still play?” he asks, nodding at a cello on display. His voice wavers slightly, but otherwise, he’s stark still and staring at me.
I swallow under the power of his gaze, not looking at him fully. “Only when no one is listening.” I fiddle with the calling card in my pocket, and he looks, glimpsing the corner. “Do you need something?”
Keegan scares me. He’s unpredictable and uncomfortable to be around. His dark energy isn’t tamed, and the way he looks at everything so intensely freaks me out. His pale silver eyes stand out strongly against his tanned skin and dark brows, almost hidden behind his unruly dark hair. He doesn’t smirk or smile often, stuck with a mostly bland face, but it fits him. Suits his vibe and makes him hauntingly beautiful. He’s a tall man, over six feet, but his strength comes as lean, honed muscle rather than bulk. He’s elegantly strong, chiselled to stony perfection, and threatens people just by noticing them. Everyone I know, apart from my brother, is afraid of Keegan to the point of respecting him for it. He belongs in Moros, and it’s obvious to anyone who sees him.
My body is strong, muscled enough to keep me fit and ready to outrun my curse, but music is the only place I fit into Moros.
When Soren says something in the back and Cain laughs at it, my eyes shift there, but Keegan’s never leave my face. I feel them on me. “Just waiting,” he answers. “Do you need something?”
I gulp nerves and shiver at the chills running down my spine. “To make it to twenty-seven,” I tell him.
“You will.”
“How do you know?”
He almost smiles. Almost. It’s there, ghosting under his features, unable to meet the light of day. It makes my chills worse. Soren comes out with his violin, shouting a goodbye to Cain.
“See you tomorrow night, Remiel,” Keegan whispers, lips somehow right next to my ear. When did he get this close? My blood turns to ice. His eyes don’t shift down to my pocket where the calling card is, but… my instincts, those very same ones that have kept me alive for twenty-six years, are screaming at me to see what is right in front of me.
I must go pale, because for the first time in his whole life, Keegan smiles at me as he backs away and out of my shop, following my brother. His best friend. The third name on my list.
It’s Initiation Night, and I’m hunkered down in my small house with Cain. But the usual anxiety that comes with Vile’s initiation is nothing when combined with the third calling card.
Burn or Run, Remiel. Either way, you’re mine.
I don’t know what it means, but it’s got me on edge. Almost as much as the clues and hints swirling around in my mind since seeing Keegan at the shop yesterday. Is he the purple mask, or did he merely say the same thing coincidentally?
There’s no way it could be him. Keegan is too… apparent in Moros. He’s with Soren a lot, and I’ve known him since they became friends in their early teens. I would have noticed if he changed his whole lifestyle to become one of the ten Vile Boys. Right? I would have noticed him missing from the house more often, disappearing for days at a time, or showing up with wounds and blood all over him.
Keegan has an older brother named Killian, and surely, he would have mentioned something if he started disappearing more often. Come to think of it, Killian isn’t around all that much lately…
No. I’m spiralling. Dipping into hypotheticals that mean nothing and keep getting more and more dire the longer I spin out into the middle of oblivion. There’s no possible way Keegan is the purple mask. If he was one of the Vile boys, I’d know. I’m the type of guy to notice the details. So, no. It isn’t possible.
But he called me Remiel…
And I don’t believe in coincidences…
“Just anxious?” Cain asks, handing me a beer and flopping onto the couch next to me. He’s shirtless because he got a tattoo after work, so he’s letting it air out. “Initiation Night is always fucked up, but we’re good here. We’ve survived it here for the past few years, right?” He nudges me with his knee to calm me down, rubbing his hand over his close-cropped hair.
He’s right. For the past few years, we’ve ridden out Initiation Night together in my tiny house. I live on a back street that isn’t too busy, but we hear things. See things through the windows. We used to look, trying to catch glimpses of an unknown night, but now we shut the curtains and try to block it out. But this is the first year of initiation I’ve been chained to a Vile Boy. I don’t even know his name, but my life is his.
When someone yells outside, I turn up the TV volume and refuse to look out the crack in the curtains. “What is it?” I ask him, nodding at his new tattoo. I’m trying to ignore the fact that my house smells different than it usually does. Like I said, I notice details, and the eucalyptus and wintergreen diffuser I run isn’t subtle like it usually is. It’s glaringly obvious, running at full tilt, and I don’t remember turning it on. I never turn it on to full strength.
Cain sits up, showing me the front of his body. Along the underside of his ribs is a new design. Tribal like most of his others, it runs from left to right in harsh black lines with pointed tips. “It’s my grandpa’s design.” There’s a glaze over his eyes when he talks about it, and I know what he’s remembering.
Cain is someone who associates pain with pleasure, and the tattooist in town, a guy named Mason, has no trouble mixing the two. A few years ago, when Cain got the balls to admit it to Mason, they started working together to make his tattoo appointments just a little more . Now Cain goes for ink and an orgasm.
“Looks awesome,” I tell him, choking on eucalyptus and wintergreen.
