Chapter Two

2 // Sanny

The flaming skull. I saw it burning in my mind as I thought back on the worst night of my life, when my father just up and walked out on us, his family. Since then"no word, no apology, no explanation. Nothing. The five years of silence that followed had been deafening.

The small plastic tray by my knee pressed into the bed's downy comforter as I rolled my brush in the black paint it held. Whenever I practiced making vévés, whether I was painting the real ones Abadai taught me or making up temporary ones of my own, I thought of that night. They were permanently bound together in my mind, my naive "initiation" on the dark streets of Brooklyn, and the secret craft of Op'a Vodou that I ended up learning because of it.

But damned if I was going to let a stupid reminder of the night my dad betrayed me bring me down, not when there were a million other things for me to be thinking about, like all the hot male asses I'd be stalking at the party tonight.

Correction -- we'll be stalking, I thought as I lifted the brush to Juliet's bare flesh.

She shied away before the brush touched her skin, golden locks falling against the freckles just below her collar bone. "I don't know."

The bare canvas of her skin teased me, peeking out from behind those golden strands of gossamer. "You won't regret this. We're going to look amazing. Guys will be begging us to pay attention to them."

"Until they get too close." Her voice was small, like a toddler afraid to be left alone in the dark.

I glanced up. A shower of hair veiled her face. I knew what she was hiding behind it. "Don't worry, J. No one's going see anything you don't want them to see. I promise."

Her slender fingers reluctantly drew aside her long strands, clearing the way for my brush. I laid the first dark stroke against her skin, then the second and the third in smooth succession, trusting my fingers to precisely recreate the image in my memory, just as Abadai taught me to do. Empty your mind. Think of the vévé, and only the vévé. Your body will do the rest.

"What if my dad gets angry?" Juliet asked.

"He already said you could go in costume," I replied. "What's he got to get mad about?"

"You know what." Her gaze drifted down to the half-finished symbol on her chest, just above the lacey edge of her slip: the slick outline of a skull, an incomplete halo of jagged black flames surrounding it.

What the -- ? That wasn't what I meant to paint on her. What was wrong with my brain tonight? After sketching dozens of potential designs for J's vévé, the mark that was supposed to represent her essence"her soul, we'd settled on a rose just about to open its petals. J wanted it because it was romantic; I wanted it because that's what she was to me, a flower waiting to bloom for the right person.

The grinning skull I'd painted on her wasn't half as romantic.

I glanced at the clock. If I started over, we'd be late for the party. If we were late for the party, Kay might not be there waiting for us, which meant we wouldn't get to meet the cute boys he promised to hook us up with. Looks like she was stuck with it.

"Stop worrying about what your dad's going to think." I smiled at her knowingly. "It's not like we’re going to give him a chance to see it."

Eyelashes so long they should've been fake hooded her gaze. She was giving me the back-out look. There was no way I was going to let her do that to me tonight. "I'm not sure we should""

I leaned closer, staring intently into her eyes. I was so close I could make out the tiny flecks of yellow buried in her dark brown irises. "Kay promised he would introduce us to some serious hotties tonight. That's not going to happen if your gun-toting 'nanny' is around. You have to do this."

Her pink lips curled into a tiny frown. "Can't you do it?"

"Ha! With the rep I have around here, your bodyguard would know something was up the moment I yelled, 'Help!' But he won't suspect you, because you're never the one who gets us in trouble. See how clever this whole thing is?"

"It's just, I'm not supposed to use that thing except for in emergencies..."

"Please." I rested the tip of my nose on hers, batting my eyes. "I spent every penny I had making my costume as sexy as I could. Don't let my pathetic allowance go to waste."

She drew away. "That's emotional blackmail."

"Is it working?" I asked.

She didn’t answer as she headed for the floor-to-ceiling mirror that took up most of one wall. The room around us was swathed in tones of baby blue and angel white, its centerpiece a frilly, canopied bed the size of Manhattan. The whole room looked like it belonged to a seven-year-old princess, not a seventeen-year-old high school senior. I loved Juliet for keeping it that way, for not letting anyone turn her into one of those spoiled party brats who'd snicker at the whimsical unicorn pattern sewn onto her pillowcases, but think it was somehow mature to throw up at the party of a friend of a friend whose name they couldn't remember.

She studied the vévé in the mirror. "This isn't the one we picked."

"Last-minute impulse," I said evasively.

"Isn't this the scary one from your hallucination?"

Hallucination. I snorted. I was the one who told her I thought the flaming skull was just a hallucination, way back when I confided the most terrifying night of my life to her, but even after spending five years trying to convince myself that's all it was, truth was I had no freaking idea what I saw that night. That I'd been assaulted by a man, there was no question. That I'd fought back, and he slammed me against a wall, and that I'd woken up in the hospital with a concussion and a full-body bruise, you bet. But everything else? I just couldn't convince myself it was real, no matter how real it felt. And as for the flaming skull that appeared on my palm...if it had ever been there at all, it had disappeared by the time I woke up in the hospital. "Yeah, the skull was scary, but in a good way. Made me feel like I could protect myself in a really s****y situation. Maybe it can protect you too."

