Chapter 5
SEAN
So maybe Sean hadn’t imagined that flash of purple in the desk clerk’s eyes.
The woman who’d shimmied her way across the dance floor toward him definitely had glowing eyes. And she wasn’t the only one.
At first, he’d ignored it. Chalked it up to odd reflections, mere tricks of the neon and LCDs that trickled over the crowd like tainted stardust. Or maybe his blood was too riddled with alcohol to see correctly.
But no. This woman flinging her arms around his neck had glowing purple eyes. Faint, yes, barely shimmering in the depths, but glowing.
“What’s your name?” he asked over the music.
In the midst of writhing bodies, she gave the sort of smile that made Sean think of scarlet bedsheets and lace-covered skin. A pretty girl, sure, but those smiles had never worked on him. Not from women. Not from men. He’d always been—and would always be—deeply uninterested.
“Why don’t you come with me and I’ll tell you?” she purred into his ear. Her arms slid tight about him. Their bodies pressed together. The music’s bass reverberated through the floor and channeled up through his body, hijacking his heartbeat.
Sean glanced toward the bar, where Cole attempted to garner the bartender’s attention. “Can’t,” he told the girl. “I’m not alone.”
“Bring your friend.” She nipped playfully at his jaw, and he fought the urge to shove her away.
Perhaps if he hadn’t doused his good sense with ethanol, the purple light would be more alarming, but he’d already half convinced himself it was some sort of trendy contact lens.
“I think he’s a little shy.” Sean offered his most endearing smile as he extricated himself from her grip.
The purple light flared. “I can work with that.”
Maybe the purple was a side effect of some new street drug. If so, they should call it Purple Rain because if he looked close enough, he swore he could see it swirling, sparking strangely in the dark of her eyes.
He opened his mouth to turn her down, but she spun away, giggling, and bumped into another woman in a pink fedora.
Pink Fedora took one look at her and raised a hand toward Purple Rain’s heart, whose face screwed into a grimace. Sean caught her weight reflexively as her knees bent, and Pink Fedora drew back. The grimace evaporated from Purple Rain’s face. The woman looked up, blinking.
No longer purple.
“Where am I?” she asked.
Pink Fedora slipped away.
Sean stared into those normal eyes, and no amount of desensitizing substances in his blood could have alleviated the fear that washed over him in that moment. He hadn’t imagined it. It wasn’t the alcohol.
Which meant—
Still holding the girl’s weight in his arms, he darted glances all around him. For every two sets of normal eyes, he found one with that strange, subtle sheen.
Purple Rain pushed away from him. “Who are you?” she screamed over the music. “Did you drug me?”
Luckily no one else seemed to hear that. “Of course not. You just invited me to leave with you.”
“No, I didn’t.” She pressed a hand to her forehead, wincing. “I—I was in the bathroom. Where are my friends?”
Did she really have no memory of coming onto him? What the fuck was happening?
He swiftly lost interest in Purple Rain since she appeared to have more questions than answers. Pink Fedora, however, might shed some light over this mystery. She might be connected to all the secrets. She might help him understand.
He had to know.
“I don’t know what happened to you,” he said to the panicking girl before him. “Are you okay? You have a phone?”
She patted her tiny purse and nodded, her brow scrunched—whether in pain or confusion, he couldn’t tell.
“Call your friends.” He bounced on his toes while he waited for her to comply, antsy to find answers but unwilling to leave this confused woman alone.
Once she had a hold of someone, she eyed him warily and pointed in another direction, moving slowly that way.
Without further discussion, he left her amid the sea of dancers.
How the hell was he supposed to find a pink fedora in this laser-light darkness? The whole place took on a sinister cast as every third person peered at their surroundings through inhuman eyes.
Sean searched through the swarms of undulating people, most half-naked and grinding on each other. He fended off wandering hands and invitations to dance, sneaking through the crowds with agile steps despite the alcohol blurring his vision and dialing down his grace.
Before he could find her, Cole caught him somewhere in the back where the music wasn’t quite so brain-jarring. Circle booths and small tables were packed with scantily-clad women and rich men, many viewing the world through alien eyes.
Cole handed him a glass of water. “Drink this, and I’ll give you this.” He held up a bottle of beer.
Playing it off with a laugh, Sean took the water, downing half of it while searching for Pink Fedora.
“So how are you feeling now?” Cole asked, eyeing the groups around them with mild distaste.