He blushes, but I’m not sure what he’s remembering, so I don’t ask. That’s his business, and other than me and Mason, no one else knows. Especially not his girlfriend. She’d be pissed if she found out he got off while getting inked.
“Where’s Sadie tonight?” I ask.
“With her sisters. Tried to talk her out of it, but they’re in the crypt.” Sadie’s family belongs to one of the many small cults around here. They’re called Death For Life, and they worship their dead and believe in their ancestors to protect them. Outside Moros, their beliefs might be admirable and traditional in some cultures, but here, they’re a cult. Mostly because they sacrifice one another to their dead relatives in the belief that they’ll come back to watch over the living. It’s fucking nuts to me, but I can’t say shit about it when I’m locked in the clutches of a suicide curse. Nothing makes sense in Moros the same way it would anywhere else, and once you accept that, life gets a little easier. So, Sadie and her sisters will ride out Initiation Night in their family’s crypt, trusting the dead to keep them alive until sunrise.
“Does it smell strong in here to you?” I ask Cain.
“Yeah, a bit.” He shrugs, swigging the rest of his beer. “Another?”
While he’s getting more drinks, I play with the frayed edges of the calling card in my pocket. Burn or run? I still don’t know what it means, and since there’s no time or sign of another meeting on it, I don’t know how to protect myself from it. I’m still reeling from the last run-in with him. A girl died, and now her face is plastered all over town on missing person posters.
I can’t say a thing about it. The Moros PD will look, but they’re as twisted as the rest of us, so they won’t look hard. They just like the attention it brings from the outside world. Even negative attention is good attention in Moros—keeps people intrigued but afraid.
“Are you burning incense or something?” Cain asks from the kitchen. “I’m getting a smoky floral smell over here.”
I try to sniff the air but only get wintergreen. Heading into the kitchen, I look around for anything that might be burning. “No. I never burn incense.” But I smell it now. Campfires and something more chemical. “The fuck is that?”
Cain opens drawers and looks at all the electrical cords of my appliances while I sniff around, trying to figure out where it’s coming from. Outside, sirens blare to remind residents to stay the fuck inside. Screams follow the sirens, and booms echo through town. Through my kitchen window, I see the orange glow of something on fire in the distance.
“Nothing in here,” Cain says, confused and still sipping his fourth beer.
I pull open the door to the basement and slam it shut again. Grey smoke slinks up the stairs, slipping out the crack at the bottom of the door.
“Fuck.” I press my back to it. “Is there a fire extinguisher under the sink? I keep one there.”
Cain’s eyes are panicked now, but he opens the cupboard and throws everything in there onto the floor. He’s taking too long, so I step away and run upstairs, where I know I keep another extinguisher in the linen closet. But I don’t get far.
“Fucking fuck!” I shout, watching more smoke curl from under closed bedroom doors. “Cain! There’s a fire! Hurry!” I pull open the linen closet and reach for the extinguisher. But it’s not there. It’s not where I normally keep it. With my shirt over my mouth and nose, I rip out towels and sheets and pillowcases, rooting through the closet because I fucking know it’s in here. I know! Because I put it there a few months ago when the cord from my coffee maker sparked up and blew a fuse.
“I can’t find it!” Cain shouts. “It’s not in here. Remi, what the fuck is going on?” I hear him turn on the sink to fill pots with water, but what are they going to do when my whole house is on fire? “Remi! Get down here,” he shouts, sounding more alarmed than a second ago.
Fuck. I sprint down the stairs, skipping three at a time. Smoke is drifting down from upstairs, creeping down each step like silent death. In the kitchen, Cain’s eyes have turned blank, and real fear lines his face. In his hand, he holds up the fourth calling card. A skeletal torso splashed in purple.
“It was under the sink,” he says, voice cold. “Where the fire extinguisher should be.”
All the blood drains from my face, every alarm bell inside me going off at once.
Burn or run, Remiel.
“What’s it say?” I ask, hesitant to touch it.
Cain flips it around to show me one word:
prey.
Burn or run, Remiel.
Run? On Initiation Night. My house is about to turn into an inferno, and anyone caught outside on Initiation Night is fair game. I look at my shirtless best friend, and he sees the panic in my eyes, but he also sees my guilt. Because of me, he’s going to have to go outside on Vile night, and if he doesn’t live through until morning, I will succumb to my family curse far sooner than planned.
“Anything you want to tell me, Remi?” he asks, flicking the card at me.
It hits my chest and flutters to the wooden floor, the kitchen now filling with smoke. “I’m so sorry, Cain.”
We both jump when something explodes outside. Through the kitchen window, that orange glow from a car fire is closer now. Because it’s my car on fire, right there in my driveway. In front of it, two black figures stand with weapons in their hands. Glinting blades reflect the fire, but their masks are easy to make out.
Purple and blue.
Cain looks at me, and I grip his hand. “We have to run,” he says. “Out the back door. Just fucking run through backyards until we get to my place.” He spins me while we choke on smoke. His hands grab the sides of my face, and something bangs against the kitchen window, shattering it. We both jump. “We can make it, Remi. We can fucking make it.”
Trying is the only option we have.
Burn or run, Remiel.
Prey.