As she studied the vévé uncertainly in the mirror, I stole a peek at the scar that ran like a single tear down her right cheek. She caught me looking. I turned my back on her, pretending to be occupied with putting away my painting supplies. I found myself wishing I wasn't a complete cynic from the top of my head to the soles of my sharp-tipped boots, that for one blissful minute I could actually believe the symbol painted on my best friend really would protect her"from the people who treated her like a plague they didn’t want to catch, just because they couldn't see past the cruel scar that marred her otherwise gorgeous face.

"Okay. I'll do it."

She spoke so softly, it took me a second to process what she was saying. I grinned. "I knew you wouldn't let me down."

She headed for the walk-in closet, which I swear was as large as the cramped bedroom I had to share with my little sister at home. She paused by the door to look back at me. "Sanny, you have to promise...don't leave me alone with a bunch of strangers at the party, okay?"

"I would never do that to you," I swore. "Now hurry up and get ready!" I sashayed toward the hall door. "I'll go play bait."

***

Juliet's bodyguard was waiting in the hall, the cloaks for our costumes slung over his thick arm"one soft and white as down, the other a red velvet deep as sunset. I was the one who had made both of them, and I was damned proud of the final results. The deep hoods would prevent anyone from seeing our faces, and Juliet's scar, but they were also my way of getting us noticed without sending J into a panic.

Who's hiding under that hood? the boys would wonder. And I'd be more than happy to show the right boy the answer, assuming I could find one that wasn’t a condescending prick in this snot-nosed town.

"Thanks, Carl," I said as I took the red cloak from him and slid it on.

"It's Ken," he corrected.

I shrugged. Juliet got a new bodyguard every couple of months, so it was hard to remember. Her dad kept getting rid of them, because he couldn't get rid of me.

"J's almost ready," I told him. I frowned at the stiff black suit he was wearing. It was Halloween and he hadn't even bothered to change out of his uniform. I'd tried to talk him into dressing like a bare-chested minotaur with bull horns sticking out of his head"he definitely had the muscle mass to pull it off"but the guy just quoted regulations at me and insisted on dressing "as required" while on duty.

He was like a babysitter who was always looking for the slightest excuse to call up your parents and get you grounded for the rest of your life. But tonight, I wasn't worried about his ruining our evening, because this time, he wasn't going with us. He just didn't know it yet.

I heard the distant sound of knocking coming through bedroom door. That was my cue. I scrunched up my face in concern as I took J's cloak from the bodyguard. "What's that?"

"What's what?" he replied.

I opened the bedroom door. The muffled knocking became loud pounding.

Juliet's voice called out from inside the closet. "Sanny? I can't get the door to unlock! And the light's out! It's pitch black in here! Sanny!"

The second he heard her anxious voice, Curt"Clyde"Whoever!"made straight for the closet. "I'll have you out in a second," he reassured Juliet as he tested the doorknob. When he met resistance, he shifted his weight and slammed his hunk of a shoulder into the wood surface. The doorknob"handle, lock, and all"snapped off, a dozen pieces popping into the air as the bodyguard's massive form disappeared into the dark closet.

A second later, an electrical buzz crackled through the air, followed by a grunt, and the sound of a heavy object hitting the ground. Then silence. I stepped inside, flicking on the light. Carl lay passed out on the carpet. Juliet stood above him, her arm thrust straight out, a stun gun held tightly in her hand. She had a look of panic on her face.

"Bull's-eye," I cheered.

"Is he dead?" she whispered. "I just know he's dead!"

I bent down to take the guy's pulse. It was beating steadily. "He's fine."

"But what if he isn't fine?" she asked. "What if he's in a coma? What if I gave him nerve damage? Dad said I should only use the zapper in emergencies""

"You set it to stun, right?"

"Right."

"And your dad spent how many hours training you how to use it properly?"

"It felt like a century," she admitted.

"Then stop worrying. That thing was custom-designed to knock people out without killing them. You know your dad wouldn't give you anything that didn't do exactly what it was designed to do." I grabbed the duct tape waiting on a nearby shelf. "Your babysitter’s taking nap, that's all. He'll wake up in a few minutes..." I winked. "...after we're long gone from here."

"Poor Ken," Juliet said. She had so much more sympathy for suckers than I did. "Dad will fire him if he finds out. He always blames the bodyguards when you"when stuff like this happens."

"That's Ken’s problem." I ripped off a piece of tape and bent down to cover the bodyguard's mouth. "If he can't handle a couple of teenage girls like us, he really oughtta go looking for an easier job anyway"like joining the Army."

***

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