He wasn’t much for crowds, and Sean had to agree. Every sense was bombarded with too much noise, too much light, too much jostling.
“The same, but drunk.” Sean toasted Cole with his water.
“I’ll probably be deaf by the end of the night.”
By the lack of slurred words, Sean was fairly certain his cousin wasn’t as hammered as him, and he definitely wasn’t tripping on the…demons?…in their midst. Maybe he couldn’t see them.
Am I going insane?
Sean downed the rest of the water and set the bottle on a nearby table, then motioned his head toward the back hallway, where people filtered in and out of the bathroom.
Cole nodded. “I’ll wait here.”
In the restroom, Sean ignored the others going about their business and braced his hands on the granite counter, staring at the blank spaces between his fingers.
When he looked up, instead of his own reflection, Sean’s gaze landed on the man standing behind him.
In the mirror, blacklight eyes locked on Sean’s blue ones.
The guy was motionless, thickly tattooed, and dressed in an acid-washed denim jacket with a mesh tank top beneath.
His expression was frozen in that same horrified recognition as the desk clerk’s.
Something jumpstarted in Sean’s chest. Prickling awareness crept down his spine.
“It is you,” the man said in that same accent.
And what else could he say except “It is?”
In a surprisingly nimble leap, the man darted from the room, leaving Sean to stare at the place he’d left behind. A few other men shot curious glances, but none of them glowed purple.
What the hell?
With hands shaking from the flood of adrenaline, Sean splashed water onto his face. He needed to get out of there. He couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t focus.
Slamming through the swinging door, he stopped short right outside.
Pink Fedora stood with a redhead at the mouth of the hallway, surveying the crowds. Both women wore ill-fitting party dresses with sequins that glittered in the pulsing lights. They leaned into each other as they spoke.
A spike of pain drove straight through Sean’s heart. Sparklers ignited inside his veins. He had the same feeling when looking at the woman that he had when staring over a cliff—like his life was just a step away from changing forever. Or maybe ending completely.
He was frozen. His instincts knew something about her that his mind had clearly forgotten.
Sean took a few steps closer, ignoring the jostles from strangers leaving the restrooms. By the time he was close enough to detect the familiar curve of her nose and cheek when she turned to speak with her redheaded friend, his insides had completely rearranged themselves, making room for her.
Images came in a great flood—her, smiling…dancing…laughing. In an instant, his entire life reset and tethered to this woman in the pink fedora, and she hadn’t even looked at him.
The redhead turned, like he’d called out to her.
Her eyes weren’t purple.
They were gold. Not inhuman gold—more like the color of whiskey in sunlight. Vanilla caramel. Honey-drenched cinnamon.
He couldn’t hold his attention on her long though. It crept right back to Pink Fedora. His heart pounded against its cage, trying desperately to reach her.
Still staring, the redhead grabbed Pink Fedora’s arm in a vice grip. “Isobel!”
Isobel’s piercing gaze slinked over his body to land on his eyes, and the entire world slowed to a crawl, then restarted in double time.
Her face was poetry. Lovely and lyrical.
But it was also unmitigated ruin.
She was like the last breath before a leap from a building. She was the morphine that hid torture behind synthetic pleasure. She was the tremor that warned of a life-ending earthquake.
In the space of one second, she snapped every cell in his body in half and put them back together in a different order, and all he could think was I know you.
But how did he know her? How had he already memorized every curve of her body?
Her eyes widened, and even in the dark, he could see the color drain from her exquisite face. Her tanned skin went ashen.
“Caden?” she said.
Sean stared at the woman, mouth slack. His pulse rose in his throat, choking him.
No one knew his given name. Only his mother had called him Caden, only when she’d been very serious about something. And somehow this woman knew it.
“Blaire was right,” said the redhead in that familiar accent. His mother’s accent.
Isobel shook off her friend’s arm and stepped closer. “Caden Sidera?”
He shook his head and backed away, right into the chest of someone else.
“Excuse me,” the man said in a pleasant, accented tone.
Turning, Sean found an older man, dressed in a fine suit that practically dripped money from the seams. He had salt-and-pepper scruff and a silver streak in his dark hair right at the temple.
The hallway behind him had emptied. At the mouth, a small legion of purple-eyed monsters formed, caging them in. Skin tingling, Sean turned back to the man, wishing he wasn’t quite so drunk.